

Ask HN: Who is firing? - startupdude

Though there are lot of companies hiring compared to year before, there are bunch of companies firing as well.
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rradu
Yahoo. Right before the holidays, too. Guess they want to avoid paying bonuses
to soon-to-be goners.

[http://kara.allthingsd.com/20101130/yahoo-layoffs-coming-
dec...](http://kara.allthingsd.com/20101130/yahoo-layoffs-coming-
december-13-and-not-this-week-though-its-still-bad-news/)

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nathanh
Ask.com laid off search engineers within the last month.

Limewire had a big judgment against it recently. They have another product in
the works, but they may be doing some downsizing.

Sorry for the lack of sources. I'll try to come back with them later.

~~~
gauravgupta
I used to get plenty of phone calls from Limewire hiring in their New Delhi
office. After the shutdown, I haven't received a single call.

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gcheong
For California, you can often find out who's having layoffs by looking at the
WARN notices:
[http://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/layoff_services_warn...](http://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/layoff_services_warn.htm#ListingofWARNNotices)

I imagine other states have their own listings as well.

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nowarninglabel
Comcast has been laying off people (learned about it through a friend who was
laid off from Comcast). Not much media on it, but I believe the layoffs are
part of this:
[http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=200690&s...](http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=200690&site=lr_cable&f_src=lightreading_gnews)

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Pyrodogg
Lockheed Martin is shutting down a plant in Eagan, MN...by 2013. Possibly
transferring 650 employees and dropping 350.

[http://www.myfoxtwincities.com/dpp/news/lockheed-martin-
clos...](http://www.myfoxtwincities.com/dpp/news/lockheed-martin-closing-twin-
cities-plant-nov-18-2010)

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dangrossman
My mother worked for a subsidiary of a certain $87 billion a year health
insurer. They are closing the office she worked at this month and firing
[edit: "laying off"] all the employees.

~~~
mkramlich
My own understanding of what "firing" meant was termination because,
essentially, the employer didn't _like_ the employee anymore, usually because
they did something "wrong". Whereas if a batch of employees had to be let go,
ostensibly purely for financial reasons, nothing very personal or direct, then
they are "laid off", not fired. Every once in a while I hear somebody say fire
when I think it was layoff, and it irks me a little. Firing generally means
"you suck" whereas laying off means "we suck" or "the economy sucks". I _hope_
that's how we collectively use those terms anyway. Because if we instead use
them to mean the same thing, it's a waste of words. A distinction without a
difference.

(Not criticizing what you said directly, just reacting to that term.)

~~~
jholman
If you're in the business of concealing responsibility, then by all means, use
the word "lay off".

Employers like to use "lay off" to imply that it was not the fault of the
management team, it's not because they're bad guys, it's just the unfortunate
reality. That's partly true, it's partly bullshit, and the fact is that it
affects people profoundly, and calling it a "lay-off" doesn't help things.

Employees who have been terminated like to use "lay off" to imply that it
wasn't their fault, to avoid impacting their hireability. But if the ex-
employee had been a net asset, they wouldn't be laying that ex-employee off,
unless they were liquidating the entire company.

In practice, lean times give management, whether soft-hearted or black-
hearted, an opportunity to make hard calls, in the equityholders' favour, at
the expense of the employees. You can like that, hate that, whatever.

I prefer to eschew both "lay off" and "fire", and use the word "terminate", as
in "one employee was terminated yesterday, and two thousand were terminated at
some point last month". I do this in the hopes of being starkly clear about
the simple fact of the termination, and avoiding the sugar coat. You can also
use "terminated with cause", which is a legal distinction in some
jurisdictions, and I think it's an interesting one.

Oh, but... if I wanted to start a thread that contrasts threads called "who's
hiring", then I'd be clever and rhyme and call my thread "who's firing". And
if I were responding to that thread, I'd use the word in the topic question.
And I wouldn't whip out the pedantry unless someone else did it first.

end-of-rant

~~~
kevinpet
"lay off" says it _is_ the fault of the management team.

"fire" says it is the fault of employee.

In the US, the standard is employment at will, which means you can terminate
without cause at any time (unless you are actually terminating for a
disallowed cause, confusingly), so "terminated for cause" is a small minority
of "fired".

Of course, within those people who are more or less interchangeable, of course
the ones let go are the poorest value, but there's a significant gap between
someone who was let go because the company wanted to reduce the number of
engineers they employed and someone who was let go because he is incompetent
and the employer turns right around and starts advertising to replace him.

~~~
hartror
A shareholder takes the opposite view, layoffs can be a great thing for a
companies bottom line (at least in the short term).

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marco_salvatori
Ebay had a large lay off at their Shanghai facility a few weeks ago

~~~
c1sc0
I guess those people won't be out of work for a long time though. Auctions are
booming in China, just not eBay ...

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phrotoma
I work for Canada's largest bank and they're turfing contractors at a pretty
rapid rate. Shoveling lots of work offshore.

Edit: FTE's seem safe for the moment.

~~~
RBr
This is a trend going through large Canadian businesses right now.

They seem to think that by outsourcing work to overseas mills that they can
save money. Sales and support aside, it's the companies that are outsourcing
engineering that are really hurting.

~~~
jrockway
I'm not sure I agree with this. I work for a "global organization", and the
people we hire in the US are just as incompetent as the people we hire in
India. (We have good people in all the locations too, of course... but living
in the US or UK or Canada does not mean you are going to do a good job.)

I love it when someone emails support and gets an answer like "plz read
wiki"... and then you realize the person that wrote that is a white dude from
Chicago that speaks no languages other than English. I can forgive lazy
writing if English is not your first language. But if it's your only language,
please spell please correctly and use "the" when appropriate. A complete
sentence would also be nice.

But I digress.

~~~
bmelton
The outsourcing of activities generally has less to do with quality than with
cost. Of course, the cost is relative too.

A company I used to work for outsourced a large chunk of the work force to
Poland. Poland was chosen because they were technically sound, generally,
spoke above-average intelligible English and, most importantly, valued the
American dollar about 6 times more than we do.

This meant, generally, that they could hire 6 Polish workers for every
American worker we laid off (if you ignore the fact that many of the American
workers were longer in the tooth, and hence higher on the salary scale, which
made it even more profitable a deal.)

The main worry about moving somewhere with an economy that isn't horribly weak
is that as our American dollars infuse their economy, and more Polish
outsourcing companies are stood up to attract more American dollars, we
inflate their economy. The cost of living goes up, the value of our dollar
becomes less strong, and the benefits to having moved work there becomes less
appealing. This could well lead to a tipping point when American companies
pull out, which I worry could 'burst the bubble' and leave Krakow Poland in
worse shape than if we'd never been there.

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kingofspain
I just got laid off. Boss said he couldn't afford my £25k pa. When I pointed
out I'm on £18k he was initially shocked but still unable to afford it :(

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karthikm
Bank of America had a round of layoffs today

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davidu
Maybe you mean layoffs...

Every company should be ready to do a firing if it's required that the
employee and the company part ways.

~~~
catch23
I'm guessing the title name was meant to complement the usual "Who's Hiring"
posts that show up every month or so.

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eru
Nokia laid of people close to Cambridge, UK. We hired a few of them at Citrix.

