This was 20 years ago though (man, that's depressing!) and nowadays I would have spotted the warning signs a long way off and planned my exit strategy / final negotiations much better.
I still think he was screwing us over, though. And I still think he was a cunt :)
That's the sad part about layoffs: Until your 30ies, not only you get screwed over but the experienced ones are long gone and aren't part of the battle [1].
[1] battle or discussion, depending on whether you need the job.
[1] First released in 1975.
The engine at least in the straight six version was a warmed over Jaguar AJ6 engine. This was however very good.
Why does owning an Aston Martin make someone a cunt? I am American and unfamiliar with British cars.
What I would have personally done in the situation would be to sell anything I had that I didn't need, to keep the company afloat, and my employees paid, because I know if we can weather it, it'll pay off in the end.
But a lot of people are assholes and don't give a shit about their employees... And that's why they have a revolving door and churn through employees like no tomorrow.
Contacting (in the uk at least) is much more honest, you work you get paid, you want to have a sick day, you don't get paid. If your crap you go, if your good they try to keep you.
It's OK to own nice cars. If the company is doing well, drive it to work.
If things are not good, it would be good form to at least drive a camry to the office.
Maybe. But most employees don't seem to care that:
1) the boss may have gotten the money to buy the car before owning the current company. Most people in business have had multiple businesses throughout their lives. Even if it's not, they risked everything to create the company that now employs you.
2) The boss probably lost much more than the employees. When an employee loses a job, it sucks. But they can often times get unemployment and find another job (I've worked for plenty of companies that went under over the years).
The boss loses: money (if they are a co-owner, they probably invested money), reputation, and credit is possibly damaged.
EDIT: Don't mean you personally. :)
Laying people off who are on minimum wage with little more than a sorry whilst having your fancy car on full display outside the window does, however.
Sorry for any offence caused.
Like I completely agree with where you're coming from, but adhering to your particular worldview, what words can I use?
Does jerk eventually become a taboo term as well?
I realize this is contrived but I think it is a relevant question to ask.
Where does this societal need for political correctness fall apart?
Why do I have to go around trying to not be crass at every single turning point? If I'm always trying to be completely inoffensive how can I possibly hope to make meaningful statements when so many of those statements are reliant on offensive ideas??!?!
I want to be a good person m8. I'd also like to be genuine.
What if I'm genuinely offensive? Seek to make changes in my nature I guess?
If words to blacklist or be offended by ran out, new ones would need to be invented to keep the fervor alive. There is now a large culture built on being offended all the time.
If you want one with a V-12 (Which, if you're buying an Aston you do), you're looking at $200k, minimum.
The 2005 Ferrari F430 your boss drives may have cost as little as $100,000, and your boss may have financed part or most of it. Good credit + an above zero net worth will get you very nice finance terms. If you looked at the car alone, you might deduce that your boss is quite wealthy, but in reality their net worth could be less than $25,000.
Even if you are into cars, a person's choice of vehicle is probably not going to give you any meaningful insight into their personal finances. Many people just like status symbols because they communicate how the person wants to be seen, not how they actually are.
Flashing status symbols in front of people who can't or don't realize they could obtain them is uncouth, though.
Only $100K?! Holy fucknozzles, I'll take five of them!
[eyeroll]
[eyes nearly roll out of head]
Low end for okay new cars is $10->30k. Most BMWs are quite nice, reliable cars with low maintenance costs. Acquiring a used one for the price of a new lesser car is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
Now, if you're snarking at spending $15k on something, I'm not sure what I can tell you.
If you've never spent $15k or more on something in a year, I guess you've owned neither a vehicle nor a house, and don't rent in a highly desirable part of a metropolitan area.
I like mine and it's reliable, but 'low maintenance costs', that I wouldn't say...
Your guess is absolutely incorrect. The difference is that I don't consider $15K to be chump change.
By all means, though, do continue your condescending snobbery. It just makes everyone around you look all the better.
We're getting pretty close to trading up the lower-valued car for a 5-to-8-years-used one with around 100k miles on it, costing us about $13000-17000. That requires planning and savings, and maybe a bit of financing. $15k is serious business to a middle class household, and we would expect that purchase to last us at least another 5-8 years, whereupon we can pawn it off on a kid as their starter vehicle. We want to ride it all the way down the depreciation curve, then take whatever is left in it as a charitable tax deduction.
It definitely is not chump change, but it isn't entirely out of reach for the middle class, either. It is, however, well beyond the ken of lower-paid employees.
The range of $10k-30k for new cars is completely bogus. You are looking at a bare minimum of $12k for a glorified go-kart and $16-18k for a decent sedan with automatic (or CV) transmission. Those used B-Mers going for $15k are probably about the equivalent of a year-old Honda Civic. If you can afford that, you are well off, and very much above the median household income for the US.
Ancestor post shows a serious lack of knowledge of the economy outside the Bay Area. For huge numbers of people, the value of that car is still well above anything they might be able to get for themselves. Deprecating $15k as not being all that much money is somewhat insulting to all those people for whom such an amount would exceed their entire net worth. By that perspective, the guy driving the $100k car in to work, to fire some people, is lucky that so many people in the US respect other people's property, even if they are hugely self-centered assholes. $100k can buy an entire house in some places, complete with rooms, floors, and indoor plumbing.
Furthermore, if anyone with a net worth of $25k is driving a car valued at $100k, they have no business whatsoever making business decisions at any company that employs me. If they make shit decisions in their personal life, they will probably make worse decisions with other people's money.
>If you can afford that, you are well off, and very much above the median household income for the US.
Agree on point #1, disagree on point #2: one of my points is that you don't need to have 15k cash-on-hand to drive a car worth 15k, but driving said car makes you appear to be much wealthier than you are.
>Ancestor post shows a serious lack of knowledge of the economy outside the Bay Area.
Not at all. SF is just a good example because of the prevalence of "luxury" cars and "rich" people who don't actually own their surprisingly low-cost cars outright.
>If they make shit decisions in their personal life
This was my point exactly. Appearances can be massively deceiving, and in many cases, they actually are. Judging someone's financial situation based on the car they drive doesn't factor in their income, how much they're willing to spend each month on a car, and how much debt they're willing to take on for it. People do silly things. I think the combination of easy access to credit (i.e., debt) and "keeping up with the Jones" is to blame.
Given the nature of financing, and the nature of an automobile as an asset, I have to question the sanity of anyone obtaining a loan to buy any new car, which drops in resale value the instant you drive it off the dealer lot. If the car in question, new or used, retails for more than $25k, I no longer need to question; at that point, I know the person is insane.
If you can make a $25k down payment on a $100k car, you could pay cash for a $25k car and own it outright. The only reasons anyone should be taking a loan to buy a car are as follows:
1. Owning the car would increase that person's potential to earn disposable income to a greater extent than the loan costs would reduce it.
2. The person has no realistic means for saving up for the purchase price of any acceptable car without having such a car already.
The traditional, rational means of buying a new luxury car is to first buy the best beater you can afford at that moment, run it into the ground, and repeat that step until the money saved by driving beaters and junking them is enough to buy a reliable car that can eventually be resold. Then, you continue saving and trading in your old vehicle until you finally achieve the quality of vehicle that you desire. The best trade-in point is right at the end of the flat part of the maintenance cost bathtub curve for that car, at which point you buy the best car you can afford that is still a few years/miles away from that point.
In that light, all those people buying used BMW 3-series instead of new luxury cars are showing themselves to be somewhat prudent car buyers. But you still don't know if they gradually built up to it, paid in cash, or took a loan.
Even so, just about everyone middle class or lower will look at someone driving an obviously expensive car and instinctively think, "what an asshole." It's probably related to the deep-rooted primate instinct for judging fairness in social interactions. All the other monkeys hate the monkey that gets more bananas and doesn't share. That's really the primary reason to avoid ostentatious displays of wealth in public, especially in the wrong social contexts.
I'm sure you know that personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News. Please don't do this.
My experiences of layoffs are:
1. A job in a huge software house. The company didn't hit the 12% profit margin it had promised it's shareholders, making a "measly" 10%. People knew when they were being laid off when the person going round with some fold up boxes dropped one at your feet and said, "pack your stuff". I wasn't laid off at that time but plenty of people I worked with were.
2. A minimum wage job when I was 19 years old. The owner calls us in and sacks a bunch of us in one go, with a big fat "sorry". I asked what the severance package was, since no-one else wanted to ask. He said, "erm, er....", and when it became clear there wasn't one because he hadn't enough empathy to even consider the proposition I said, "you can at least give us some money to go to the pub." He laughed, others nervously laughed. I said, "12 of us multiplied by a tenner each is £120". I eventually got £60 off the miserable excuse for a cunt who had his new Aston Martin parked on the carpark directly outside the window. (Yes I made sure everyone who got laid off got an equal share of that £60 at the pub).