Salesforce to Hire 3,300 People After Layoffs Earlier This Year
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
No job this week guarantees a job next week, unless you have a termination clause and a defined monetary penalty. Anything else is wishful thinking.
Where does the idea that either party to the transaction has some implicit future commitment to the other come from? It seems to me like an anachronism from a hundred years ago.
People regularly switch jobs annually to make sure their compensation is in line with the market. Should we expect companies not to do the same when market conditions change?
This is where the idea that either party to the transaction has some implicit future commitment to the other come[s] from. In many (most?) labor contracts this commitment by the company to keep their workers after they’ve been hired—unless a termination is justified by a good and demonstrable reason—is codified in a contract between the company and a labor union. It is not “an anachronism from a hundred years ago” it is very much a reality of today (at least for unionized workers).
The idea that companies and workers are equal parties and we should expect similar behavior between them is a flawed logic that assumes idealism only asserted by free market capitalism and has never been demonstrated in the real world. Unlike layoff protections, which have been in used continuously for over a century, and has very much proven its worth.
I think this only holds true in certain limited cases. Certainly it was a lot more common a hundred years ago and especially in manufacturing jobs in locations with few employers; today many information workers have an extremely liquid market into which they can sell their time.
For the majority of the people here (ie working hackers), I don't think this is true at all. Big Tech is more dependent on its staff than the staff are dependent on Big Tech. This is one reason Google and Apple and others engaged in that illegal wage-fixing scheme: their staff were often availing themselves of their options to hop jobs for big raises.
Eric Schmidt and Steve Jobs (and others!) had to engage in an actual criminal conspiracy in order to tip the power balance back into the employer's favor.
Everything is upside down.