Hacker News Reader

Comment by yard2010 | Hacker News Reader

yard2010·

This is not a real risk you're talking about, but small inconveniences. A risk is losing your house for example, or losing the ability to rent.

Inconveniences are part of life anyway. Being the first engineer means you get all these inconveniences (tell your wife and your kids) plus real risks as above (taking a loan to buy the options and losing it)

View on HN

“Letting people go” is taking on the risk of all of those people being let go losing the ability to rent or pay their mortgages. That seems like more than an inconvenience to me if you take one of the responsibilities of being an employer at all seriously.

If you are working a tech job and know how to program computers and have no savings slash the loss of a job costs you your house, you have deep and fundamental problems far beyond the loss of one job and it isn’t your former employer’s fault that your life is mismanaged.

No employee should join a startup with the expectation that the company will be around forever.

Compare startups to restaurants- their failure rate is absolutely massive. Working for a new company is simply always a risk for everyone involved, there's no getting around that.

far easier for me to layoff people at megacorp then when your the founder

at megacorp, you shrug and look them in the eye and they know you can’t do much

your in the same boat

as a founder every layoff is YOUR failure

Reply on news.ycombinator.com