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Comment by scrabble | Hacker News Reader

Is there a problem here? You shouldn't be recording a video like that on your phone.

It's shitty behaviour by the filmer, certainly, but it is also terrible that firing someone in that manner is even legal. (In the UK it would not be, misconduct must be handled by verbal then written warnings. Only a narrow range of "gross misconduct" can result in immediate termination - and even then it wouldn't be handled with "you're fired.")

what a god-awful process an employer has to go through to fire a bad employee. That's a terribly bureaucratic law that only protects bad employees.

It is the UK.

What's awful is that you seem to think you shouldn't have to do those things to fire someone. Just a verbal, a written, then fire. What's so awful about that? Do you want to be able to fire someone on less than 3 warnings[1]?

And yes, I understand there are some things - like maybe bringing a gun to work or punching a co-worker is auto-termination on the spot. But besides those outrageous things, you should be able to give a person a fair chance if it's a performance issue.

1.Depends on what is a "warning". At $LARGE_TELECOM, you get 2 warnings. First is verbal/email. The 2nd warning is in the form of a 6 month probation. That's a 6-month-long warning. If you haven't figured out how to succeed by then, I think you're now fair-game of getting fired.

I don't like the idea/law because all it's doing is protecting bad employees from getting fired quickly. I'm going to hate myself for using him as an example, but Steve Jobs was famous for firing people in elevator rides if they couldn't clearly explain what they did at the company. I agree not because it's steve jobs, but because it is important to get bad employees out as quickly as possible. Negative employees tend to make the people around them more negative, lazy employees tend the make the people around them lazier. If you're not firing them for being lazy, you're implicitly telling other employees that it's somewhat okay to be lazy. The longer you keep them around, the longer you're letting your team absorb the negative behavior. I'll let the employees go have their second and third chances at competitors, who will be weighed down wasting time and energy rehabilitating bad employees.

Ah, so the problem we have here is defining what "bad" is. You don't know an employee is bad without talking to them about the problem first to make sure they're aware of the problem and giving them at least 1 chance to correct it. Even in jobs where lives are directly at risk, like an air-traffic-controller, get 1 warning. No company is so important that you're justified on firing people for performance issues without at least 1 warning.

Also, I'm going to put some of the blame on the employer. The employer needs to improve their interview process if they really have such a problem with bad performers, not make firing easier.

(Shrug) As long as it's legal for me to quit with no prior notice, it should be legal for the company to fire me the same way.

I really don't understand the European notion that a private-sector job is some sort of government-sanctioned entitlement.

That implies that an individual person has the same resources as a Company. If you just quit, it's assumed you know what you're doing. And I'm guessing you're probably assuming a certain privilege that others may not have. If you're on HN, you probably are among the people who are paid well, have savings and can get another job in no more than 6 weeks. There are a lot of people out there who aren't as fortunate; who will be stricken with horrible-hardship if they're job just disappears.

You quitting without warning won't harm a big corporation as a whole, but a bigcorp firing a person without warning has a chance of nearly destroying that person depending on what job and situation we're talking about. Especially in USA where health-insurance is connected to employment. A sudden dismissal can really cause someone to die.

That implies that an individual person has the same resources as a Company.

No, just the same rights. "Privileges" should have no place in the law.

Put another way, as an employer, why should I lose my rights of free association simply by partnering with one or more other people in a corporation?

Ah, then we simply cannot agree. The ability to exercise a right is just as important as the right itself. The sudden termination of a job is more difficult for the employee than the employer in almost all cases so the law should help balance that out. Either it's harder to fire people or the government needs to arrange for basic-income & healthcare for the unemployed.

You should be able to get unemployment insurance for at least 6 month after you are fired - in most cases it's enough to find a new job. There is problem with very low cap on unemployment payout (~2k/month which is not enough to live in many parts of the country) that has to be fixed but otherwise it's not like you will starve the next day.

In Denmark you have 1 month of resignation if you resign your position.

And if the company wants to resign you these rules apply:

Time with the company, time of notice:

0 - 6 months, 1 month.

6 months - 3 years, 3 months.

3 - 6 years, 4 months.

6 - 9 years, 5 months.

9+ years, 6 months

The first 3 months in your position you can be resigned at any given time, and is seen as a trial. You can also resign at any given time within the first 3 months.

You can get better "deals" if you work within an union, or for the government.

Can you proceed with the firing before the second "6 month" warning has finished?

If this is just warnings for under-performance in an office, this seems fine (so long as I don't have to wait the 6 months).

In less white collar jobs I don't think your warning system is necessarily appropriate. A restaurant manager should not have to issue warnings for an employee showing up to work without pants, they should be able to fire on the spot.

The 6 months is only for performance issues. I'll say that showing up to work without pants generally falls in the "extremely wrong" things to do, like punching a coworker, setting your cubicle on fire, sending a nude image to an email-distribution. All fair-game for instant termination. It doesn't have to be 6 months if something "extremely wrong" happens during those 6 months. Maybe 6 months is only appropriate for at&t. I'm just saying they need a "reasonable chance" to give you enough data to measure performance change. That's different for different industries/companies. For a start-up with lots of coding, maybe only 1 month is needed to measure any change in performance. But some of the blame goes to the employer as well. In theory an employer should almost never have to deal with an unfixable bad employee. If a company really keeps having repeated problems with bad employees, the interview-process probably needs some fixing.

We're an employment-at-will country here in the US, you can be fired for (almost) any reason or no reason at all at any time.

Yeah, we say that but I've never seen, or even heard of it, being used that way literally. When I was with $LARGE_TELECOM for 5+ yrs it was at-will but warnings+paperwork had to be done to justify firing someone. Or it had to be in a wave of layoffs.

Definitely not:

"We just got a new coffee machine in the lobby. It's great. How was your weekend Bob? That's nice. Oh by the way, did you get the news? You're fired. Extra cardboard boxes are by the printer. You don't work here anymore so don't touch the last bit of coffee; Susan's got a string of meetings this morning and hasn't had a chance to get a cup yet."

Employees are expensive, there is often little sense in throwing them away before seeing if you can fix them. Furthermore most bosses are, contrary to popular belief, decent people.

Why not? Is a meeting with 1000 people an off the record sort of thing? Does the CEO not stand behind his words?

Also what kind of non-game plan involves telling people they'll be fired in a week, maybe. You can't reveal game plans when there are none.

A video like what?

What about the video contents mandates it shouldn't be recorded?

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