Hacker News Reader

Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

This is generally a problem with employees in general, especially as tenures decline.

Sales stuffs the channel with products that are later returned as they get their commission. Or they vastly oversell what the product can do.

Engineers rack up tech debt to keep the Scrum Master happy and choose technologies based on how good they look on a resume.

HR people pass around crappy or abusive employees to other departments rather than doing the hard work of terminating them.

Wells Fargo shareholders evidently don't care that much and a big reason for that is that the average shareholder is probably just a fund of sorts, so it isn't really their money either.

View on HN

I think the tenure decline is a symptom of the removal of incentives outside of simple base pay from the majority of employees. When you have a pension that can only be paid in retirement if the company remains solvent you tend not to make these short term choices.

What you are drafting is the difference between private ownership (ie the company is owned by current a former employees who have an incentive to keep a watchful eye for long term risks) and public ownership (ie the company is owned by anyone who either buys a share or has money with a fund manager who buys the shares), where no single person has any long term incentives.

"... so it isn't really their money either."

Talk about perverse incentives. Their customers, meaning the people who are directly affected, are like the only ones who don't have any power to influence what happens.

And everyone with power to influence the company just isn't affected and doesn't care ...

> Their customers, meaning the people who are directly affected, are like the only ones who don't have any power to influence what happens.

They do, but they would need to actually change their spending. That's the other thing. After scandal after scandal after scandal, plenty of people still bank at Wells Fargo.

> After scandal after scandal after scandal, plenty of people still bank at Wells Fargo.

It’s not always exactly a choice. Wells Fargo bought my mortgage from a local bank. The only way to change your lender is to do a refinance, which incurs closing costs. Despite several serious WF fuck ups like double and triple charging my mortgage payment, failing to correctly maintain escrow, etc there is literally nothing I could do without losing tens of thousands of dollars until market conditions had changed and enough time made it feasible to re-fi, which I did promptly.

The problem with big banks is not just that they’re criminally fraudulent assholes, it’s that they will straight buy your customership on the backend in ways you are locked into. The same thing temporarily made me a Bank of America customer when they just straight bought a local bank chain. I’m now with a credit union and moved everything there, but it’s non trivial to do.

> rather than doing the hard work of terminating

I don't think that terminating an at-will employee is any hard work.

What's hard is to hire a replacement; it can easily take months, and cost months of the employee's salary in the interviewing costs. And somebody got to do the jerk employee's work in the meantime.

(And this is in the US; I can't start imagining the hurdles of firing somebody in the EU.)

> And this is in the US; I can't start imagining the hurdles of firing somebody in the EU.

German (and Workers Council member at my employer) here. Firing incompetent workers is possible here, although you do have to show efforts on your part as well to have improved the situation (e.g. by providing training to the employee), and firing malicious-acting employees (e.g. in cases of theft, violence or intentional property damage) is easy.

European worker protection laws demand good will from both sides, not just from the employee - so for example you can't be fired because you damaged or destroyed a piece of machinery in an accident if the employer hasn't taken reasonable steps to prevent such accidents, including not overloading your employees with work.

>I don't think that terminating an at-will employee is any hard work.

Contrary to what HN may have implied, you still have to comply with federal labor law in at-will states and if you want to terminate someone in a manner where you can be all but guaranteed you will not have to settle a frivolous wrongful termination lawsuit there is a pretty decent amount of coordination and documentation work that needs to be done. I wouldn't call it hard work but it's not non-work and it does take time.

We have a term for that where I work, 'CV Driven Development', we even have a service called 'Brag'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com