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Comment by ptero | Hacker News Reader

Being able to easily lay off employees means that the companies are much happier hiring, too. Most of those fired will likely land another job soon, precisely because their new employer does not have to treat their hiring as a multi-year commitment.

Europe, which makes it very hard to let an employee go, tends to have significantly higher unemployment than the US, which is much more cavalier about layoffs. My 2c.

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Europe makes it _costly_ to let an employee go.

You can get rid of 20 people for next monday if you want to, you’ll just pay the due amount as defined in the contract and the law. It’s also not some astronomical amount, worst case scenario I think it’s around 6 months of pay, which isn’t that far from what you’d pay for a non compete for instance.

PS: also unemployment is a complicated figure, it’s hard to tell how much any specific variable impacts it. Unemployment rate goes up and down while laws stay mostly the same, so singling out labor laws is mostly an opinion at this point.

Lot of devs in Europe do contract work though. It's an employee disguised as a contractor so mostly as grey area, but it's becoming more common.

Yes. Companies having that choice is also interesting in that they get to decide if it's worth to have people come and go, as a replaceable resource.

For some company it totally works and they plan their staffing in 6 months spans (seen a small web agency basically having an "on" and "off" season, with half of the staff during the dead part), removing or adding people as they see fit. For others it's more difficult and they're pretty happy to have staff that can't just disappear within a month if they decide to go tour the Silk Road on a bike.

In Finland its actually easy and cheap to do massive layoffs at once. But very difficult and costly to let single employee go.

Japan makes it very hard to lay off employees too, but unemployment is very low.

Also Australia. From the outside (and this could well be the wrong take), it seems as though “at will employment” leads to cultural problems. People are afraid to speak their mind, and hierarchy becomes dominant.

I like that Australia is a bit more egalitarian, and people can “speak truth to power”.

Having worked salary jobs in tech in both countries, I can tell you that hierarchies are a much bigger thing in Germany than in the U.S. In tech companies as well as in academia, FWIW. Her Professor, Herr Direktor, these are actually still a thing in Germany.

You might want to rephrase that because the way you stated it just seems kinda silly, as if somehow titled-obsessed idiots don't exist in US companies or something...

I have worked in UK/Aus and for US owned/run and French owned/run (from aus) and aus owned/run (and others, I’m getting old). There definitely seemed to be a cultural difference with US based employees being much more reluctant to say anything negative (but this may have been nothing to do with at-will). I had assumed this was because they were afraid of losing their jobs by pissing off the wrong person, but it may well be something else entirely causing that.

In Australia, you have the opposite problem of randoms going “that’ll never work” to a CEO (which is not exactly endearing).

Japan also has a stagnant or declining labor pool size.

So does the U.S...

Yep, a lower-than-replacement birthrate combined with a hostile immigration policy that is against permanency will do that.

> a hostile immigration policy that is against permanency will do that.

Why are you spreading lies? Permanent residency is really, really easy to get in Japan, unlike the US where you have to win a lottery.

Wages for SWEs are lower than other comparable countries in Europe, Canada, and APAC (SG, AU, NZ) and Japanese fluency (not a PR requirement but still needed to live in Japan) is hard to acquire. Why deal with the headache of learning a hard to learn language not spoken outside of a handful of islands in the Northern Pacific with a very insular culture when you can become a German or Canadian national for much less effort.

The things you complain about do not equate to a "hostile immigration policy that is against permanency".

SWE wages are lower than the US, yes, but not Europe in my experience. Japanese fluency is not needed for PR or even citizenship (you do need a little ability for naturalization). You don't need to be fluent to live in Japan; most of the expats I know are not fluent at all.

German is also a very difficult language to learn, and you won't go far in Germany without it. It's much easier to be English-only in Japan than in Germany, in my experience.

I'll copy an earlier comment I made on a separate thread specifically with South Asia in mind, but I've seen similar dynamics in ASEAN as well. Also, I think you are an L1 Japanese speaker. If you're L1 is Indo-European, other Indo-European languages tend to be easier to learn.

Why go to Japan (in reality only Tokyo) where median software TC is around $60k [0] when you can go to Canada where median software TC is around $90k [1] and English speaking, let alone other English speaking and relatively easy to immigrate Western countries with large South Asian communities like the UK (95k) [2], Netherlands (87k) [3], Germany (77k) [4], Australia (100k) [5], Norway ($74k) [6], or Singapore (73k) [7].

[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...

[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/canada

[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/united-...

[3] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/netherl...

[4] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/germany

[5] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/austral...

[6] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/norway

[7] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/singapo...

I don't see a huge difference between $60k and $77k for instance, and it all depends on your actual job offers.

Regardless, while I don't disagree with your facts, the original claim (not by you) was that Japan had a "hostile immigration policy that is against permanency". This is false, and sounds like a lie in fact, unless the OP just woke up from cryo-sleep after being frozen in 1985. Sure, there are real challenges to working and living in Japan if you're a native English speaker (which I am), but my whole point here is that legally, immigration here is actually very easy, contrary to the anti-Japan posts like the OP's that I frequently see on forums like this one. Immigration policy here is far, far more inviting than the US which claims to be open to immigration, yet has severe limits on visas and green cards and is legally extremely difficult and expensive to emigrate to.

Agreed that GP's comment is innacurate on that point, but...

Are you White? That's the differentiatng factor. If you're of South Asian or Chinese or SE Asian origin (not even nationality, origin), you face much less microagressions in other countries than you do in Japan. In general, factoring in CoL and the insular culture, Europe and other Asian countries tend to make sense. Heck, when I was backpacking out in Isan, while a number of people did go work in assembly lines or pick mushrooms in Japan on the JET visa, they preferred South Korea and Taiwan due to a (relatively) less insular culture than Japan, though Germany, the US, and Australia was the more popular option. This is reflected in diaspora demographics as well.

"Microaggressions"? Asian people in the US are getting physically attacked, brutally, in the streets. That doesn't happen in Japan.

Anyway, I don't know why you keep talking about this kind of thing. I'm addressing ease of immigration, not how welcoming people are in particular countries. The whole thread was started because someone outright lied about immigration laws, and you keep talking about culture, which has nothing to do with the discussion.

That's not what GP was critizising tough.

Almost as if TANSTAAFL.

First encounter with this initialism.

TANSTAAFL / TINSTAAFL

"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tanstaafl.asp

Also, if I may add: I wish there were more substance in your comment. This non-sequitur was disappointing.

Yeah, there could have been a lot more substance but to be honest a disappointingly large number participants here don't seem to understand that very basic principle when they engage in discussions here.

To be clear, the parent to my comment seemed to completely understand TANSTAAFL. My comment was very obliquely directed at other participants in the larger conversation who seem to think that there is no legitimate reason for an employer to ever let a single employee go because any competent business will work like an oracle and make perfect business decisions always. Any unexpected outcome must be because they are greedy corporate monsters that don't care about their employees. (my apologies for the exaggeration but you should have seen what I wrote and deleted previously :-)

Most hackers would already know TANSTAFFL through Robert Heinlein's works?

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