“I, along with almost all of Disney Imagineering, am furloughed without pay”
twitter.com
twitter.com
[1] https://github.com/skypher/montezuma/blob/master/README.txt
Huge shoutout to the Imagineering team, their work is incredible!
https://web.archive.org/web/20200409030935/https://twitter.c...
I guess someone wants to get rid of this tweet thoroughly.
(this really isn't far from how Denmark is handling the crisis nationally -- freeze employment, have the government pay salaries, and do their best to have companies pick back up where they left off w/ the same workforce).
It's possible they know exactly what they're doing, are doing everybody a favor, and will just hire them again when everything opens back up.
I get that John is down, and I definitely don't have whatever insight led him to say "even if I'm lucky enough to return someday, other people won't be". From my understanding though, a huge portion of corporate around the stores and parks was furloughed because there's not much for them to do at home. Their healthcare is covered and kindness aside it doesn't make much sense for Disney to bleed money. But this wasn't a covert layoff — when things get back to speed Disney wants people back.
Edit: And furloughing the employees allows them to claim unemployment, so that the US government can absorb the impact rather than Disney. Not pretty, but rational in a time of stimulus.
It's a shame
They are freaked out and making any decision they can to stop the cash burn, if it’s a good idea or not.
It seems to me that even if Disney earns 100 times that, their employees should not get more than the market rate.
I agree with your comment if it's a small business that struggles to make ends meet, but this is Disney. I do expect better from them.
If you wouldn't mind taking a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and using HN in the intended spirit, we'd appreciate it. It's understandable that temperatures rise and pots boil over, but we all need to control ourselves in those areas, or else we end up ruining this place.
So you don’t think attitudes like what trophycase was responding to, ruins this site? I’ve known more programmers leave this site because of ugly attitudes worded civilly and so left unchecked, than because of responses like the one you’re complaining about. I think you’re threatening to ban the wrong people.
That doesn't follow, and I'd be careful about drawing such conclusions. It's difficult to reply meaningfully to general statements like those in your comment here, because they can actually be referring to a wide range of different things. I'd really need to see specific links.
In the case of the comment trophycase was responding to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22820206), the fact that it was heavily downvoted already indicates a kind of community moderation, signalling that there's something objectionable about the post. The fact that I didn't reply with additional censure doesn't mean I somehow like the post or agree with it. It was a low-information comment with an ideological slant. But HN gets a huge number of those, from all ideological sides. If we were going to try to moderate all of them, first of all we couldn't because we'd be spending all our time doing nothing else, and second it would generate a massive backlash from users who don't agree that such comments clear the threshold for public scolding.
(The difference between that and "Ah yes. Hard decisions about whether the new CEO will wipe his ass with that 11 billion, or use it as fuel for his fireplace. Decisions, decisions." is pretty stark. Note also that I was responding to a repeated pattern.)
I'm by no means happy about such comments on HN, but there are limits, much harder limits than people assume, to what moderation power can achieve. Usually when people demand more from moderation, what they seem to want is for us to ban anyone who supports an ideology they disagree with. That's not an option for HN (even though we get accused of doing it all the time). It would kill the community, and I don't see what good that would do anyone.
There's a junior MBA somewhere bumping their career by destroying others'.
Having been through this stuff a couple times and heard these reactions before, I can tell you most people, esp those from blue chips, get picked up fast.
Covid changes things yes, but the system is not static. Response and handling of it will get better and better week by week as people learn and adapt. Companies will restart work and hiring sooner or later. Look at S.Korea. They got hit by MERS. They learnt, evolved new plans and this time around were prepared.
Yes, it is. People literally cannot leave their houses. There are certainty some online/100% remote jobs that will hire you via webcam, but most don't. And I'm saying that as a guy who has been 100% remote for the past 5+ years now. All, every single one, of my remote gigs had me show up and interview in person. That's just not an option for huge swaths of the US, and may not be for months yet.
> Response and handling of it will get better and better week by week as people learn and adapt. Companies will restart work and hiring sooner or later. Look at S.Korea. They got hit by MERS. They learnt, evolved new plans and this time around were prepared.
They're predicting as high as 50% of the local businesses failing in my city by the end of summer, and I've heard similar doom and gloom about other parts of N. America. S. Korea is an outlier in most respects, and there is little reason to believe that the responses put out by other nations will be as effective. The UK lagged on their COVID response and now their PM is in the ICU. Sweden just isn't doing anything, and it looks like Trump is trying to cause a civil war in the US by stealing resources from the states.
The worse is yet to come, IMO, and these former Disney workers are right to curse their employer.
> Any full-time or part-time worker who is furloughed, laid off or had their hours reduced due to the coronavirus is eligible for expanded unemployment benefits.
Seems to incentivize getting rid of people when they need healthcare the most (eg "I have cancer" -> "Look, we're going to have to let you go, your performance the past few months hasn't been up to scratch"). I assume there'd be a bunch of health related after-effects to jobloss too, particularly around mental well-being.
Then, you get the coronavirus. Pretty bad. You’re young, so you live through it, but those days on a ventilator weren’t cheap. But unfortunately for you, the ambulance driver took you to one of those hospitals that sues its patients for non-payment. You should have told them to take you to a different hospital as you were gasping for breath.
In any case, you now have a medical debt of $40000 for a week or two of ICU. You have to file for bankruptcy. Unfortunately you’re young, so you’re barely into the principal on the house. So that’s gone.
Luckily, you still have your car. At least you can get to interviews for the few jobs left in the recession. But it’s sure hard to show up looking clean without a shower. At least now, you’re eligible for public insurance.
Up to eighty percent of people on ventilators die to Coronavirus die. (This percentage is so shockingly bad that some doctors are doing all they can to avoid or delay using them.)
Most who need ventilators for Coronavirus are older and have other health issues already.
As someone in a high risk category due to being medically handicapped, I will suggest that a lot of those people aren't hale and hardy enough to have a good job with good benefits. I've done freelance work for years.
Though, yes, it's true: In spite of the "all homeless are junkies and crazies" meme, serious health problems and their cost are a significant contributor to people ending up homeless in the US. Another major piece is our lack of appropriate housing options.
In addition to fixing healthcare, the US desperately needs to fix it's housing issues.
Upon passage of the CARES act, everyone that loses their job due to COVID is eligible for UI, and the federal UI is now $600/week, on top of the existing state UI. So in the state of California, an ex-Disney employee would receive $4200/month[1].
If you're single, $4200/month in California will more than pay for rent + health insurance + food.
If you're a working couple, together you will receive $8400/month.
However, when you get sick that rate doesn’t go up, so there’s no incentive from your employers standpoint to fire you when sick. Because of the “losing coverage” part it’s still extra shitty when they double up (cancer plus being fired sounds pretty awful).
Obamacare notably created markets for folks not receiving health insurance through work to purchase it directly (in addition to subsidies for low to middle income folks to do so, and several regulatory changes around other parts of the system), but that basic system wasn’t fundamentally altered and has been more or less how the US has done things since world war 2.
Fun bonus fact, employer based insurance was first offered as a workaround for world war 2 era wage controls.
except that if you get a severe illness and can't come to work, they can fire you for that
This means there could be a strictly financial incentive to dismiss a sick employee. This is of course entirely illegal if that were the purpose. [1] https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/benefits/pa...
Plus, its tax incentivized in three different ways.
- The employer can deduct it as a business expense, reducing corporate profits on which they have to pay income tax. In fairness, wages work the same way...
- ...but! The employer doesn't have to pay payroll tax on the amount it adds to their payroll.
- And while the employer puts it on the employee's W2, it doesn't contribute to their taxable income.
Dodging two kinds of income tax and payroll tax means that it works out to be way cheaper for a company to buy health insurance for their employees than it would be to raise their employees pay enough that they could buy the same insurance themselves, and that's before the company leverages its purchasing power to get good deals from insurance companies. It's an absurdly strongly incentivized system.
Doesn't seem unlikely to me, once you have enough employees, average cost per employee ends up being about the population average, skewed heavily by the fact that the company isn't employing very many people past retirement age where so much of total medical expense lies. Profit margins for health insurance companies aren't very high, so after administrative costs, what the average person/company pays in healthcare insurance is about what the average person accrues to their insurance in healthcare costs.
> Also, payroll taxes themselves are also deductible.
Shifting compensation to untaxed benefits brings the savings from corp_tax_rate * payroll_tax_rate to payroll_tax_rate.
Sorry but that's just wrong. Most large employers and even many smaller shops "self-insure" meaning they are footing the bill. Your health insurance company is just a front/conduit/paper pusher. In those cases, it is your employer who is ultimately deciding your prescription is not in the formulary, your jaw surgery is cosmetic even though you suffer from chronic headaches, etc. It is also your employer who sees that employee number 438 is costing them >> 1M/yr in covered medical bills (cuz cancer). They have every incentive to suddenly realize you are not working out for entirely unrelated (and fake) reasons.
B. You can also be covered under your spouse's work plan. So losing your job doesn't necessarily cut you out completely.
C. A few years ago, we changed the law to make it possible to remain covered by your parents' healthcare up to age 26, even if you are married.
D. If you are old enough, there's Medicare. If you are poor enough, there's Medicaid.
If none of those situations apply, yup, it sucks big time. The high cost of COBRA makes that option an ugly joke for a lot of unemployed people who simply can't afford it.
The US should join the rest of the developed world and provide universal coverage.
Edit: For context, my father, ex husband, father-in-law and assorted other relatives were career military. I'm not anti military. I'm just trying to say "That's totes a good faith wild guess!"
Unfortunately for many people, because things like this just show companies that they can (even) treat high-tech employees like disposable items and get away with it. The right reaction would be to make sure that no one in your division EVER goes back to this company and prevents everyone in their close circle to start working there, unless they pay some really nice and big severance package.
I wonder if this is more related to "game development". This isn't game development but it is kinda related. Perhaps people just think differently there and the normal employer - employee separation of concerns just goes out of the window. An employer collects HUGE profits from your work in the IT sector, no matter your level. You, as an employee, sacrifice these profits for convenience, essentially. Now they take your convenience away and you still want to work there. It's kinda baffling to me. And the game industry always spat on engineers, probably because too many people "want" to do it.
Therefore I've banned the account. If that ever changes, you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com and let us know. In the meantime, please stop creating accounts to break HN's rules with.
My contract has a 3 month notice so unless I agree to anything else, I’d be paid 3 months regardless of whether the business is able to operate at all.
But I suppose that if my contract didn’t have that and I instead had a signing bonus or some other comp that gave me a few months of security then that would be equivalent.