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by asadalt 427 days ago
that’s very business hostile tbh. I wouldn’t start a company there.
6 comments

Treating people with dignity is “business hostile”… welcome to Hacker News comment section.
It's more like "welcome to US mindset" IMHO
This mindset is what moves us forward. Union of soft nations don’t add much these days.
Define "forward".
I work for a paycheck. I can’t exchange “dignity” for goods and services. The guy got paid nice compensation for his labor.
Therefore, let's throw everything non-monetary under the bus because work should be purely transactional?
What else should it be? Do you believe that your company is like “your family”? Your coworkers or especially your manager are “your friends”?

Why else do you go to work?

I don't believe my office is my family, but I expect to at least be treated with a baseline level of decency, civility, dignity, respect, and kindness, which are non-monetary and (by my reading of your post) unnecessary in your office full of Vulcans.

The fact that these things are seen as optional and unimportant explains a lot of what's happened to public discourse.

Was it indecent for Google to lay someone off, remove all access and give him 16 weeks of severance + two additional weeks for each year of service?
You're taking "Human resources" a bit too literally.
We are resources. The one Big Tech company I have worked for has 1.556 million employees. What else was I besides a “resource”?
Pretty sure they wouldn't want someone like you to do so either.
they are doing great!
Thanks.
People are more important than businesses
that’s only what employee handbook says.
You're not starting a business anywhere, so no one cares.
too late
Always someone with a horrible opinion to give in this hellsite
i have had to avoid hiring excellent candidate(s) from EU, just because they would become unflushable if it comes to that.
> just because they would become unflushable if it comes to that

Your choice of verb tells a lot about what you think of your employees.

sure i am being dramatic but my point stands. if my company can’t be fluid and can’t react fast to market due to bs unions and backward laws of some land, that place is what i avoid.
This is a genuine question: do you make these views clear during hiring? Because if you believe in them and think that they make sense, there shouldn't be any harm in sharing them with the candidates upfront, right? Especially since these views directly affect their livelihood. And if you don't, why not?
And people in those places will thank you for avoiding hiring them, some folks prefer to not be treated miserably for your own greedy exploitation :)
The fact you refer to people as “unflushable” or “useless” is chilling.
If your business is contingent on the behaviour of one employee then you have failed to hire properly or build a resilient business...

In many cases problematic employees can and are removed from EU companies.

many cases isn’t competitive when i can find equal talent with no such restrictions.
How exactly would they become "unflushable"?

Also, surely if they were excellent candidates then you'd be doing your absolute best to keep them around?

> Also, surely if they were excellent candidates then you'd be doing your absolute best to keep them around?

Well to be fair excellent candidates are excellent on paper. It sometimes happens (not often, but not once in a blue moon either) that the candidate turns out to be completely unsuitable for the job.

Thats just not true.

You don't sound like a big company ceo. If you have a good reason, even as a small company, and revenue / affordability is one, you can fire people.

You just need to be able to pay them for min. 3 month if thats your contract length and as a business owner you should know how to calculate.

vs. i can hire in canada/ukraine/india/pakistan/china for a more skilled person with no such bs restrictions.
This doesn't make sense. If you hire them to work in local offices in those countries, they often have even more employee protections than Europe does. And if you bring them over to US, then it's the same law regardless of where they are originally from.
why would i establish a local office in say paris if laws are so hostile towards startups.
people are getting quite snippy about this comment, but hating this mindset means you lock yourself away from so much actual wealth. It means you confine and condemn people to significantly worse economic conditions by limiting people's ability to freely associate and disassociate.

just to hammer this point home: Every mandatory employee benefit has a huge cost, and adding enough of them kills your economy. It makes it more expensive to have an employee than X many jobs can justify. That X grows every year, and that's X people who cant do that job and get paid money for it.

exactly, as a startup founder i wouldn’t commit to a yearly reserved ec2 instance for a year let alone an employee.
Wow, that's an interesting perspective.

Meanwhile, Big tech (pre-2022) went to pretty extreme lengths to keep tenured employees around because of all the knowledge they'd built up which made them valuable to the company.

But whatevs, you do you. I'd advise you to only hire contractors if you want people to stay less than a year.

And it's worth noting that you appear to be responding to people who are in German speaking countries, where 3 months notice is standard. Other parts of Europe are not like this, and in Ireland you can fire as per the US for the first 6 months/year, and only need to pay redundancy if they've been there 2+ years.

Please post the name of your company so we can be sure to avoid it.
done
I take it that this was posted in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard"?
"had to"
Not even building and exporting widebody aircraft?
outlier.