You would need some class action lawsuit I’d think? Need a good number of laid off people to join it and you need solid statistics that would convince a jury more than the corporate lawyers would with whatever HR covered their assess on paper have.
>- “Are you hiring people just to fire them a year later to protect yourselves?”
You think the naive part is the response and not that question?
My point is that you'll simply have to read between the lines on responses with leading questions not that they're going to be upfront about these things.
Also the interview isn't the only way to gauge these things, You can Google for layoff numbers as well and make determinations that way. There are some websites that are dedicated trackers of layoff announcements, both the loud and quiet ones e.g. Spotify I think were letting 29 people go per month for a while. I think the law in Europe was if was 30 people you had to announce it. I can't remember the exact detail but plenty of companies expose these loopholes.
Wonder if they'll do it like they did for Brittany Pietsch. She recorded her firing video some years ago. I think it's on tiktok but there are youtube videos discussing it as well.
Anyway, new employee at Cloudflare, just finished onboarding. Suddenly a short meeting is scheduled with two people she had never met before. She is told she is let go for "performance" reasons. She kind of tears into them with "what performance issues, I only got great reviews" just to hear the HR people squirm and backpedal, well because, they know they are lying. But of course, they're trained enough to never admit it and say "they'll get back to her on that". Needless to say, it has the same effect as a suspect being arrested arguing with the cops. But it did make Cloudflare "famous" on tiktok for a bit.
I found that video and I couldn't finish watching it. TBH it's really incomprehensible to me why we've created a culture where being so heartless is praised upon.
HR doesn’t squirm because they are lying. They squirm because they minimize lawsuit surface area as much as possible. I have been on the giving end of performance layoffs in big corps and there is an extremely strict script you have to stick to (both HR rep and me as the manager).
I saw the video you’re referring to and it’s completely unsurprising they clam up further when she became confrontational. You’re not gonna talk your way out of a termination unless you have some pretty hard evidence it was for something illegal.
That’s just what getting fired looks like and people don’t often get to see the process so cloudflare “became famous”.
Most of the US is a right to work environment where a company can let someone go at any time for any reason other than the few protected class reasons. Many companies also have 90 day probationary period where they bypass internal company processes and let someone go, again other than for protected class reasons.
It's obviously hard when people's lives are upended, but no one complains when companies do a lot of hiring because the risk is lower.
It starts with some things that minimize the lawsuit area, but over time it transforms into a habit of lying. It's company policy, you know? Don't question, just execute.
> Ok, so... why do people take it seriously as a concept? Occam's razor would point towards some general misunderstanding on which we have no evidence to reasonably speculate a cause.
One scientist says "We don't know, really, it's a head scratcher" and the others say something cool like "Dark energy", which ones will get more attention and publicity?
But it really isn't a head scratcher, and it's not a wild guess, and also, dark matter is not the same as dark energy.
Think about some random person born in the 1950s. It will be impossible for you to directly prove that that person has two parents, but with all your knowledge about biology, and your knowledge that humans could not be cloned in the 1950s, it's not a head scratcher, unless our understanding of biology is completely off, it's not just speculation there were two parents. That's the comparable situation with dark matter. It's not a head scratcher. Every indication shows there is a lot of mass around that doesn't interact with light.
> We are disappointed that our international participants won’t get to experience the Zambia we have come to know through our planning for RightsCon
This strikes as a bit naive. Like a bunch of kids who saw a Disney movie about Zambia and then decided to go there and have a RightsCon. Have they seen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_in_Zambia and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Zambia? I could see if they wanted to sponsor an action there or protest or something but it's unrealistic expecting RightsCon to go without issues there. Unless... the whole point was to show that Zambia would never allow this and they just wanted to "expose it".
> I would wager that the people running RightsCon are more familiar with Zambia
One would hope, but their actions don't seem to point to that?
So you might have lost that wager, unless you wagered also that this part of an exposure or performance to highlight the issue. It would be kind of an expensive, round-about way to do then.
If wikipedia are not enough another 10 sources probably not going to convince anyone. That's my wager :-)
> We invested months in building government relationships focused precisely on transparency and mutual understanding, including explicit conversations about the diversity of our community. If this foundation was somehow deemed insufficient, we are left to ask: why was that not communicated to us earlier, rather than only five days before our participants were due to arrive?
> This was our red line. Not because we were unwilling to engage, but because the conditions set before us were unacceptable and counter to what RightsCon is and what Access Now stands for. The manner of the government’s communications process this week also raised serious questions as to the integrity, forthrightness, and value of any future engagement based on good faith
I can't read that as anything but being naive and not being able to read between the lines.
(From one of the toots) > That said, I do not believe humiliation is the ultimate goal of the contributor here, nor venting a frustration. The ideal outcome is probably to acknowledge the risk, reduce the interpersonal heat
I think that’s a very charitable interpretation, and that’s a good attitude in general. In this case though, given that this ended up with all toots and tweets about it, I would suspect notoriety and internet points are at the top of the list of at least some parties here…
Just another Mythos breakout. Excuse us while we airgap the affected DC and send in a team to drive framing nails into every storage device in the building.
I think what someone needs to do is before looking up these names or professions, first define a the category of "sensitive US research" well enough (specific institutions, areas, level of access, seniority, etc) and only after that look at history to total missing persons and then decide if there is more or less of them missing in proportion to the total.
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