Hacker News Reader

Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

In America laws like this are sidestepped by the manager coming up with a sufficiently solid reason to fire you. Suddenly nothing you do will be good enough, and good luck proving in court that it was. Huge hassle.

(Narcoleptics like myself have a somewhat unique perspective on this topic. I imagine other people with disabilities might have similar stories. But narcolepsy is a tricky one because it’s not very visible, and the optimal strategy is to conceal it as long as possible. I remember wandering around the streets of Chicago during my lunch break looking for anywhere to catch a nap, collapsing on a bench, then getting yelled at by some random security guard to leave.)

View on HN

Just about everywhere in the US, people can be fired without any reason at all. It is up to someone who is fired to show that they were fired for a reason that is illegal.

Came here to say this. The only reason this French court case was a case at all is that the employer had to give a clear reason why the employee was fired. For at-will employment in America, you could also be fired for not fitting into company social culture (or for any number of other random reasons) but they don’t have to give a reason at all.

EU and American labor laws are very very different. This has been brought into stark relief by the recent goings-on at twitter, in which several European employees were certainly fired illegally.

It seems some states, like NY and California, have some sort of civil protections, however weak, that at least make companies write up justifications, document stuff, and do a PIP. It seems more rare to suddenly disappear someone unless they've done something terrible. Granted one month and 'here is an employee performance improvement plan that they will never achieve success for' is a bit dicey ethically.

While this is legally true, in practicality all companies will give a reason for being fired in the US precisely because, if the employee does bring a suit alleging discrimination, "just because" isn't a reason that's likely to pass muster with a jury.

Right. A legal reason is a good defense to an accusation of using an illegal reason.

The modern boss does it one better. Keeps a record of every "transgression" you ever committed from the day you're hired. Then, when the day comes that he decides to fire you, his case is already made.

It's standard practice at my local food co-op. Those hippies are heartless.

It's legally advisable. Even if you do fire someone for a good reason, you will want to have those reasons documented if the firing is legally challenged.

Out of curiosity, what problems did your narcolepsy cause your management so that they decided to fire you under a pretext?

I was a pentester. In ye olde pre-Covid days of 2016, it was important (at least to this manager) for pentesters to be available at precisely 9am for client engagements.

I actually didn’t know I had narcolepsy when I got the job. The discovery happened on the job. It was pretty comical. He was putting increased pressure on me to make sure I was there at exactly 9 (rather than leaving at ~8pm or later like I usually did). So I remembered a coworker from my first job being miraculously cured by a CPAP machine. I suggest “let’s try out a sleep study, I bet I can get this taken care of.” So I do that and they couldn’t even wake me up for the 3rd check. (There’s three checks during a sleep study, and I was apparently the heaviest sleeper they’ve seen.)

They were like “So it turns out you have narcolepsy” and I told my manager “so it turns out I have narcolepsy” and he was like “so it turns out I can sidestep disability laws. Gimme two months, I’ll speedrun your notice.”

It was an interesting experience being booted out with no severance and no notice. It’s just one of the many reasons I simply don’t believe any manager when they go on about family values or protecting employees. Even if they have good intentions, they still answer to the person one step above them.

From an employee POV the optimal strategy is to treat everything professionally. When times get tough, be professional. It sounds trite, but if you do your best and try to do a good job, then you’ve done all you can, and you can be satisfied with the outcome. Even if it’s not in your favor.

Was super relieved to be out of that situation. Though not so relieved when the electricity was almost shut off. Luckily my wife got a job within a mouse’s breadth of losing the apartment.

I'm interested in getting more details on this. Mandatory meeting times makes it sound like you were a W-2 employee and not a contractor, and it's hard to imagine that an accommodation for narcolepsy would cause the employer any kind of undue burden. How did they avoid legal consequences?

Step one was to transfer me off of client engagements entirely. No more pentesting. Which raised the question of what exactly I would do at a pentesting shop.

His particular solution was to have me write security documentation and recommendations for clients deployed on Azure, then to say that the resulting documentation wasn’t satisfactory.

I actually noticed one morning my access had been cut off, so I snagged a few chat messages from my laptop. I went in and was called into the side room to be lit on fire.

In reality it’s not so dramatic, though at the time it felt like the end of the world. I was putting my wife through college so she could be a developer, and without a job we’d have to abandon those plans. None of that matters to an employer; they’re not here to accommodate people, they’re here to make money. And I say that with seriousness, not cynicism.

Your problems are your own. When I started transitioning to that mindset, I became both more professional and tougher. I expect to be laid off within one month as of this writing, and it’ll roll off my shoulders like I’m laying in a river letting the water flow by. It doesn’t phase me, precisely because this time around I planned from day one that day next-month would come.

I could have taken them to court, but I was a mess at the time. Getting on Prozac and taking care of my mental health really turned my life around.

What do you do now? Anything special to handle narcolepsy or just a more accommodating employer?

I’m a contractor at Groq working on custom ASICs for ML (at least for about the next month). The specialness was to plan my entire schedule around tuesdays and thursdays. Those are my only days with required morning meetings, and thankfully those are 11am and noon respectively.

With careful planning, I’ve managed to only miss one meeting.

Getting a diagnosis is the most important step. It helps you accept that it’s not your fault (a big one for me). Which lets you focus on delivering value in your niche, which is all that employers actually care about.

If I’d known I had narcolepsy, I wouldn’t have tried to get into an industry so focused on client meetings. So the planning phase is pretty crucial.

> In America laws like this are sidestepped by the manager coming up with a sufficiently solid reason to fire you. Suddenly nothing you do will be good enough, and good luck proving in court that it was. Huge hassle.

It's worse than that—at least in "right-to-work" states (ha!), they don't even have to come up with a sufficiently solid reason; they just have to not mention the actual reason. There's this bizarre system of incentives where you can fire someone for no reason (which I think is a bad thing), but you can't fire someone for certain specific reasons (which I think is a good thing), so it is better from the manager's point of view for an unethical manager to pretend to fire a worker for no reason and hope that no-one accidentally documents something.

Small corrdction, that's 'at will' not 'right to work'. Right to work is about being able to force you to join a union to work at a place.

> Right to work is about being able to force you to join a union to work at a place

Isn't it more accurately described as forcing a union to give you the negotiated benefits without requiring you to pay dues? I don't think anybody, on either side of the issue, is under any illusions, it is intended to break unions.

Honestly I'm not entirely sure, possibly because it probably varies by state. My understanding was that the main thing it did was make it so that you didn't have to join the union and pay dues to them to be able to get a job at a workplace. I'm not sure if it requires that you get the same benefits or not but I'd definitely agree the intent is to cripple union's bargaining power and resources.

You are right; thank you. (And that is not such a small correction, since I did not just use the wrong phrase, but used a phrase that means something totally different in the same domain.) I am now outside the edit window, so unfortunately cannot fix it.

And, I thought basically all states were at will, except sort of Montana?

At-will is per job and most states allow that sort of arrangment: https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/at-will-e...

Right-to-work is a specific anti-union campaign: https://www.nrtw.org/right-to-work-states/

Correct

"sufficiently solid reason to fire you." is the important piece.

As a person, who at one point had to deal with suddenly doing everything wrong, I cannot stress the importance of logging everything you do to ensure you have a leg to stand on if it comes to actual confrontation over unemployment benefits, which under current system in US, one may not be eligible for if the employer proves it was for a 'good' cause. For example, employee did not want to drink with me; is, likely, not a good cause, while 'he is unable to complete basic requests by deadline x' is.

And I do mean log every deliverable, conversation and so on. Memories fade and perceptions vary and your notes will be taken into account should it come to actual confrontation with employer. I was frankly spending more time documenting than a reasonable person should. It was sheer luck that things just kinda worked out and it did not get to that stage.

Good cause is surprisingly narrow. Even stuff like poor performance is NOT good cause. Generally means either insubordination, time theft, actual theft, excessive no-shows

You are likely right ( but people rarely contest performance charges by employer as far as I know ). Apologies. I think I need to add some disclaimers. I am not a lawyer. I am just a guy on the internet. There are 50 states each with their own interpretations so before you do anything, consult a lawyer ( especially now with a potential wave of layoffs if you think you were not treated fairly ).

That's generally the strategy, but if you're fired without cause then you can collect unemployment. The unemployment insurance premiums can get pretty expensive, so there is a small counterweight to discourage at will firing

> That's generally the strategy, but if you're fired without cause then you can collect unemployment.

Thank you. I was not aware of this point.

I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. Yes, the correct term is "at-will" and not "right to work". However, that was clearly a typo.

It's important to dispell the myth that it's difficult to fire people without cause. Perpetuating the myth, besides being factually incorrect, changes the conversation that should be had about the topic. Keeping it factual helps keep it objective.

It's simply untrue that it's difficult to fire people. The degree to which it is depends entirely on the integrity of the company and the people involved. Unless it's explicitly said, "we are firing you because you are <insert federally protected class>", and you have that in verifiable form (eg. email) and you're willing to press charges, everything else comes down to integrity. HR will have a cute procedure of warnings and meetings. There is no obligation for an employer to follow that. In fact, the contracts I've been under explicitly say they don't need to follow those procedures. My experience and observation is that they never do follow them.

I'm not sure how to fix that. You certainly can't legislate moral behavior. Maybe bind companies to actually follow their self-determined procedures?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com