Just because it can be terminated at will doesn't mean people wake up every morning going to work thinking "hmm... wonder if I'll be let go today, or hey maybe I'll quit!"
Similarly most non-marriage romantic relationship can be trivially ended "at will", but people get plenty upset when those end early than one party had anticipated.
More important though is the inherent asymmetry: it hurts employees much more to be terminated from an employer than the employer hurts when employees leave. You know, unless those employees organize and all leave at the same time. And we know well that companies put a fair bit of energy keeping that from happening.
Historically the way to resolve this asymmetry was an implicit understanding that you won't arbitrarily get terminated unless the employer has no other choice. This implicit assumption has been weakening over time.
I mean, I definitely end a fair number of days thinking "I may quit" at various points in my career. I'm happy for the ability to do that.
I'm not arguing that layoffs don't suck for those involved, but if offered a contract where I couldn't be laid off or quit for N years, I probably wouldn't take it. Layoffs already have some legal protection in most places that require severance and other things that quitting or firing for cause don't.
For all the companies like Zoom and Shopify claiming they thought the COVID gravy train would never end, there was never a chance of that. But they hired as if that was the reality because because of the asymmetry: Your output is .000001% of what the company needs to function.
Meanwhile even if you're saving 50% of your pay and living on the other 50%, that's many orders of magnitude more need
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So yes, either side can walk away tomorrow morning, but who's more likely to be hurt? Definitely not the company, so there's no real punishment for overhiring knowing you'll need to fire.
If anything you get rewarded by the market: If company A hires in a sustainable way that can weather headwinds (believe it or not, this used to be somewhat common) and company B goes full "feast or famine", the market rewards B for their growth, then rewards B when they lay off a bunch of people. Meanwhile A is punished for limiting growth, and not really rewarded for not having fired people, since valuations are bad at capturing nuanced ideas like "B just fired their best minds, while A has cultivated an effective workforce" (just check out Zoom's ticker today)
"90+ percent of all internet arguments are over semantics."
I honestly wish HN would adopt a "no semantics arguments" rule. These debates over what one person thinks a word means vs what another person thinks they mean are just uninteresting and really never lead anywhere, especially when all sides pretty much agree on the underlying issue.
A couple days ago I made a comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34656626 , where I even started off by saying "well, perhaps word X isn't exactly the right word", and still the original commenter felt compelled to reply in 6 different comments why he was so sure his definition of that word was the right one and it was important that everyone else agree with him. :shrug:
I sometimes wonder if Americans are uniquely prone to focusing on words rather than the underlying concepts that the words, somewhat imperfectly, attempt to describe.
Once you learn a second language, you have to confront this reality. But many Americans only ever use English, and it's maybe easier to never have to think about this then?
But isn't this discussion literally about the idiomatic concepts involved? The whole argument of semantics is a "literally vs. figuratively" discussion. Workers were "used" in the way I use a tool to do a job, but potentially not "used" in a colloquial English way that someone tricks someone into doing something for them.
If anything, this is because Americans on HN think too much about the concepts underlying words and don't just take everything literally as defined.
I think you are both right to a certain extent. As the comment thread demonstrates, some people think the literal definition of used is exploitative. This begs the question of why people thank the literal definition is different. I think a reasonable hypothesis is that American English speakers communicate less with non-native speakers who have learned a textbook definition.
That makes sense - if you learn words and phrases from their common use vs. from instruction, you're more likely to know both the literal and colloquial version of the words.
That said, taking everything as textbook literal isn't viable in most languages. English isn't even close to the top of the heap of languages that use idioms and contextual clues to change the meaning of words and phrases. In the context of a thread where people are likely upset about layoffs, taking the use of the word "used" to have more of a negative than neutral connotation makes sense.
It's not as if we're looking at a textbook example with "Jack used their employee James" and you have to guess what definition of "used" is intended. No one is arguing that OP meant that Zoom literally picked up their employees and wielded them in combat, even though that could be a viable context-less definition for "used".
Words and language are how humans communicate information so I think it is worthwhile to talk about. That said, I think everyone would benefit from being more Curious and less dogmatic. It is ultimately subjective. I can choose to use the word up to refer to down. It would certainly cause some confusion, but at the end of the day nobody can force me to change. The best that they can do is point out that they use a different definition and why that makes sense to them.
That's all I was trying to do here, and in this other more interesting thread
And in fact almost certainly what happened was the employees got paid to work on a bunch of new exploratory, speculative work that now all needs to get canned.
There's an AMAZING managing podcast that I never get tired of recommending called Managers Tools [1], where in one of their episodes they talk about hiring/firing: They correctly mention that, as a manager, you should be able/willing to FIRE people when you are asking to HIRE. If you say you need more headcount and thus more money for it, be ready to shrink it when you don't need it anymore. Nothing is forever.
That's what a lot of people fail to internalize: If a company is able to grow, then it must equally be able to shrink. Otherwise, you hire contractors or third parties.
Both sides got what they needed. The company got work done, and the employee got paid.
Calling either side "used" makes no sense to me. Employment is always a temporary relationship that can be ended by either side at will.