Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I don't see the relevance of (1). As for (2), I missed it on my first reading. Regarding (2), I see two ways to interpret it.

One is that the CEO was asking for a bunch of "above-and-beyond" work. The other is that there was an implicit agreement for such work, but Belgian law made it impossible to explicitly contract for. In the former case I have no problem with the employee, in the latter case he sounds like a pain to work with.

And make no mistake, there is an implicit contract at nearly all jobs. Typical clauses might be "CTO filters BS from above so developers can do real work" or "go ahead and take reasonable flex-time in spite of what the official policy is, but be available for crunch time". Even in a flexible place like the US, it's simply logistically impossible to encode everything in a contract. The closest anyone has come to it are union work rules, disaster that they are.

What "find an employee with passion" really means is "find an employee who's attitude fits better with the implicit contract".

> The other is that there was an implicit agreement for such work, but Belgian law made it impossible to explicitly contract for.

Considering Google has a datacentre in Belgian that presumably has 24/7 availability, I find this hard to believe. I presume Belgian has security guards, nightfill and a fire brigade also.

> What "find an employee with passion" really means is "find an employee who's attitude fits better with the implicit contract".

I read this as "find an employee who is too scared, too naieve or too stupid to enforce the explicit contract they signed".

If you want someone to do the work, you need to contract it. Anything else is abusive management.

The relevance of 1) is responding to this in your original post:

"Additionally, it sounds like the employee was treated well."

If Belgian law required say, two weeks notice and the CEO gave the guy 12 weeks I'd be more forgiving of her, but if the bare minimum of law is being implemented then she deserves nothing extra in return.

That one enters into implicit contracts is undoubtedly correct, however I would question the duration of that contract.

Firstly, the benefit relationship of all contracts, implicit or otherwise, is asymmetric: the benefits accrued to the employer will be greater than those accrued to the employees: to do otherwise would erode profits, and put the company out of business. Some companies have 'enlightened' opinions about how to extract good work from their employees, but it is still done with the goal of being more profitable. Arguing from the poor practices of other companies is not constructive.

With respect to the particular situation, once the employee had been placed on notice, it seems to me that the implicit contract was broken, unless the employer was just as willing as they were beforehand to offer the 'implicit benefits' to the employee, which seems unlikely. Indeed, the situation really seems to be that the employer is asking for all the benefits on their side of the implicit contract, without offering anything in return.

Finally, for me the implicit contract is not really between the employee and the employer, but between the employee and their coworkers. Whenever I have gone above and beyond, I haven't been doing it for the company, but for the people I work with. However, my experiences are limited to medium sized companies, so things might be different in smaller environments.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com