[PragmaticPulp]

> My boss is asking for progress updates and I'm just responding "Nothing. The guys are focussing on staying safe, warm, and well stocked right now." (with a small side of incredulity.)

Incredible. I know several managers with employees in Ukraine and their companies are all being very thoughtful about handling the situation.

When I hire remotely (including Ukraine, where we even had a remote office at one point) it wasn’t uncommon to discover entire teams of people being mistreated as remote employees of some clueless foreign company. It was so easy to hire away the entire team and so satisfying to just see them enjoy working for a company and managers who actually cared. This might be a signal for where to go with your career at a later date after the current events are behind us (hoping sooner rather than later)

[lijogdfljk]

What's expected though? Not that i'm defending mistreatment, but i work with a small team of all remote and we have a few Russian devs. If they go absent for a while due to all this issue, we're not going to fire them or be angry.. but we still need to try and keep the company afloat, no?

Like forget bottom lines and corporate greed for a second. My company is small and if we don't hit an upcoming deadline, we're laying off at least half of our staff. I'm in full support of affected people but i also have to do my best to make sure the people employed by this company have a job tomorrow. This post seems to make that sound.. cold, uncaring?

To be clear i don't own the company nor am that high up on the management chain. We're only ~50 people. But still, i think this way. If an employee goes through really difficult times, of which we've had many, we wish them well and continue to pay them as best we can for as long as we can, but the 49 other people still have families, need food on the table, etc. It's just as important to me that the 49 other people are happy and healthy as it is the 1 person is happy and healthy.

I'm a bit confused by the anti-corporate take sometimes. I think the human lives are all that matter, fuck corporate greed - but when everyone is months away from losing jobs due to runway-like funding models.. it seems unfair.

Am i off base? I imagine you're mostly thinking huge companies?

[rovr138]

What kind of company is it?

• A startup can crash

• A fee for service company focusing on dev will probably crash

• An established company where development is just done for internal things. Can they pause feature requests and focus on maintenance for a bit? I'm not saying it may not come to having to hire people and talks need to start, but did they even think about the devs? What have they been doing in regards to their devs? Any help?

IMO, it's just the way it's being handled. They have their people fighting for their lives. Here's what looks like a manager or lead not being able to work with all the stress around it. And all that upper management sees is, fill in the chair.

[lijogdfljk]

> What kind of company is it?

A contract company with customers. The company would likely "be fine", but 5 years ago it was ~6 people. We've pushed for some larger clients recently, which allows us to employ ~50 people. If rolling out to the larger clients fails, that income source dries up and we go back down to ~10 people or w/e. With a sizable failure on our track record, which will be a bit difficult too.

> IMO, it's just the way it's being handled. They have their people fighting for their lives. Here's what looks like a manager or lead not being able to work with all the stress around it. And all that upper management sees is, fill in the chair.

So in our case i imagine we'd attempt to fill in a chair. I'd advocate for it. But again, i want to keep the rest of the staff employed and fed, myself included. However i would _definitely not_ expect to see those employees let go. I'd raise hell and question my employment if they were treated that way. Just filled in while they're gone, hopefully still paying them as long as we can (which probably wouldn't exceed 6 months i'd guess).

Which is partly why these conversations can be difficult for me. My #1 concern is keeping everyone employed, including the people having a tough time. Which can often mean keeping my head focused on income.

As much as i love WorkReform and worker focused rights, i often feel these conversations are adversarial and don't seem to consider what will happen when the company goes under. But they're also framed against massive corps, like Starbucks or w/e, and the reality is much different for them than it is my company.

Talking about my company in the WorkReform context is really odd these days.

[rovr138]

Is there anything on the company benefits or laws regarding active military or reserve members?

Regardless, it might be good to bring it up if the company ever plans to contract people again from Ukraine. Looks like you've found great developers there now and in the past, so it would suck to get blacklisted by devs there due to something like this.

Maybe it's possible to keep them employed and just contract out a company for devs in the meantime? Just something that can be renewed as needed but that would also leave your devs with a place to come back to after.

Good luck with everything. Good luck to your friends and coworkers fighting for their homes and livelihood.