"If you don't testify or produce documents, we're going to fire you."

"I still refuse to testify."

"Alright, you're fired."

That's all they can do.

What else would you have them do? Jail him? Torture him? The company has limited tools at its disposal the ultimate one being to fire the person.

Although for the sake of this discussion I agree with you, I could have a lot of fun making a list entitled, "things companies have done to people that are worse than firing them."

And most of those things would also go on a list called "illegal things companies have done".

Probably not a good idea to do something illegal in the middle of a lawsuit.

http://lostinjapan.groth.hm/archives/2010/04/sitting-at-the-... http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-il...

Legend has it that Japanese companies, rather than terminate under-performing employees, will seat them "at the window" and not assign them any tasks at all ... This is not terribly compelling short-term, but is horribly boring .

Played well, that sounds like a good way to get your side project off the ground. Then again, I imagine the cross section of under-performing employees that get this treatment and those that are ambitious enough to follow through on an idea for a side project/business is probably quite small.

Also, you probably would have to hide all the work, since depending on your contract your employer would probably have some claim to it, since it was during work hours.

I would love to get 'put on the roof' like that, but I think the Japanese policy also states that you're not allowed to do anything outside of the ridiculously mundane task they assign you, and they actually watch you like a hawk to ensure as such. Pretty smart, most people aren't going to stay in that situation for long.

Could you imagine being the manager assigned to watch such employees? That's a special hell.

I once worked at a newspaper, when "online" was new and side project of the marketing department so that they could sell more ads.

Until I automated things, we were cutting and pasting a few articles each night from Quark into BBEdit and hand-massaging it into HTML templates for upload. They assigned us an "editor". Poor guy had written pro-civil-rights editorials at a time when that didn't go over well. Got assigned shit jobs for decades to try and force him out. We didn't create new content; there was nothing to edit. But, they made him go to all the meetings and report that each day. Dude used a giant trackball and knew nothing about tech, but somehow landed in the department that would one day rule the newsroom. I wonder how he's doing these days.

> Could you imagine being the manager assigned to watch such employees?

What do you think they do with the managers they want to fire? ;)

Why they don't fire the person? This is ridiculously sleazy.

It's a huge cultural taboo to fire anyone without cause in Japan. And even if you do have cause, there's a pretty high bar for what actually constitutes cause. It would be a huge scandal if a Japanese company, especially a large salaryman-style company, fired an employee for anything less than stabbing a coworker.

Hell, even in the entertainment industry, where employment is gig-based, Masashi Tashiro didn't get blackballed until he was convicted twice for voyeurism, twice for drug abuse, once for nearly crippling a guy in a car accident he caused, and once for posessing an illegal weapon [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masashi_Tashiro#Second_trial_f...

In these Japanese companies they'll be sorta monitoring you and fire you if you're caught not doing the mundane tasks they've assigned you. So they basically force you to quite or get fired.

If firing is an option, why wouldn't they do so in the first place?

Presumably it's the difference between firing with cause and firing without cause. There are many positions where performance is measured pretty ambiguously, so if you want to get rid of someone you couldn't demonstrate strong cause for doing so. Make them do pointless simple make-work, though, and you can easily find cause for firing if they don't do it.

Firing someone for performance isn't a thing in Japan.

The "pointless simple make-work" isn't to build up cause, it's to abuse and degrade them until they have enough of it and quit. The technical term for this is "constructive dismissal".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal

Your explanation is missing a nuance in the comment I was replying to -- namely, that people were being fired for not doing the pointless simple make-work. If you're going to fire them for that, why not just fire them in the first place and skip that entirely.

Not familiar with the culture or mindset, but I'm guessing it's simply because "you're fired because you intentionally didn't do your work" is easier to accept mentally / emotionally then "you're fired because you're just kinda stupid and slow."

Yeah, that's in the same vein as to what I was trying to get at. Being fired because you refuse to do stupid make-work is certainly less psychologically damaging than being fired because you were no good at your real work.

And I think it goes both ways. The firee takes it less personally, the firer doesn't feel as rude.

Not sure if it's typically the case in Japanese custom, but there are a number of scenarios where a person forfeits certain compensation by quitting that they would otherwise be entitled to if they're fired. So if the company can get rid of them by making them think it was their idea, the company saves on severance / recoups equity, etc.

There are many ways to make an employee's life worse without doing anything illegal. You tend to see them in dysfunctional companies.

Yes, but usually not in the middle of lawsuits that spell 'doom' in large letters for the eventual loser(s).

Uber has one and one chance only to get this behind them: to play by the book and to ask 'how high' when the judge tells them to jump. If they try anything funny they can expect the ROI of that to be substantial and negative.

I agree, but the topic had diverged somewhat.

OT, have you noticed an increase in superfluous downvoting? I'm not really complaining, just trying to figure out if I'm imagining it or if it's randomness doing its thing.

Since HN has become so much bigger, I wonder if the mods could scale down the effect of downvoting. E.g. make it take two downvotes to make a comment appear at 0.

Happens all the time, I wouldn't worry about it, just ignore it.

Ok, I wrote a tampermonkey extension to hide the effects of being downvoted: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/9d681310f4714277a37832643c...

It removes scores from your comments and replaces your karma counter with "(9999)".

HN is much more pleasant now.

Hah, that's a cool solution.

I submitted a better version at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14456200

Here is an example from a previous job.

The location was a factory for a company you have heard of. Temporary employees were 99 and 44/100% of the workforce. One staffing agency, call it Agency A, had the main contract for the site and they were required to give some of the work to their competitors. It was policy to assign temps from other agencies impossible schedules so that they would quit and be replaced by temps from Agency A.

Companies can do worse things than firing people, but it's hard to legally compel them to do so.

It also probably means that Levandowski loses some or all of his compensation for Uber's acquisition of Otto, right?

From what I recall, that purchase was made in Uber stock, and I'd expect it to have a vesting schedule. Depending on the length of the initial cliff, it seems possible that he hasn't vested any of that stock. I am speculating though and don't know for sure.

My understanding is that the vesting started when he left Google/Waymo. Uber made vesting retroactive back to Otto's nominal start date. This has been called out by Waymo's lawyers.

Of course, if it is the case that Otto was built on misappropriated trade secrets, and Levandowski lied to Uber about that during the acquisition, then we might well see some of that clawed back in a separate lawsuit.

You could fire him and then write a public post explaining that he was fired because of rank incompetence and unethical dealings. Just saying.

(IANAL but if I were I would probably not counsel doing that in any case. :-P )

A bit pedantic maybe: firing him doesn't pressure him, but threatening to fire him does. And it's not a threat if they don't eventually do it.