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Comment by Jagerbizzle | Hacker News Reader

Significantly better than the tone-deaf email Satya sent Microsoft employees, which continues to cause undue anxiety for employees who have no clue if or when they'll be laid off over the next 90 days.

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It's actually better for workers when layoffs are announced in advanced. They can prepare for it and not make an important financial decisions e.g.: buying house while waiting

Seattle real estate has already been one of the harder hit areas for the past year

Harder hit in which direction? Have prices gone down or up in general?

Google US employees know if they'll be laid off or not immediately, but all non-US employees are still waiting.

Does anyone have a summary of what laws need to be abided to in EU, Canada and other countries that prevent them from rolling this out at the same time as the US?

In Germany, and possibly many other EU countries, there is a mandatory notice period plus a social plan.

The longer you are with the company, the longer notice period, starting from 4 weeks and can get up to 6 months.

You also cannot fire a parent of a newborn if you keep the single 20-something in the same position.

Sometimes they need to negotiate with unions or government agencies.

They could still notify employees, it would be the nice thing to do.

"You'll be laid off once we get approval from the relevant groups".

Of course, that disrupts productivity for these target employees for 1-2-3 months, so they won't do it.

I wonder if the hit to productivity to <<everyone>> is worth it.

If you make layoffs of over 100 people in the UK, there needs to be a 45 day consultation period with representatives from the groups of people affected. This sometimes means people end up in a horrible situation where they are in a pool that have been told their jobs are at risk but not whether they are actually being made redundant, though presumably it's more fair, and allows staff to volunteer themselves for severance if they so choose.

At least, advance notice which might be long depending of the country, probably at least three months in France. Plus, Google will have issues justifying a cut for economic reason in much of Europe. They remain very profitable even if less than before so they might need due cause to fire people.

Generally speaking European laws protect the employees more than the shareholders. You can't really just employ a lot of people when things are doing well expecting to fire them if there is a downturn. It encourages companies to be more conservative regarding hiring which can be both a blessing and a curse.

> You can't really just employ a lot of people when things are doing well expecting to fire them if there is a downturn.

Well, you can, but not as direct employees. The usual way is to enter a service contract with a different company who hires the employees and assigns them to work on bigcorp's tasks for 100% of their time. If bigcorp wants to cut costs, they just let the contract with the other company lapse and that company can fire their employees on the basis of "my own economic outlook is bad because we lost the bigcorp contract".

But at the same time the ServiceCo's employees also understand that this is a two tiered system with them at the bottom.

I thought this was a reason Europe has struggled in tech a bit - hard to try things out. I also thought this was why lots is “on contract” - it’s better not to bring people into your actual team (which must have some negatives)

In Japan for instance, you simply cannot fire someone without notice in these situations. You also have to prove that you've tried a whole lot of measures to avoid layoffs, such as reducing exec compensation, asking for voluntary resignations, etc. And I believe there needs to he some actual evidence layoffs are justified in the first place, same as in France I believe.

Strictly speaking, forcing a worker out in these recent tech layoff cases is going to be difficult. I'd expect both in Japan and other countries there will be much more generous severance package offers for "voluntary" quitting. The majority of workers will way that against the reality of staying in a company they know doesn't really want them anymore.

For NL: Those severance packages generally have to be applied broadly so everyone can make the choice. They usually result in the ones who know they can easily find a job moving on and the rest staying and thus don't happen that often. In general they let term-limited contract expire and offer people in early retirement. Doing layoff's when you are making a massive profit is not easy, it might be doable but it's not easy.

Fun part: Sometimes you cannot chose who you fire, the age distribution in the company may not change so firing everyone older than 45 is not an option in general.

They are giving 60 days notice

The notice in the US is not a notice in the way you would apply it in Japan (or how common sense would dictate). It would be illegal to block someone from accessing company systems or premises just because you tell them "officially you are terminated in 60 days".

That "giving notice" is used in the message is because of some law (I forgot) that requires this time but also permits to actually block people from working as long as they are paid.

They way this kind of thing is usually done in the EU to avoid the hassles of proper layoffs (that need justification and come with restrictions - e.g. in Bulgaria if you've done layoffs you can't hire on the same position within the same unit in the next couple of months) is to propose a mutual termination - we'll give you X months of pay (where X > what the employee would get legally if laid off), you sign here you agree to leave immediately. It's sometimes a bad idea because in that case you're sometimes not eligible for regular unemployment (depends on thr country of course) because you agreed to leave your job, so you have to be sure you'll find a job afterwards. Sometimes it's a great idea because you get a pile of cash and you're "winning" if you find a job faster, or if you want a nice break.

In some places, a company can't just fire people because they feel like it. In Germany, where this is called a "Betriebsbedingte Kündigung"[1] you have to make a socially adequate choice based on how long someone has been at the company, whether they have kids, etc. and you also have to prove that there isn't an open position elsewhere in the company.

[1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betriebsbedingte_K%C3%BCndigun...

This varies in the EU IIRC for example here in Sweden if you plan to fire more than 5 people you need to alert the public employment agency and employees 2 months in advance and the union which the company has collective bargaining agreements with. There is usually a negotiation between the union and the company on the forms of the fireing.

Yeah Satya’s note was bad for several reasons, not the least of which is he sent it right after attending a private Sting concert. Starting to wonder if rather than being an exceptional leader, he just benefitted from following Steve Ballmer which would make almost anyone look better in comparison.

Also, it clearly states there are layoffs! Anyone skipping over corporate jargon could have easily missed the single line with "btw, we'll lay off 10k people" in Satyas mail.

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