Ask HN: Who Is Firing?
Times are bleak.
Last week during covid crisis, all while announcing a $100m Series E round of financing, they let some employees go and did not offer any severance.
Disorganized management, and with some teams, passive-aggressive management style.
Would not recommend joining...
I have a fairly rare surname, but have {surname} at gmail, so I get a lot of "spam" from companies that sign me up before verifying if the user inputting my email is the person owning the email.
In the most egregious/spammy cases I'm gonna find some higher-up emails and sign them up for their own services in hopes that the practice will stop.
TL;DR: email confirmation or get egged.
Circle however I've used with some fairly lengthy and complex build processes involving multiple parallel builds of Rails apps during upgrades and it's handled the workflow well.
I think they've improved the UI a bit recently, but it's still pretty complex though.
Coupled with Terraform for us.
edit: I'll also add that in terms of time, I feel like most of the time in build pipelines is actually spent in tweaking, adding, and modifying the build configs, as opposed to the servers themselves (and you might also value developer time differently from devops time). I have found Buildkite easier to work with than CircleCI in this regard, and thus saved much more time overall.
The motivation for this was exactly this problem. With Box CI your local build is your CI build because it runs jobs via agents on your own hardware so you can very easily debug / understand what is going on.
The thing I'm concerned about that doesn't seem addressed on your home page is security : by installing your agent on my machine, I'm basically giving you access to my machine non-stop, no ? What guarantees do I have that your agent can't be used as a backdoor ?
Firstly, and very importantly, the agent is open source (https://github.com/boxci/boxci) so you can see exactly what it does and even build it from source if you want. I should mention Box CI isn't launched yet, everything is still in beta including the agent.
The Box CI service doesn't have any way to send requests to or send commands to agents - the requests are one-way, agent to service only, with agents polling the service for build jobs to run, running them, and sending logs and results to the service.
Build scripts and configuration are all in your source code. This is a tradeoff, because it definitely means you have to trust your source (and everyone committing to it) if you're going to be running agents on your dev machine for instance.
There are obviously mitigations to this though, like running the agents on a dedicated Cloud VM with nothing on the filesystem and internet access locked down to package manager and cloud provider hosts. A future plan is to provide pre-configured VMs for various cloud providers so this can be set up in a few clicks for low cost ($20 a month or whatever a reasonable build machine VM would cost).
The real security point of the the agents though, the other side of these tradeoffs, is that your code and your production secrets never leave hardware you control - the CI service never has access to them. That's a massive security advantage Vs centralised CI services which do have full read access to your source and effectively full write access to your production infrastructure via keys you give them - compared to what I've described above this is a massively bigger and more dangerous potential security hole.
You can probably tell by the length of this comment I'm super interested in this aspect (along with dev experience I see it as the key advantage of the model and one of the reasons I'm building it) there's a lot more depth to this and if you'd like to discuss further, I'd love to :-) Email's in my profile.
It's quite spartan, but it gets the job done, and I love that a) it's fast, b) I can see exactly what happened, down to ssh'ing into the build directory and poking around, and c) If there's a feature I want, I can just add it!
Here's my bot in action: https://github.com/lukechampine/us/pull/37#issuecomment-5936...
When something fails it makes the debug and retry loop just as simple and fast as when you're developing, and there's really nothing like watching a production build run and ship in literally like a minute, just as fast as if you're building and starting your local dev server :-)
I know for the fact that few US, Indian firms with offices in India are just using this as an excuse to trim their workforce, enforce paycuts (upto 50%), hold back increments for the year (and even next) and restructure salaries drastically - by moving almost 60% to vaiable pay(which typically never gets paid).
Such a list is live at https://careervscovid19.com/insights
Traditional BigCo ITeS/outsourcing shops are using this as a great opportunity to trim the flab in the middle (claiming as "a dire measure to sustain shareholder value") while it was always about . These are the same bunch in middle-management whom they would pamper regularly by giving quarterly/monthly awards (quarterly Gem, Spot awards, Player of the month, etc bullshit accolades)
And the markets also work that way. On a regular day, if there's firing, stocks of a BigCo go wonky sensing something is amiss. During a crisis, if they do not fire people by the thousands, markets deem it as lack of financial prudence and stocks go down.
Everything (and anything) in the name of profits and shareholder value. There's a saying dated thousands of years, goes like "vyaparam droha chintanam” meaning "Business is all about profits most often via undue advantages".
Related article - http://www.informaticsjournals.com/index.php/dbijb/article/d...
Most of the big firms (Tata, CTS, CapGemini) have big offices or call centers, with VPNs or private connections to western infrastructure -- otherwise you would have random Indian IPs logging into your systems, and that would make my security team lose their minds.
But with COVID they can't congregate in those offices, and the logistics of getting additional VPNs, working around geo-fencing, and the fact that some of the admins don't have internet at home means they're not able to support anything.
The handful of Filipino and Mexican offshore talent has been more successful in that regard. Mexican talent in particular has been pretty good -- more expensive than Indian hires, but generally more qualified with overlap of US timezones.
Yes, this is the reality. Most of these shops do not believe in issuing a laptop along with a secure connectivity option, simply because they deem all of that as a sap on procurements.
And they still use shitty 2005 era desktop since work gets done on VDIs (citing info sec and DLP) and desktops are mere dumb terminals. But even to operate those dumb terminals, they are ready to spend cost on electricity and logistics but will actively avoid issuing good equipment just to avoid cost on licenses and manageability.
Bunch of old coots that do not ever learn.
Living in Singapore, I met some people who trained India and then used their own good equipment and their productivity was on par with US or EU employees. I was also unfortunate enough to manage some people using '95 equipment, and they were basically dead weights for the project.
I used to work on a product with a web console. One of the things we designed and planned for was a login storm around 9-10 AM on Monday in pick-a-timezone where 200 users log in from the same IP. If you ignore the seasonality, it looks a bit like an attack.
They're replacing their ClojureScript mishmash of libraries with a React action team because they couldn't onboard effectively
As a customer, I can see I'm being pushed into this new UI that I'm indifferent to but moving between the options is difficult
As a Clojurian & customer, I'm not sure any of this bodes well
I'm in the final stages interviews and up until now have generally been looking forward to the prospect of working there. This is troubling. Thanks in advance.
If we can't, my advice to you is to backchannel. See if you have a friend of a friend's who works there, reach out to people via LinkedIn whom you didn't interview with, or find former employees, they will tell you the real story...
I bet they all had severance guaranteed in their contracts...
We basically just hit hard edges and missing features very quickly, and what’s there is good, but not great.
Each bit of the product feels good, but it feels like there’s a lack of direction, product thinking, understanding users, or something at a fundamental level that is causing friction.
I have a friend who worked there a few years ago and from her experience it sounds like there are some good engineers, but some careless decisions being made.
Hello fellow HN readers. Here's the short version of the story:
So I was working at X SF startup company (with a subsidiary office in Costa Rica) and decided to give it a try at First Factory, an outsourcing shop based in NY and Costa Rica, they handed me a contract (March 5th, 2020) to start working with them effective March 30th, 2020.
So I quit my job and was ready to jump on board. Then on March 25th, 2020 I get a call (the lady pretty much laughably telling me all this) stating that they were in financial trouble and couldn't onboard me at all, and the contract was voided.
I know this happens, but you get a feeling of how shocked I was hearing this. I couldn't believe my ears. And now I'm unemployed pretty much. I've applied to a few positions through "Who's Hiring" at HN tough, let's see how it goes -_-
https://www.protocol.com/eventbrite-major-layoffs-coronaviru...
https://www.booksandpublishing.com.au/articles/2020/04/09/14...
Right after September 11th, that site got very popular among engineers like me -- seeing (on a daily basis) which company bloodbath was next.
It was kind of fun, until it was our company.
Got their start in the heyday of the .com crash as domino after domino fell and many companies were exposed for the unviable company’s they were.
The site took great joy in documenting (mocking) companies that were once tall and proud and quickly collapsed.
I remember one where a CEO made a big deal about the tech staff working through the holidays to finish vital new products. And then the CEO went on vacation to Hawai'i, leaving the nerds to grind it out. The memo and vacaction leaked to Fucked Company, where comments were spirited, and I think it eventually caused a big to-do.
I bought furniture there for something I was starting up. Very cheap, and they delivered.
IIRC, some of Howard Stern's wack pack people were regular posters on the forum as well. It was a pretty awesome message board for that era, until ruined by nazis and other lowlifes.
(It's from "Fucked Company", so obviously it's NOT SAFE FOR WORK, but who's at work any more these days?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmaRTZpJgPA
>Dot Com Boom & Bust - Digital Entertainment Network
>A parody of the founders of Digital Entertainment Network. DEN was "a quintessential example of the excesses and lack of control of the dot-com craze."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Entertainment_Network
>I rescued this from Web Archive, and it was originally posted on the Fuckedcompany.com website, which went defunct in 2007.
Yes, THAT guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg&t=19m42s
>Cryptocurrencies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
Oh no :(, the Internet Archive fucked them:
https://web.archive.org/web/2/http://www.fuckedcompany.com/
>Sorry.
>This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.
Alternative archive of the front page, at least:
https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20060603194832/http://www...
Then they went from sorta fucked:
https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20091016001955/http://www...
To fucked:
https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20130104195206/http://www...
Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM?
A: IBM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleida_Labs
https://web.archive.org/web/19970617084520/http://www.suck.c...
For Goldhaber and Braun, we
recall the line of Guildenstern
in coming out the losers in a
game of princes and kings from
Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead: "There
must have been a moment, at the
beginning, where we could have
said - no."Very scary to sit in an office where nobody is working because we are waiting to see who gets let go next.
Their tracker, https://layoffs.fyi/tracker/, has reasonably well corroborated data, although it's surely incomplete.
a startup based in London just fired 10% of their workforce. all were given two options: government's furlough scheme where the state pays 80% of the salary, or outright dismissal. interestingly, half chose to quit.
That said, I'm surprised half of people turned down 2k/month to job hunt.
Ah, I see you've never applied for Universal Credit. Immediate, it ain't.
Generally uk dev pay is very bad compared to US or even other Europe.
Contract work used to be basically the only way to make good money but this has now been nobbled. Not a good city to work in.
As a result permie developers generally don't have a huge amount of a savings.
Moved to New York following Brexit, now making literally twice that. (Paying twice that for housing, too, but my housing is more like 15 minutes from work instead of 60 and I have a real subway option instead of putting up with Southern Rail and the strikes.)
This isn't true. You'll get new style JSA for 6 months [1] pending you have contributed NI for the past 2/3 years which almost all will have.
https://www.gov.uk/jobseekers-allowance/eligibility
You're talking about universal credit which yes you won't qualify for with greater than 16k savings (pension savings or HTB ISA are however are excluded).
If you make them redundant instead then you must give them a redundancy payment as well. However, this only protects employees after two years and in any case it's capped at a low level relative to typical salaries in fields like tech, so this might not have been worth much to the staff at a startup. Many employers do offer more than this voluntarily, but I wouldn't necessarily assume any startup did.
Maybe the staff who chose to leave were more concerned about the future viability of the business, an extended pause in their career development, or both. Or maybe they really were offered voluntary redundancy on favourable terms.
Curiously, just yesterday the UK government announced some new measures aimed directly at supporting startups, particularly tech startups in their early stages that aren't yet making money. Apparently at least someone in government recognises the business model and feels it will be better to protect that part of our economy during the downturn, which is a remarkably enlightened view given how badly successive governments in the UK have treated small businesses in the past.
Although obviously you should consult with a proper employment lawyer.
Obviously this means employers who are abusing the system to try to force a pay cut on people or fire them by the back door when they weren't genuinely redundant may be out of luck. I'm not sure anyone is going to have much sympathy for employers doing that, though.
Do you have a link about this please? Hadn't heard of it until now
It sounds like some sort of investment-matching scheme, where the existing investors have to put more money in to keep the business viable but the government will then make some sort of contribution as well.
Never really felt such thing being anything but odd ball case in Europe.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/26/success/layoffs-women-minorit...
https://hbr.org/2019/01/why-most-performance-evaluations-are...
Links to the research cited are in the articles, which provide a basic overview.
I am a gay black man.
No, it's not. Even if they were favored, one racial minority group being favored and others being disfavored doesn't balance out to “no racism”, it's even more racism than the latter being disfavored alone. And even if there is no evidence of racism in either direction affecting Asians, that doesn't negate racism affecting other groups.
At best it might be accurate of you only look at Asians.
What's the line here? At what point would tech not be racist? I really don't see your point here. There is a lot of evidence pointing to a really diverse, generally progressive industry with, if anything, a higher over representation (compared to the population) of multiple minority groups, different gender identities and a much more inclusivity conscious mindset than probably any other industry. We have no data that really points to the opposite conclusion. Again, at what point would you not say that those are all exceptions?
When it's demographically representative.
See how absurd your expectations are?
Please be a little more receptive to stuff like this. Racism and sexism are social ills that affect the majority of people. It's worth your time to having a passing understanding of the major concepts.
What about them? (Mostly, what both of those show is what the structure of the immigration system favors for nationalities where there aren't lots of people who are eligible for family-based immigration.)
> Transgenders?
Mostly reflects that people of higher socioeconomic status and in social environments concentrated on particular geographic locations are more likely to primed to accept.(or, viewed another way, less strongly conditioned to deny) transgender identity, and that both of those correlate with onramps to the tech field. Not that that is germane in any way to racism since gender identity isn't a race/ethnicity.
> Neurodivergents?
Also aren't a race/ethnicity and so aren't germane.
> Iranians?
See above notes about Indians and Arabs.
> Muslims?
Aren't a race, but also see above notes about Arabs and Iranians (which apply to lots of other places where Muslim immigrants come from.)
> At what point would tech not be racist?
I never said tech was racist, I said that “some races are overrepresented” isn't counterevidence to racism but, absent evidence for some other explanation for the overrepresentation, supporting evidence.
But, that aside, obviously, at the point where no one was systematically disadvantaged in the field on the basis of their race.
> There is a lot of evidence pointing to a really diverse, generally progressive industry
No, there's not. There's a lot of evidence of an industry drawing principally from a narrow domestic racial and class pool, that on non-racial/class grounds overrepresents groups overrepresented in that pool, and which in addition to that domestic pool overepresents immigrants to the US on non-family bases because being in the industry is itself highly advantageous to employment-based entry into the US.
>There is a lot of evidence pointing to a really diverse, generally progressive industry with, if anything, a higher over representation (compared to the population) of multiple minority groups, different gender identities and a much more inclusivity conscious mindset than probably any other industry.
That is not true. Retail, labor, non-tech administration are good examples to the contrary. The difference in pay and prestige is telling.
Work permit/visa holders will see an increase in workload (with a "work-more-or-eff-off" note, along with possibly a paycut too) Even pay negotiations on open offers, making it seem generous tha offer doesn't get cancelled.
Personally know a couple of friends who are in the US (with H1Bs awaitng transfer/extensions) facing this particular situation now.
Hiring is fucked. Tech hiring and ex\mployment more so.
Seems every employer treats employees as though the wage slaves are just so, or just above hamsters on wheels doing tricks.
Depressing, to say the least! :(
Work permit workers (H1, OPT and L1-B in increasing order) are the worst exploited and least privileged sub group of the entire tech workforce.
Be it an upcoming economy with a flood of opportunities like we saw for the past 7 years or a downturn, like the one we are witnessing now, visa workers will be exploited no matter what.
They are not cheaper than non visa-dependent hires, but they are abundant, easy to hire, easy to fire, easy to replace, incredibly easy to bully, pressurize and basically exploit. The only barrier to total exploitation is the manager's own conscience and values. And we all know, values are easily compromised when it can help the bottom line.
Working on a visa in USA is fucked.
https://news.err.ee/1070009/starship-technologies-makes-redu...
- All salaries are net, after taxes - Estonian average salary is 1000 euros/month
It's worth remembering there are plenty of companies not laying people off, and "normal" will return eventually.
That said, I was watching The Big Short yesterday, and a line that I had noted before haunted me even more: "For every 1% unemployment goes up [in the USA], 40,000 people die".
Stay safe, stay positive.
> Population health did not decline and indeed generally improved during the 4 years of the Great Depression, 1930–1933, with mortality decreasing for almost all ages, and life expectancy increasing by several years in males, females, whites, and nonwhites.
(Although, significantly, it does note that suicides increased, and another study found no increase in life expectancy, but no real change outside of suicides and car accidents.[2])
1: https://www.pnas.org/content/106/41/17290 2: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110324202055.h...
I think this is mainly fearmongering by the upper 0.1% seeing that now they might have to bear the "risk" they are always claiming to shoulder when taking in enormous returns on their capital... (e.g. in Germany currently most car-companies (BMW and VW are both largely family-owned) still pay their dividends, while their employees are getting unemployment benefits from the state...).
In the end history tells us, that people generally seem to prefer to stay alive however low the odds are. If this has significantly changed in the last 50 years, maybe we should think about what has changed that – I seriously doubt that a "let's go back to business" is the right approach in that case.
I have seen that line too, but I wonder how substantiated this is? Is there any data to support it?
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3070776/#R41
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3070776/#R65
Also probably much more transient, no?
Is there a reason to think this trend would continue beyond say... six months? (or whenever quarantine measures are mostly relaxed).
If we relax quarantine measures, the virus just comes back immediately. This is going to stay with us for years.
Where did you get that number? This seems more like propaganda than scientific claim.
> Results
> Overall, during the recent recession, an increase of one percentage point in the standardised unemployment rate has been associated with a statistically significant decrease in the following mortality rates: all-cause-mortality (3.4%), cardiovascular diseases (3.7%), cirrhosis- and chronic liver disease-related mortality (9.2%), motor vehicle accident-related mortality (11.5%), parasitic infection-related mortality (4.1%), but an increase in the suicide rate (34.1%). In general, the effects were more marked in countries with lower levels of social protection, compared to those with higher levels. Conclusions
> An increase in the unemployment rate during the Great Recession has had a beneficial health effect on average across EU countries, except for suicide mortality. Social protection expenditures appear to help countries “smooth” the health response to a recession, limiting health damage but also forgoing potential health gains that could otherwise result.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009174351...
Many animals live longer in captivity than in the wild.
Restricting your caloric intake as much as possible will prolong your lifespan.
There's more to health than just how long you live.
We do not live in a 1930s world of belligerent alliances itching for a chance to bloody someone up.
Wars between the big powers are now economic and political. Nobody wants nuclear annihilation.
> Did the Great Recession affect mortality rates in the metropolitan United States? Effects on mortality by age, gender and cause of death.
> Our finding that all-cause mortality decreased during the Great Recession is consistent with previous studies.
And yes some specific mortality like cancer did increase because of the broken -- profit based -- health care system. But otherwise, no.
Extreme sports may technically have a long term boost on life expextancy (from fitness) but short term would make a spike in accident deaths. I guess money is sort of the same way - better outcomes from affording healthcare but the temptation to take risks results in more immediate deaths.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2010/04/wall-street-excerpt-...
But if you mean dot-com-crash bad in terms of the economy in general crashing, oh man are you right. This is an economic free-fall for most of America.
"fail fast; fail often" seems ominously dark for the circumstance.
And the list is just startups, too - they're obviously more vulnerable in many ways to financial shocks than large companies, but large corporate layoffs are going to be where the big numbers are.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/finance/markets/australia-unexpect...
To quote, "all jobs are essential services".
- low density
- government actually listening to scientists and reacting quickly and non-ideologically.
The government responding quickly and non-ideologically is the number one reason why Australia is doing good and the rest of the west is doing so badly. Whether it's the ideology of freedom of travel or the ideology of the economy before health, it has hurt other nations whereas Australia's ideology of pragmatism (and our neverending experience with many other crises and disasters) has helped.
Leadership in the early days of the crisis made a huge difference. The early days of the crisis now are passed us, so whatever happens next it is about perseverance - a completely different matter and something a country does not excel at if it goes through prime minister faster than a pub goes through sixpacks.
I could make a list, but I won't. Instead I'll focus on the positives and note that the one commendable thing that the federal government has done in this crisis is to reach deep into their mothballed hip-pocket and squeeze out a few billion pineapples.
I fully appreciate how hard that must have been, given their fixation on 'the black'. And all with only half a whinge.
For real? Morrison’s response to this has been lacking in its effectiveness and treacle-like in its speed. Up until a few weeks ago he was saying that people shouldn’t stop going to football games, and up until teachers put their foot down and in spite of health professions advice and common sense he thought keeping schools open indefinitely and as a fine idea.
I'd be cautious with this point.
Sydney is more dense than LA, Chicago. It is lower than NYC. But still for an urban area of over 5 million people it's densely populated and has all the ingredients for a bad outbreak. https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/the-truth-about-...
What's it actually like there? It sounds like you're under strict lockdown but everyone seems to be saying the government is doing a terrible job (even though the test positive rate is low and the relative number of cases, even the absolute number of cases, is low). Here you say the economy is still humming along but other people say there's queues outside of Centrelink and down the street and around the corner.
Are shops like Bunnings and Big W still open? Bike shops? Hobby stores? Gift shops? These are considered non essential here in Germany some of which has caused me difficulty and some of which have not (somewhere may be non essential this week, but over a long enough period of time, everywhere is essential; we just moved a fortnight before the lockdown and fortunately I bought the things I needed for a new home just before they were shut down as non-essential).
Restaurants I gather are closed to in house meals same as here. But same as here they're open for takeaway.
Factories and such businesses were closed in Italy, but I don't think they were shut down here.
Cinemas I take it are closed. Prisons in Victoria at least do not accept inperson visitors which causes prisoners severe isolation but is obviously better then getting them all infected. I understand prisoners are still working - if they're isolated and healthy I guess there's no reason to stop them from working.
Most retail shops are closed. A lot of restaurants and cafes are closed. All events cancelled. So there's a lot of casuals / partimers who don't have any work anymore.
Bunnings, BigW, Kmart, all supermarkets are open with social distancing and limiting people in the store. Not sure a bout bike stores. Hobbyco in QVB is still open. A lot of stores closed their retail but are still doing online orders.
Basically Australia uses a combination of blacklist and a whitelist system. Some places where people gather like gyms and pubs are forced to close, and restaurants are forced to takeaway-only. You also have a whitelist on reasons to come outside of your home, which still include work.
My company was good - we spend a week preparing and now almost everyone is working from home, which is probably unusual considering we work in embedded systems. I have several boxes of hardware in my room with me now.
Open and doing roaring business from what I can tell. Took my mountain bike to get serviced and my mechanic said he’s far busier than he anticipated and it’d be over a week before he could even get to my bike.
Most of our retail is still open, for example Target, Kmart, most coffee shops are still open doing takeaway and I can still go to JB HiFi, BBC shop, book shop, EB Games etc. So it seems like not a lot has changed regarding my current lifestyle except working from home.
Gyms, Massage, Casinos, Pubs, Clubs etc. that you’d expect to spread the virus really quickly are all closed.
Expect those numbers to change. A lot.
The company I'm in hasn't fired anyone and is safe.
Some neighboring countries have similar programs.
Take 2019 for instance. If that scheme existed then, without any pandemic, it would be a great way to soften the exit and allow folks time to find new jobs.
But the world we're in now, not so much. It's pulling the band-aid off slower, and my take is, waiting for a hail-mary play when someone magically comes up with a solution for this problem.
My interpretation of all of this waves hand around at world leaders is that they genuinely believe science and technology work like magic, and will come up with something, soon.
- A lot if them are not profitable. - They don't know how long this will last. - Many planned on growing into profitability over n months and expected they could raise more money if needed. - Now, there is no growth for many and contractions. - Investment money is drying up - they might not have 2 years at their current burn rate to get to profitable status.
In the end, it can be about survival. Their pre coronavirus burn rates are not sustainable. Of course, for some, it is also a continent way to shed staff who appear to be underperforming, freeze raises, and ask more of their employees.
For many (even unicornish) startups the funding is released in tranches, usually tied to certain performance metrics. With drastically reduced revenue, new customer flow all dried up, and even marketing result graphs simulating nosedives, there aren't that many milestones you could hit.
If [enough] performance milestones are missed, company's next batch of on-paper funding pot may not be released.
Rainfocus
Domo: 10% of workforce
Vivint Smart Home
HireVue
Divvy employees have been told that layoffs are inevitable.
No whispers yet of layoffs at the two Ycombinator startups in the state (Weave and Podium)
They've used it as an opportunity to make 30% of their mobile engineers redundant, as well as push many senior engineers on higher salaries towards the exit
My sister is a doctor. She told me that she is getting less patients, as only those are very serious, are coming.
Plus transport system is down, so only ambulance can be used for transporting patients to and from hospital. So this puts a limit to hospital's income source.
If they thought their senior engineers were getting paid too much, what was stopping them from cutting their salaries before the pandemic?
I imagine, for a manager to get rid of someone on performance grounds needs heck a lot more work and time than getting on the company wide blanket firing bandwagon.
"We hate to let you go but we have no options in these challenging times" gets less opposition from employees and more legal stance over any performance related reason.
Sad.
I worked for one of these facilities years ago, and elective surgery was the only thing the administrators cared about.
Your parent comment refers to the Mayo Clinic, which is neither "for-profit" nor "a stain on the American healthcare system".
To help you understand how this could decrease revenue - my annual checkup is postponed by 6 months. This is true for everyone who had an annual checkup scheduled.
>...The study, released Tuesday, compared the universal health-care systems of Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland, and looked at the presence of for-profit hospitals and for-profit health-care insurers in each of these countries. ... The study found that for-profit health-care insurers and for-profit hospitals are found in all six countries. This is in contrast to Canada, where similar for-profit insurance is not allowed, and where only a small number of private, for-profit hospitals exist.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/for-profit-care-can-exist-in-a...
Insurance companies in the US are also "incredibly tightly controlled". Regulations even specify amounts that can be spent on patient care, administration etc. Health insurers are the only segment of the health care sector in the US where profits are directly limited.
>Which is why the state can and will fund hospitals directly after this crisis.
I don't think that has anything to do with it.
When I mean incredibly tightly controlled, I mean effectively price controls, and very stringent ones at that, and all of them have the state as the main insurer anyways, while AFAIK the US does not insure anyone directly.
The government provides health insurance to many people. 44 million people are insured by Medicare. 74 million people are insured by Medicaid. Over 1 million veterans get their health care provided by the government run VA medical system.
As I pointed out, most countries have a mix of private/public funding a mix of private/public run health care. Lots of people seem to be under the misconception that universal health care coverage is only possible in a Canadian or UK type health care system.
Even non-profit, publicly funded hospitals are feeling the squeeze. Most are paid on a fee-for-service basis. If you cancel all your elective surgeries, there goes a huge chunk of funding. Yet you still need to pay salaries and other overhead.
It's not like non-profit hospitals are suddenly immune to the realities of economics.
Were it not for for-profit healthcare, the US would almost certainly operate this way.
In both public systems I've been a part of, yes there is a hospital budget, but it's paid out through procedures. Don't have anyone in the hospital? No payment.
Mayo earns $12bn per year.
As contrast, a hospitals in Germany for a whole year cost €105bn, with an average total cost per stay (including operations etc ) of 4500€.
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2018/11...
Can Covid costs (at current patient levels) make up for the loss of other claims? I'm doubtful, especially since some Covid costs are evidently borne by the federal government. The suffering of hospitals is circumstantial evidence that insurers are paying out less overall.
The other thing is that as millions of employees get laid off, millions of health insurance premiums stop getting paid.
Failure mode of a system where healthcare is tied to employment -- works as long as people keep shuffling around, shatters when a systemic black swan comes along.
And no, cobra doesn't address it. It's just a patch. Anyone actually pay cobra for more than a month or two? You quickly realize just how expensive employer group plans can be for an individual.
Well, whatever colour the swan is, a pandemic is no any unprecedented crisis. It's frankly more predictable than large scale earthquakes, but many people simply didn't give a shit to plan for it in advance.
Nassim would like people to stop saying this. I view him as an authority on the subject.
https://mobile.twitter.com/nntaleb/status/124494673873917952...
Meanwhile there may be costs stemming from complications where the treatment was delayed.
https://www.cms.gov/CCIIO/Resources/Files/Downloads/mlr-repo...
Quick edit: since he's been working there for the last 18ish months he has made it clear how poorly run and awful that place is to work for, sentiment is from way before covid.
My wife works at an orthopedic office as a PA and they're talking about how they'll probably have to work weekends just to catch up with the backlog of surgeries.
* Absolutely no overtime for hourly employees (the salaried doctors, of course, do 18-hour shifts) * Doctors in elective departments (dermatology) are furloughed * They've all but confirmed the techs will have layoffs
No idea how that compares to other companies, but if it differs, that's one possible explanation for different results.
https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/cares-act-paychec...
That said, my overall point was that different measures can lead to different results - not that specific measures were different.
That said, the PPP ran out of funds today, so not all businesses are getting saved.
https://www.uschamber.com/series/above-the-fold/how-access-s...
[1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tijdelijke_noodmaatregel_overb...
Norway went from 65 000 to 290 000 unemployed since beginning of March.
We also have something called "permittering" where you don't loose your job, but you stop working and get aid from the state. It's meant for temporary dips where there is less work for your company but you think it'll pick up within the next 6 months. Pay is usually ~66% of your regular salary.
For "permitteringer" we went from 1 000 - 2 000 per month on average to 345 000 in the last 1 1/2 months.
In Norway we have around 2.67 million people in work. So we have seen a reduction of our workforce by 10% since beginning of March.
Sources: - https://e24.no/spesial/2020/coronaviruset/permitteringer - https://www.ssb.no/arbeid-og-lonn/statistikker/arblonn
Also firing people is now temporaly banned (technically not, but it's much much more difficult to do until we're out of the state of alarm).
Eventually...
Italy is basically under state salary, the only one not using it, are companies with a meaning in this crisis (food producer etc...)
Their theory is, get some free money and treat it like 6 months of salary to help and take it as a "gift".
When I cited that they "weren't directly affected by this and could keep going until this COVID thing ended and it wouldn't matter to them." The person I know who's involved at the exec level said, "It's free money, when you get a free bag of money, you don't turn away on that..."
I wanted to throw up.
It is more an arguement for doing your goddamned homework as a government. Companies are essentially a function to find corner cases within what is written or not written. That sort of "creativity" is what they do. Using it as an arguement against it is like saying we should never have kept and domesticated cats or dogs because they can't be trusted to not to grab the Thanksgiving turkey when your back is turned.
It should have been a loan at favourable interest rates with a fixed term.
And besides, all these small-business loans are exactly that; loans. You can get them forgiven later if you can show that you used it directly for salary. But later is the key word. Get the money out now, worry about forgiveness paperwork later.
The idea government should have rules around keeping people afloat seems anathema to its mottos.
And the people blaming government... it’s like COVID... reality doesn’t give a shit about you not paying attention
The sheer quantity of loans is the only bottleneck. Even that would probably be add minor stress to their system. A regular loan can take a week to two weeks to process when things are running smoothly. Most of that time is the loan sitting in a queue waiting to be processed. The actual enforcement requirements will be relatively unchanged compared to regular loans.
From my understanding the actual compliance of whether the loan will be forgiven or not is straightforward and probably wont need to be enforced until a few months down the road. If it does not comply, the company will pay back in full.
It's also hard to extend what the government is doing now (payroll protection) to a university or some other large firm. Funding for those type of entities has been around for a long time and is set in stone.
I spent time working as a Credit Analyst for an Economic Development Firm (AKA we made SBA 504 loans). I would like to note I am no longer in the industry, however I do have contacts still. I've spent some time on the phone discussing the program with current lenders.
The SBA does not just hand out money with no strings attached. The actual 504 loan program (general small business loans) have strict requirements that are adhered too. There are size constraints, business type constraints etc. and (some of) these constraints extend to the PPP. I can't say for certain but it is entirely possible this firm doesn't qualify.
As for the PPP, I believe the max loan amount is 2.5x monthly payroll. I can imagine that 200M burn rate is not purely salary. But safe to say they can apply for a maximum 500M. Is that an exorbitant amount of money for a firm with no revenue? Probably.
But in talks with those in the industry, the main concern is Construction Companies. In the markets I'm in, construction is still underway, so these companies are applying for PPP while still maintaining a constant revenue stream. They are essentially getting free employees for 2.5 months, while still being relatively unaffected. That will most likely change if the economy enters a larger downturn as construction is usually the first to go.
I mean I get but ffs why? Let the big companies do it. They're just a hassle.
I think you'd be very hard pressed to find people willing to turn down free money.
It's not like are lying to gov't to get it. They qualify, so why not take it.
[1]https://www.sba.gov/funding-programs/loans/coronavirus-relie...
If they don't, then they're a fraud.
If they shouldn't qualify but they did, then blame the policy makers.
Only (2) would have been their fault.
Taking your argument of the morality of individual choices at face value: how is one supposed to put that money back? Are they obligated to report this action as they would others? What’s the enforcement mechanism like?
I get your point but it opens up a lot of questions IMO that maybe adds some sediment to the purely moral water being poured out
It's tough to say, since there's always the risk of more layoffs; and there's an argument that the payments are stimulus as well as relief, and so it's perfectly legitimate to accept, so long as one spends it. But as a matter of conscience/citizenship, if one is economically stable, it's at least worth considering giving it to someone in greater need. Everyone's circumstance is different, and a lot of people were economically struggling before the virus, so I think we each answer that question for ourselves.
That said, I think the corporate bailouts are in a different category than individual payments. The $1200 relief check system is hardly perfect, but it's at least transparent and fair: every citizen of the same income bracket gets the same flat payment. But we all know there's a lot of wheeling and dealing and favors and promises taking place with the bailout money, and there's no objective algorithm for deciding who gets paid, or how much. If a travel agency gets $50m when they really could've stayed afloat for $25m, how exactly would anyone arrive at that definitive number, including the travel agency themselves? But if a company takes a bailout when they don't truly need it at all, I think it's fair for taxpayers to cry foul.
Now, if they used it to buy a new McLaren or something like that, then, yeah, they're a piece of shit.
It'd be nice to have a place where companies which are struggling right now can post ads.
Another thing to note here is that despite not being harmed directly by COVID19 we are all suffering the indirect harm. Consumers are broke, supply chains are disrupted, air freight cost is sky high, etc.
The language in the terms of the loan is far too ambiguous for anyone that's not in a life-and-death situation to take on the risk imo.
The application makes you certify the following: "Current economic uncertainty makes this loan request necessary to support the ongoing operations of the Applicant."
This is fairly ambiguous language putting most applicants in a defensible position regardless of firm performance over the next 6 months. There was a lot of litigation against lenders during the last QE so banks were more cautious about compliance. However, I was still not asked for tax returns, any financial statements, etc.
https://www.pkfod.com/insights/are-hedge-fund-managers-eligi...
Hedge funds asked for money.
The U.S. government works for, and is run by, big businesses.
It isn't much fun but that's the way of these things. Got to stay positive and will be checking the HN "Who's Hiring" threads.
If you want to read more about the recent layoffs here is a link in French [0] (unfortunately behind an ad paywall)
[0] https://www.nicematin.com/economie/ce-groupe-base-sur-la-cot...
____
also a $14M Series A the same month: https://twitter.com/voipsipguruPB/status/1094042447070613504
the role is full remote at the moment, but otherwise when this covid situation is over, it is based in an office near Liverpool street station.
Remote interviews were an interesting challenge. Remote paperwork went somewhat smoother than expected. Introducing the new hires to the rest of the team is something we need to get better at.
It works out great for me because I now qualify for state & federal unemployment benefits that will allow me to net more than I'm actually making at least through 7/31 while working only 4 days a week.
Productivity will recover when businesses can use resources productively. It's either keep the scheme running until quarantine measures are reduced enough to allow businesses to start ramping back up and productivity increases again, or remove the scheme and push people to unemployment which is worse for productivity. If the government is daft enough to stop the scheme before the quarantine measures are reduced we're in for a shit-show of a decade.
(If morbidly curious, you can keep an eye on tribunal outcomes at https://www.gov.uk/employment-tribunal-decisions .. I just checked this month's unfair dismissal outcomes and not a single one was in the complainant's favour, though some may have been withdrawn due to negotiating an offer.)
(Mexico) They have been firing people systematically in the last months. They don't have any new projects and they keep hiring more people just to fire them a few months later.
Top management sends global emails saying they want to keep all the employees, but locally they are firing people.
Ironically, to this day, no local managers have been fired.
on the good side: full law compensation is offered.
The Wikimedia Foundation is still hiring many of the same positions we were before all of this. You can see the currently-open positions at: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/jobs/
They've been an outstanding employer during these difficult times, as announced publicly on our blog: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2020/03/06/wikimedia-fo...
Come help us bring free knowledge to the world!
They have encouraged us to find new employment because there is no guarantee they will hire us back. I believe this to avoid paying us severance.
They started today and will continue tomorrow.
I, as an expat, am absolutely grateful and have changed my tune on the “European welfare state” trope to “this just makes sense”. I got let go from a Berlin based fintech and got 3 months pay plus a small severance. They did this likely because funding fell apart during the pandemic but it could have also been to cull people that they didn’t need but they did do right by us.
I'm absolutely amazed at how people in the US are so against severance being mandatory.
It's just vastly better organized in a way that (largely) protects consumers from capitalism where it doesn't belong.
“I like free money” is hardly a good argument to support statements like “it just makes sense”.
That's not an argument also, Germany is actually doing very well for everyone ( civilians, business, healthcare, innovation, ...)
They are almost launching their contact-tracing app, while the poor, that need it, in the US get 1200$ in the next 3-6 months, lol.
The rich get 1.700.000 $ though, that's "normal". Good job! /s
Perhaps you were talking about the federal state saying that states have to look for their own medical supplies? That's nice
Employment is a transaction, like any other. Doing some business yesterday is no guarantee of business tomorrow.
You'll forgive us for not being convinced by your argument.
Except that you can't later withdraw your consent. You said that was "a violation of consent".
Which is it?
Employment contracts in the US (if they exist at all and aren’t simply an implicit agreement, so-called “at will” in most states) don’t generally provide for severance. Almost every one I’ve ever read allows for either party to opt out at any time without penalty, or explicitly states what the remaining liabilities would be in the instance that one of the parties did end the transaction.
If you don’t have a written, signed contract, you cannot assume future consent to perpetuating or extending a transaction. There wasn’t any explicit future-consent.
The existence of a written, signed contract changes that.
I'm sorry but there's plenty of both liabilities and obligations in the event of early termination. Have a look at your telco contract if you don't believe me
This is just a bad-faith attempt at using the language for sexual and interpersonal consent to pretend that businesses and workers are on an equal footing and have no obligations to their staff.
Making employers responsible for severance pay is a way of aligning costs with information asymmetry, and also trying to make employers at least a little sensitive to the impact their whims can have on real people's lives.
It’s interesting though, how would you go about establishing a proof?
I always enjoy Hans Rosling going through the stats, if you’ve time it’s well worth it https://youtu.be/FACK2knC08E
Hint: they do.
The argument that the regulatory burden on small businesses can be bad for economic growth does have some real validity - the great work on this is Hernando De Soto's The Other Path on Peru. However, that's an argument for making the tradeoff in an informed way and exempting small businesses (something the EU is extremely bad at!), while being against severance pay in its entirety is just a profit-before-humans talking point.
It's also important that people can get unemployment benefits for at least 6 months after losing their job. I'm not sure how that works in the US. I'm guessing it changes per state like everything else in the US.
So all employees effectively pay for layoffs, which goes against you if you're not the one that gets laid off.
(I am very much in favor of mandatory severance and generally other kinds of safety nets.)
Or you could say that the company needs to save the profit generated by your position until it equals your anticipated severance before paying dividends from that profit. So it’s still a drag on profits, but it has nothing to do with other employees.
Sounds like a very acceptable compromise. I'm happy to chip in. I'm also happy that I pay taxes for universal healthcare so that I can take advantage of that when I'm in a disadvantaged position, but that's me.
When you're employing people you're not already thinking about their future exit. You hire based on your growth, so you're usually optimistic about the future and thinking about employees being long term. If not you hire contractors, who you can lay off easily.
Part of this is that you can't just fire people without good cause and without following a process. There are probationary periods to allow the hire to be let go if they don't work out in the first 6 months or so, but after that you're into a long "managing them out of the business" process that may or may not end up with a pay off.
+1 for the contractors thing. If there is already an expiration date for these people, then make them a contractor or reach out to a staffing firm.
I'm sure you already know, but in the UK you can be fired for any non-protected reason within the first 2 years of employment. I think UK companies are typically less cavalier than their US counterparts when it comes to firing, but in the frist 2 years, the employee protections are similar to US at-will states.
1 - If you make it too hard to let people go, companies will be less willing to hire. (You’ve added a cost to the employee)
2 - If you make the cost of severance too high, it will kill companies that might otherwise have a chance to squeak through.
There are plenty of good arguments on the other side (companies offloading social costs to the govt, etc) but these two are consistent with economic theory on labor supply and demand.
So have you run a business where you had to hire employees?
This creates a never-ending hamster-wheel of hiring-firing - not good for the employee and not good for the company.
Also, if paying 1 month of severance is too much for a company, then perhaps it is not run well and should be allowed to fail?
I agree that no severance sucks. Although keep in mind that in theory, higher salaries should equal hire savings. The average developer in SF makes more than the average developer in Berlin (how much more... maybe 2X)? If you could make 100% more & forego a severance package, would you?
It's not a real world choice, I'm just trying to offer context that one way to look at higher salaries is that you are getting cash more cash upfront instead in lieu of having a stronger social safety net. And people who work crap jobs just don't have a safety net, which is another conversation.
In France if you earn 50k/month, your boss actually pays you ~100k. 50k is going in your pocket, and the other 50k goes to a centralized fund which pays for healthcare, pensions, and unemployment compensations ; things you would have paid for yourself otherwise.
People in France complains a LOT about those 50k that are "lost" but in fact there are "forced savings", or "indirect salary", what they don't realize is that not having a centralized compulsory saving system end would up costing them so, so much more.
Whether the ${COUNTRY} social model is sustainable is another question.
There are plenty of apparently reasonable ${PEOPLE} that argue it is not.
${PEOPLE} = "americans"
it seems to compile as well...
Europe has problems, but they've had their periods of extreme expansion and contraction and learned their hard lessons.
The new average emissions target for new cars in the EU is 95g CO2/km. That's equivalent to 4.1 l/km (57.4 mpg) of gas or 3.6 l/km (65.3 mpg) of diesel. That's already ambitious on paper, but manufacturers are soon required to have cars record the actual consumption of their fleets on the road.
Of course, just because you could doesn't mean you actually should sue. For one thing, as a tech worker you're probably better off just finding a different job; if you're someone from a different profession who has a harder time finding jobs (or you're pregnant or sick or something), it's different of course.
I am just saying this because I was fired (together with my whole team) recently for very dubious reasons and while I did get severance, I am not sure it would have been actually legal (especially after it turned out the reasons they gave us were largely bullshit). But in the end it wouldn't have been worth it going into a legal argument.
Unfortunately I already signed the termination agreement. Honestly it’s probably better I just find a new role even though I think legally it’s a bit suspicious given the history of the company to experience mass layoffs.
The CEO just awarded himself a 30mil bonus: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/playtech-plan-to-pay-boss...
Lulz, classic case of bad incentive: I bet revenues for online gambling are way up at the moment, now that more and more people are forced to stay home and be fundamentally unsupervised all day. But because stock markets are drying up across the board, stellar profits might well not get reflected in stock prices.
Just another reason for not basing exec compensation on stock prices.
Instead of burning a few wooden pallets and having a BBQ while blocking the company entrance, you guys could perhaps put a firewall rule to drop all incoming traffic to the VPN and having an online video party.
How could you ever trust an employee who did this with their access privileges?
A rainy day will arrive sooner or later - whether it is a pandemic or an economic crisis or a dry spell in additional funding, etc.
If you ask me I think all bonuses should be returned but again, nothing uniquely evil about this company.
Some employers may want to fire the people who organize the protests, but in France the employees representatives are more protected than others and you can't fire them easily. It has pros and cons.
I've heard about workers in France literally kidnapping and stripping the clothes from their bosses and it being tolerated. I think that kind of thing is never tolerable under any civil circumstance. If a co-worker tried to kidnap me I'd see that as a threat to my life and I'd be fighting for survival.
Kidnapping is for sure not acceptable. Stripping the clothes as well, it was very criticized everywhere in the world including France when the AirFrance HR cunt got his shirt destroyed. If you work in France in the future, don't be scared about being kidnapped by your co-workers. It's very unlikely, especially if you are not a bad CEO, and I don't remember physical harm happening. I'm not saying it's acceptable, but it's a very small risk and you should not dismiss the benefits of protesting for only a few protests that went wrong over the last 10 years.
Well the persons responsibles for stripping the Air France HR guy got 3 to 4 months jail sentences, so I don't know if I would call that "tolerated".
At the same time, in the US there's litterally an idiom for starting to kill your coworkers if I'm correct : "going postal".
So, overall, I prefer the most violent thing to happen at work to be shirt stripping.
How does that work exactly? I imagine you're presented with a contract that says "you salary is now <previous salary 0.9>"* and you're also told (or heavily implied) that if you don't sign, you're fired.
Surely the employer can't just start paying you less than specified in your original contract? And maybe if you don't sign, you're owed some benefits (but who wants to be jobless going into pandemic+recession+inflation)?
It still happens though.
What large companies do is hold a large minority stake in their group companies. Then they shut down the 'programme' in one company and move it, modulo some cosmetic changes, to another group company.
Bitter experience.
If the business is in danger of going bust because it can't afford to keep people on then it may need to make some of them redundant (and redundancy rights will then apply), but that's totally different to unilaterally changing the contractual terms of employment for the worse.
[1] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1996/18/section/98 [2] https://www.bto.co.uk/blog/refusing-to-accept-a-wage-cut-%E2...
It appears that the case in question has not yet been definitively resolved, though, and the argument made would contradict almost everything many employment lawyers have been advising for a long time about the implications of the ERA in this area. Notably, that includes a lot of advice given during the previous financial crisis just over a decade ago, when similar questions were widespread.
The conventional legal wisdom seems to have been that mandating a pay cut is not allowed, because it's not a permitted deduction from wages and it's likely a breach of contract, and that firing someone just for refusing is not allowed either, because any decisions about who to let go if the business is in financial trouble are a separate matter that should be made objectively. That would mean without reference to the refusal by any given employee to accept worse terms of employment, and without conflating a position that might now be redundant with any employee currently holding that position who might also be able to work elsewhere in the business instead.
For example, my home state's Employment Security Department: https://esd.wa.gov/unemployment/laid-off-or-fired
Given that there are non-US readers here, maybe there's another pair of phrases that Hacker News could use as standard in this situation. I know in the UK, "made redundant" is used instead of "laid-off".
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
We've been penalizing these threads but I'm kind of changing my mind about that (other than that we don't want them very often because repetition is not good for the front page). Unfortunately they tend to devolve into junk, so there's more of a moderation burden.
Edit: this thread ended up making a poor case for having threads like this on HN. Most of it was off topic, and a lot of it went into low-quality rage and even outright flamewar.
Yes, though most Brits would pragmatically accept the term "laid-off" as covering redundancy, though formally a "lay-off" is the same as furloughing in the UK (i.e. not permanent).
> There is a difference between being laid off and fired.
> Generally, we treat your job loss as a layoff if your employer is not replacing you, and you'll qualify for unemployment benefits if you meet all of the eligibility criteria.
> If your employer is replacing you, we generally will treat you as being fired.
Some companies here are firing people so that they can replace them with people willing to work at a lower salary.
The article also allows the concept of no-fault firing:
> If you were fired through no fault of your own, such as not having the skills to do the job, you may be eligible for unemployment benefits.
So I think from a dictionary definition, it's an OK title; from an emotional perspective, I can understand how someone telling you that you were fired can be jarring.
However, we should remember that the shame is placed squarely on the shoulders of the company - in any case of firing, the company can always be seen as partially at fault, as it is usually caused by lack of forward thinking, agility, engagement or empathy.
So remember: Whether they laid you off or fired you, it is our job as a community to stand with you.
Video calls with friends and co-workers doesn't cut it, plus the 1 hour mandatory exercise.
I'd rather change jobs and be outside chopping wood or something that is "productive".
Your original phrasing is incorrect hence the confusion by the other persons' comment. It would be more accurate to call it a restriction.
"one form of exercise a day, for example a run, walk, or cycle - alone or with members of your household"
Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-outbr...
Here's the relevant law: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2020/350/contents/made
Here's the relevant section of that law: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2020/350/regulation/6/mad...
Here's the relevant text of that section:
> to take exercise either alone or with other members of their household;
There is nothing in that law that restricts either the number of times you can do that or the amount of time you can spend doing that. There _has_ been guidance issued by various people in government and law enforcement agencies, but that is exactly what it is: guidance. According to the law, you are free to take exercise either alone or with other members of their household, and the law doesn't care how often you do that or for how long.
(Caveat: that's the "England" version of the law; Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own versions; see e.g. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/id?title=Health+Protection+%28... )
I guess ultimately it's up to the individual - the longer you exercise for and the greater the area you cover, I guess the higher the risk of you spreading the virus if you have it or getting it is. But I think the government are crediting people with some common sense here, e.g. if you are in the middle of nowhere and don't see another person, you can probably justify exercising for longer to yourself more easily than in a crowded city.
FWIW, I've been doing about 30 mins cycling outside most week days in London, around an hour (sometimes 90 minutes) at the weekend. Would love to go further or more times a day, but feels like we have to do our bit to help, while also staying sane, personally I feel comfortable with this level.
[1] random link from Google, https://www.runnersworld.com/uk/news/a31973975/coronavirus-u...
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