Layoffs are down, but employers are still finding ways to cut jobs | Hacker News Reader

Layoffs are down, but employers are still finding ways to cut jobs

wsj.com

46 pointsBostonian51 comments

> Employees to whom it would be costly to pay severance or months of unemployment benefits might decide to leave on their own if they feel stuck in a job they don’t want, executive coaches say.

The hourly rate these "executive coaches" must charge for this is probably hilarious.

So is this one just as much of a media-created nothing burger as Quiet Quitting was? I'm betting yes...

It seems that media today is all about volume of content, which requires that controversy is created from virtually nothing to justify another pointless article.

This appears to be a way to avoid paying severance. I'd expect any decent employer would offer employees the choice to leave with appropriate severance if they were going to do this to them.

Not only severance but unemployment compensation (which can significantly affect mandatory unemployment insurance costs to the company) can also be avoided by companies if their people quit instead of being laid off.

That is why there is the concept of "Constructive Dismissal" (or other similar terms). If the company is significantly degrading your work conditions, hours, requirements, interactions, responsibilities, etc., for the reason of getting you to quit instead of firing you, there may be an issue.

If you have immediate better employment options, take them without doing your old company any favors. But if you do not, start making detailed contemporaneous logs of what is happening to you (and what happened before) and talk to an attorney specializing in your state's employment law. Do not take it lying down, especially if you don't have immediate better options.

> If you have immediate better employment options, take them without doing your old company any favors.

Not sure about the US but here in Europe that's a very bad idea. If you change jobs willingly you give up your "seniority" meaning if your next job lays you off you will get no severance and also lower unemployment benefits. So caving in you would give up a huge chunk of social security.

If you have a mortgage in particular I wouldn't risk it. I have 15 years seniority right now. Meaning I'd get full pay for more than a year after being laid off. No way would I quit voluntarily.

But this coercion is pretty rare here because unions are strong. They won't put up with that shit.

On an individual level it's probably best to play the same game. They screw you just within the lines, you screw them back just within the lines. But again luckily this skullduggery is rare here.

Indeed!! - I was speaking only in the US context and I am not a lawyer; not legal advice).

Same sort of applies here but usually only if you are a union employee, but then you have your union management who can resolve such issues.

Wow that's really terrible advice. If you see a good opportunity then jump on it and don't look back. Otherwise your career will stagnate and you'll eventually get stuck somewhere with no growth potential.

As for paying your mortgage, anyone working in a volatile field such as tech should prioritize saving up several months of living expenses. You have to assume that on any given day your employer might get destroyed by an upstart competitor and lay everyone off.

That's a very US centric view IMO. Here the companies stick around longer. We don't do that survival of the fittest mindset here.

And with the ridiculous house prices and crap wages even in tech it's not really possible to save anymore. I'd take social security over anything.

My accrued benefits are something I am entitled to and I worked hard for and I wouldn't drop them without a fight.

> We don't do that survival of the fittest mindset here.

Which is why the gap between US and Europe is widening - 20 years ago EU GDP was on par with US, now it is 2/3rds of it (and that's after adding UK, to make things comparable after Brexit).

I don't really care though. I don't always want more more more. I have enough.

The only thing that's really crazy expensive is housing but that follows GDP anyway, the real issue is shortage. I even took a pay cut to move to a lower-wage country with higher quality of life. Slower pace, better weather, better infrastructure and social services. I don't even need a car now because public transport is amazing where I live and I really enjoy not having to worry about one.

But what I want from my job is stability and security. Not golden mountains in the distance if I work myself down to the bone.

Europe has the same survival of the fittest mindset as the USA. When revenue drops, employees are laid off and businesses go bankrupt or get sold for a pittance.

Olivetti, Bull, and Nokia used to be a computing industry leaders. How many people work there now?

No one is entitled to anything beyond human rights. Your social security can be cut with the stroke of a pen. In fact, if you live long enough then that will probably happen due to the collapsing demographics in most European countries.

When I speak of this mindset I mean the idea of "every man for himself" when it comes to the employees. The idea that everyone must be a winner or loser, they cannot just be a decent contributor and just "be". In Europe we believe much more strongly in this (except for the hardline neoliberal parties)

I didn't really mean it in terms of the corporations which compete in a much harsher macrocapitalist realm. I don't want that harshness to come down to people level. I'm very happy paying taxes for job stability and a social safety net. And other things like free healthcare even though I have enough right now to pay for privatized care.

But I should have explained better what I meant by that, yes.

Changing demographics will make it harder, but I don't think it makes social welfare impossible. There's pressure from governments but if you see the people in France for example, they are happy to pay taxes and retire early. They've just been cheated out of it by their president.

Providing social welfare and early retirement will be impossible in France as the ratio of workers to retirees falls to 1.5. Retirement ages will increase and benefits will be cut. That is inevitable now regardless of who is elected president.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/french-pension-strikes-retireme...

Part of this is his refusal to increase taxes though. Which a majority of citizens don't have any issue with.

Working longer is not a major issue for me personally either especially because life expectancy is higher as the article mentions. But the French specifically do find this a problem and don't mind paying for it.

Also, this ratio drop is a temporary thing. It's a result of baby boomers retiring. Eventually they will die and the amount of retirees will be back in balance. You see this effect almost all over Europe as the cause (WWII) was affecting pretty much the whole continent.

> You have to assume that on any given day your employer might get destroyed by an upstart competitor and lay everyone off.

But this is exactly why we have social welfare and severance pay laws. So we don't need to :)

So, the biggest opportunity you can count on in your current job is to be laid off and get a huge severance? I guess that makes sense for some low level, incompetent employees who live in fear that their incompetence will be discovered and they will be laid off. For people who are actually good at their jobs that's a very limiting approach. But then, unions were invented for slackers.

No, it's a safety net in case that happens. Not an opportunity.

At least in California, if your employer substantially changes your work duties or schedule, then you can very likely collect UI. Your advice to take better employment options is still the best advice though.

Unless there is a contract with the employee, such as a collective bargaining agreement with a union, there is no legal reason a business has to pay an employee severance in the US.

A business might pay an employee severance for morale purposes, good PR, and/or to entice the employee to sign agreements that reduce the business's future liabilities.

If an employee agrees to quit their job in exchange for severance money, this would result in lower unemployment insurance premiums (i.e. tax liability) for the business because the employee would not be eligible for unemployment benefits from the government. The more unemployment benefits former employees receive, the higher the unemployment insurance premiums for the business.

There's a difference between legal reasons and decency

Sure, but note that anyone who does not work for government or big or well funded businesses is not going to get severance when they are laid off or terminated. Which is probably half of the US or maybe even more. All the franchised restaurants/hotels, most retail, smaller construction contractors, etc.

It is mostly a benefit for those earning more than median incomes.

My understanding, which could be wrong, is that in a lot of cases severance is offered on condition you won't fight the termination or take legal action.

So it is in part a CYA from the companies side.

Yes, that is what I meant in:

> and/or to entice the employee to sign agreements that reduce the business's future liabilities.

> Unless there is a contract with the employee, such as a collective bargaining agreement with a union, there is no legal reason a business has to pay an employee severance in the US.

Who on Earth is working without an employment contract?

A lot of W-2 jobs are simple pay per hour or per year, nothing more. There is not even a need for HR, there are no benefits, just a small business where the owner might run everything.

Even if you do have benefits, I doubt the local hotel/restaurant/spa/doctors office/etc is going through a formal layoff process with severance. Probably not even all the outsourcing companies that Apple/Microsoft/Meta/etc use for tech support and whatnot.

I have no idea what a "W-2 job" is. In my country, and most countries, it doesn't matter if you're paid by the hour, by the "year" (what?), salaried etc. Virtually every employee has an employment contract, and every employee without an explicit employment contract (which is illegal) has an implied employment contract.

In the US, a W-2 job means one where you are classified as an employee, which means various labor regulations apply in your relationship with your employer. But even then, everywhere except the state of Montana has the concept of "at-will" employment, meaning absent an explicit contract that says otherwise, an employer or an employee can sever the relationship whenever they want.

So if you are an employee and the manager wants to reduce labor costs, they can simply terminate employees, and the employees would have to apply for unemployment benefits from the state government.

An example of a non W-2 job is when a business sells their services to another business, even if the business is just 1 person. Such as a business hiring a painter who works by and for themselves. There would be no labor regulations involved here because the painter is not an employee.

W-2 is the federal tax form a business gives to employees stating the taxable income and other information for the year, and 1099 is the federal tax form a business gives to vendors stating the taxable income for the year.

In the US, implied employment contracts are "at-will". This means the employer may fire an employee for any reason (except reasons that explicitly break a law, like firing a black employee for being black). Likewise, an employee can quit at any time, with no recourse for the employer (2-weeks notice is a custom, not a contractual obligation under at-will employment).

Just to be clear we don't have indentured servitude or forced labour in my country either. Employees can quit any time they like, even with employment contracts. A contract cannot force anyone to work, under any conditions. Even with a contracted notice period an employee can walk away at any moment. They would be in breach of their employment agreement but there's very little recourse on the employers side. The employee must be paid for any work they have performed, no exceptions.

The employer may sue for damages in the case an employee does not complete their notice period, but they cannot force them to work it. And the employer would need to demonstrate damages.

But an employer cannot just dump an employee who has an employment contract (implied or explicit).

> The employer may sue for damages in the case an employee does not complete their notice period, but they cannot force them to work it. And the employer would need to demonstrate damages.

Not completing your notice period opening you up to a lawsuit sounds like essentially forcing you to work.

In America, it is exceptionally rare to hold someone liable for quitting their job, even if there are damages. Like, if I work the opening weekday shift at a small store, and decide to quit with zero notice, and now there's nobody available to open the store the next day, it's not my problem. Even though the owner could demonstrate the damages of lost sales an during those hours, there's literally nothing they can do.

At a larger corporation, even if my departure causes some major project to fall behind schedule, it's not my problem. Software engineers can quit with zero notice and be completely immune to any legal ramifications.

I just want to throw out that "paid by the year" has not been a common thing in my American experience. I've never heard of anyone with that.

Unless they are talking about a yearly salary.

Yes, I meant yearly salary.

In the US we have exempt and non-exempt employees. Non-exempt have more protections and have to be paid hourly and twice a month. They have to be paid overtime rates. There are other legal protections. Big one is the government will take direct action against employees that break labor laws against exempt employees. Where for non-exempt it mostly a civil matter.

Exempt employees are generally managers, engineers, that perform complex autonomous decision based work. Typically they are paid a monthly salary. But they don't have to be. I'm exempt and get paid hourly, every two weeks and I in theory get overtime.

I have never heard of non exempt employees having more protections or having to be paid twice a month, in any US jurisdiction. Can you provide an example?

I have only ever heard of non exempt and exempt to simply distinguish employees that are owed overtime after 40 hours per week and employees that are not owed overtime after 40 hours per week.

There is no federal law about pay frequency, but pretty much all states require at least monthly, if not semi monthly or biweekly, regardless of exempt or non exempt nature of employee.

https://www.patriotsoftware.com/blog/payroll/pay-frequency-r...

Americans!

This isn't new, right? I've heard it's especially prevalent for management positions, both because the severance would be higher, and because it's "better for office politics" to slowly push someone out, or have the official story be that they left, than to fire someone with power and followers.

You don’t hear about companies innovating anymore — you just hear about them screwing over workers and customers.

I think LLMs are pretty innovated. The new Mac chips seem pretty innovated. Nvidia's H100 are so innovated they cannot keep them stocked. Companies are innovating all the time. Maybe it is because we are too focused on doom and gloom in the news.

That is true, but it does seem like the innovation is coming from a small number of companies while most other companies are relentlessly trying to cut costs at the expense of the customer and employee.

Maybe the news is biased towards these types of articles.

I do think this type of negativity goes against the positive mindset you need to start a company .

Old hat in new clothes

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50865211.amp

Head of growth marketing? Sales enablement? My god, your job title should have given you sufficient heads-up.

My advice to new college students is to code whether you like it or not. Work sucks, period. Might as well get paid and have free time and enjoy being in demand.

Those are definitely bullshit jobs.

Yeah, the dude checks all the red flags. He needs an enabler/management position with "senior" in the title (at 34), and of course we have the combo of remote + baby at home mixed in. When asked to actually sell software himself it "took a hit on his mental health". Not quitting was "a matter of principle". TBH it was a bit more than that; if not at IBM, where else could he have found such an entrenched position ?

Not that I support it in totality, but that's why I wasn't surprised when Twitter didn't fall over when Elon fired 80% of staff.

People like the gentleman in the article are PART OF THE PROBLEM, because they (and it seems most people) seem to have a certain benevolence towards their employer (and US capitalism) no matter how hard they’re fucked by it. He was reassigned to sales, it took a toll on his mental health, but hey no hard feelings because now he’s in a role he enjoys at IBM. The message to IBM is that they can get away with it and this trend will no doubt continue there and elsewhere in the US.

We could unionize like that, guys, especially the software engineers. Where are your balls?

Why not do it then rather than shaming others for not doing it?

I don’t have an employer for which to unionize

Folks flagged ae_throw's question and got it to be muted (which I found very interesting)... so I'm resurrecting his question from <dead> and answering it anyways:

>Can someone give a reasonable argument as to why we should read WSJ? Or WaPo? Or NYT or any other large publication of this nature (looking particularly at The Economist). We know they post propaganda, spin stories however they please, and we know their fact checking is awful. I don’t think they have any journalistic integrity left.Please enlighten, am curious.

I find it useful to understand the other side and the echo chamber/bubble they are in; and by extension, leads to better insight and critique of the echo chamber my side is in.

As a right-winger (I put my bias forward to help communicate up-front my angle/bias as everybody has their biases) - for instance, I stopped reacting to NYT, NPR and WaPo's headlines and instead just categorized and label mechanically (as an AI sentiment bot might do) what their purpose for "manufactured consent" is; the headline behind the headline, for example for the left:

Many headline news if you flip to any NYT headlines any time of day, you can categorize them as "climate insecurity" (Global Warming is eating up a local area, Maui/Florida), the "MAGA threat" (a minority group is being persecuted by the vengeful "white right"), "neo-conservative foreign policy endorsements" (Ukraine is 'wining the war; Ughyur human rights violations; America is winning against Russia/China bloc and always on the progressive side of human rights).

It helps me frame critically the right-wing biases in my own echo chamber. For instance, it makes me realize that WSJ's more endorsement for "holier-than-thou" free-wheeling enterprise/business is really the equivalent right-wing propaganda to indoctrinate its side against left's efforts to union and regulate businesses for consumer rights and the environment. Similarly, the anti-SJW, exodus from California to Texas theme in Fox News is parallel to the "MAGA threat" stories from the left; and is just right-wing identity politics - just as bad as left-wing identity politics. And foreign policy-wise, both left and right are surprisingly uniform and orthodox to American exceptionalism and interventionism.

It makes me realize that American politics and journalism is at large a game of sports, marketing where both sides hype up the "brand-values" of their sides and vilify the other side; but at the end of the day, the owners in the box seats at the top of the arena have the same values; and the fans/citizens though may spit and belittle each other in the spirit of factional rivalary, surprisingly have so much in common with each other as jersey-wearing blue collar tailgating fans - than the NFL owners in their suites and boardrooms. And this notion of simultaneously gives me both great cynicism and hope for the state of America.

Yes, all media is biased, from well established outlets like WSJ and NYT to Hacker News to my own blog and a random celeb's Twitter feed.

Biased in both how stories are covered as well in _which_ stories are covered.

The bias may not line up neatly to the prevailing major US political partys' platform or narrative - it's still bias.

Very simplistic example; NYT is biased pro-New York. WaPo is biased pro-D.C. The Economist is pro-EU. All are pro-full-time 9-to-5 jobs.

I've been a subscriber to all at one more or another. Those biases means a solid chunk of their articles are irrelevant or just real weird for readers (me) in a different locale and life situations.

The comparison to sports is apt. Unless you're on the field - sports is entertainment. Same is true of media - unless you care how a story you're directly involved in is being discussed - it's all entertainment.

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