Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jolux 2159 days ago
If I'm at a place where people will lose their jobs if I leave the company the answer is simple: I don't leave until that's either not the case or I personally can't afford it anymore.
2 comments

I owe no loyalties to corporates, I have other interests that I would like to spend time on and pursue more than convincing stakeholders to make decisions that should have been made long ago to have them avoided being put in the position they are now.

If people insist on making choices that will continue to sink the ship, I don't have to go down with it.

>If people insist on making choices that will continue to sink the ship, I don't have to go down with it.

I think this calculus flips around when your commitment has entered a stage where other peoples' livelihoods depend on it, basically. That's all. Get out before it springs a leak in an org like that, is my advice.

My point is frequently your world descends into a flaming pile of shit unannounced.

Go ask the career restaurant workers how the year is going. Go ask the tourism guides and travel agents. Go ask their bosses how they intend to keep the doors open with an 80% decline in revenue.

Short answer: you can't.

I don’t understand what your point is. You think I don’t get this? This is a thread about giving executives bonuses when the company is going bankrupt.
No, it’s a thread about rewarding executives for managing to keep any semblance of a company alive. A company that comes out of bankruptcy is much more valuable than one that doesn’t. The shareholders have to compensate the execs enough to entice them to go through that rather than leave for greener pastures where their shares won’t be worthless and they won’t have to fire people.
That seems to be the "common sense knowledge", but I see little evidence to back that up. Yes, certainly for a specific company, coming out of bankruptcy is more valuable than not, but I'm not convinced it's always a net positive for society as a whole, especially if doing so requires things like exacerbating our already messed up wage inequality situation.
> I think this calculus flips around when your commitment has entered a stage where other peoples' livelihoods depend on it, basically.

For you, not for others.

> Get out before it springs a leak in an org like that, is my advice.

I'll be fine for a long time even if the company goes under, others may not though, I've seen it happen way too many times to not be prepared for stuff like this. And I can just accept an offer from another place rather than outright reject them.

>For you, not for others.

So I see.

>I'll be fine for a long time even if the company goes under, others may not though, I've seen it happen way too many times to not be prepared for stuff like this.

Yeah, and it's their problem up until the point at which the situation is unrecoverable without you, and even then it's still mostly theirs, but I would have a lot of hangups about acting in a situation like that.

> Yeah, and it's their problem up until the point at which the situation is unrecoverable without you, and even then it's still mostly theirs, but I would have a lot of hangups about acting in a situation like that.

It's business, things fail. The problem is that people have come to accept that things shouldn't fail has made it so that it has built up to the point where it is today. Id call this environment Dirac-delta solvency.

I mean, some things shouldn't fail. I would have less qualms about all of this stuff with a strong social safety net, but we don't have that in the US.
I owe no loyalties to any company.

I actually liked the company I just left. I liked the people and thought that the people in management up to and including management were all good people. I am usually far more cynical.

Post Covid, they decided to give everyone a pay cut instead of laying off people. This was morally the right thing to do in my opinion. It is a small company and I didn’t feel we had any dead weight.

I knew that in my position, the company would struggle a little bit. But what was I suppose to do? Stay out of loyalty or accept an offer that was a 60% increase in total comp at a more stable company?