[lazyasciiart]

Amateurs. My employer does mass layoffs by terminating access to everything except their email account at 3am, and then sending an email to the victim saying “you were let go at 3am”. Managers get to figure out who’s left on their team by pinging everyone when they learn about it at work.

[gcr]

Google powerwashes your corp Chromebook when they let you go. A friend was composing an email on the train when their screen went black and the device reset itself to factory settings.

They even send the “you’re being fired” email to their personal email they have on file. Didn’t even schedule a meeting.

[ninalanyon]

Most of the employer behaviour described in such gleeful terms here would be outright illegal in most of Europe and open up the employer to risk of being sued for wrongful dismissal, etc.

[nalthis]

Skeptical that this would actually be illegal in Europe if all the details were provided.

I went through a similar thing at Amazon. Locked out of my laptop at 3 a.m. and emailed I was laid off. The key thing though is that my official end date was 90 days in the future. Legally, the 3 a.m. lock out was actually just a warning of impending layoffs. I got paid to “work from home” for 3 months after I returned my badge and laptop.

My understanding is that Europe may have longer wait periods, but most tech companies still essentially do the same thing there. Amazon’s laid off Berlin employees still get locked out at 3am and told to do nothing for months while legal does whatever it needs to do to get rid of them.

[lazyasciiart]

Funnily enough it is actually illegal in Europe and so our laid off German employees were reinstated by court order, several other countries as well. Amazon presumably ran into the same problem, or was smart enough to know they would: they give plenty of notice to European employees and follow local laws. https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestionsEU/comments/1qpni5...

[Der_Einzige]

This is why the EU continues to get much more poor compared to the USA. Turns out "live to work" really does beat "work to live".

[UltraSane]

Seems like only a few thousand people in the US are really getting rich from this.

[weberer]

Eh, there are ways around that. I've worked for multiple Finnish companies that do layoffs via "lomautus" whereby they put the laid-off employees on a forced, unpaid, indefinite leave. After multiple months of not receiving a paycheck, the employees inevitably "resign".

[kuerbel]

In Germany that's forbidden, you'd have to pay them.

But you can be placed in a room/office with no windows (not the OS), a computer without internet access and nothing to do. How long can you go on like that?

The law, sadly, can't forbid asshole employers.

[blokey]

Royal Bank of Scotland did that to me and a few colleagues when they didn’t want to pay redundancy whilst closing the only building for us to work in.

Was a battle of wills and eventually after 5 weeks of coming into a random branch office and sitting in an empty room, we came in one Friday to be told that the manager in charge of the building closure had been removed from the project and they would be paying full redundancy pay and we didn’t have to come back in but they’d pay for the next 3 months as well.

Fun as a 21 year old.

[mschuster91]

And then US tech has the arrogance of claiming "we don't need unions".

yeah, shit like what we're reading here is precisely why y'all need unions.

[kortilla]

We’re talking about a Google employee that makes 5x or more of what a European counterpart would. Lack of termination notice and other at will employment is easy to plan for when you make so much money.

Until someone starts providing examples of software companies where the employees are unioned and clear $400k+ annum, the bar is still “no unions”.

[AlexeyBelov]

Why not fire people humanely, even if you pay a lot?

[rixed]

A full email? We need a "you've been fired" emoji.

[tosti]

U+1FAF5 U+1F525

[laughing_man]

Man, that's cold.

[gear54rus]

I think at least on windows you can powercycle it quickly a few times until it gives up this behavior. Not sure about Chromebooks.

[Twirrim]

If you're talking about Oracle, the large round previous to that they did had individual meetings with employee, manager, and HR. With so many layoffs it took a week+ to do, effectively torturing an entire set of employees who had no idea if they'd have a job by the end of the hour, let alone week.

I'm not sure there's any good way to lay off large amounts of staff (besides not getting yourself into the situation in the first place where you have to)

[joe_mamba]

>I'm not sure there's any good way to lay off large amounts of staff

Someone on HN once wrote that after the dot.com bust, Yahoo! HR had 1-1 meetings with every single employee that was part of the mass layoffs back then, and they did this for hundreds of workers. Boy what I wouldn't give to go back to such state of affairs, even though I wasn't yet part of the workforce back then.

An older family friend of mine who started working in tech around 2003-2005, told me "back in my day, to get a job, you'd just send your CV to [e-mail], and in 2-3 days you'd get a call asking you when you're free to come over for an interview". Now today you're lucky you get an automated reply back from 50 CVs sent, just for the opportunity to do an impersonal take home assessment as part of the seven stage interview process. It's like screaming into the void of AI bots and automated CV screening systems, while you spin the barrel of the revolver to play the next round of Russian roulette.

And the crazy part is, that when people talk about "the good old days", we're talking about events from recent history, just 10-25 years ago, that a lot of current workers experienced in their lifetime, not stuff from when boomers were kids.

The massive sudden shift in the commoditization of human workers and turning them into faceless labor resources that can be inhumanely disposed of with a keystroke, is real and noticeable to everyone, that I'm envious for you guys who are set to retire soon out of this shitshow.

What comes after this? Have we reached rock bottom, or will it get even worse?

[duzer65657]

Either your dates or experiences are off, because I've been working in software since 1999 and the easiest time to get a job was quite recent, in the back-half of COVID. The early 2000's were decent, but I didn't experience - or know anyone who did - any sort of "free jobs' period. Also pay was relatively decent but much less than what you saw even 5 years ago. It's only the in the past year or so that the world has appeared to be ending for developers, and I think that pronouncement is premature.

[joe_mamba]

>Also pay was relatively decent but much less than what you saw even 5 years ago.

IDK, I'm not from the US/Bay-Area, nor does my country have any big-tech/FANG jobs to distort the market for what constitutes a "high wage" in tech, it's all the same.

>in the back-half of COVID.

Sure, but Covid was only a short blip, a temporary exception, not a baseline norm for wage/job growth, like the years prior which was a longer period of getting a job was easy, like 2012-2020.

For me where I live now, the career depression I saw came in 2023 already when jobs become less abundant and harder to get, and it only got worse later when mass layoff started. So we're already 3 years in the decline, longer than the Covid boom lasted and things aren't going better yet.

I entered the workforce in around 2012-2014 and it was significantly easier to get a callback from sending a resume than it is now where it's mostly automated rejections. When I say "easy" I also mean you didn't need 7 stages of interviews to get a job back then, you'd have 2 stages and those were pretty chill and get a call back from every 2-3 resumes sent. Now you need to send dozens. I guess "easy" is relative.

>Also pay was relatively decent but much less than what you saw even 5 years ago.

Inflation also happened in that time.

[michaelt]

> the easiest time to get a job was quite recent, in the back-half of COVID

Things can be easy or difficult at different parts of the hiring funnel.

Towards the end of covid, it was easy to convert a resume into interviews, and successful interviews into a job.

But in the 1990s the tech industry hadn't yet invented the five-interview, live-coding, culture-fit, hiring-committee gauntlet. If a hiring manager liked your resume there'd be one interview, and it wouldn't involve any coding.

[edoceo]

Annecdata: 1996-1999 was super easy, one round start next Monday. 2000-2003 difficult. Easy again until 2008. Hard till 2013. No data since then.

What I hear about today seems crazy hard.

[laughing_man]

Late '90s were crazy easy compared to anything since. If you could demonstrate any amount of technical skill you were in.

[bigfudge]

I got my first job by meeting someone on a train Thursday night and starting on Monday morning! (1998)

[aidenn0]

Shortly before the .com bust, I was offered a job if I was willing to drop out of college.

[firesteelrain]

2004-2007 was hard for me in my experience.

[FabHK]

During the dot.com bubble, so many folks went to work for startups that old-fashioned corporate IT (in insurance, industry, banks) was struggling to hire. The saying goes that they hired you if you could spell "C++".

[reenorap]

In 1996-1998+ they had something called the Brass Ring job fair in the Santa Clara convention center in the heart of Silicon Valley. Employers would set up booths and some would hire people on the spot.

2021-2022 was pretty good as well.

[zamadatix]

How you handle employees after the layoff announcement is a much easier conversation: Give them a lot of dedicated resources to navigate it and give them a good parting offer.

Nobody ever seems happy about how the announcement part is done though. "Wait for everyone to have 1:1" and the problem is the mass panic that starts to roll through the workday as employees wonder if they are next. "Mass announce and then engage after" makes another group upset they were told by a generic mass email. I've been at places which have gone each way and I'd honestly rather hear from the mass email myself.

[monksy]

The 2010s were not that easy to get a job in. It took quite a lot to actually get a job. It didn't take 6+ interviews and takehomes. But you could use a recruiter, go through the interview etc.

There was no leetcode and the resources weren't great. The introduction of leetcode made everything super painful.

[volkadav]

I mean, not to snarkpoast on main, but all of this has happened before re:

> The massive sudden shift in the commoditization of human workers and turning them into faceless labor resources that can be inhumanely disposed of with a keystroke

Look up the treatment of labor during the industrial revolution. Similarly then large competitive advantages in automation lead to concentration of power in the hands of those that (not to spill the beans on where I'm going with this) controlled the machinery and means of production by way of access to capital. Collective bargaining of some form by labor was (and I would maintain, still is) a reasonable response, as is state regulation. Not to literally use the M-word* here but ... these problems aren't new, and solutions have been explored in the past (not that they were or are perfect!). As is typical in tech, we could stand to learn a bit from history when considering paths forward from the present. History may not repeat verbatim but it sure as hell rhymes.

idk, just my two cents as someone in the technical trenches who happened to fall in love with an historian. :)

* Marxist/ism. The communists certainly had/have their problems, as did Marx's analysis itself, but he wasn't wrong about there being some society-scale Problems with unfettered capitalism.

[vidarh]

In much of Europe, if you're planning redundancies above a certain (low) number of employees, the employees / unions has a consultation right before layoffs start in order to be able to negotiate or consider other options...

[lazyasciiart]

No, Salesforce.

[brightball]

Oracle?