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Comment by yboris | Hacker News Reader

How is it legal to demand people work on weekends?

How is it legal to (even threaten) firing if a new assigned task that takes a long time is not done on time?

For salaried, at-will employment, the employer can demand whatever they want and fire you for whatever reason they want. There are exceptions for, like, sexual harassment and racial discrimination, but not for "I disagree with the boss about what is a realistic project timeline".

The nice thing is that this goes both ways. If you are an at-will employee you can send an email that says "I resign effective immediately" and walk away and never speak to anyone at that company ever again.

Who’s hurt more: the company whose employee leaves on the spot, or the employee whose company fires them on the spot? At-will is asymmetric.

It is the definition of symmetrical. Both parties can cut ties at any time without any warning.

In general employers are able to benefit from this symmetrical relationship more often though since they are only losing a small percentage of their workers while the employee is losing 100% of the income they were getting from that employeer.

Symmetry can exist on one axis but not another. Sure it's symmetrical on the "actions an entity can take axis", but when people refer to the employee/employer relationship being asymmetrical they are discussing the risk or impact axis.

>It is the definition of symmetrical.

GP was clearly talking about the assymetry of consequences, not the action itself. You intentionally misinterpreted them.

Depends on the role, the company, and the timing. A single worker in an important position leaving on the spot, dropping some critical work half-way done and taking all the context and specific knowledge with them, could easily torpedo a million dollar deal. Or, a single employee leaving could trigger a cascade, and soon you're short a whole project team.

In general, I'd say at-will still favors employers, who are in a better position to structurally mitigate the threat of a critical employee leaving, even though they often don't do so.

I'll note that a company that depends on a single employee like this has failed to plan and is already in trouble. No matter how well you treat them, your critical employees will leave. You might be able to pay them well enough to limit the risk on them taking another job (though few employers do) but even with that sooner or later they'll win the lottery, get hit by a bus, or just retire.

A business can and must hedge against critical employees leaving. It's much harder as an employee to hedge against your employer giving you the boot.

As an example to further illustrate your point, it is possible for a business to purchase key employee insurance. As an employee we do not have the same privilege.

It's just a nitpick and it doesn't impact GP's point all that much, but: surely employees in the US have some sort of job loss insurance - if not standalone, then attached to a mortgage or life insurance?

It's usually unemployment insurance and it's provided by the state (literally, it'll be the state the employee resides in - here's California's: https://edd.ca.gov ).

There ARE "insurance" products that will "defer your credit/mortgage payments in case of a job loss" - they are almost all universally some form of scam (or at least a very bad "insurance").

I think it’s the state of the employer but I’m not sure. After all that’s who is paying into the fund. At least that’s what I remember when I looked into it when I was living in a different state than my employer and things were looking precarious.

I'm out of state compared to my employer and they had to establish a "nexus" or something because I am here, which required them to do something like register as a business and withhold state tax; I assume they're paying into some sort of unemployment in my state for me. All of those things became much more important when Covid hit, but cross-border employment has been big in Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, etc for a long-time, so it's a solved problem (by someone).

I was commuting across state lines at the time. Never looked deeply as I left before it became relevant and it was what it was in any case. MA would have been more than NH and I thought it would be NH but not sure why.

But the bigger point is that unemployment insurance is very little money compared to a good professional salary.

Interesting. My personal experience is with a loss of job insurance I had to buy as a condition on my mortgage, which did have somewhat reasonable terms. I also noticed options for this on life insurance, but never pursued them.

I suppose the ultimate protection a person has is savings, and it's likely more cost-effective than any form of insurance - except it's hard in practice for most people, partly because they barely have any disposable income, and partly because it requires the degree of self-control many (if not most) don't have (and the overall culture isn't encouraging it).

Not really. There’s unemployment insurance. But in NH for example to pick one state I’m familiar with, the maximum is $427 per week for 26 weeks. Some other states are certainly more but for someone in a high paying job it’s not much. So a max of about $11,000. I’m familiar with other insurance other than your own savings.

Employees have exactly this - it's called "Unemployment Insurance". YMMV depends on which state you live in, but many states, mandate employers pay into this so that when an employee is let go, they receive compensation.

You can debate whether it's enough or fair or whatever, but insurance against unemployment does exist for employees.

As GP said, sometimes, there is a cascade effect. One employee quits, and the whole team follows. Sometimes going to a competitor.

In tech, it is relatively easy for an employee to hedge against getting fired. It is a well paid job, in high demand.

It is not the same if the company fires its janitors, but I don't think I will stay in a literally filthy company that fires its janitors.

If one employee quitting takes out your whole team, the problem isn't the employee that quit. Something is seriously wrong with your working environment and the whole thing was balanced on a knife edge.

> In tech, it is relatively easy for an employee to hedge against getting fired. It is a well paid job, in high demand.

I have a friend who several years ago who was laid off with 3 months severance. They left feeling cheerful, telling people that if they couldn't find a job in 3 months, they deserved to be fired. Fortunately it only took slightly longer than 3 months and it's something we can laugh about now. The whole "it'll be easy to find a job with this skill-set" is true right up until it's not and is a risky backup plan.

Employees often depend on prior employers as references and for social connections. It is rare that anyone would actually walk out without notice, as doing so would almost always hurt their careers even if that job was truly shitty (the old adage to “never burn bridges” does apply!).

Employers do not experience this same effect. Even if lots of people get laid off from a company without notice, there will almost always be people who are willing to take new jobs there.

> Employees often depend on prior employers as references

Not really. I have not once been asked for references from previous companies.

Ah an individual data point, the crème de la crème of evidence.

I have not heard of any other developers needing to furnish references either. Just ask on HN or Reddit or Twitter, most devs will say they're not needed.

I've had to provide them for 3/4 positions so far (in Australia), and have provided many references - usually over a phone call with a hiring manager.

I've had to provide them for all job searches I've done (Silicon Valley).

I’ve supplied references. Don’t know if they’ve ever been checked. But it’s either other people I know in the industry or a friend at my employer.

Mainly because many companies now have policies that will only communicate three things about former employee: time employed, ending salary, and eligibility for re-hire.

You might make an assumption from the last item, but without specific details and by the time you might be confirming employment the ineligibility for rehire likely will not disqualify the candidate…especially if other former employers have you tagged as eligible.

That’s interesting. Are you in tech?

I’ve worked in many positions where I had unique knowledge. If the company fired me without notice, I’d have a new job within a few days.

If I quit without notice, high revenue systems could fail or not launch.

I kind of like software because of this. An individual has great value. Of course, I wouldn’t want to work for a company that fires people Willy nilly.

But for software at-will can definitely be asymmetric benefiting the employee. Software developers aren’t replaceable cogs.

This causes minimal hard to a business and zero harm to Musk's ability to afford yachts. But a very large number of employees have jobs because they need to pay rent and buy food. Losing that job is a significant change to their lives. Software engineers are more likely to have large savings that make it easier for them to say "fuck you" to their boss and leave but in general this system of at will employment is not actually balanced.

Correct. In the US, all working people serve and exist under authoritarian regimes as a matter of life or death.

> the employer can demand whatever they want and fire you for whatever reason they want

In the US.

I'm glad I work in a country where workers actually have rights.

Good for you.

Well yes. Yes it is.

You probably don't work in a country with a 3.5% unemployment rate.

Actually I do, precisely 3.5% in fact:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin...

That unemployment rate is nonsense. If you want a job that does not pay you enough to even afford a studio apartment in many locales then yes there are multiple jobs ready to take you. Hell they'll even provide you some free (candy\pens\fast food\a pat on the back) to further tempt the deal. For everyone else that unemployment rate is a mirage.

Are you telling me there are no housing affordability problems in the US?

Fascinating.

Everything in life is tradeoffs. American software engineers get paid more than basically anyone else in the world, but we also have less job security. What's preferable just depends on your risk aversion vs marginal utility of money.

> American software engineers get paid more than basically anyone else in the world, but we also have less job security. What's preferable just depends on your risk aversion vs marginal utility of money.

Of course, this comment is predicated on the assumption that America's loose labour laws are the reason for this salary disparity, and I'm not personally willing to follow you to that conclusion.

I think it's far more likely that American software engineers get paid more because the industry was effectively born there, and it was born there due to historical accidents like the US being where the transistor was invented, the advancement of technology due to government spending during World War II and the subsequent space race, etc, not to mention the US being the center of the VC world, which has its own deep history.

A tradeoff can exist without implying that the tradeoff is necessary.

In other words, America has A but not B, Europe has B but not A, and there doesn't happen to be a place with both A and B, but it's not impossible in principle. Workers would still need to decide if they value A or B more, even if in a perfect world they could have both.

Fair enough. I took the parent comment to be implying that that tradeoff was necessary--i.e. to have high salaries you have to have loose labour laws--as opposed to a simple statement about the current world we live in.

If it's the latter, absolutely you are right, and it is certainly the case that tech employees today are forced to make the choice between New York/California tech salaries and strong labour laws, regardless of whether or not there's a necessary inverse relationship between those two things.

It is necessary.

If you can fire low performers, average performance will be higher, which means average pay will be higher. The risk is that you personally get mistaken for (...or correctly assessed as...) a low performer. Hence, tradeoffs.

interesting framing to use "historical accident" to describe the directed US gov funding that turned into today's tech sector.

The rules are the same for less privileged workers, so what's preferable also depends on how good you already have it.

American software engineers * in unicorns from SV *. They have their own scale which is not really a national thing. Then you also have to adjust for the cost of living / not included insurances etc.

Just because American SWEs are able to exploit the current workers paradigm in the US due to eye-watering amounts of money from VCs and the state of ad-tech doesn't mean jack shit for any at-will salaried employee that isn't paid in truck-loads of equity.

There are states in the US where teacher's unions are out-lawed. US workers don't have rights. I have a feeling you might feel differently if not part of the segment of the working class that happens to be seeing benefits atm.

> There are states in the US where teacher's unions are out-lawed.

That’s a bold statement. Care to back it up?

Hyperbole, but ... a quick look at the Wikipedia article on Wisconsin's 2011 law [1] looks like the next best thing (e.g., yearly votes to retain union).

> Collective Bargaining: The law limits collective bargaining for most public employees to wages. Total wage increases cannot exceed a cap based on the consumer price index (CPI) unless approved by referendum. Increases from the bargaining process for teachers are applied only to the base wages, and do not include the additional salary of teachers. Contracts are limited to one year and wages frozen until the new contract is settled. Collective bargaining units must take annual votes to maintain certification as a union. Employers cannot collect union dues, and members of collective bargaining units are not required to pay them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Wisconsin_Act_10

2nd link on Kagi search (first one says the same things):

1. https://www.businessinsider.com/states-where-teachers-unions...

Outlawing collective bargaining might make unions less effective, but it doesn’t make unions illegal.

Making it illegal to drive over 20mph might make cars less viable as a transport option, but it doesn't make driving illegal.

To offer a bit of counter-perspective, do keep in mind that while American SWEs do get paid more on the average, the costs of living in the US are also sky-high the areas where big software companies operate.

Yes, in the EU I get paid a lot less, but the cost of living in Europe is also not nearly as expensive (although we also do pay more taxes). That's not even accounting for job security or workers rights, I seem to just have more money left over each month on average than any Americans I know of in the same industry because the cost of living is just lower and I have less heavy unexpected expenses (healthcare being the big one of course, but when I hear what US SWEs need to pay just to stay housed and fed, it makes absolutely no sense in prices compared to the EU).

That's not a case of risk aversion, its a case of relative vs absolute pay. In relative pay, the EU pays their employees just straight up better. The US is only better in absolute pay, but that gets drained quickly due to the local economy scaling up to match.

I would be really curious to see the numbers behind this.

Anytime you compare things anecdotally to people you know be verrry careful. It’s easy to not be comparing apples to apples. Do those people have kids? Rent vs own? How nice of cars? Commute? Sq footage of house? Etc etc. for example, I don’t work for FANG and you probably haven’t heard of my employer, but out of ~300k TC I save 48k cash + 100k stock + ~20k 401k retirement, which I think is pretty good. Tell me if you think I could do better in EU. . And while I live in suburbs of HCOL area, I’m fully remote so could move and save even more. Also remember if you own your house the money is usually not being drained it’s building into an equity nest egg. So at the end of the day the HCOL person will have more wealth even if they have to sell a house and move to use it; that arrow only goes one way (LCOL can’t sell and move to HCOL area and come out ahead).

It means if you lose out on a job to a less qualified person there is much less chance it ever gets rectified in your favor.

This is not true. I don't know who told you this.

All of these relationships are two way. If they make a demand to change the expectations of working hours and work time, you say no, I won't do that. They can fire you if they don't like the relationship, but even in the US you're likely to win at least unemployment benefits.

That is not true in the least. Keeping corps honest about that requires legal action.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/electronic-arts-faces-overt...

There are legal, labor, consequences for cultures that expect more than 40 hours on average.

I had a manager like this once. They won’t explicitly ask you to work on the weekends, but the deadline in combination with the workload made it obvious you would be working on the weekend and late nights. So glad I left that toxic place.

They are all exempt employees so they aren't covered by a lot of labor law, such as getting paid "overtime", etc. This is how professional, salaried employment works. Exempt employees tend to be paid very well and have great benefits though.

You can fire an employee for no reason at all since employment is "at will". Musk probably assumes a good deal of the workforce is lazy and/or incompetent and he doesn't want to pay them. So he's figuring out who to fire.

If the terminations are happening for the purpose of depriving employees of stock-related compensation they are about to earn, that may be an illegal reason. For example, you cannot let a salesperson snag a huge deal and then fire him or her to avoid paying the commission - it’s not an “at will” issue.

RSUs only vest if you are an employee the day they vest. If a salesperson wins a deal and you fire them before paying their commission that’s different since they closed the deal first.

It’s very common for companies to let individuals go before bonuses vest.

I would certainly recommend any employee in this situation to get legal counsel. Terminating an employee for the purpose of preventing them from satisfying conditions precedent to a payment is a bad-faith move that some courts will set aside.

Sure but good luck proving that.

There's no legal framework for weekends. They were originally created due to massive labor advocacy and strikes. I imagine since such advocacy has been undermined for decades it makes sense the victories the advocacy fought for are also being clawed back.

Even if the firing is legal - and California does have restrictions when a company fires a large number of people at once - arguing that it's "for cause" to withhold severance packages is going to be a lot more difficult.

For the rank and file layoffs yes, you need to have a notice period and those people will probably get severance at least equal to that much pay. But C suite executives are another matter. It’s very likely that Elon Musk received access to information after taking control that supports a for cause dismissal.

That these questions are being asked makes me think software engineers are very detached from the other 95% of humanity.

5% seemed high by a lot. It's high, but not by as much as I'd have guessed. It seems about 2.5% of the US workforce is in software development.

These things would be illegal in the EU, which alone is ~10% of humanity.

Don't frame not wanting to take abuse as being entitled.

It's always been legal to ask tech workers to work unpaid OT. Only places like FAANG, and a few others, pay extra for on-call.

Usually your contracts doesn't specify time worked per week, only that you finish your work.

Of FAANG I think only Google does that.

US "at will" employment laws.

In the US, there is a fair amount of respect (in business at least) for the idea of “consent to continue the interaction can be revoked with or without cause at any time”.

I personally can’t see a good reason why it should be illegal outside the rare edge case where there is only a single employer in a geographical region, and even that unfortunate situation should probably be remediated with a different type of government intervention.

Employers should be able to be unreasonable and shoot their business in the foot, no?

> Employers should be able to be unreasonable and shoot their business in the foot, no?

No.

Not when they hold an employees ability to meet basic human needs and their access to Healthcare over their employee's heads.

At-will employment is ideologically built on the equal splitting of the power between an employer and employee. The reality is as far from equal as can be.

I see a ton of signs saying help wanted in frot of businesses.

Anecdotally, any business with a sign in their front window is not a business which can replace a full time job, let alone employment by Twitter.

There are full time jobs, but I agree that they likely won't match a Twitter salary.

I've seen signs for commercial truck drivers around town in front windows, starting $80k and "local deliveries only".

For certain types of jobs it's still the most effective method out there.

There's no law that says the number they give on the sign is the exact number you get on your offer letter and not some "work for us for X amount of time and get Y amount of pay increase over that time" that may (or may not) eventually reach 80k

That's all true, but around here they're getting damn desperate.

Not saying it's worth doing, or a good job, but they're out there, especially in the smaller towns.

How does Twitter hold any sway whatsoever over their employees' abilities to meet basic human needs, or their access to healthcare? I think for this to hold true, you have to assume that anyone working there must have zero savings, and no other job prospects.

> I personally can’t see a good reason why it should be illegal

There is a big one: the employer/employee is not a balanced relationship, the employer clearly has more power over where things go. So it's absolutely normal to protect the employee from being asked too much, especially when said employee doesn't benefit from the overtime.

There is a big bias towards taking companies as important citizens whose needs must be catered for, but it's taking more and more importance when the actual citizens aren't listened to. It is important to put companies back to what they are: a social construct for exploiting people and make profit from their work.

> the employer/employee is not a balanced relationship

Sure it is, they want my labor, I want to sell my labor. We agree on a price.

If my price changes, or they are unwilling to buy it any more I find a new person to buy my labor.

I was looking for a job when I found this one, and I will be looking again when I find my next one.

It's typically held that the average employer being able to go without a worker in a given position much longer than the average worker can go without a job is what makes it uneven. Saying "no" is far riskier to one side than the other. There also tend to be large information imbalances, in practice.

I the US your manager can demand the moon be sitting on his desk by Monday morning, or you are fired.

I think this is a reality check and a power play by Musk to remind employees of the fact.

I mean that would be begging for the "pantsless on the desk" method of quitting, but I get the point.

Musk is a narcistic asshole, he commands at will and sadly a large group of people stay behind him and defend every step.

Murica!!!

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