Not technically "firing" I suppose but all of the dev org in Atlanta and SF, including myself, were laid off at athenahealth last week. Something like 120 people. Sucks.
The entire org?? Why? I recruited for a company that started a few innovation centers around the country. Part me now wonders why they needed all those devs. This was around 3 new centers that hired about 70-100+ each in mostly non tech hubs. The way tech advanced in the last 3 years I'm sure most of their work is or fastly becoming obselete.
I was working on pop health, which is based out of Austin, but I'm in Atlanta. Job market is pretty good though and they're still employing the Atlanta people through December 30th, so I should be good. I'll just likely have to walk from the (pretty meh) severance... Nobody is hiring in late December.
In the UK, "getting fired" or "getting the sack" means you were incompetent (or commited misconduct) and are sent home. For incompentance, they can only do this after a "performance review" (they have to give you 3 months to improve, I think).
"Laid off" is called being "made redundant". The company can do this much more easily to a bunch of people, but it generally has to pay them ~6 months salary and can't hire new people at the same time, for the same job(s).
Any employer being more aggressive than this will probably be taken to an employment tribunal.
In the States, I've heard you guys use the terms synonymously, but it always sounded a little weird. Your employment law is awful for employees though, by comparison.
You don't get 6 months salary, that's never been a thing. Unless there's something different in your contract, it's a week per year worked. A normal contract clause in the UK is that it's a month or 6 weeks notice both ways after a probationary period of 3 or 6 months, so that's usually a minimum.
You forgot about being 'sent to Coventry' - i.e. the company doesn't want to pay you redundancy, and can't fire you for incompetence, so you get ignored, not given any work, get put in a useless role, etc until you wise up and quit/find another job. British passive aggressiveness at its finest!
Being American. I would have had no problem with being fired aka 'you're now surplus' and it would have been far more helpful (i.e. get it over with) vs. letting me twist in the wind for a few months... or even have a hard talk with me to see if I might be useful elsewhere in the company because I was bored etc.
But the procedure they used to downsize the workforce earlier that year before that was cruel - straight out of the Victorian era...
I've heard that that practise (what a name!) Is relatively common in Japan: I've never heard of it in the UK before.
I have heard of "gardening leave" though: where you're left on full salary but kept out of the building for your notice period, to stop you passing up to date market info to your new company. (It's the only legal way I know of in the UK to implement a non-compete clause.)
>Grose's The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue - 1811:
>>To send one to Coventry; a punishment inflicted by officers of the army on such of their brethren as are testy, or have been guilty of improper behaviour, not worthy the cognizance of a court martial. The person sent to Coventry is considered as absent; no one must speak to or answer any question he asks, except relative to duty, under penalty of being also sent to the same place. On a proper submission, the penitent is recalled, and welcomed by the mess, as just returned from a journey to Coventry.[0]
Wow, I wonder how effective time-out was on infantrymen of the early 19th century and how often it was enforced. It seems like an analog to solitary confinement while still forcing you to be a contributing member of your armed forces.
This is actually fine by me: if you want to pay me to do nothing, that's fine -- I'll just look at it as conditional severance. As an employer, you should know that I'll be using the time to look for other jobs on my phone though.
It's almost always worth the lawsuit, it's cheaper for a company to pay an employee off than fight them in court.
The actual numbers of people who take abusive companies to court is low, just look up the statistics of companies who constructively dismiss women after pregnancies, compared to the number who actually get sued.
It's a thing to do carefully; especially in a small industry. Unless the situation is pretty messed up it's generally better to take a small hit than become known as someone who litigates against their employer.
On the other hand, full respect to anyone who stands up for themselves when the situation warrants it.
> and personally, as an employee, I'm fine with it that way
You mean as a reasonably well-off employee who was lucky enough to have picked a growing field when you went to uni. On the other hand, if that field ever stops growing for any reason... you might see why people enjoy stability and the ability to plan ahead in their work life.
Actually I picked a dying field at uni. Well, not a dying one, but it's become very difficult over the past 10-15 years to find a job doing digital hardware design. Fortunately I gave up on that quickly and switched to software (something I was lucky enough to start picking up well before uni).
But I think that misses the point. We shouldn't halt progress in the name of job security. I'm fine with slowing progress a little; hell, even in the US it's customary (even though not required by law) to pay a decent severance package during layoffs. But I just don't get this whole idea that you're entitled to a job (and job security) just because you trained for it.
I also don't get the resistance toward retraining, aside from the obvious issue that retraining takes time and money, and in the meantime you have to feed and shelter yourself (but this sort of thing can and should be solved via social safety nets). Sure it would be easy to be able to have a single job for the rest of your life, but that's just not how life works, or should work. Things get obsoleted all the time, and that doesn't mean we should legally require private enterprises to keep paying someone to do useless work.
I do very much object to how difficult it can be to vanilla fire someone in many places in Europe. They've gone way too far with that one. Extra protections for layoffs are fine, but if someone is consistently underperforming, it should be possible to get rid of them immediately and without any sort of severance. I've been at a couple very small companies in the US where the lack of ability to do that sort of thing could have killed the company.
Pro-employee laws are not good for employees in the success case - that you're a top 10% worker in a field that is growing and has lots of demand. The thing is, if you think about the failure case - you're a disposable cog in a field that's stagnating - there's issues which need to be solved, unless you're a staunch libertarian with a belief that people who are unable to find work should die. Nobody wants to pay for a 40yo person with a family to spend years retraining when they lose their job and can't find another, so what is there to do?
> Nobody wants to pay for a 40yo person with a family to spend years retraining when they lose their job and can't find another, so what is there to do?
That's the thing I don't get. In the grand scheme of things, it is much less costly to an economy to pay to retrain someone than it is to pay them to do a redundant job. It's even less costly than doing nothing and kicking them to the curb.
The alternative to making it impossible to fire people, is to make getting fired less of a big deal. Instead of adding friction to the employment market, implement a decent social safety net that includes provisions for voc ed / retraining.
Instead of focusing solely on prevention, work on mitigation. To much prevention can make everything grind to a halt.
Well, "why should I pay for my neighbour's re-education when they should've just picked right in the first place?" - if you are lucky enough to pick a field which grows for the rest of your life, and you're a reasonably good worker, you're never going to take advantage of that and so your neighbour gets more than you from the Government. Not fair! /s
Is that actually a prevalent attitude, though? I mean, it's stupid... someone else retraining is easily still having it harder than someone who "picked right". And in the end, I'd much rather help pay for someone's education than have to walk past them on the street, begging for money.
And a in IR/HR terms a lay off is not exactly the same as a redundancy.
With redundancy the job is 100% gone, with a layoff the job may come back ie a factory may lay off the night shift - with expectation that if things pick up the nightshift will be re hired.
Technically none, but "fired" tends to refer specifically to when there was some specific employee conduct, e.g. failure to fulfill responsibilities, which forced the company to let the employee go. "Laid off" is a broader term that doesn't carry the same negative connotation and is more appropriate when, say, a company is strapped for cash and lets go of someone to free up money in the budget.
Being fired generally means you did something wrong wrong. Laid off means the company is getting rid of people to reduce costs or due to removing the position, for example due to change of strategy.
One generally implies personal fault, the other implies side-effect of business.
Fired - you did something wrong, incompetent (or pissed someone off) and they are doing it specifically to you.
Laid off - your group is redundant or discontinued, they have no need for you or your team/product, they're closing an overseas business unit, or culling 10% of their staff. You're in the wrong boat at the wrong time.
For California, that is wrong. You can claim right away if you are fired. The employer can dispute it however they have to prove they tried to rectify the situation. The way the system works, the former employee has to dispute the unemployment rejection if the employer wants to try to claim it was a valid firing. So if you do get fired and there was not a pattern of behavior or something that you were warned about, then you simply appeal, state your case and the judge will almost certainly reject the employers false claim.
Unfortunately, I know this by experience. I was fired for some fishy business and it was obvious at the hearing. So always file for unemployment unless you are certain it will not be granted. Unemployment also qualifies you for health insurance through Covered California.
Do you know anybody who might be interested in wiring Apache Camel up to be a Rhapsody replacement?
The NEDSS Base System has an expensive dependency on Rhapsody, but all it does is grab incoming HL7, do some transformations, and dump the result into a NBS table.
(For the uninitiated: State Health Departments are generally the users of NEDSS Base System... Rhapsody is a graphical ETL tool.)
Just out of curiosity, any reason you're using Camel for that instead of Mirth? I've been out of the healthcare sector for a few years but at one time was doing essentially that same thing to build out the state biosurveillance network in TX. Mirth was a great fit for it at the time, I'd imagine it still is.
I haven't evaluated Mirth. It seems like a consumer oriented product. The marketing around it is so deep that I can't find a list of it what it's not good at...
Camel appears to be basically a library. As a programmer, I find that appealing.
I'd take a closer look at mirth. It's highly capable, and I never had any major issues with it. You have a number of options for integrating with it, and I imagine those have expanded since last I looked at it. Email is in my profile, feel free to drop me a line, I kind of miss my public health work :)
I could do this. I'm not from Atlanta, but two other developers and myself have a small company, Columbia Ops, that has done a lot of HL7 work. Usually we use Mirth, but we could do it in Camel instead if you prefer something lighter. My email is in my profile.
