This is also on the front page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38629355

Some of the people being fired will have been at Netflix less than a year and 6 figure of college debt and a hard-to-break lease on a $3000/month apartment -- do you expect them to have 6 months of salary saved?

> A job today is no guarantee or even context for a reasonable assumption for a job tomorrow.

This is rolling over in submission for evil men, thinly veiled in the language of badass cynicism.

Submission is living day to day without proper planning and hoping and praying that things will always be as good as yesterday.

Sweeping generalizations, without any empathy or ability to understand circumstances different from your own is a recipe to become a person that is incapable of understanding others.

I don't see why this has to be some kind of common stance in the tech community. Yes many of us make decent money, but you have no idea what peoples life circumstances are. Learn some empathy before you comment.

> I don’t agree. A job today is no guarantee or even context for a reasonable assumption for a job tomorrow.

That's called lack of labor laws.

I fully agree with that, it should be a very high priority to have 6 months of savings before you go on holiday or to a restaurant or anything non essential.

I think it's less about the cash than the PTO. People plan ahead for time off during the holidays. If instead you have to spend the holidays frantically looking for employment, then you're massively stressed during what should be a time of relaxation. The stress placed on the employee simply isn't proportionate to how little it would take for the company to wait two more weeks to lay people off (or plan ahead and lay them off earlier).

To the OP's point. If you have a reasonable emergency savings account you will not have to be looking for a job over the holidays. Also there is no one looking to hire over the Holidays anyway so might as well take a beat, regroup, and focus on enjoying your time off. I know getting laid off sucks and is a kick in the gut, I have personally been laid off a few days before Christmas one year early in my career. Having the emergency fund made it not a frantic scramble and I was able to get another job starting in January.

Also one of the reasons companies fire them before the end of the year is if company pays bonuses and you are an employee at the end of the year you get said bonus even if you aren't employed at the company when they pay them out. I think a few states have laws saying you can't get around that by firing them a few days before the end of the year but I am not sure which ones.