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Comment by mukmuk | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t this illegal?

In the United States (where most Cloudflare employees work):

    > The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older.

To answer your question: Probably not. Even so, it is incredibly hard to prove workers 40 and older were laid off as a result of age discrimination.

> Even so, it is incredibly hard to prove workers 40 and older were laid off as a result of age discrimination.

The only way for this to happen is by leaked private conversations, I think.

So you can’t be discriminated against if you’re less than 40, but that seems somewhat discriminatory (maybe you wanted to be), but that means that you are being discriminated against, but that’s meant to be forbidden.

I sense a paradox.

There's no paradox.

The law is you can't descriminate against a protected class. Lots of things are protected classes, like race and religion. Old age is, but young age isn't. Clothing choices in general aren't, but if it's a religous choice, it likely is protected.

Etc.

It's kind of weird that you can fire young people because they're young, but not old people because they're old. But it's not a paradox, it's just how the system is codified.

Yes, from a legal perspective this will always be true: in-group vs out-group. Age discrimination is a special category because everyone will be in the out-group (when young) the age into the in-group. In this case, it is probably legal to fire someone for being too young. It sounds weird, but that is not a protected class of employees.

Only if you're dumb enough to leave a paper trail showing that's what you did.

I know there's an unspoken rule to not speak directly about whatever shady thing your organization and leadership is doing but for this situation it would be surprising if there isn't some correspondence that would come up in discovery detailing the strategy. It's too much of a coincidence and too big of a decision to hire 20% of your workforce as interns and then a couple months later fire 20% of your employees.

It seems it would be easy to show a pattern.

You would need some class action lawsuit I’d think? Need a good number of laid off people to join it and you need solid statistics that would convince a jury more than the corporate lawyers would with whatever HR covered their assess on paper have.

Is it not fine to just cut for pay rate? That should be easy

Is it legal to cut pay rates based on age? I doubt it. 'We didn't fire them, we cut their six-figure salary to minimum wage'.

No I'm saying you lay off your senior people. Not because they're old and you don't want to pay retirement but to save on payroll since they make more money than juniors.

After all, they're all just Claudr users now.

Technically yes, IBM just got sued successfully for it.

That said they just settled the case for what happened in 2016. So you might be right and even win but that wont help you for a decade (assuming you win at all)

Just your average Thursday in American capitalism!

Should companies be forced to retain talent of a certain age group? Should they be forced to retain less competent people? How do you expect this to work?

In Sweden,the Employment Protection Act, (LAS ) mandates 'last in - first out', meaning if there are layoffs due to over-capacity, people with seniority (years of employment) take priority for available positions. This is kind of partioned by profession-group, so yes you can fire nurses but keep doctors, or other way around. (Its been a while since I looked into it, but thats the rough gist of it)

Yes, and that makes working for a Swedish company so much better. You know you can’t just be shown the door at any moment after years of service and you get a lot of peace of mind which is worth more than the inflated salaries in the US. There is still a way to get rid of people, of course, but that goes a little like the Japanese do: just don’t give any important work to the person, or give them a bad performance review. People quickly understand they need to move on and they can do it with dignity.

That also means that a) it's harder for younger people to get a stable job b) the bare minimum of work not to get fired decreases over time, which is bad for productivity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider%E2%80%93outsider_theor...

If a significant share of your employees optimise in the sense of doing the least of work possible, without getting fired, you have a huge problem anyways. Usually, given the right conditions, people have intrinsic interest in doing a good job. Even if their motivation is more of the extrinsic type, there is more to it than getting paid.

Not everyone has an interesting or well-paid job. Or competent manager.

I have worked a fair share of that kind of jobs in the past. The colleagues on my level who cared about more than being paid and not getting fired where the absolute majority. People want to belong. They want to work. The ones who are the exception of the rule can be seeded out pretty quickly. You do not work for an organisation for 10+ years, wake up one day and switch to pure opportunism.

As for incompetent management, that problem can not be solved by churning workers. It can only be solved by better career paths and selection processes for management roles. The most intelligent people in an organisation are often more interested in getting things done than getting more power.

Yes, it only works in a high trust society where there’s plenty of jobs and people actually care about doing a good job (any company will have incentives, people can’t just sit around and do nothing, lots of social pressure too if you’re a slacker). But hey, that’s been mostly true (until recently, I hear immigrant unemployment is really high, while “local” unemployment is close to zero, but the official statistics sit in the middle at around 7% I think, much higher for the youth).

Or if you really want to get rid of someone you can buy them out with a severance deal that is better than standard and hope they take it.

In my experience those people get juicy positions doing nothing useful as they their competence long atrophied due to zero pressure to keep their knowledge up to date. Of course now companies hire "consultants" to work around to issue, so those get fired on a week's notice when money is tight. The warm bodies remain in their chairs until retirement. Inefficiency remains a huge problem in Swedish economy, but no one dares to touch these archaic rules (BTW no minimal wage in a European country, WTF?) due to political reasons, so the immigrants get the blame instead for everything.

Its a choice - work hard with minimal securities, get better salary. Heck, one can do that in many EU places when working as self-employed on contract (if legal), and be paid by just billed days, no vacations or sick days. Its actually pretty good career path in the beginning of one's career in software development, get more money and ie invest in a property. Then get more secure permanent position, coast more and enjoy and appreciate more those stability benefits.

But high economic performance this isn't. Adaptability of market to ever-changing world that certainly isn't neither. Europe is getting hammered by this and things will get much, much worse in upcoming years. We will have to revisit our comfy lazy attitude towards work, or end up being a stagnant place with 3rd world salaries and corresponding QoL.

Switzerland is doing things much better, its sort of in between both extremes and economy is reflecting this very well. But EU leaders egos will sooner accept poverty than that somebody figured out things better than them.

The Netherlands recognized the problems with the last-in-first-out system and requires that after a reorganization, the statistical distribution remains the same. How well that works is hard to say because the level of unemployment in The Netherlands has been quite low for many yours.

What I hear is that Switzerland is a bad example. Many people there struggle to make a living.

> What I hear is that Switzerland is a bad example. Many people there struggle to make a living.

The poverty rate in Switzerland has increased (source:https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/economic-soc...) but is defined as:

The poverty line is derived from the guidelines of the Conference for Social Welfare (SKOS). In 2024, it was on average CHF 2388 per month for a single person and CHF 4159 for two adults with two children.

I live in Zurich (by far the most expensive city) and while 2388 (or 4159) would be tight (depending on housing) it would still afford you a fairly comfortable life with access to top quality healthcare and public transport. Life quality wise one could argue that poverty in CH is a better option than a middle income in a lot of European countries.

Outside of Zurich rentals are not even that bad. You can easily get a nice apartment for 1500.- or even less. If one is struggling financially, rents are lower e.g. in Aarau district, starting from around 1000 and you can commute from there. Spending 1000 when the median salary is around 7000 is really not that bad. Low inflation in Switzerland meant other European locations are now at the swiss level or sometimes even above.

Yeah Switzerland has rather few poor people and very strong middle class. And poor ain't some US version of homeless/trailer park living, just lower income, less fancy clothes, shopping in cheaper supermarkets, less/no vacations abroad.

lol does all of European tech companies combined even make more than what the EU brings in from taxing US companies yet?

Why don't you research this and report back your findings. Learning is a cool experience, compared to prejudice.

Just for others, it seems this was already an article so it came up quickly, but for fines, not taxes.

"In 2024, the total income tax paid by all publicly listed European internet companies combined was approximately €3.2 billion. This total, which includes firms like SAP, Adyen, Spotify, and Zalando, was notably lower than the €3.8 billion in fines the EU collected from US tech giants in the same year"

China is hiring engineering talent. US is firing. Nobody forces anybody to do anything. Just pointing out the current state of affairs in the long life cycle of empire. As Ray Dalio says US is very late stage declining „financial capitalism”. While China is early stage aspiring „production capitalism”. It is not like late stage declining USSR needed as many engineers as it did when it wasnt collapsing. USA is a collapsing empire. China is growing.

from what I know, Chinese engineering grads are becoming food delivery couriers because there's not enough opportunity?

Making it illegal would be communism

Would it be Communism to require a license stating you know what that word means in order to use it?

Yes because anything that is good for individuals is communism.

People are feeling more alone than ever. But whatever you do, don't do anything communal!

Anything I don’t like is communism

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