According to this[0], the absolute most generous package is the Netherlands, which offers 1/3 of your monthly salary for each year of employment. To receive 14 weeks of salary, you'd need to work at a company for 10 years. Coinbase was founded in 2012.
Other "European" countries have much worse severance packages. So what Coinbase offered seems to be better than even the best country in Europe.
Long notice periods typically soften the blow in Germany. After the first six months (where both sides can call it quits with two weeks notice and without cause) the notice period is four weeks to the 15th or last day of the month (and firing people without cause is no longer possible). There are some circumstances when that notice period is not relevant (if the employee is caught stealing, for example), but those don’t matter here.
From 2-5 years it’s one month (to the last day of the month), from 5-8 years it’s two months, eventually maxing out at seven months after twenty years. That’s the notice period for the employer. It can and often is asymmetric but can never be shorter for the employer than for the employee.
However, these are the legal minimums. Many employers will have longer notice periods in their contracts which apply to both sides. Something like three months or so isn’t uncommon.
Severance pay can even lead to problems with the mandatory unemployment insurance (which in most cases will pay you 60 – without kids – or 67 percent – with kids – of your last net earnings for a year) that can reduce the payout from that insurance (and then it becomes a game of calculating severance vs unemployment insurance, which can be annoying).
Different countries have different laws, but at least in sweden it is common to be part of an income guarantee program (a-kassa, usually via a union but can also be outside of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_funds_in_Sweden). You get around 80% of your income for the first two thirds-ish of a year (200 days) and 70% for the rest of the year.
It's obviously good that this is handled outside the employers control.
After that you get the normal unemployment benefits from the state which is capped at a low but livable level.
It is (in sweden) abnormal (and illegal) for companies to just fire people without cause, and the valid causes are pretty restricted. One of the few valid causes are lack-of-work (arbetsbrist), but even that triggers negotiations between the employer, the employee and the union, and is usually a last-in, first-out thing. The employment contracts are always including a fixed notice (I think it's 3 months regulated by LAS, can be lower if your on a trial employment up to 6 months).
As an example, the klarna downsizing was major news in sweden a second time because of their obviously illegal way of handling firings.
> Other "European" countries have much worse severance packages.
> which offers 1/3 of your monthly salary for each year of employment. To receive 14 weeks of salary, you'd need to work at a company for 3.5 years,
1/3rd of a month is 1.44 weeks. To get 14 weeks, that would be 10 years.
You're right in that Europe generally provides less severance, but they do tend to sign fixed term, renewing employment contracts with rather lengthy notice periods for either side to terminate it. E.g. in Switzerland, statutory minimum after 1 year of employment is end-of-calendar-month + 2 months of notice, but typical agreements extend this.
Also, there's the whole concept where regulators are involved with layoffs and negotiate for payments and assistance in many jurisdictions.
Yes, anecdotally, no recent evidence, though expect to gather some in the next year or two.
The last time my company laid people off it have very generous severance packages, way above the legally required 1/3 months depending on duration of employment.
In Europe you have guaranteed minimum wage, can't be fired without good reason, healthcare, all sorts of other help if you lose your job, public transport/cheap means of getting around. It's not even close for the typical worker.
Its difficult to compare because the cultures and industries are completely different. Im not even sure what a typical worker means anymore - what category are you talking about?
What's the current (2022) take on Hugo vs. Jekyll?
I'm also wondering if Github Pages is a good alternative for hosting. Judging from their description, it seems to be free, without ads and can optionally be used with a custom domain.
I have only used Jekyll in the past but I would try Hugo nowadays since it's the "brand new stuff" (only because it's written in Go). Jekyll hasn't been abandoned which means that both are good and I'm sure they have the same set of features.
As for using GitHub to host it, it's still free and you can use a custom domain which is nice.
I have been using Hugo, Vercel, and a custom domain for my blog. I have found Hugo + Vercel to work well together. I can't speak for how it compares to Jekyll, but Hugo has been fairly good to work in. I like the development story quite a bit once you get over the initial hump of getting everything setup. I also use Vercel to manage the custom domain, which I consider a bonus.
I strongly second this. It took me some time to learn the first time set up. But it's been well worth it. Now all it takes to post something is write on a plain text file -> git commit the updated folder.
Thank you! I hate people on Reddit who advocate for those cheap keys. If you don't follow the license you are pirating it. Simple as that. Now whether or not piracy is okay is a whole different issue.
Pirating Windows is a lot riskier (think downloading random unlock.exe files) while the key gives you a fully working functional official Windows without any hassles.
Not really: it's not bureaucracy that scares us Europeans, rather than the fact that over 50% of the country voted in an indisputably racist way to lower immigration. It's the fact that Europeans in the UK feel mistreated and disliked now.
Whilst some people may have had racist intentions in voting leave, it is not fair to say that 50% of the country voted in a racist way. Also why does a desire for lower immigration automatically mean you must be racist?
I'm sure it's not the whole 50% but it is a significant number, I've even seen it on my own family and it isn't very nice. This part of Brexit worries me more than the economic issues.
Sure it's fair. We intelligent and moral people in America have already determined that anyone who voted for Trump to be decent facto racist. This is just a small extension of that. There's no other possible explanation. None at all. The other side is evil, and just want to watch the world burn. Can't they see that were building a better world and they just want to live in ruins with their pure bred families.
I wonder how many times I need to repeat myself on HN before the message gets across...
I voted for Brexit, but I did not vote based on immigration policy. In addition to seeing no major problems with the current immigration arrangements from an economic perpective, one of my grandfathers was an immigrant to the UK, and I'm glad to have my mixed ancestry, if nothing else it made my childhood more interesting.
The problem really is with the media. They've set out Brexit as a two-issue debate. The only two issues that get discussed are immigration and the economy. So if you voted for Brexit you're either a racist or an economic luddite. I bet you can't even guess why I'd vote for Brexit without being driven by those two factors. That's the level to which the debate has been simplified in the media.
So let me say this, speaking as a Brexit voter, you are welcome in this country. Don't let the media tell you why those 50% of voters (which wasn't 50% the UK population) voted the way they did, they haven't got a clue.
I intentionally omitted the reason I voted leave to highlight how limited the public debate has been (i.e. that it's not possible for many Remain voters to guess any other reasons than the two I outlined).
If you are curious about the reasons I voted to leave, look through my comment history around the time of the Brexit vote. I may explain it again later once I've made my point about the media's role in limiting the public debate.
British sovereignity is certainly closer to the reasons why I voted for Brexit, but it's not the full picture. The main problem I have with the EU is how it's run. I'm not opposed to a union with other countries, just not the union we have, and the structure of the EU makes it resistant to any change that doesn't strengthen the current power structure.
One of the complaints I have about how the media has portrayed the issues is that it's conflated membership of the EU with being European, by focusing so heavily on the immigration angle. I'm still a European if I want to be outside of the EU. The EU is still mostly a trade organisation. Nobody calls people from the US anti-American if they criticise NAFTA (they are of course different arrangements, but certain comparisons can be made). Yet the portrayal of a European who is critical of the EU is of someone who is anti-European.
If you want a view that certainly wasn't emphasised in the Brexit debate, here are some of the comments of Tony Benn about the EU:
Agree but try "last 300+ years" rather than 30. Sadly I don't think Brexit will be their salvation. The problem with the UK and class has always lied with domestic politics. This wont change whether we're in or out of Europe.
We're entering a new industrial revolution - a lot of white collar jobs and blue collar jobs are being disrupted or eliminated. For example every factory and driving job will disappear in our lifetimes, many office jobs will be disrupted. New jobs will be found, we'll be more productive, and the world will be better because of it, but history shows us that this sort of disruption and destroyed livelihoods leads to violence, revolutions and unrest. We will see a similar situation to the original industrial revolution.
I do think it is misguided and harmful to attempt to try to find scapegoats for structural changes in society (popular just now are immigrants, muslims, corporations or evil federal governments), which is why I disagree fundamentally with almost every argument advanced for Brexit (from foreigners are taking our jobs to the evil EU is out to crush our democracy). It will not end well when people don't see improvement in their life but suffer more, and wonder who is to blame if not immigrants.
Our enterprise used a lot of Oracle (e.g. Java) products but never committed to actual Java development. As of late they have been heavily divesting themselves of Oracle as rapidly as possible.
Because it's the most used language in enterprise software.
It's reliable, rather easy to learn, and quite productive. It's not particularly fun, but it works and the tooling is pretty great.
Our product, a large-scale enterprise software, is slowly getting killed.
It's old and it's rather unusable (by the users).
Plus, for "backward compatibility", it supports dozens of strange configurations. It's dragged down by so much technical debt (functions longer than 3000 lines with 60 parameters!) that every small changes requires so much time.
We're slowly killing (i.e. no big new developments, but only maintenance for existing customers) and abandoning it. And luckily we're not rewriting it. :-)
Ah, but that's only a one-directional test. Cheap oil is obviously not olive oil, but that doesn't help you choose in the supermarket aisle if the expensive oil is also not olive oil.
(And, in fact, the expensive oil being the fake is rather the whole point: the Italian Mafia wants to sell something cheap as something expensive and capture the margin; there's no point in just selling something cheap as something cheap.)
You should get to know better java developers. :-)