There should be some kind of legal restrictions against opportunistically laying off thousands of staff for no good reason. Maybe something like, in order to do so, the entire C-suite would be legally required to resign.
Asking for profit companies to ensure full employment is a dumb idea.
Asking for profit companies to keep people on for any other reason than profitability is a dumb idea.
Subsiding companies to keep the jobs is a dumb idea.
The only good idea is for the federal government to eliminate involuntary unemployment. The private sector can sort itself out.
If you really want to help people, we need to drastically bring down the cost of living in cities through building more housing, then provide some unemployment or ubi to keep you afloat with your savings while you look for something worthwhile to do.
Housing is not ruled by the supply and demand wizardry. Housing is subject of infinite cash from fossil fuels, oligarchs, pension funds, dynastic family fortunes, and mortgage leverage by individuals already owning real estate. You build more, more will be purchased and the prices will still grow.
Occupancy is at record highs in most US cities. It’s simply too little inventory, mostly due to local regulations and NIMBY’s. Most housing is owned by ppl, and a lot of the nation’s net worth is tied up in housing, disencentivising the lowering of house pricing.
You could see it duting covid in NY, people left and inventory went up. Rent and housing came down.
Same now in SF, ppl leave, inventory goes up, prices come down.
It’s not that complex really. Solving it will not be easy though.
Markets are important in the system we've built, we can't just toss out market effects and assume nothing else will break. Whether markets are the "right" approach or the one that a majority of people still want is up for debate, but in the meantime much of our society is based on markets operating relatively freely as the approach of both understanding sentiment and allowing markets to shift without centralized control. Getting rid of the downside in our job market would almost certainly break the job market all together, as there are few downsides motivating people to try to find and keep a job.
I don’t understand this mindset. Looking at numbers in a vacuum.
The labor market is literal wage slavery, with slaves being rented instead of owned.
This attitude of everyone for themselves is literally what’s wrong with this modern, disgusting “individualist” pull yourself up by the bootstraps society.
I know the rules here are to be civil, but I really don’t understand this “f you I got mine” mentality.
And yet it's the best system we've devised so far. Maybe we should go back to the older systems where the only way to climb the social ladder was to go to war pillaging our neighbors and taking them as slaves
This is the truth, and it's the saddest part of all...
There are much more reasonable arguments made for individualism than "f you I got mine", just like there are more reasonable arguments for communalism than the ones posed by Stalin.
> The only good idea is for the federal government to eliminate involuntary unemployment. The private sector can sort itself out.
You are talking about mandatory work camps right?
People don't have to work for a large corporation. If they are uncomfortable with the fact that their employment is at will and can be terminated for any reason, including as part of a mass layoff, work somewhere else or work for yourself.
If the company's board doesn't approve of mass layoffs, either don't approve them (if they have that power) or fire the C-suite after the fact.
We don't need laws, and therefore larger government control, to fix all our problems. Its concerning to me how frequently the initial reaction to situations like this is "the government should fix this."
US gives you freedom. Europe locks you to a country and culture you don’t necessarily want to live in.
I'm European and I don't feel that way at all - the very opposite in fact. Care to expand?
Another aspect is local culture. Europe is still INCREDIBLY centered around national cultures despite people trying to be more open. A lot of X-nationality are still acting according to stereotypes and it's incredibly hard to stay in such country longterm.
Part of being happy is to live in a welcoming, happy place not just money and amazing infrastructure.
If I were to accept a job in country B I would (in 9/10 scenarios) need to move to that country and adjust to the local culture and language.
I had a friend with korean wife who was in Germany and then Belgium each for couple of years. The whole family was suffering from the constant need of adaptation to local languages and eventually they ended up going to Canada.
PS - US developers get all of those benefits too, so you're just taking a pay cut for no reason. Not so attractive to me.
Just don't make specific claims which are not true. Europeans earn lower than 40% for the senior positions. e.g see google salaries[1]. Google pays good but is not the top of the league. Send me a page in Europe with 60% of those salaries.
[1]: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...
Sure if you're a run-of-the-mill university graduate with no particularly valuable skill set you won't be able to pull that off, but if I remember correctly in the US it's also not guaranteed to get into these companies. So not sure what's not true, do you want to say you believe there's no single software development manager or principal engineer at SAP, BMW or Zalando that earns in the range of 200-250 T€ including stock options? People don't share their salaries here on US platforms as much as in there so the data in levels.fyi is not very useful, but there's e.g. DATEV which has more detailed salary data (as they provide the tax software for most companies) which you can get access to, that shows a strong bimodal distribution with "regular" salaries and salaries for "exceptional" employees.
erm... none? the "sky high" threshold in major EU cities is 100k EUR. Zalando and SAP mentioned by OP might pay above 100k but only in Munich or Frankfurt am Main.
Edit: though I wouldn’t trade our current Hamburg flat, 2 floors, balcony, office room, for below 1300€/month, difficult to leave such a place!
Edit: I moved 5 times since 2015, across 3 countries, I know how horrible and difficult it is to find flats, even more in a place where you’re not speaking the language or know the culture. I never pretended it was simple. I’ve been refused flats for absurd reasons such as because of my foreign last name (like, explicitly), or because I was working remotely before it was considered acceptable.
Did you have a better experience in Munich or Frankfurt? From what I heard Munich is also its own mess when looking for flats. No idea about Frankfurt (I just visited once and loved the place but don’t know people living there).
I eat vegetarian, but yes I love Berlin’s falafel dürüms!
And for a job like software engineering, skills and regulation should be the only factor for salary of a team as outsourcing is done by everyone.
Yes, not everyone has the courage to stand up to their employer, and it may take some time for the legal process to work itself out, and it can be stressful. But the guarantees are there.
For myself, as an American who moved to Europe and has stayed, I found my quality of life much better. The reduction in pay has not bothered me one bit.
The employer can always negotiate with the employee if they want them gone sooner, but that's still going to be expensive for the employer, and the worker in this case has much more robust rights than the employer. If my company wanted me gone I could easily get a year's salary out of it with any decent lawyer, as I have a permanent contract.
> If the HR and management want one out, one is out.
Definitely not in the Netherlands, and I expect most EU countries are similar.
> Is is worth the massive paycut the Europeans are accepting?
I don't earn anywhere near the 600k number that I see flying around in this thread and elsewhere on HN (which is lunacy to me but more power to you guys), but I'm still better off than 99% of people I meet, have my own home, have actual usable public transport and don't have to worry about a hospital visit bankrupting me. Oh, and my employer can't arbitrarily decide to just fire me, and if they do (for example in a wave of layoffs) I get compensated generously for it, plus the gov't itself will compensate me as well if I can't find a job for whatever reason while having 35 paid vacation days (I think the legal minimum is 25 vacation days for a fulltime employee, not 100% sure on that number though) + 10 or so public holidays. So, yes, definitely worth the pay cut.
There's more to life than gross monetary amounts, and from the horror stories my USA-ian friends relay to me about living there, I consider myself quite privileged to be where I'm at.
In your experience, has this led to more careful hiring?
One big downside I've seen at some companies in the US is that its so easy to fire someone that companies can tend to hire whoever walks in the door. Especially at larger and publicly traded companies, it can often be more important to fill seats and show company growth when times are good and fire by the thousands at the first sign of any economic issues coming ahead.
I don't personally mind it being easy for a company to fire someone as long as that situation is clear before accepting a job, but it would be interesting if we have clear examples of better hiring practices when the employee can't be fired easily.
Not in my (albeit limited) experience in the Netherlands. What I’ve seen it lead to is people hired initially into temporary one-year contracts, which are then converted to permanent contracts if things work out. I’ve definitely seen people be fired or otherwise pushed out even on permanent contracts. It’s not impossible, but as the above poster mentioned, it’s not easy either.
The quality of employees hired was certainly no better than at other companies I’ve worked for where firing was much easier. That’s with a sample size of 1 Dutch company though, and that company sucked, so it’s not a great dataset from which to draw conclusions.
Anecdotally I've seen companies skip even that process and hire anyone who seems even slightly qualified. The bar for "better hiring practices" is pretty low for me when the examples I've seen over 20 years in tech are either hire anyone to fill seats or throw obscure logic problems at candidates assuming that maps well to the role being hired for.
I've never been at the helm for hiring decisions so couldn't tell you too much about the process itself, but we have a concept of a trial period here. The first month (or two, it varies by company but I think the maximum allowed is 3 months and most companies only go for the 1 month) of your employment, either party can part ways for any reason whatsoever at the end of the trial period. So if you're just not a good fit for whatever reason, the company can let you go when your trial period ends, no questions asked (assuming you weren't being treated unfairly of course).
At least anecdotally, everyone I've worked with that has passed the trial period at the 4 companies I've worked for in NL has been great to work alongside. People like to imagine a scenario where someone will bust their ass off for the trial period and then coast once they get through the trial period, but I've never experienced anyone doing it, I have however seen plenty of people dropped once the trial period ends.
Keep in mind that you can only get a permanent contract after 3 consecutive temporary (usually 1 year) contracts, so it's not like there's endless room for abuse by a bad employee either. If they're shit at the job within the first or second contract, the company just has to wait them out and not extend another one, and if someone's been fine for 3 years then it stands to reason that they should get a permanent contract that protects them extremely well.
Of course, if the company likes you they can offer you a permanent contract even sooner or even straight off the start, but I just mean that legally the company has 3 years worth of contracts to decide to keep you permanently or not.
It's probably a bit harder to get hired here (I don't really have that struggle but friends do complain about it), but once you do land somewhere then you can at least have the confidence that you won't arbitrarily be fucked over with no recompense due to things wholly outside your power.
If anything, they're more free market oriented than the US, see Tesla versus IF Metall.