[Spooky23]

Yes. This sort of thing is used all of the time to get rid of executives… you park the guy in gardening leave, gagged for 6-24 months. When the person gets replaced permanently, nobody remembers the old guy. The only option is to quit, but that has consequences.

Laws around this aren’t written for professional/management employees. The rules are designed to protect tradespeople who get laid off every winter, etc.

Most of these employees don’t have contracts, so if you refuse to return or don’t like the terms, you’re resigning. And what’s happening inside of the company is that the political networks will be smashed and rebuilt. People will be sucking up to the new overlords to be made junior overlords. There’s no rules around rehire and the market is soft, so you’ll probably see the new power players bring back people loyal to them.

This is why I always eyeroll at “10x” HN posters who think they can negotiate with big companies. When the chips are down, you’re a peon, and however smart you are, there’s another guy.

[KVFinn]

>Yes. This sort of thing is used all of the time to get rid of executives… you park the guy in gardening leave, gagged for 6-24 months. When the person gets replaced permanently, nobody remembers the old guy. The only option is to quit, but that has consequences.

Reminds of the Korean show 'Good Manager' where the company is trying to get the employee to quit rather than be fired, and keep making the work environment worse and worse in a comedic fashion, and he keeps finding ways to somehow get work down.

[rurban]

For those 10x HN hero's there is never another guy. Only he can fix this problem, the other guy will need 5 years to replace it.

Or only he can produce this feature, e.g plenty of folks tried to improve python or perl performance to an acceptable state but no one succeeded.

[kamaal]

I've seen people who believe they are 10x gang, sometimes go on a long vacation, and when they return to their horror they realise nobody missed them.

Happens all the time. People are less important than they think. Even without this whole layoff business, people in big corps get themselves competing offers and go like 'give me a raise more than this, or I leave'. In every scenario that I saw people leave nobody missed them after 1 - 2 weeks.

As a general rule everybody can be replaced, and everybody can always find a new job somewhere and most do. This is with or without layoffs and happens in ordinary situations too. People leave all the time, many think they are 10x, and they get replaced. Nobody misses them.

[prirun]

> As a general rule everybody can be replaced

My mom always said this to me. Very good advice over my long career. Don't get too uppity, because even if you are a star, most businesses will hire 3 people to replace you rather than deal with an uppity star.

[rurban]

Not my experience. To the contrary.