It does seem insane to me that healthcare is tied to employment.. that's just crazy

This part never makes sense to me. I've had friends stay in jobs to keep getting healthcare treatment - it's not great.

It's a complete relic from the WWII era.

It's a relic from the days when Americans only wanted "upstanding citizens" to get subsidized healthcare.

It actually came about due to labor shortages during WWII. So many people were drafted into the military or voluntarily joining that employers were having trouble finding enough workers.

To prevent this from leading to rampant inflation the US passed laws that regulated wages and prices, such as the Emergency Price Control Act of 1942 and the Stabilization Act of 1942.

Insurance and pension benefits were not counted as wages, and so employers that could no longer legally raise wages to get people people to come work for them instead started offering health coverage.

Americans, who before this had largely been on their own when it came to healthcare, liked this, and so even after the wage controls ended unions bargained to keep those benefits and over the next decade or two expand them to include vision and dental benefits.

By the early '60s it was clear that there was a serious problem inherent in this. Employer sponsored health insurance had become that basis for nearly the entire American healthcare system. People who then left that system such as when they retired often found they could not afford to buy their own insurance. And so Medicare and Medicaid were created to try to handle people who could not get employer provided health insurance.

We almost got major healthcare reform in the early '70s. Senator Kennedy proposed a single-payer system that would be available to every American. President Nixon proposed a system that pretty close to the ACA (aka Obamacare). Then Watergate happened and pushed healthcare reform to the back burner were it sat for around 40 years.

Racism and classism is an equally convincing explanation.

There’s Medicaid for these situations

my healthcare was actually better when i was unemployed than it is with my current company

Right? I was on Medicaid for about half a year because of weird bureaucratic reasons.

It was the best health care plan I've ever had in the US. No deductible, copays were literally $1 or $2. I had access to the entire Kaiser system for routine stuff. You literally can't buy an insurance plan as good as the medicaid that I got.

Of course, now I live in Canada. That's even better.

Mind you, this was in Colorado, which took a vey progressive stance on Obamacare. I'm sure that there are places where medicaid is close to useless.

It's not. You can buy (and deduct) it on healthcare.gov. Ask any self employed person.

You're also paying it out of your salary with employer. There's no such thing as "employer match."

There is such a thing as employee and corporate bargaining power. Many SV companies adopt gold plated health insurance policies on top of competitive wages. I suspect hat this extra bit of health insurance helps prevent the perception the employer is overbidding on labor.

Similarly large corporations can negotiate to get better insurance rates, and larger insurance providers negotiate to get more cost effective care.

(One of) the problems with the health system in the US is that once you exit this negotiation scheme, prices go insane. A hospital might list a procedure for 2 million dollars only to take home 50k from the insurance provider. I don't believe anyone has a handle on what the true cost of any health procedure is.

Get paid for two months to party/holiday/rest, the have another whole month (paid) to lazily job hunt in a crazy hot market and walk into the next place with a 10-30k raise. Happened to me a few times, was fucking awesome.

Lack of healthcare would have been a worry but I’m in the U.K. where we get it free.

How hard is it to fund your own US insurance on a tech salary to tide you over?

The problem is the market is losing heat by the hour. There’s absolutely no guarantee there’s anyone hiring in a couple months. This year is very unlike the past ones. Closest analogue would be 2007 into 2008… until it’s 2001. Stay alert, eyes on the ball at all times.

> How hard is it to fund your own US insurance on a tech salary to tide you over?

Healthcare is NOT cheap if you want to maintain the same plan. I had to pay $2K a month for a family plan under COBRA several years ago. This is the same as a mortgage payment for me. Typically your employer bears the majority of your insurance cost, but you pay all of it under COBRA.

Oh wow that is absolute madness. That covers your costs for pretty much everything, right?

Not necessarily. There’s deductibles that need to be met, Copays, and co-insurance (what you pay after the deductible), rather you’re in network or out of network, etc.

For example, I had pneumonia some time ago and was in the hospital for about 10 days. The hospital billed by insurance something silly like $100,000. I ended up having to pay something like $4,000 out of pocket. I consider myself one of the lucky ones. It’s really important to review an employer’s health plans before accepting a job offer.

Not at all.

You will still have to pay your yearly deductible which is normally in the thousands of dollars. Then you also get to pay co-pays for every service regardless of where your deductible stands.

Don't forget that the insurance company gets to decide what is necessary, not your doctor.

The reason to have guaranteed severance for a long-ish time (3 months or so) is to soften your landing when the market/economy does not guarantee you a more well-paid job within that time. We might be entering one of those times, we might not, either way you should be prepared for it. If your employer has already made sure that you are prepared for it then that is less stress for you, which is good for everyone. It also means more predictable (although maybe higher) costs for the employer, which is usually good for them too.

It seems like tech-workers assume that things will always be easy on them when history clearly doesn't bear that out.

In the US there is something called COBRA, which allows you to continue the company plan for a year by paying the full amount (most companies will pay all/some of it while you are employed). It really depends on what kind of coverage and whether it's an individual or a family but it ranges from several hundred to over $1000 per month.

The whole system sucks really, but in today's economy I think most of these people will be just fine just because so many companies are hiring.

Depends on your age and dependents, but in the US the cost of health insurance can easily be in the same price range as housing. Employees are often not aware of the actual cost since most or all of the premiums are often paid by the employer.

Even if doing huge amounts of hiring during good times and quickly pivoting to doing large layoffs during bad times is ethical, it sure does seem wasteful and not indicative of great leadership. Although it does seem to be the norm now, if recent years are any indication.

Well it’s not clear that anyone could have predicted the timing of this downturn. Just a few months ago people were painting a very rosy picture for the future. In that context, metering investment can have a huge opportunity cost as well.

I’m not advocating for CB - just suggesting that it’s harder to predict the future than you are implying.

We knew that rates going up was inevitable, and that crypto is essentially a sponge for excess liquidity. We knew that inflation was inevitable (to an extent) given the Fed's actions over the last two years. Upon observation of the current macroeconomic environment, it appears that either markets did not properly price in rate hikes, or there is something far worse happening that will ultimately trigger a valuations reset.

That's still a very employer-centric view. If the company reasonably expects a downturn at some point, it should be preparing with right-sized sustainable hiring. It's not "metering investment" but rather "building a sustainable business". Rushing to hire as many people as possible, then firing during a downturn, creates the impression that employees are cannon fodder.

Exact timing? No. General direction? There are people who made that call in November, plenty more joined January-February. Note the question is where does this end and those same people are the first to admit nobody knows, because the fed doesn’t know - and the answer is, when the fed pivots.

Someone could come along and ruin your life by framing you for some morally-awful social-presumption-of-guilt crime. Or a nuclear war could start tomorrow with a strike on your city. Or a tiny little meteorite could happen to fall directly on you. Or God could stop+terminate the VM containing the universe mid-run.

The insecurity and stress are the human condition, my friend. That's what it means to be sentient.

You are arguing that because very negative but also very unlikely events that we can't control, may happen, we shouldn't as society try to improve the conditions of our lives?

No? What I'm saying is that there is no such thing as true security; and so you've just got to learn to live with the feeling of insecurity, regardless of what social safety nets you put into place. Even in a much better world, you will be fundamentally insecure.

Let me rephrase my original post: "We all die someday — and potentially sooner than you expect. There's no guarantee that any particular person will survive the next 24 hours. Even living in a bunker in the middle of nowhere, you could still have a heart attack!"

This is entirely distinct from the question of whether you should advocate for societal policies that make quality-of-life more robust/fault-tolerant to small upsets. I'm all for that.

My point is more that even if you do achieve a social-welfare utopia, you'll still likely be insecure and stressed, because mortality.

And, therefore, "insecurity" and "stress" aren't good indicators of anything other than having an overriding awareness of one's own mortality. So it's not sensible to base policy decisions on trying to lower them. Base your policy positions on rational utility-maximization, not on trying to achieve personal emotional well-being. You want emotional well-being? Go to therapy.

That is a false equivalency.

We (theoretically) have control to improve and enhance workers' rights, and can make legislative changes to increase job security, or decouple the ability to live and subsist with employment.

I think there's quite a statistical difference between being laid off and the situations you listed.

What the fuck? So one should actively go out and seek more of it? To me, BECAUSE things are uncertain, there's even more value in things that can be made certain. Then, we at least have the hope of being free to devote our limited, anxiety-riddled, conflict-avoidant, procrastinating brains on the parts that matter. I don't want to have to worry about things like health insurance or the wham-baam-thank-you-ma'am nature of US Capitalist idiocracy.

Sincere question: would you give up your right to quit "on a whim" if your employer gave up their right to fire you "on a whim"?

This is not a hypothetical in Britain. Many categories of workers cannot be fired on a whim, nor can they quit on a whim. Many people prefer that trade-off.

For example, in 2012, at Timeout, Aksel Van der Wal was promoted to CEO. He had previously been the CTO, and now we needed a new CTO. We made an offer to a person who had a great reputation as an engineering manager at another company. But he was on a contract he could not get out of, nor would his employer let go of him. So we had to wait 9 months, while he finished that contract, before he could join us.

No, because humans and their needs are much more important than companies and the profits of their owners.

Yes? The power imbalance there is obvious. Employers have much greater access to wealth, capital, and lobbyists. As an individual I have no such agency. So yes, trading away risk in exchange for fixed contracts is a great deal in most circumstances. Most of modern finance exists to exchange risk for dollars in some sense.

I would, yes. 30 day terms would work for me as it does for many business to business agreements. I dont agree with the other commentators entitlement to 14 weeks of severance pay in any situation, however

i don't think that's equivalent. it's tremendously easier for a company to fill a position than a person get another position somewhere else. this is a billion+ company. some developers probably live paycheck to paycheck.

You still have your career and can get another job somewhere else. If your whole industry has collapsed so you have no alternatives, then that's a risk to prepare for in your general life plans. The world doesn't owe you comfort and security but you can easily create it for yourself if that's what you want. Also, obviously don't work at a crypto startup if you want that either!

I've done this for myself. I can't be fired, and I have 3 different "career" directions I'm going in at the same time. I'm not a high flier in any of them, but at least one is bound to always be available. That's comfort and security.

Any suggestions for getting this done? In a similar boat looking for some safety net. Are you describing overworked?

Teacher is a fairly safe fall-back. I also happened to get lucky building a succecssful commercial software product, and have another degree and a little experience in engineering. I'm not overworked but I should make it clear that I'm not senior or particularly successful in any of those fields, buy also have no worries about money.

It is actually the bare minimum in many European countries (where you would also get unemployment benefits).

What glorious risk-free world do you live in? The low volatile relatively risk free last decade and a half just vanished the next 5 - 10 years is going to be a much rougher ride.

14 week severance bare minimum at a private company? That sounds very rich.

[edited for better manners]

c) European.

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.

0. https://www.claimsattorney.com/2020/05/understanding-severan...

EDIT>> Correcting years

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).

You are comparing apples and orages.

Coinbase was generous, it could have chosen to give them exactly 0 and that would have been legal.

You're taking the best case scenario in one case and comparing it to the norm in another country.

The person I was replying to was taking the norm in another country and suggesting it is as-good-as-if-not-better than what Coinbase offered.

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.

Please give me a source.

>Please give me a source.

The source is in my post. They cover France, Luxembourg, UK, and the Netherlands, and the first three are worse than 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 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.

Thanks for the correction!

Don’t mistake the legal statutory minimums with normal practice.

Are you suggesting that European countries regularly offer severances to all employees that exceed what is legally required? Can you provide a source?

I don’t know about Europe, but in e.g. Canada, employees are generally entitled to common law severance, which is significantly more than the statutory minimum severance. e.g. https://www.monkhouselaw.com/how-much-severance-pay-should-i...

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.

On the other hand, unemployment is consistently higher in Europe than in the US (and wages are lower), so pick your poison.

I think it's an easy pick, to be honest.

The US.

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?

More risk in US but also more opportunities.

I was going to reply the same. Heck, you don't even have to actually be European if you just read what protections you have in other places.

You signed an employment-at-will agreement. You have no rights.

I think the parent's statement was descriptive, not normative. The writing was on the wall when unions became scarce and "at-will employment" became the norm.

The fact that things shouldn't be like this doesn't change the fact that they are like this.

Unfortunate that workers have internalized the idea that they are disposable tools and not long-term assets. It wasn't that long ago that large corporations like IBM and GE prided themselves on how many people they employed, how much salary they paid and even how much in tax $ they gave to the gov't[1].

1: https://www.npr.org/2022/06/01/1101505691/short-term-profits...