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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 profi
by torben-friis 3mo ago
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.
- ReptileMan 3mo agoLimit mass firings and you are also limiting mass hirings.
- vanrysss 3mo agoI 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.
- para_parolu 3mo agoThis also a reason why starting a business in USA is usually better.
- torben-friis 3mo agoEconomics 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 3mo agoYou 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 3mo agoPresumably you aren’t paying 52 weeks of severance to someone you hired three months ago.
- infecto 3mo agoThat’s right but depending on country there may be other legal requirements necessary so the costs tend to add up quickly and on average when you peak behind the curtains at an EU company you see it’s often easier to retain low performing members than it is to go through legal expenses and the notice period. You tend to be more thoughtful if you want to add HC on that region and avoid restructuring the company. Maybe it works out on average but there are distinct pros and cons. On the net you get less job creation, less innovation and on the flip employees have more protection from being fired.
- bunderbunder 3mo agoPerhaps, 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 3mo agoWould you rather they never hire those people? Because that is one option.
- callmeal 3mo ago>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).
- yamillove 3mo ago[flagged]
- smsm42 3mo agoI don't think there exists a company (at least in the US, in Asia they do have "lifetime employment" system even though that gets eroded too) that can promise it will never have a layoff. Did you know any such company that when it hires you it would tell you "we're here for the long term so you will never laid off, no matter what"?
- matchbok3 3mo ago
- Matticus_Rex 3mo agoI'm sure that level of overhead has nothing to do with the reason Belgian incomes, standards of living, and business outcomes are worse.
- KittenInABox 3mo agoHow do you want to measure standards of living here?
- FireBeyond 3mo ago> 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.
- HatchedLake721 3mo agoReminded me of https://youtu.be/ML3qYHWRIZk https://youtu.be/ML3qYHWRIZk
- ecshafer 3mo agoHis 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.
- ozgrakkurt 3mo agoIt 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
- PowerElectronix 3mo agoAnd people wonder why there are zero companies in europe competing with american ones in the tech sector...
- tracerbulletx 3mo agoTell that to ASML.
- joe_mamba 3mo agoASML 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 3mo agobooking.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 3mo ago>booking.com is in NL, and Spotify in SE. Both outcompeted quite some US competitors. Like wich? Does it count that a lot of their shareholders and managers are in the US? Does it count that Apple music can do the same thing as Spotify and that Booking has loads of competitors that do the same thing? They have no technical moat other than being first to the market. ASML does have a moat. >I would add Hetzner as an example that EU labor laws are no obstacle to being competitive with US companies. Sure, but Hetzner is a dust spec compared to AWS, virtually irrelevant outside of EU/Germany. They also came to the market much later than AWS once building a hyperscaler became more of a commodity. One one hand, lax labor laws means you can be first to market and capture most of it before the EU can wake up from their 3 month holiday and decide to pivot but can't because unions are blocking it. See VW. On the other, Austria has very lax labor laws around firing people, similar to US and they have next to no big tech companies so that's not the entire formula. You also need the VC capital of Sequoia and AZ16 which doesn't exist in Austria, you need the scale which doesn't exist in Austria, the low tax caproate environment which doesn't exist in Austria, and a small government regulatory environment which doesn't exist in Austria.
- yamillove 3mo agoNow compare your cousin’s yearly salary in Belgium with the average salary of a US employee doing the same job.
- heylook 3mo agoNow you compare the all-in cost of living across salary, taxes, housing, healthcare, and everything else.
- infecto 3mo agoReally 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 3mo agoAre you aware that you are saying US devs are making bank in a thread about US devs being laid off >
- yamillove 3mo agoNot sure why this is a thing. As an extreme example, if Elon got fired from Tesla, I am sure he would be ok. He manages his money well and I am sure he does not think his job at Tesla is some king of God-given lifetime human right. If you are making $250k, a company is not expecting to be your baby sitter. You are a grown man or woman. An employee needs to manage their economic life without depending on some company to make financial decisions for them. Getting laid off is simply part of life. If you don’t want to be laid off, you can always start your own company and hire all these people, with your own money of course.
- dh2022 3mo agoI think you meant to respond to a different post…
- 3mo ago
- infecto 3mo agoThis 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.
- joe_mamba 3mo ago>since they gave no notice WHy wouldn't they do that? What type of notice ado you mean in this case?
- wbl 3mo agoThe Nordic countries provide income replacement and retraining instead. Labor market inflexibility locks out younger unproven workers.
- ronnier 3mo agoHN is very much pro regulations of all types.