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Comment by RHSeeger | Hacker News Reader

> Cloudflare is paying out terminated employees thru the end of 2026, imagining this is a case of people going hungry requires some very serious ideological capture

We were talking about the people interviewing and picking jobs in general, not specifically ones that had been laid off from CF.

> I think you have to squint pretty hard to think that's the case in software engineering.

Maybe not right now (though I imagine that varies a lot even now). But I've been there. I've gone from making plenty of money to 100k+ in debt and having less money in the bank than I need to pay the rent + buy food next month. Admittedly, that was after the dotcom bubble; but it left me with a mindset of not assuming everyone has a choice to work at the company they want to. Sometimes you need a job, and being picky about which one you choose isn't always an option.

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Huge gulf between "sometimes you need a job" and "employees are pigs to the slaughter".

"I've gone from making plenty of money to 100k+ in debt and having less money in the bank than I need to pay the rent + buy food next month" is pretty intense. I'm sorry you went through that, but if you get ~7 months of paid time to job search and still wind up 100k in debt, there are definitely other problems. I don't think it's at all fair to characterize getting laid off from an extremely highly paid job as a humanitarian crisis.

Should tech companies hire more slowly and carefully? Yes, definitely. Does that actually help employees? I'm not sure, in this case they're getting paid more than they would have had they not been hired at all. Are there plenty of jobs available outside of software? Yes.

> Are there plenty of jobs available outside of software? Yes

None that matter, you're not going to reskill into another career in 3 months that severance covers or even a year

Agreed. I know plenty of people that are looking for jobs and failing to find anything good. People that I look up to; highly skilled developers.

Though it’s ridiculous to entertain the thought that one would pivot their career at the drop of a hat. Even just bumping into a tech stack will chain one to it as recruiters stare at yoe in a specific one and completely ignore anything adjacent, imagine doing anything more radical.

One can do it, but it’s a life changing, irreversible and likely damaging event nobody sane would take lightly. Absolute nonsense.

"I don't think it's reasonable to suggest that anyone who wants a job in tech should get one"

I understand your point, but this is the least bad world we're in. If you mandated no-firing or mandated year-long compensation for laid-off workers, you would be crushing the small business economy and destroying more jobs than you were trying to save.

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