[tracerbulletx]

Before the 1980s layoffs were seen as a massive failure of the company and almost never happened to tenured employees unless the company was collapsing. Before we are all made to think this is normal and unavoidable behavior.

[zamadatix]

I wouldn't have nearly as many complaints about this mindset change if ones life (e.g. insurance) weren't still so deeply tied to who your current employer is.

[jimt1234]

I'm aware that HN frowns on "THIS", but...THIS!!!

I don't know what the best solution for the current healthcare clusterfuck in the US is, but I think disassociating health insurance from employer/employment is a great first step.

[brianwawok]

As a business owner yes please! Charge me a flat insurance tax. And then give everyone insurance. It’s such a cluster.

[kelvinjps10]

Improving coverage and acceptance by plans in the marketplace would be a good start. Multiple healthcare providers only accept plans from an employer or the state, not individual plans bought in the marketplace. Crazy that in a pro-business country, if you have your own business or you're self-employed, you can't have access to healthcare

[collabs]

The goal should be a single payer health care system. I am not asking for like luxury spa five star treatment. However, there definitely should be a "free of cost at the point of service" option that does not have any means testing of any kind.

That should be the goal and once we have that, it will not matter if you are self employed or own a business. We keep doing half measures and pretend to be surprised when it doesn't work.

[bigfatkitten]

The U.S. already spends considerably more tax dollars per capita on health care than almost any other country, with much less to show for it.

[tonyedgecombe]

I’m always amazed that the US is as entrepreneurial as it is given the healthcare situation.

[torben-friis]

I know HN is mostly against regulation, but I'm very glad my country restricts mass firings, and particular stricter rules apply for companies that turn a profit.

If you're generating benefits, there should be very few reasons you need to let go people massively.

[vanrysss]

I have a cousin in Belgium who was laid off following some restructuring and her severance was 52 weeks. Not out of the goodness of the company's hearts, but mandated by law since they gave no notice and she had accrued seniority. US labor laws are a joke in comparison.

[Matticus_Rex]

I'm sure that level of overhead has nothing to do with the reason Belgian incomes, standards of living, and business outcomes are worse.

[trgn]

vacationing/digital nomading in belgium atm, it looks erhm rich. traveling between brussels, leuven, ghent, bruges, soon antwerp... people dress well, never been anywhere with so many german luxury cars on the road, meals cost about the same as US.

I'm sure statistics this and that, but something doesn't translate, sanguine reality is different.

[sensanaty]

I've worked in the US and now in the Netherlands, and while I earn less in NL it would take a quadruple of what I used to earn in the US to willingly move back there, and even then I'd GTFO as soon as I possibly could. The US is great for getting an absurd amount of money fast, for basically everything else that matters in life I'll take anywhere in the EU over the US.

[HatchedLake721]

Reminded me of https://youtu.be/ML3qYHWRIZk

[ecshafer]

His little rant about "freedom" ended up aging poorly as most of the countries he lists as being more free have put serious limits on free speech since then. The most Soorkin screed he has written, might as well be John Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged for how much its just the author inserting his political views.

[FireBeyond]

> standards of living

As measured by ... purchasing power.

Let's take a look, Safety Index - US 50.8, Belgium 50.6. Health care index - Belgium 75.9, US 67.8, Pollution Index - US 36.7, Belgium 49.2, Climate index - Belgium 86, US 78.5.

As it stands US standard of living is better really only in "you can buy a larger house" (shocking, giving the relative size), and "it'll be slightly cheaper".

Not by any other metric.

[genxy]

I'd like to understand why you are so sure, and what does worse mean here both qualitatively and quantitatively?

[KittenInABox]

How do you want to measure standards of living here?

[ozgrakkurt]

It is a delusion that US is rich because of capitalism.

It is an insult to the people that founded the country and people that developed science/tech/finance etc. in it. And ofc the space, natural resources and isolation from wars.

Saying US is rich because capitalism is about as accurate as saying it is rich because it is christian

[matchbok3]

Do you think those natural resources would have been taken advantage of as well in some other system? Same with the geography and isolation.

You are talking about entirely different things. Makes no sense whatsoever. You could make your same argument about any economic system. The natural resources are inputs, not the outcome.

[callmeal]

>Do you think those natural resources would have been taken advantage of as well in some other system?

Yes. See Norway for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...

[ozgrakkurt]

> Do you think those natural resources would have been taken advantage of as well in some other system?

What I mean is those factors can obviously effect a country's success. And can be argued that that do much more easier than arguing about religion or ideology.

Similarly it is easier to argue that proper nutrition, sleep, drug usage etc. can effect an athlete's performance very positively. But you would find it much harder to argue on their religion, place they live, how wealthy were their family etc.

As another example I think it is pretty easy to argue that the Jewish scientists going to US because of Hitler was a massive gain for US and a massive loss for Germany. And there are so many concrete factors like this that, all things considered, ideology seems irrelevant in comparison.

You might say "this is all because US is capitalist in the first place". I want to point out how similar this kind of thinking is to the way some religious people think and how inconsequential it is in real world.

[yamillove]

Now compare your cousin’s yearly salary in Belgium with the average salary of a US employee doing the same job.

[heylook]

Now you compare the all-in cost of living across salary, taxes, housing, healthcare, and everything else.

[infecto]

Really depends on the type of job. Software? You are making bank in the US and partly because companies in the US can move quick because of their labor laws.

[dh2022]

Are you aware that you are saying US devs are making bank in a thread about US devs being laid off >

[callmeal]

>Now compare your cousin’s yearly salary in Belgium with the average salary of a US employee doing the same job.

Take home is about the same after including health insurance and all the myriad taxes that US employees are subject to.

[smsm42]

No, that's not true. Most companies offer at least HDHP plans either fully covered or at minimal cost. HDHP plans, by nature, have high deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums, but usually well under $10k per year. So for a typical case, unless there's some catastrophic expense not covered by any insurance, the difference can't be more than $10k per year. The difference between typical compensation for a seasoned SW engineer is much more than that, even before taking options & stock into account. In the US $150-200k is pretty common for a seasoned engineer. In Belgium, you'd look at around E100-110k from what I could find online. And I don't think Belgium has lower tax burden overall. So the health insurance alone doesn't come close to covering the gap.

[para_parolu]

This also a reason why starting a business in USA is usually better.

[torben-friis]

Economics is hardly a reproducible science, but an American company has basically instant access to 350 million consumers (and workers) with no language barrier and little inter-state red tape.

It's hard to imagine that this isn't a larger differentiator than the ability to fire hundreds at will.

[infecto]

You would be surprised. Don’t think about it as firing but also being overly cautious. If you run a division in the EU you are overly thoughtful for every single HC you add. You don’t take risks because that HC at minimum is going to cost a year of severance. It’s a balancing act, maybe less new jobs but you get less layoffs.

[tonyedgecombe]

Presumably you aren’t paying 52 weeks of severance to someone you hired three months ago.

[bunderbunder]

Perhaps, but one does have to wonder why the US favors making life easier for founders and venture capitalists over making life more livable for people who aren’t already rich.

Like, a while back my employer had 10% layoffs, and their most profitable year ever, in the same year. There’s a real reason why that happened, ans the reason is that the C suite seriously fucked up on managing the company’s finances. In a sane world they should be the first to bear the consequences. Instead they got fat bonuses while hundreds of people who had no part in creating the problem lost their jobs. And the moral justification for a society that allows this is somehow, “But isn’t it great that it’s easier for privileged people to play fast and loose like that?” That is, at best, circular reasoning.

[matchbok3]

Would you rather they never hire those people? Because that is one option.

[callmeal]

>Would you rather they never hire those people? Because that is one option.

Yup, and that way those people should be hired by companies who are in it for the long term and not looking just at the next quarter (and using hiring as a way to deny employees to competitors).

[bunderbunder]

It’s not like countries that decided against kleptocracy are drowning in unemployment. On the contrary, they often enjoy a happier population, a better standard of living, or both.

[andriy_koval]

> Perhaps, but one does have to wonder why the US favors making life easier for founders and venture capitalists over making life more livable for people who aren’t already rich.

because US government is more controlled by business interests than population voting power.

[infecto]

This is a tough problem because it’s not always great. There is a reason companies largely (not all!) think twice about innovation, hiring and building out new facilities in European countries and part of that are those labor laws. So you miss out on upside but maybe it evens out on average.

This is not me advocating for either side but it’s one of the reasons most startups exist in a country like the US.

[PowerElectronix]

And people wonder why there are zero companies in europe competing with american ones in the tech sector...

[tracerbulletx]

Tell that to ASML.

[PowerElectronix]

ASML licenses their IPs from the american government. But yeah, they are in europe and work with european suppliers.

[tonyedgecombe]

Or SAP, or ARM.

[PowerElectronix]

I honestly don't know how sap is still in business. ARM is a good one.

[joe_mamba]

ASML is over 30 years old. It also has a massive IP and financial moat that's impossible to replicate by start-ups competitors seeking to disrupt it. Labor laws don't matter at this point as that's not the limiting factor, it's IP and capital.

But SW can be much more easily disrupted, and if you can move faster and stay leaner than your EU competitors due to laxer laws, then you will win. SW success is often about time to market, not IP, since a lot of companies and countries can build a Airbnb, a Booking.com, a Spotify, etc there's no rocket science, they dominated because they were first to market but they can also be easily disrupted by other SW companies if they drop the ball and piss off their userbase as the cost of building SW is much cheaper than building an EU machine.

Also, there's a reason people can only name ASML as EU's shining examples but nothing else.

[wsng]

booking.com is in NL, and Spotify in SE. Both outcompeted quite some US competitors.

I would add Hetzner as an example that EU labor laws are no obstacle to being competitive with US companies.

[joe_mamba]

>since they gave no notice

WHy wouldn't they do that? What type of notice ado you mean in this case?

[wbl]

The Nordic countries provide income replacement and retraining instead. Labor market inflexibility locks out younger unproven workers.

[ronnier]

HN is very much pro regulations of all types.

[ReptileMan]

Limit mass firings and you are also limiting mass hirings.

[cramer4next]

In the 80s you didn't have the majority of your employees being white collar and making six figures.

The U.S. is suffering from office worker bloat. They have an increasing growing population of people who know very little about physical labor and most likely won't be able to adapt to upcoming AI induced mass unemployment. I only see the pain getting worse for them.

Not sure what the solution is for them here.

[manishsharan]

Also so many people with so many guns.

Mass Unemployment with no healthcare or supporting social services , very few opportunities and lots of guns.

It will not be ok.

[33MHz-i486]

the business people took over tech and somehow convinced us Jack Welch’s management philosophy (targeted attrition, layoffs for financial engineering) was a best practice even though he and his proteges drove numerous old guard tech companies into the ground

[Avicebron]

I don't know how the social contract between employees/employers gets rebuilt..feels like it needs to though

[danans]

> I don't know how the social contract between employees/employers gets rebuilt.

The only social contract that is guaranteed is the one written into law. That's why we have government, but the problem is that the government is (for a while now) captive to / bought by large corporations, not responsive to employees/workers/voters.

Whatever principled social contract you may have thought large corporations upheld was smoke and mirrors. It just worked for enough of the right kind of person for a while.

[b3kart]

What’s written into law is just “contract”, not “social contract”. Your argument is basically “if it’s not illegal it’s not wrong”.

[eli_gottlieb]

No, he's arguing that if it's not legal, it's not enforceable by men with nightsticks.

[danans]

I was thinking the justice system, but yes the entire concept of government and law is built upon the monopoly of violence. Bringing it into this discussion is reductio ad absurdum. Even property rights are protected by the same monopoly (and even more directly).

My point is that the so called "social contract" has never been upheld by large corporations - it may have seemed that way at times but it was mostly self serving marketing, not anything that would influence their treatment of employees vs their shareholders and executives.

Furthermore I'm arguing that we shouldn't rely on them to uphold it. If we have a belief in what is universally fair or just (i.e minimum wages, no child labor, no slavery), we should encode it in law, not hope corporations find their conscience to renew the social contract.

[jknoepfler]

Yeah. There is no such thing, especially and in particular with publicly traded companies. The only meaningful way to change behavior is regulation.

Beyond that, "social contracts" benefit the powerful and have a tendency to turn a blind eye to the worst off. Does the "social contract" require me to be a white, college educated male to secure worker protections? If you need a clear example of this, consider the relationship between citizens and police in the United States, and how blind the majority has been to how fundamentally broken the "social contract" around policing has been for minorities. That's what a handshake-society looks like.

Granted having both might be nice, but relying on a social contract is like relying on a benevolent dictator. It's great until it's not.

[joe_mamba]

Social contracts only work in high trust societies that are also ethnically and culturally homogenous so the only grumble citizens have is fighting over class and not race.

But if you have a very diverse society that operates on tribalism, then you need a strong rule of law with strong checks and bounds to weed out tribalism, but this doesn't come for free as policing and lawyering the behavior of all members of society to check if they aren't discriminating each other over immutable characteristics, is gonna costs the government and companies operating in this environment a lot of money, so you're gonna have higher operating costs. Which is why it's so much cheaper for US companies to hire in places like central europe where your payroll expense are mostly ICs and you don't need auxiliary armies of diversity consultants like in the US.

[jknoepfler]

Are you seriously suggesting that the reason it is cheaper to shift factory labor from the United States to Mexico or Vietnam is because Mexican/Vietnamese factories don't need to hire diversity consultants? I have to have misunderstood what you're arguing, because that's transparently ridiculous.

Basic labor regulation around hiring/firing has nothing to do with diversity. It has everything to do with basic labor regulation around hiring/firing. Sure, regulation is expensive. There's no special reason the United States can't foot that bill and every other Western European economy can.

What on earth do diversity consultants have to do with prohibiting opportunistic layoffs to maximize short-term profits?

[joe_mamba]

>Are you seriously suggesting that the reason it is cheaper to shift factory labor from the United States to Mexico or Vietnam is because Mexican/Vietnamese factories don't need to hire diversity consultants?

I was talking about white collar labor, not factory work, but yes, that also applies there as well.

>Basic labor regulation around hiring/firing has nothing to do with diversity.

It does when some poor performers you want to fire are part of a minority protected group and can sue you even if you're not firing them because they're minorities but because they're bad at their job, it's gonna cost you extra to avoid fake discriminatory lawsuits. Then hiring abroad becomes a better idea.

>every other Western European economy can.

Because in places like central europe you don't need them so you save money on payroll, as there's no bitching over "diversity", every worker is the same so there's no chance of "i've been discriminated because of my skin color, I'm gonna sue you for millions"

[yamillove]

When you are making $250k or above you should not think the job someone gave you is some kind of God-given right.

[nosioptar]

Employers will only do the right thing in two cases: they're afraid of stiff government penalties or they're afraid their workers are going to cut their heads off.

Personally, I'm in favor of regulations and stiff penalties for employers who break them.

[jknoepfler]

I don't think it's rational to rely on relationship with a business, especially and in particular a publicly traded business.

Change starts with regulation. That's how every other advanced economy handles it.

It's really not that complicated. It's the same situation as healthcare. You shouldn't rely on the free market to do anything other than maximize short term profits.

[heylook]

You tax the everloving hell out of the rich, so they can't just buy whatever policy or judiciary outcome they want or build mega "just in case, i promise uwu" bunkers.

[darth_avocado]

When Elon fired 80% of the company, I remember a lot of celebration on HN. Some of it was the perceived political bias within the employees and some of it was “The app works fine what were all those employees doing? They probably deserved it.”

At the time I remember talking about this becoming a norm as CEOs follow the lead and getting downvoted heavily. Its unfortunate that we are here, but also not surprising, given how limited empathy people have for each other at times here on HN. Unless we stand for each other, this won’t change.

[meerita]

When that happened, AI wasn’t even at today’s level. Elon clearly didn’t fire those people because AI would replace them. They were laid off because the company could run pretty well without them. And that’s exactly what happened.

[darth_avocado]

You’re missing the point. You’re still holding on to the notion that somehow getting rid of people was fine because the company could run well without them (that’s debatable but it’s a tangent). The same logic is being applied now with AI. Doesn’t matter there was no AI back then or how good/bad AI is. People are being laid off and the companies are doing fine. You can’t cheer one and then complain about the other.

[smsm42]

> You’re still holding on to the notion that somehow getting rid of people was fine because the company could run well without them

Yes? It's not an adult daycare. It's a commercial company. The premise is you are employed because you contribute to the functioning and the profitability of the company. If it's not the case, well, it sucks but you can't expect to be paid just for warming your seat. I mean, I wouldn't object somebody giving me six figures just for existing, but I hardly can expect and feel entitled for that to happen?

[monksy]

That's not from what I remember. I'm sure there was some skepticism about some of the roles that were there. But I do remember Ian Brown just completely dunking on that triobyte on Twitter Spaces. (Ian Brown is an ex-Twitter performance engineer, he pushed Musk on "what is non-performant, and you explicitly define it".. suffice to say gehot and Musk got a little embarassed and kicked him off the stream).

[pram]

George Hotz’s entire tenure as a Twitter “intern” was so hilariously embarrassing. And the entire preamble at the time about basically “purging the parasites” and Heroic 100x Coders (the search still sucks)

[tonyedgecombe]

It’s not that surprising there wasn’t much empathy when there was so much bragging about how much people were earning and that it would go on forever.

For what it’s worth I was one of the people questioning why they needed so many people although I never said those let go deserved it.

[darth_avocado]

> I was one of the people questioning why they needed so many people

Unfortunately that’s what managers, executives and investors are doing everywhere now. Everyone Should’ve been more careful with the reactions when the status quo was upended.

[smsm42]

"We all know people are overpaid for doing nothing, but if we don't talk about it somehow it would continue forever"? Doesn't sound like a smart strategy to be honest. The truth will come out.

[mhb]

It seems like you are itching to offer your version of what should happen, so let's hear it.

[phendrenad2]

The tech industry spawned a new type of Wall Street investor who thinks a stock is a high-interest savings account. There's no room for risk, you need to grow at exactly 3.141593% per quarter or you face the pitchforks-and-patagonia-vests threatening to take their money down the street to the next bank.

[outside1234]

The worst part about the current situation is that the company is then just turning around and hiring people.

It is almost like the company really is just doing it to arbitrage or get rid of expensive (aka old) employees.

[Rekindle8090]

"Before the 1980s layoffs were seen as a massive failure of the company and almost never happened to tenured employees unless the company was collapsing. Before we are all made to think this is normal and unavoidable behavior."

Yeah and psychology was considered unserious, computers were still new, civil rights was barely ten years old and most work was unskilled labor.

What is your point? Stop using "not how it was 50 years ago" as an argument because it isn't one.