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The U.S. healthcare system traps people in companies, for fear of losing access to reliable healthcare. A system that was completely independent from employers would be much more beneficial to employees. Plus, it would save huge administrative costs for private companies. This would especially benefit small companies, but, really, it would make the job of running any company much easier.

In that universe people might possibly work for lower wages. It’s an income effect. Plus the present value of future healthcare costs goes far down too (individually and in aggregate).

Healthcare.gov. We've had that system for 12 years. I've never had employer healthcare, it was way more expensive than private insurance in Hawaii, which anyone can get and you auto-qualify for enrollment if you change jobs or move.

https://www.navapbc.com/insights/twelve-years-of-healthcare-...

Are you saying you’ve declined your employer sponsored healthcare and just signed up at healthcare.gov and it ended up being cheaper?

Yes. The plan my employer had in Hawaii was $700/mo for pretty average coverage. On Healthcare.gov the best possible plan I could get, $0 deductible, full coverage, etc, was $510/mo.

I think the difficulty is that most people who have employer healthcare have never checked healthcare.gov because they didn't need to, but it's hard to keep seeing people perpetuate this idea that hasn't been true for over a decade.

Ah, you might not have kids? I just went through the sign up process. All the plans were about the same for me on Healthcare.gov: $1,400 a month with no coverage until after a $14k deductible. This is for a family of four in Georgia.

I suspect you're also putting in your current income, rather than something much lower that you'd be experiencing if you just lost your job.

I do this, because I need one of the higher-end plans with the low cap on out-of-pocket expenses. It'd be more expensive to take my work's; cheaper on monthly premium, but my family OOP max would be $14k instead of $4k.

I have noticed several people in my life seeming to vastly overestimate the cost of getting healthcare through the healthcare.gov exchanges. If you leave your job, you can just do that. It’s much cheaper than the COBRA price, which I think people are looking at. For many people, it shouldn’t be a huge problem to get insurance this way. (I would still prefer single-payer!)

Depends if you quality for the subsidy or not. Mine's $2400/month (family of four) through the exchange. Going up 10% next year, too.

> healthcare.gov exchanges. It’s much cheaper

Interesting... I've heard it's the opposite, price-wise.

A lot of folks compare the amount they pay in premiums against it, which is a mistake, because that's almost always only part of the cost; employers tend to pay all or some.

I ran into someone who genuinely thought their health insurance ran $100/month, because that's how much got deducted in their paycheck.

I'm curious what prices you are seeing and considering no big deal; because I'm not sure if you're seeing different prices than I've seen, or just have a different threshold for what would be a huge problem for most people?

I've seen like $600/month for an individual, and this is just kind of ok probably good enough insurance (with a non-trivial deductible). For a family, even more, $1800 or more a month. Again for not great insurance. For me that'd already be a significant problem, but maybe not for an ex twitter engineer? Or maybe if you are a single person in your 20s (or I forget, do they still charge different for different ages post obamacare?), or in a different state than me, it's a lot cheaper?

Those are normal prices.

https://www.kff.org/report-section/ehbs-2022-section-1-cost-...

> The average annual premiums in 2022 are $7,911 for single coverage and $22,463 for family coverage.

People get shocked by COBRA pricing, but it’s literally just your existing plan’s cost plus a max of 2% for administration. The real cost of health insurance is hidden from almost all Americans.

Maybe an extra $22K/year isn't a "huge problem" for the average twitter engineer with a family (although if you have enough to afford it, you probably want better insurance than that not-top-of-the-line $22K/year one), but I am confident saying it would be for most people!

Those numbers to me confirm that health insurance is part of what makes it hard for Americans to quit jobs.

They were given 90 days severance… which is like 6 standard notice periods.

Not the original plan to do that, so there was a forcing function. Check further down for the comments noting that severance is there to cover the WARN period.

> If I were asked back I'd take it

Since the workers mostly aren't actually fired, but in a no-access, no-duties period between notice and dismissal while still employed and on payroll, its “resume duties, quit, or be fired for cause”.

> Why is it corporations can "layoff" without notice but as an employee you are expected to give 2 weeks notice?

Both sides can equally give as much notice as they want. 2 weeks is only customary, but also seems to be rarely honored on both sides. If an employee gives 2 weeks, they’re often just walked out the door and stay on the payroll for 2 weeks (for any job more complex than menial tasks, no meaningful transition can be completed in 2 weeks, so it’s better to reduce any risks immediately). Companies often give severance packages longer than 2 weeks to avoid being sued, on condition of signing some paperwork to that effect.

The company needs to bite the bullet to secure a short-term contract that stipulates certain things need to be done on a (expensive) fixed-cost basis. No reason to expect any of these employees to work the same way anymore, and they might even present some risk, so extra carrot is needed to keep them around for critical duties and hand-over.

> Sorry for the rant.

Don't be. These are things worth ranting about; and even moreso they are things worth acting upon.

There are elections in the US this week, right?

I would probably take the job and proceed to do fuck all until they fired me again.

A company tried to get me to come back and do handover after terminating a contract in breach a few years back. Agreement was a month. I did nothing for the entire month because they didn’t specify a deliverable. Due to working through an agency that was larger than the company I got paid and they got told to piss off when they complained.

The at will is both ways, legally. It’s the massive unequal market power that forces two weeks notice.

That is certainly a hot take. When a company is losing $4 million a day drastic measures are in order to save the company so the remaining employees still have a job. Having worked in tech for over 20 years and being on both sides of layoffs I can tell you how hard it is for the people making the decision of who to layoff is exceedingly difficult and heart breaking.

It definitely looks like Twitter was a hot mess and needed an amputation to save the patient.

Yeah, cry me a river for the poor heart-broken decision makers, who (in fact) aren't actually losing their job.

Would you prefer drawing straws like a marooned pirate?

AFAIK the company didn't lose $4M/day until the advertisers halted their ad buys because of the uncertainties brought by the new management.

And the interests on the debt the company got from Musk.

I have no doubt that for most of the people making the decision of which person to lay off it would be hard. They are human.

But, I wonder; are these the same people (managers) that were making decisions that allowed the company to loose $4 million a day? If so, then hard to have sympathy for them.

If the decisions were being made above the managers, in the C-suite, then it is their asses (which we all know Elon sacked them as well). If I had to make an educated guess I would assume their severance pay is orders of magnitude greater than the 90 day severance that the regular Joe and Jane got.

So let's say the decisions that cost the company $4M/day came from the top, not middle managers and not the end employee. The people who say "we have to lay off X amount of people, today, tomorrow, ASAP" are not the ones who are doing the actual telling individuals they are laid off. So in their mind this is "the price of doing business". Again, fuck 'em. Why should the individual who got laid off, rehired, found a new job then give the requisite 2 week notice? It's the price of doing business.

In my mind either we are going to take out the human aspect or we aren't and both sides need to take the same approach. It can't be "it's business" on one side and "the human element" on the other. It can be, but I'm not going to play that game. In a couple of years (if that long) I'm going to be forgotten about and the business will probably keep on keepin' on.

> But, I wonder; are these the same people (managers) that were making decisions that allowed the company to loose $4 million a day?

Twitter is losing US$4 million a day now, with the added interests Elon has to pay back on his US$ 1 bi loan to buy Twitter. So using this claim as a justification is exaggerated, by the sheer fact that most of that US$ 4 million figure is from Elon's own creation.

He is directly the reason they are losing $4 million a day. They weren't losing anywhere near that before he took control.

It sounds like it just recently got some potentially terminal disease, so maybe the cure is to cut the tumor out, instead of all the limbs? But it might be just too late.

Did you know that Musk's acquisition put Twitter under massive debt and his actions chasing off advertisers means they're losing even more money by the day?

Twitter was a mess prior to Musk, but stable enough to remain afloat. When Musk acquired it, it became a flaming hot mess. Layoffs like these is like treating an infected finger with amputation. It temporarily solves the problem, but then you're still left without a finger.

Only in this case he cut off a whole hand.

> I can tell you how hard it is for the people making the decision of who to layoff is exceedingly difficult and heart breaking.

We want C-Suite execs to think of employees as people. But in reality the C-suite execs just think of them as another expense, albeit a necessary one.

At the C-Suite, everything is a number: number of employees, income, expenses, etc. The most important ones are cash on hand, and profit after expenses.

Here's a thought experiment: If Elon offered you $100 million to fire half the company would you do it? Personally I'd have a hard time saying no to that.

> Personally I'd have a hard time saying no to that.

Particularly when you tell yourself that they’ll find another job easily.

That's what I would tell others as a cold-hearted condolence whether I believed it or not. I'd just be looking at the cold hard cash.

Of those 4M/day, 2.7M are the interest on the leveraged buyout debt that Musk had Twitter take, they weren't there before!

In comparison, assuming an everage yearly cost per fired employee of 200K, by firing 3000 of them they are saving 1.6M a day.

Musk added 2.7M/day of purely financial cost, and then tried to reduce the damage by firing half the company and it's not even nearly enough!

And this is before the lost income from advertising...

I won't pretend to know business better than the richest man in the world, but from down here this sure looks like the train wreck of the century. We'll see I guess.

I wonder if all these commenters blaming Musk for screwing up Twitter and the layoff realize that the pre-Musk Twitter had already planned layoffs.

> Before Musk took over the site, Twitter had already planned broad layoffs, which would have affected up to a quarter of the staff, according to people familiar with the plans. The Post reported previously the company’s board was planning to cut thousands of jobs as part of an effort to save $700 million in labor costs.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/03/elon-mu...

This is like saying that people who call new painting as super ugly on the wall should stop complaining, because there was originally plan for different painting. Size of layoffs matter. How you execute layoffs matter. How you choose people to be fired and how you treat them matter a lot. And also, it matter a lot whether you dont play into hostile attitude nonsense toward them on social media (they were surely all lazy useless zero product employess think should be at least commented on).

You can come in, have respectful speech, announce yourself as an owner, announce future layoffs and then work on one that at least appear semi reasonable. Or, you can come in with sink, hahaha, make it into twitter joke, spend weekend planning layoff while joking about it on twitter.

These two are radically different.

eh, most of the comments here aren't saying what you're saying. They are blasting Musk for having layoffs in general.

It really does not seem so to me. They complain about size of it, speed of it and the way it was done. They are however reacting in more of emotional way.

The thing is, Musk really went out of his way to troll Twitter employees and those who like twitter. And his fans really went out of way to mock fired people, call them lazy and so on. It was not just layoff, it was layoff designed to let you know how much looser you are.

People respond in kind, with schadenfreude and bullying back.

> They complain about size of it, speed of it and the way it was done

I haven't seen much of that here in HN though. Do you have examples?

> It was not just layoff, it was layoff designed to let you know how much looser you are.

Again, I don't see that. It just needed to be done. Could have been handled better? Were mistakes made? Probably. But I don't think it was intentional to show what a loser people are.

DHH has a nuanced take on it that I like. https://world.hey.com/dhh/apple-fired-4-100-when-steve-jobs-...

He quotes Jobs during his return and reboot of Apple

> Some mistakes will be made. That's good. Because at least some decisions will be made too. We'll fix them... But I think it's so much better than where things were not very long ago.