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Comment by buscoquadnary | Hacker News Reader

Wow laying off a large chunk of an unprofitable company is lex luthor evil? Guess the bar for super villain has become substantially lower.

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Layoffs are part of business yes (pretty much what I said in my parent post). What I have a problem with is the way this is being done. Forcing people to quit by dropping arbitrary deadlines without any notice? Notice of 84 hour work weeks? Sleeping in the office? Asking devs to print up their code? All this because he doesn't want to pay severance etc. I think that is hella f*cked up.

> Forcing people to quit by dropping arbitrary deadlines without any notice? Notice of 84 hour work weeks? Sleeping in the office?

Did any of this happen as a matter of policy? Or are you getting upset about rumors and hearsay?

It did.

https://twitter.com/esthercrawford/status/158770970548883046...

That'd be a big heck no from me dawg. No job is worth that.

I've slept at work plenty of times. It's fun! Except one time I went outside for a spliff break at 2am and dropped my wallet w/ key badge right as the door shut. I had to hunt down a taxi and promise him I had money at my house! I also didn't have shoes on for some reason.

Your original comment made it sound like businesses shouldn't layoff people because they were people who had real lives. After reading this follow-up, I realized you have no issues with layoffs, but you actually just had an issue with how they were laid off. Basically, same outcome, but with more grace.

It’s not the same outcome at all - severance pay is often the difference between needing to take out a loan or not when embarking on a job search after a layoff. Lack of that stability will have material impact on many people: they might have to move, change which schools their kids go to, avoid medical treatment not covered by Medicare, etc etc. He’s not committing some sort of victimless crime.

> but with more grace

> Grace - courteous goodwill.

I think we are saying the same thing. Goodwill can only be built with actions and that would be similar to what Stripe did in their layoffs. The lack of goodwill would result in what you are saying.

None of that was in the linked article.

Not paying severance is also part of business and what people signed up for if it is not a law or a contract.

Forcing people to work over weekends, 84 hour weeks, finding any excuse to make them quit or fire them "for cause" like making them print their code out physically? The end of the year is coming. It's supposed to be the holidays soon. Thanksgiving is in like 3 weeks. C'mon, dude.

Just so. Some big Grinch energy coming from one of the wealthiest people on the planet.

Having employees pull 80+ hr crunch time is common in the AAA game industry... whats so bad about it happening for a few weeks at twitter?

Yes it is common in the gaming industry. That is not a good thing nor a justification for it happening elsewhere.

Having then pull 80+ weeks is bad no matter where it is.

The game dev work environmental is notoriously shitty, that doesn't make it okay to make it shitty elsewhere.

It is no longer common at all.

> Having employees pull 80+ hr crunch time is common in the AAA game industry

You say that as if the working conditions in the AAA game industry _aren't_ widely regarded as horrible...

Crunch happening in the games industry isn't a defense of it happening elsewhere. It shouldn't be happening in the games industry either.

Lex Luthor would never make so many stupid comments on social media. Musk is more cartoon villain than comic book villain. But I think the Joker once lampshaded that a CEO was more evil than he would ever be. Its probably somewhere in the Even Evil has Standards trope (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvenEvilHasStand...).

Lex Luthor did, however, take forty cakes. That’s as many as four tens. And that's terrible.

He hasn’t communicated with the employees. He has left them twisting in the wind. They’re finding things out from his tweets instead of through proper company channels. It’s unprofessional and disrespectful.

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