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Comment by csallen | Hacker News Reader

Yes, and it's an employee's responsibility to not depend on a single job, and to be prepared for the possibility that it might go away. That's the mindset we should be teaching people, because it's REALITY.

Plenty of people are aware of this, and they navigate this successfully by saving part of their income, by maintaining an employable skillset, and by living within their means, while working a job.

When you suggest to people that it's their company's responsibility to take care of them, to guarantee their job into their future, or to look out for their personal financial livelihood, that IS NOT REALITY. That's not how it works. You're telling people that their own responsibilities are someone else's, when that's not in fact true. When people mistakenly believe this drivel, they're far more likely to take bad risks and make huge financial mistakes.

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Employers employ many people at once. The risk of a bad employee is divided by the entire workforce.

Employees, on the other hand, put all their eggs into one basket at a time. Many (most?) employers specifically forbid moonlighting and working multiple full-time jobs at once, so employees are forced to depend on a single job at a time. The risk of having a bad employer is shouldered 100% by the employee.

It's this power dynamic that justifies different standards for employers and employees.

There is not some guaranteed power dynamic.

Business is not all huge companies with infinite redundancy. There are 30M small businesses in America that employ 60M people. For the vast majority of businesses and teams, losing an employee hurts, and employees have lots of leverage. These business owners have to do the work to ensure redundancy, to plan their budgets and products and systems to ensure they can weather inevitable employee turnover. Plenty of businesses fail to do this and have to close their doors. It happens with regularity.

On the flip side, unemployment is the US is super low. It's true that workers can only hold one job at a time, but they are not "trapped" at a job. In fact, they have more mobility than ever, which also gives them leverage to negotiate for higher salaries or to hop jobs. Not to mention more gig jobs, remote jobs, and contract jobs than ever, even for highly paid positions. Sure, losing a job hurts. But the employees who plan for this possibility, who maintain skills, maintain savings, and live within their means, can find new jobs, just as businesses who plan well can weather employee turnover.

It goes both ways.

So if you're in a position where your employer has some huge power dynamic hold on you, is that some universal truth for all employees resulting from the nature of the employer-employee dynamic? I don't think so. I think that's the result of poor personal decisions, or bad luck at best.

All that said, I'm 100% on board with legal protections that set a high standard for employers. We have plenty of those already. And I'm 100% on board with government stepping in to help take care of people who fall through the cracks. For example, I love that COBRA allowed me to stay on my previous employer-provided group healthcare plan for 18 months(!) after my last job ended.

What I'm against is any cultural or legal change that begins to suggest that its employers' responsibility to keep their people employed. It's not. Financially, the system can't work that way. Employers are not our parents or our nannies or our caretakers, and we should not try to make them into that.

Hundred percent. Yet, it's also reality, today, that the power asymmetry between individuals and corporations are huge. Anybody trying to bootstrap an independent business is heavily punished, simply because corporations want you to be an employee, just because they can. Unless the system balances the power dynamics, it's futile to tell people that they shouldn't ask for more rights from corporations.

I literally run the biggest website for people trying to bootstrap independent businesses, and I haven't seen anyone complain about being heavily punished for trying to do so. Founders are the most employable people I know, and they typically find it the easiest to go get jobs when their businesses fail (although they hate doing so).

Not everyone has a rich family to fall back on, bud. You could say "fall back on the government" but then this is how the government would do it. They wouldn't want you to fire people for no reason at all. In the same way that people are paid a certain wage as an agreement, there are other conditions too. This can be part of those conditions.

Your claim of: > Yes, and it's an employee's responsibility to not depend on a single job, and to be prepared for the possibility that it might go away. That's the mindset we should be teaching people, because it's REALITY.

is capitalist mindset that thinks there's never a chance of change. Kinda pathetic for a MIT grad, tbh.

> Kinda pathetic for a MIT grad, tbh.

Personal attacks are shite, especially when they dig into someone's background for extra 'bite'.

P.s. what rock have you been living under where you have a preconception that all MIT graduates are ethical white knights that share all of your own opinions?

It's one of the most varietal student bodies at a school that forks people majorly into military programs and research labs.. to expect harmonious homogeny regarding ethical opinions from the graduates is ridiculous.

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