Ask HN: Who is firing?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1960977

by startupdude • 16 years ago

64 35 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Though there are lot of companies hiring compared to year before, there are bunch of companies firing as well.

phrotoma3• 16 years ago

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.

tamersalama2• 16 years ago

This is the exact same plan for 3 major Canadian oil-n-gas I know. Details are unfolding, but many will be affected. Basically, individual contractors are to be replaced by fewer BigName companies with work done overseas.

Edit: details

dasil003• 16 years ago

I look forward to hearing how that turned out for them.

waterside81• 16 years ago

Presumably this is RBC? Do you think it has to do with meeting some sort of quarterly budget targets?

phrotoma3• 16 years ago

The bossman really doesn't like it when I specify, but googling largest bank in Canada will confirm / deny your guess. As I understand it the new CIO got the job based on this plan to keep IT budget down. For this one friend who will be losing his contract early next yr, we can have 8-12 offshore programmers from his contract alone.

Sad, but seems to be the trend.

jrockway2• 16 years ago

Isn't this exactly what contractors are for?

rdtsc• 16 years ago

Yes but they are "too expensive". We like our contractors to be willing to work for $20/hour not $120/hour.

RBr• 16 years ago

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.

jrockway2• 16 years ago

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.

dangrossman• 16 years ago

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.

MrFoof• 16 years ago

Assuming who I think it is, your mom isn't the only one. A lot of their subsidiaries are being sold off. I'm assuming less attractive ones are being shut down if they can't find buyers. I'm consulting for a firm that has bought one of their subsidiaries as a new business unit.

Much of it has to be done before the end of the year, per the US government. Haven't dug into why that is the case just yet, but I'm aware of much going on with said health insurer.

mkramlich• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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

rue• 16 years ago

A "layoff" is (should be) a temporary suspension from work to reduce costs and "termination", well, termination of employment.

rradu• 16 years ago

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...

davidu• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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

nathanh• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

nowarninglabel• 16 years ago

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...

karthikm• 16 years ago

Bank of America had a round of layoffs today

Pyrodogg• 16 years ago

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...

marco_salvatori• 16 years ago

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

c1sc0• 16 years ago

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

eru• 16 years ago

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

gcheong• 16 years ago

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...

I imagine other states have their own listings as well.

kingofspain• 16 years ago

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 :(

Ask HN: Who is firing?

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