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Comment by martin_a | Hacker News Reader

Title should be "YC fires 17 people". Can someone change that?

I don't think that'd be accurate - YC is exiting the business of late-stage investing, and that's the main news. It sounds like they had 17 people who were working on that part of the company who they laid off as part of this transition, but given the major role that YC Continuity played, it's significant news that they're no longer doing that.

I don't know of a title edit that would satisfy everyone, and pretty much any of the standard edits we'd make would generate accusations that we were censoring or whatever to protect YC, so in this case I think we probably need to go by the default.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

"fire" != "laid off"

I agree. You're fired when you sexually harass or suck eggs. Being laid off doesn't have the stigma for the employee.

Yes it absolutely does carry a stigma.

What companies layoff their best people?

(I say as someone who has been laidoff)

Competent people who were effective at their job are laid off all the time. You're basically saying there's a stigma to not being the best at work.

No, I am saying there is a stigma for being laid off, which comes from the (incorrect) belief that companies don't layoff their top performers.

As noted, there are many reasons why layoffs may occur, however, the stigma of being laid off exists.

I mean if the company is pivoting and closing the entire division because they no longer need to, eg, make film cameras or make buggy whips, why would you keep anybody from there around? You don't need their expertise any longer. Even if they were the best at their job, if you're not doing those things any more, what would you keep them around for?

A company might lay off really good people when shutting down an entire business line, for example. It's different than firing someone.

Right, lots of legitimate reasons why a person might get laid off, yet there is an unfair negative association with it.

Hence stigma.

> What companies layoff their best people?

Any company where the execs and decision makers are so far removed from the people they're judging, where they won't even truly understand or care what the person does, let alone who they are.

Google and Twitter and two very recent large companies that have done just that.

"laid off" is a subset of "fired" "to fire" just means "to dismiss from a job" which includes lay-offs.

At the very least, we can agree that "Changes at YC" is burying the lede?

Only if you're not fluent in corporatease. Whenever I see an e-mail entitled "Changes in [some organization]", I assume that one or more of the following is true:

  1. The leader is leaving.
  2. People are getting laid off.
  3. They're exiting a line of business.
  4. They sold the company.

Haha, same here, whenever I see some random meeting called "[whatever] chat" being scheduled, like "Engineering chat" or "Quick eng all-hands", you know it's

1. Someone's leaving or is getting fired from the department 2. More people are getting fired

The point is that this, along with "*changes" is always bad news. :D

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