> Employees who can work from home still must go into their “My RTO” portal, where they manage their sick time, and change their work-from-home status to “natural disaster” to not be penalized. This won’t subtract from their PSSL hours, though.
So was this just headline bait? It's a sick day but not counted against you.
> TikTok’s LA staff are being asked to use their personal/sick days if they cannot work from home due to power or Wi-Fi outages, or if they’re under evacuation orders (unless their entire team has been given time off, which is not the case for many impacted by the fires).
> Employees who can work from home still must go into their “My RTO” portal, where they manage their sick time, and change their work-from-home status to “natural disaster” to not be penalized.
You're talking about the second paragraph here. This article's headline is talking about the first one.
Are you sure? It seems like staying home due to the wildfire uses up sick days if you cannot WFH, but if you can WFH then it does not use up sick days.
They're essentially the same from what I heard. No one's expected to work and ppl can avoid using sick days by setting their status in that portal in advance
There are two points made, but the article makes it easy to conflate them.
1. If you are able to work from home, set the proper code to avoid losing PSSL days
2. If you aren’t able to work, you need to use a PSSL day.
What’s not fully clear to me is whether the expectation is normally that you work on a PSSL day, as it seems to be the case that you get paid on those days whether you work or not.
Or they could just be like “anyone affected by the fires should know we are behind them completely with the full weight of the company behind them” pinned to the top of every internal page.
Indeed. Some years ago, also during a California wildfire, I was at a company with honorable leadership. Not only did people impacted by evacuations get all the time off they needed but the company paid for hotel accommodations if necessary.
Thanks for bringing the community another example of a better way and a better time.
The word honorable is definitely applicable. But I’d contend that substantially similar values and actions are also effective: they’re also good business.
If you’re selling some innovation it behooves you to advocate for people being prosperous enough to enjoy your innovation. It behooves you to maximize the potential of the people working on the innovation.
Good treatment of workers creates effective workers who in turn are consumers: a wealthy and prosperous society is good for business if you take a long view.
This weird 5-20 year horizon around outcomes is just a small clique of serial killers who have captured the levers quite recently.
And it doesn’t matter how many blood boys that Thiel or Altman or whoever leech from: they’re going to grow old and die.
The best thing I ever saw in Silicon Valley was when I was a middle manager at glory days FB.
An intern in his last week got smashed up by a car riding a bike and by this and that quirk I ended up playing a very minor role in passing the message up the chain.
In under an hour Sheryl Sandberg not only knew but was directly involved in pledging all of Facebook’s resources to the medical care and the travel for the family and just everything.
It was truly inspiring. The intern in question made a full recovery and everyone on the team saw that they could look forward all the time, trusting their leadership to watch their back.
Well, I am the GP, but knowing the person who got smashed up I can say that he had a sense of humor about it, great guy, real legend.
Speaking for myself it’s a pleasant trip down memory lane in spite of a pretty iffy situation: we had leaders who cared about people, leaders who got you out of bed in the morning with a passion, and HN was full of people like yourself who combined wit and charm with humanity and grace.
Ahhh sorry, I misunderstood! That’s a very kind thing to say to a stranger, thank you. Thanks as well for sharing your story (or, the story you were involved in), I enjoyed reading it.
> “anyone affected by the fires should know we are behind them completely with the full weight of the company behind them” pinned to the top of every internal page
Inappropriate for a global company. Send targeted emails to those you know are affected, and be specific about how you're putting the "full weight of the company behind them." Maybe put a note on one internal landing for everyone to see in case they e.g. have family affected you didn't know about.
That’s maybe fair, the details of the paperwork in a tricky situation are a question for senior leadership.
There are a lot of ways to say “we support you completely” and none of them are “here’s a weird liability motivated form on top of losing everything else”.
So to clarify the language -
>The days the office is closed are being made Work From Home days as opposed to days off, however — unless an individual team leader decides otherwise.
I would expect a good leader to decide otherwise, but who knows, maybe leaders deciding otherwise might get penalized.
So that means you have to work from home. BUT
if there are power outages / connectivity issues as there might be in a natural disaster they cannot work from home or if they are being evacuated then they cannot work from home, in these cases then they use their sick days. (but how - because they can't register those? Do they call in or something)
But of course what is the main problem then is they have 10 sick days in the year and
>This leaves them fewer days later in the year to use in case of an actual illness or other personal emergency, like staying home to care for a sick child...
There is also some stuff about the manual not actually allowing anyone to use "natural disaster" as an excuse, but I guess that will be cleared up.
>> But of course what is the main problem then is they have 10 sick days in the year and
>This leaves them fewer days later in the year to use in case of an actual illness or other personal emergency, like staying home to care for a sick child... <<
What was the usual allotment of sick days in the before times when regular wfh wasn't common? What's the current usual allotment for jobs that can't be done remotely?
Every company I worked for had 10 sick days. I’m on my 10th job
I can’t remember ever coming close to using those. But I can’t imagine any company I have worked for being a stickler for my going over slightly. But besides Amazon and General Electric, I’ve always worked for small companies
Funny enough, the company I work for now only gives us 9 sick days. But we have “unlimited” PTO.
no idea as this is discussion of U.S, but there is also consideration of industry standards. From an IT perspective this is a big warning sign, don't work for this company! Of course maybe they pay double what others do in which case it would be worth it. But probably not.
Is it really any more of an imposition than your employer wanting to be notified of you need to take bereavement leave or spend a few days in the hospital?
Notifying your employer that you can't work is the most basic of things.
Sure, if you're in the hospital with an emergency they'll hopefully forgive that you couldn't notify them, but if you're sick it's expected you tell somebody.
Disasters also burn down cell towers and other power outlets go off for safety. I haven't had power in nearly 24 hours and I fortunately haven't had to be evacuated.
I can still access internet, but I'd be unable to if I lived even 10 miles south
Well, if I'm being a bit cold: I haven't has a coworker check up on me in 7 years. It's only a natural extreme to move towards after the rejection of the whole "we're a family" narrative off yester-decade.
Not that I have strong feelings about that. But none of the companies I worked at have ever felt like I could trust having a job if I had to spend a few days in the hospital.
If I have no power or worse, am in the hospital: yes. There's emotional factors with others, but you may not physically be able to access such contacts and portals.
It’s a wash IMO. Both the actual situation and the article are unclear. The article probably should have been shorter with limited information but there’s pressure to make an article not be very short. The gist of it is that TikTok is at least somewhat hassling their already stressed employees which seems it needed to be said, but it’s unclear whether they’ll be charged these hours once things settle down.
Holy shit though, who thought this email (or Slack message or whatever) in the middle of an ongoing disaster was a good idea? This is the equivalent of asking you to make sure you file your TPS report. Honestly why do they give a shit about the knobs in the RTO portal? They can see if people are based in LA already. Benefit of the doubt, etc.
There's a separate announcement showing some support and asking everyone in LA to WFH, which isn't mentioned in the article
Also not updating the RTO portal won't cause any penalty from what I've heard, and ppl can update the WFH status anytime, e.g. marking their whole month as natural disaster WFH in advance if they really care, which no one really does
You don't. But they want to minimize avenues to get sued because people can and probably will file an wrongful termination lawsuit.
I don't know the exact laws, but given California I would not be surprised if there's a "no, you cannot fire someone who's in the hospital over a state of emergency" clause. Similar to how you can't fire an employee to avoid workman's comp.
Yes, I know, and in fact I checked before posting.
I was using “I think” as a conversational affordance to give OP a less confrontational way in to disagreeing with me, if even in an at-will state, termination for cause is better for the employer for some reason (I couldn’t find one when searching, but it’s not an area I am knowledge about).
Would it be? I was implementing similar stuff for a crappy PHP forum 15+ years ago that wanted to track which users were sharing private posts outside their community. It started with screenshot-tracking by embedding small 1xN base64 images that were almost completely transparent except for some tinting on each pixel to represent a 1 or a 0 bit at the edges of several elements where they wouldn't be noticed. That didn't survive jpeg compression or photos, so I added text transforms that represented tracking bits as well. Things like one vs two spaces after a period or an expanded contraction would correspond to a bit of the ID of the user the text was served to.
That worked fine since the site was mostly prose, but I couldn't help but think about generalizing it to encode tracking bits as page styling information as well. Never ended up finishing that implementation because I got too in the weeds trying to account for rendering differences in customized user agents by adding error correction bits to the IDs. That way it wouldn't matter if a few styles were overridden or obscured.
I don't think any of these ideas were particularly novel or difficult to think of, so I'd expect plenty of independent implementations over the years. If they do their job right you'd never know about them, so there's likely more than you expect.
It is actually pretty common among Chinese companies. At least in Tiktok, where all software are internally developed (as explained in the article they use Lark, something similar to Slack).
This gives them flexibility and usability as different softwares can interact seamlessly. For example you can click open a link to the document that other people are screen sharing during a meeting. But it also embeds your name on the screen so you probably don't want to take a screenshot or a photo.
I know many companies also use techniques that generate invisible watermarks that are difficult to remove without breaking the image. I don't know exactly what the technique is, but maybe this is close:
They could place nearly invisible watermarks that only a camera would notice. Probably your safest bet is to deep fry the image. Pictures of pictures with high compression turned on.
Lol it's literally just a giant watermark across the screen with the person's name and blocking the screen when the webcam identifies a smartphone...
Needless to say, both of these are trivially bypassable.
I think most of us are more concerned about the potential presence of invisible watermarks, obviously submitting a picture with "JOHN SMITH ACME CORP 2025-01-09" blatantly strewn across the screen will be trivially traced back to you
Google used to watermark internal emails using non-visible Unicode. It would catch people copy-pasting things to the press. (This was circa 2010; I don't know if they still do it.)
Printers and copiers have hidden "tracking dots" that can ID the specific device used. Introduced by Xerox in the mid 80s and not known to the public until 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
I do remember world of warcraft using some funny trickery for their screenshots too. embedding client info into the screenshots, to figure out who took it. (If the player was under NDA or similar)
> Google used to watermark internal emails using non-visible Unicode. It would catch people copy-pasting things to the press.
How does that even work? I assume the unique identifiers are generated along the lines of https://zws.im but do they send a different version of the same email to each unique recipient? Or does the watermark get inserted by some email client when copying text?
iPhones, Pixels, and Samsung phones have been defaulting to HEIC for around five years now, so it’s unlikely that compression alone would prevent tracking dots or other unique noise or patterns from being preserved. Steganography is a well-established technique that can definitely survive through photographs, even under compression. Variations in fonts or typography could be used for tracking too. There are plenty of creative ways this could be achieved.
> Additionally, after the story was published, TikTok enabled a feature that now alerts everyone in a company-wide Lark channel — a Slack competitor from TikTok parent ByteDance — when a screenshot is taken.)
It's rare that a single sentence can tell me so clearly whether or not I'd be willing to work at a company.
The actual article could be misleading (it's not obvious if setting their RTO status to "natural disaster" status means they expend their sick days or not), but this is so clearly petty micromanagement that there's really no ambiguity.
I might take a dozen screenshots a day for various reasons not connected to communicating with journalists. This seems like a low signal to noise way of monitoring employees.
Salaries are only better for certain fields in the US though. If you are working in a grocery store in the US vs EU, you would be better off in EU. And you wouldn't have to worry about falling ill and skyrocketing healthcare costs.
In certain areas of the US maybe. I believe the average wage in the EU is actually higher than in the US. Need to look up the Source, which is hard because I'm on mobile right now.
To be fair, this is a company in the U.S and the people are working in the U.S so it is in fact - U.S working conditions, if you imported the company to the EU it would not be EU working conditions because those working. conditions would be illegal.
To be fair, EU working conditions are pretty bad compared to Canada. Sure, Chinese conditions might be worse, but EU conditions aren't good to begin with.
I worked in both EU and Canada.. and no, lol, Canada does not have better working conditions. Less vacation, longer working hours, less ‘protection’ for employees vs employers.
To me, that is an absurd statement. Speaking as someone who has work in EU countries, the US, UK, and Australia, the EU was by far the best for “working conditions” (holiday, flexibility, benefits, overall working environment). I’ve never worked in Canada, I admit, but know people who have.
This is how millions of Americans already work. Millions have no paid sick time at all (and even unpaid sick leave can be iffy) and millions more get less generous PTO than this.
The only remarkable thing is that this policy is bad for a tech company. Tech is special because demand for specialized workers is high and supply is low. But in most other industries, this would be standard behavior.
Workers in other industries deserve better, but it’s also important to remember that the HN bubble isn’t the norm.
Cool, let's just accelerate to the inevitable lawsuits when the government questions why so many Americans can't get work but we're importing more people than ever.
Give Trump's whole narrative, that will be an interesting show to watch.
This is an oversimplification. One should of course take great care not to use generalizations to promote group-based hatred, but this is in addition to the fact that it would be naive (and impossibly restrictive) to declare nationality generalization forbidden. Nationalities, cultures, and many other set-formings of humans have salient features, on average, for better or worse.
You’re ignoring the context of my comment. They’re implying that Indians are second-rate engineers, not that they have a cuisine that uses lots of spices.
Acknowledging the nuance on this issue is hard, because a lot of people will call you a literal nazi for doing so. But that is a position which, ultimately, entirely denies the existence of culture as a concept.
This compulsive need for data is such a mental crutch. Reason from first principles. Use logic. You don’t need to be spoon-fed data from a scientifically rigorous study in order to deduce basic cause-and-effect relationships.
There are sub-$60K H1B jobs. That's below my $55K starting salary as a fresh grad which, after adjustment, is $100K today. That was in an era when CS grads were pulling $100K with no experience so by no means extravagant for the time.
We've had decades of STEM hype but somehow can't produce college grads to do entry level tech work?
As a small amount of data, my asking salary has never been less than the highest paid H1B at a company plus another $30k/yr, and I've always been offered more than I've asked, despite the H1B position being more senior. That doesn't prove wages being dragged down by itself, but it's evidence of H1B workers being paid less than the legally mandated "actual wage", and ECON 101 can take care of the rest in terms of the expected effects on the market.
I don’t understand why people on this forum, who are 90+% in favor of remote work and don’t believe physical presence in an office matters at all, believe they companies will choose to replace H1-B employees with different people when they can simply hire those exact same H1-B employees at a quarter of the cost when they are forced to return to their home countries?
The H1-B logically displaces offshoring, not citizens. Otherwise it’s a massive coincidence that the H1-B visa happens to be used overwhelmingly by the industry that has seen the highest increase in salaries by far for Americans over the past 2 decades.
So you do bring up a very common line of thinking (and, I think, a common one that isn't expressed often in such topics).
Firstly, you seem to be conflating H1-B with obtaining a foreign contractor. That's an accounting burden, often comes with time zone issues, and does damage to a company's return-to-office agenda unless they are hired for something completely divorced from other teams. This puts the contractor in a considerable position as they can maneuver with effectively zero oversight. Great for the contractor, bad for the employer (at least the first time; after a rapport is established it could be fine).
If that's not what you meant, then the engineer(s) being hired are from a staffing agency or similar. But now you are at the behest of who the staffing agency pulls for local talent and their ability to retain said talent. Often, while incoming engineers can be vetted the employer doesn't have the latitude of choosing any engineer from the region and plucking them like they would s contractor or H1-B.
An H1-B gives the employer the best of all worlds at the cost of sponsorship. The employee works for them and has considerably less options as many companies do not sponsor H1-B visas, so they have less opportunities. Between the value of the US dollar and engineers being salaried much lower elsewhere you could likely pull an H1-B for half the price of a US engineer and in many cases they would still come out very well ahead. As well, by bringing them to the US you fix any time zone issues and RTO questions.
FWIW, I think a lot of US engineers tend to have a negative view on both being in-office AND having compensation reduced; I think most would be fine with a reduction in comp if it meant remote work - but most companies seem much more interested in maximum control AND minimal investment.
I more or less agree with you, but there’s a third path that you left out: expanding their footprint in other countries. For example, pretty much all major tech cos have offices in Hyderabad, India.
Oh, definitely, and that does resolve a large class of the problems that people have with H1-B visas! However, it's often a non-trivial choice to go that route so it excludes the majority of companies that still want access to talent. As well, even if a company does have such a footprint there are still compelling reasons they could make for wanting to bring that talent stateside long-term (i.e. a particular team is only located in the US).
Time zones are still a thing to workaround. It's easier to import them or to nearshoe. Tech in south America is there but not super plentiful.
But you're missing the real reason. It's not about salaries by itself. It's control. People like musk would even pay H1b's more than an American when they lack the leverage to easily hop to another job or can threaten to end their visa if they get uppity. Even under American soil, he can coerce them to work to the bone easier than a citizen.
This is the (very common) fallacy that disagreeing with something, or considering it immoral, is equivalent to not believing that it will happen (if not prevented somehow).
I’m pretty sure they have a big office in the Arts District. I listen to a lot of Ringer podcasts and the hosts are often talking about the crazy benefits Spotify offers.
This is why we need our governments to protect the people.
It is exuberantly clear that some companies will treat their workers with the minimum amount of decency up to the point of illegality, or past that if they can get away with it.
How about an “asshole employer” gov program? Society needs to fight back against those doing harm to society.
A wet dream that will not become tangible reality in near future. The inexistent labor protections are one of the major economic drivers of USA. When companies can lay off whole departments nilly-willy (we had some discussions here on HN), they can take on riskier endeavors than their European counterparts at the same cost.
Partner works at a county agency. There are 1-2 weather-related days off you can use, but if you experience more weather than that in a year you are free to use your vacation or take unpaid time off. This applies also if the job site is closed.
The goverment is effectively the employers. They can override everything they don't like or can't find a way around. If it ever seems otherwise, you're missing part of the story.
>TikTok’s LA employees have 10 paid sick/personal (PSSL) days per year in addition to 15 PTO (paid time off/vacation) days… as TikTok’s strict return-to-office policy requires employees to work from the office a minimum of three days per week. (The days of the week are chosen by the team and can’t be swapped for other days if needed.)
Is this amount of strictness normal for the large tech companies? I’ve only worked for one - Amazon - and my position was “field by design” and didn’t come under any RTO mandates until this year. I left in late 2023.
In a few states, there is a state-run short-term disability insurance program that pays if you are sick. Some employers offer short-term disability insurance as part of their benefits package, which is also available to purchase privately. If you don't have this, you are on your own in the short term. If you or a family member are sick, your employer must give you job-protected unpaid leave for up to six months.
If you have a long-term disability, which is expected to last longer than a year or result in death, you are eligible for Social Security Disability payments and Medicare health insurance from the federal government. Again, some employers offer supplemental term disability insurance as part of their benefits package, and it is also available to purchase privately.
You can even have accrued sick days, starting at 0. Catch covid week 3 at Amazon? You'll start having problems above and beyond the illness in a hurry.
There's a separate short term disability (STD) benefit and ppl can still receive a certain percentage of their income when on leave. FMLA for longer absence
Yeah I got sick, had diagnosis from a doctor, and they denied my claim for a bunch of bullshit reasons. It took them 2 months to finally tell me I was denied. Just to recieve a fucking fax took 24-48 hours. They delay and delay as much as they can and will pull every trick to deny you. Then when they finally deny you, you just get a letter and your only way to appeal is by mail. They don't even have the decency to make your "representative" call you and tell you. Insurance is a scam.
FMLA is also only good for 12 weeks a year. And FMLA only says that they can't fire you or cancel your benefits for being sick or caring for a family member, it doesn't give you any other benefits.
> TikTok’s LA employees have 10 paid sick/personal (PSSL) days per year in addition to 15 PTO (paid time off/vacation) days
> This week, TikTok’s LA staff are being asked to use their personal/sick days if they cannot work from home due to power or Wi-Fi outages, or if they’re under evacuation orders ... This leaves them fewer days later in the year to use in case of an actual illness or other personal emergency, like staying home to care for a sick child.
Today my employer’s HR sent out an email telling everyone to put their family’s safety first and work can wait.
And I kind of did a mental “well, yeah… you’d have to be a real ghoul to think otherwise,” perplexed by the very idea that HR would feel the need to say it at all.
In the early days of my career, I took very little PTO and didn't mind at all. I was young, no dependents, and was growing by leaps and bounds. Forcing me to take PTO would not have been beneficial, as I wouldn't have utilized it properly.
Now, today is a very different story, and I use it responsibly, but I'm at a very different stage in my life.
Sibling comment mostly nailed it for me. I was self taught as a programmer and improving my skills (and generally enjoying programming) consumed me for several years.
The whole point of compelling people to take PTO is for the mental health benefits associated with not working- decompressing, resetting, call it whatever you want. I didn't have other hobbies, didn't have money for traveling, and didn't have anyone to do those things with. My social circle was more or less as obsessed as I was. Most evenings were spent watching TV together while we worked on our laptops, either on side projects for fun or actual work.
Had I taken more PTO, my behavior in my off time would not have been any different than that of my work time. I wouldn't have gotten the benefit supposedly derived from being forced to take PTO. The one exception was a few days off to do some home renovation work that I didn't want to try to fit into evenings or weekends.
The way you want to use it is how you end up using it. You’re welcome to use your time to do things that others see as destructive. Of course there may be consequences.
I do believe in forced PTO because it creates an opportunity for someone to think about what to do with that time (which like you said, hopefully many people choose to use that time to decompress or rest). Up to them what decision they make. It tells a company what happens when a specific person is gone (Is Kelly the only one who knows how to do X? Is Chris stealing?).
I think there’s possibly a company culture argument where you don’t want a person on PTO logging into Slack, grabbing Jira tickets, going to meetings, or whatever. In that case you maybe end up firing the person if they cross whatever line too many times. But of course if the person is valuable enough, you might look the other way. Or your culture might be such that you don’t care. Up to the company.
not GP but I assume they meant they would still do work very similar to their job, or the job itself. This is very common for lots of young techies who don't have huge social circles outside of work, but arguably not a great use of time off.
AT&T wrote me up for missing pages while I was battling cancer! And I supposedly had std/ltd/fmla/etc. my current job , which I’m grateful for beyond words , would just about be sick at the idea of treating anyone like that.
Taken at face value, it's hideously evil, and we should fight as hard as possible to prevent this ideology from intruding any further into the culture of American employers or employers of American workers.
If there is context you feel is missing, you should add it.
The ideology that the employer-employee relationship is fundamentally one where labor is exchanged for money? The most I expect is, "Don't worry about things at work. Take care of yourself and your family. You are welcome to use any accumulated leave you have available, and your job will be here for you when you get back on your feet."
My perspective may be colored a bit by working in an environment with strict labor cost accounting where labor is accounted for down to the tenth hour (even for salaried-exempt employees), and there isn't some magical slush fund that can be used to pay for what would otherwise be unpaid leave. We do have "disaster leave" for salaried employees, but it's on a "work extra hours over the next X weeks to make up for it" basis, where X is a reasonable number given the nature of the disaster. For run-of-the-mill "snow days," it's typically 4 weeks. Taking PTO is also an option, including running up to a 40-hour negative balance. Thankfully, I don't have to deal with any of these RTO shenanigans.
> And yet, TikTok’s LA-based employees are being told to either continue their work from home or use their personal/sick days if that’s not possible, while the company’s LA office remains closed due to power outages caused by high winds.
In other words, in this case, employer is unable to provide a safe work environment (i.e., is not even "on their feet" at the moment) and their answer to that is to force employees to compensate for it using their own time off.
I would call this behavior vindictive but in my book, to be vindictive first you need to have a soul.
A natural disaster is neither the employee's nor the employer's fault. If a business's operations are interrupted due to a natural disaster (or for any other reason) and it cannot productively use an employee, it is appropriate to furlough or lay off that employee until operations can resume. Impacted employees can seek temporary or permanent employment elsewhere and, if eligible, apply for unemployment insurance compensation. The one-week waiting period for unemployment insurance is waived as part of state of emergency declarations.
If an employer wants to pay employees to stay home and do nothing because no work is available, potentially to avoid losing valuable employees, they can do that, but they are not expected to. If working remotely is feasible, it can be mutually beneficial to both the employer and employee, but like everything employment-related, it's also voluntary on both sides of the deal.
> If a business's operations are interrupted due to a natural disaster (or for any other reason) and it cannot productively use an employee, it is appropriate to furlough or lay off that employee until operations can resume.
1. Even in a logistics level, that's pretty much an abuse of "salaried" positions. Especially exempt ones. You get to suck out 60-80 hours of someone's time, but when they need to not get burned alive it's suddenly "furlough"? No.
2. A business that cannot survive for a few weeks without production is one that deserves to shit down. Individuals that don't have a savings is judged as unsafe, but companies can getaway with that behavior? It's a double standard.
>they can do that, but they are not expected to.
I'd definitely look up state laws about this one before spouting as fact. Federal may not care, but states have an incentive to not lose their entire workforce because businesses don't want to support the econimy in an emergency situation.
You're one of those people saying the system is set up a certain way, and it can't be changed. It was built by people, they can fix it and figure out how to make it work.
I don't give a fuck about your accounting system. These are real people that work for your company, not numbers in a computer. You can't figure out how to give them some paid time off during a huge rare disaster like this? Figure it out, and fuck this whole attitude.
Making people make up their work time during a disaster. Fuck me... seriously?
There actually is, but it isn't the employer's responsibility. It's called Unemployment Insurance. The one-week waiting period is waived as part of the state of emergency declaration.
Your limit is how long it takes them to find somewhere safe for their family. I evacuated and got back online later that day. Several leaders reached out to me to ask if I needed anything or if I wanted to take time off. In response, I feel more allegiance, and want to work harder. I love my job even more than I did 3 days ago.
Treat others how you would like to be treated. Respect breeds respect.
Ideally yes. And the limit is until things are stable.
But if you need a discrete answer, probably a few months? If we're in an emergency situation as a tech industry for more than a month, something much dire than business has happened. Many tech companies rebounded from COVID in a few months times.
> this ideology from intruding any further into the culture of American employers or employers of American workers.
Are you doing satire? This is already the status quo for American employers. Do you mean American employers of the labor aristocracy? It is hideously evil, but your wording conjures the idea that US company culture hasn't been corrupted (even with the "any further" part). It has already gone too far. The only thing that's truly interesting to me is that it's a Chinese-influenced company and China hasn't used the last decade to do socialism diplomacy through TikTok.
> Employees who can work from home still must go into their “My RTO” portal, where they manage their sick time, and change their work-from-home status to “natural disaster” to not be penalized. This won’t subtract from their PSSL hours, though.
So was this just headline bait? It's a sick day but not counted against you.
> TikTok’s LA staff are being asked to use their personal/sick days if they cannot work from home due to power or Wi-Fi outages, or if they’re under evacuation orders (unless their entire team has been given time off, which is not the case for many impacted by the fires).
> Employees who can work from home still must go into their “My RTO” portal, where they manage their sick time, and change their work-from-home status to “natural disaster” to not be penalized.
You're talking about the second paragraph here. This article's headline is talking about the first one.
The "being asked to use their personal/sick days" is the reporter's interpretation of having to go to the "My RTO" portal to set their status.
Are you sure? It seems like staying home due to the wildfire uses up sick days if you cannot WFH, but if you can WFH then it does not use up sick days.
They're essentially the same from what I heard. No one's expected to work and ppl can avoid using sick days by setting their status in that portal in advance
There are two points made, but the article makes it easy to conflate them.
1. If you are able to work from home, set the proper code to avoid losing PSSL days 2. If you aren’t able to work, you need to use a PSSL day.
What’s not fully clear to me is whether the expectation is normally that you work on a PSSL day, as it seems to be the case that you get paid on those days whether you work or not.
Or they could just be like “anyone affected by the fires should know we are behind them completely with the full weight of the company behind them” pinned to the top of every internal page.
Ya know, like leaders worth following.
>Ya know, like leaders worth following.
I hear ya and all, but what does anyone expect from TikTok?
It's not a product worth building, why would it have leaders worth following? You go there to get in, make some money, and get out.
> Ya know, like leaders worth following.
Indeed. Some years ago, also during a California wildfire, I was at a company with honorable leadership. Not only did people impacted by evacuations get all the time off they needed but the company paid for hotel accommodations if necessary.
Thanks for bringing the community another example of a better way and a better time.
The word honorable is definitely applicable. But I’d contend that substantially similar values and actions are also effective: they’re also good business.
If you’re selling some innovation it behooves you to advocate for people being prosperous enough to enjoy your innovation. It behooves you to maximize the potential of the people working on the innovation.
Good treatment of workers creates effective workers who in turn are consumers: a wealthy and prosperous society is good for business if you take a long view.
This weird 5-20 year horizon around outcomes is just a small clique of serial killers who have captured the levers quite recently.
And it doesn’t matter how many blood boys that Thiel or Altman or whoever leech from: they’re going to grow old and die.
And so we should be optimistic.
Obligatory nag at @pg to renounce these sociopaths.
> “anyone affected by the fires should know we are behind them completely with the full weight of the company behind them”
Like a steam roller? Sorry, but that was the first picture that came to mind when I read that sentence.
The best thing I ever saw in Silicon Valley was when I was a middle manager at glory days FB.
An intern in his last week got smashed up by a car riding a bike and by this and that quirk I ended up playing a very minor role in passing the message up the chain.
In under an hour Sheryl Sandberg not only knew but was directly involved in pledging all of Facebook’s resources to the medical care and the travel for the family and just everything.
It was truly inspiring. The intern in question made a full recovery and everyone on the team saw that they could look forward all the time, trusting their leadership to watch their back.
An excellent example of why cars should never ride bikes.
I can’t speak for the person in question but I strongly suspect they’d thank you for keeping it light.
Well done friend.
Yes, I perhaps would have passed on the joke if OP hadn’t clarified the ending of the story.
Well, I am the GP, but knowing the person who got smashed up I can say that he had a sense of humor about it, great guy, real legend.
Speaking for myself it’s a pleasant trip down memory lane in spite of a pretty iffy situation: we had leaders who cared about people, leaders who got you out of bed in the morning with a passion, and HN was full of people like yourself who combined wit and charm with humanity and grace.
Ahhh sorry, I misunderstood! That’s a very kind thing to say to a stranger, thank you. Thanks as well for sharing your story (or, the story you were involved in), I enjoyed reading it.
> “anyone affected by the fires should know we are behind them completely with the full weight of the company behind them” pinned to the top of every internal page
Inappropriate for a global company. Send targeted emails to those you know are affected, and be specific about how you're putting the "full weight of the company behind them." Maybe put a note on one internal landing for everyone to see in case they e.g. have family affected you didn't know about.
>Inappropriate for a global company.
Why? They've done local stuff like this for PR points before. Not much politically incensed about this.
You're also missing the obvious lede here that these portals probably are already separated by region. If not, definitely localized.
That’s maybe fair, the details of the paperwork in a tricky situation are a question for senior leadership.
There are a lot of ways to say “we support you completely” and none of them are “here’s a weird liability motivated form on top of losing everything else”.
Yeah, maybe I'll get one of those one day. Sadly not my current career trajectory though.
Search them in another country
So to clarify the language - >The days the office is closed are being made Work From Home days as opposed to days off, however — unless an individual team leader decides otherwise.
I would expect a good leader to decide otherwise, but who knows, maybe leaders deciding otherwise might get penalized.
So that means you have to work from home. BUT
if there are power outages / connectivity issues as there might be in a natural disaster they cannot work from home or if they are being evacuated then they cannot work from home, in these cases then they use their sick days. (but how - because they can't register those? Do they call in or something)
But of course what is the main problem then is they have 10 sick days in the year and
>This leaves them fewer days later in the year to use in case of an actual illness or other personal emergency, like staying home to care for a sick child...
There is also some stuff about the manual not actually allowing anyone to use "natural disaster" as an excuse, but I guess that will be cleared up.
>> But of course what is the main problem then is they have 10 sick days in the year and
>This leaves them fewer days later in the year to use in case of an actual illness or other personal emergency, like staying home to care for a sick child... <<
What was the usual allotment of sick days in the before times when regular wfh wasn't common? What's the current usual allotment for jobs that can't be done remotely?
Every company I worked for had 10 sick days. I’m on my 10th job
I can’t remember ever coming close to using those. But I can’t imagine any company I have worked for being a stickler for my going over slightly. But besides Amazon and General Electric, I’ve always worked for small companies
Funny enough, the company I work for now only gives us 9 sick days. But we have “unlimited” PTO.
It’s weird that they do that they do that
no idea as this is discussion of U.S, but there is also consideration of industry standards. From an IT perspective this is a big warning sign, don't work for this company! Of course maybe they pay double what others do in which case it would be worth it. But probably not.
Still very strange, no? Changing my WFH status wouldn’t be top of mind in a disaster situation.
Is it really any more of an imposition than your employer wanting to be notified of you need to take bereavement leave or spend a few days in the hospital?
If I’m in the hospital unexpectedly the last thing on my mind is logging into a “my RTO portal”, Jesus
Notifying your employer that you can't work is the most basic of things.
Sure, if you're in the hospital with an emergency they'll hopefully forgive that you couldn't notify them, but if you're sick it's expected you tell somebody.
Disasters also burn down cell towers and other power outlets go off for safety. I haven't had power in nearly 24 hours and I fortunately haven't had to be evacuated.
I can still access internet, but I'd be unable to if I lived even 10 miles south
"I had no internet or power" is an emergency situation they'd hopefully be lenient about.
People seem to be taking this aspect in the worst possible way, when it also functions as a way to let your coworkers know you're ok.
Well, if I'm being a bit cold: I haven't has a coworker check up on me in 7 years. It's only a natural extreme to move towards after the rejection of the whole "we're a family" narrative off yester-decade.
Not that I have strong feelings about that. But none of the companies I worked at have ever felt like I could trust having a job if I had to spend a few days in the hospital.
I wouldn’t log into a portal. But if I could, I would at least send my manager/team a Slack message.
If I have no power or worse, am in the hospital: yes. There's emotional factors with others, but you may not physically be able to access such contacts and portals.
Not really. It’s around an equal level of evil, uncaring imposition.
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I read this as they still need to WFH and just need to indicate they’re doing so in the portal so they aren’t penalized.
That says if they can work, not if they can't.
That "my RTO" portal will automatically be updated to "on leave" status when on leave
Right, these are additional paid sick days, just need to be manually claimed through the "My RTO" portal
There's also no penalty for forgetting to update the portal in time, from what I have heard
Update: and ppl can set their status in advance e.g. setting the whole January to "natural disaster" to avoid using personal paid sick leave
Update 2: There's a separate announcement showing some support and asking everyone in LA to WFH, which is omitted in the article
It’s a wash IMO. Both the actual situation and the article are unclear. The article probably should have been shorter with limited information but there’s pressure to make an article not be very short. The gist of it is that TikTok is at least somewhat hassling their already stressed employees which seems it needed to be said, but it’s unclear whether they’ll be charged these hours once things settle down.
Holy shit though, who thought this email (or Slack message or whatever) in the middle of an ongoing disaster was a good idea? This is the equivalent of asking you to make sure you file your TPS report. Honestly why do they give a shit about the knobs in the RTO portal? They can see if people are based in LA already. Benefit of the doubt, etc.
There's a separate announcement showing some support and asking everyone in LA to WFH, which isn't mentioned in the article
Also not updating the RTO portal won't cause any penalty from what I've heard, and ppl can update the WFH status anytime, e.g. marking their whole month as natural disaster WFH in advance if they really care, which no one really does
> why do they give a shit about the knobs in the RTO portal
They don’t. They care about having legal cause to terminate employment, as is the style at the time
I think California is an at-will state, so you wouldn’t need cause to terminate.
You don't. But they want to minimize avenues to get sued because people can and probably will file an wrongful termination lawsuit.
I don't know the exact laws, but given California I would not be surprised if there's a "no, you cannot fire someone who's in the hospital over a state of emergency" clause. Similar to how you can't fire an employee to avoid workman's comp.
Or worse, it's not there and they set precedent.
Every state in the US is an at will state except for one.
Yes, I know, and in fact I checked before posting.
I was using “I think” as a conversational affordance to give OP a less confrontational way in to disagreeing with me, if even in an at-will state, termination for cause is better for the employer for some reason (I couldn’t find one when searching, but it’s not an area I am knowledge about).
That's if they are working, not if they need the time off.
Just a reminder to people: if a company is monitoring for screenshots, you can take photos with your personal phone to send to journalists.
Those photos may still have embedded signatures that track.
That would be next level corp spyware. Can you point to a enterprise offering that sells that?
> That would be next level corp spyware
Would it be? I was implementing similar stuff for a crappy PHP forum 15+ years ago that wanted to track which users were sharing private posts outside their community. It started with screenshot-tracking by embedding small 1xN base64 images that were almost completely transparent except for some tinting on each pixel to represent a 1 or a 0 bit at the edges of several elements where they wouldn't be noticed. That didn't survive jpeg compression or photos, so I added text transforms that represented tracking bits as well. Things like one vs two spaces after a period or an expanded contraction would correspond to a bit of the ID of the user the text was served to.
That worked fine since the site was mostly prose, but I couldn't help but think about generalizing it to encode tracking bits as page styling information as well. Never ended up finishing that implementation because I got too in the weeds trying to account for rendering differences in customized user agents by adding error correction bits to the IDs. That way it wouldn't matter if a few styles were overridden or obscured.
I don't think any of these ideas were particularly novel or difficult to think of, so I'd expect plenty of independent implementations over the years. If they do their job right you'd never know about them, so there's likely more than you expect.
It is actually pretty common among Chinese companies. At least in Tiktok, where all software are internally developed (as explained in the article they use Lark, something similar to Slack).
This gives them flexibility and usability as different softwares can interact seamlessly. For example you can click open a link to the document that other people are screen sharing during a meeting. But it also embeds your name on the screen so you probably don't want to take a screenshot or a photo.
I know many companies also use techniques that generate invisible watermarks that are difficult to remove without breaking the image. I don't know exactly what the technique is, but maybe this is close:
https://patents.google.com/patent/CN106384328A/zh
Why, sure we can: https://www.xsecuritas.com/
https://zecurion.com/blog/screen-watermarks-and-screen-photo...
Spy v spy, It has a phone detector, but will it detect my smart glasses or my nest cam…or the camera secreted in my bookcase capturing my screen?
They could place nearly invisible watermarks that only a camera would notice. Probably your safest bet is to deep fry the image. Pictures of pictures with high compression turned on.
For a wavelet based stamp, you might have to stamp your own pattern on top so it no longer cleanly reads.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187705091...
Lol it's literally just a giant watermark across the screen with the person's name and blocking the screen when the webcam identifies a smartphone...
Needless to say, both of these are trivially bypassable.
I think most of us are more concerned about the potential presence of invisible watermarks, obviously submitting a picture with "JOHN SMITH ACME CORP 2025-01-09" blatantly strewn across the screen will be trivially traced back to you
Conveniently, they also offer webcam-based smartphone detection, tied into screen blanking and reporting.
The fact we are discussing this is a damning indictment of late-stage capitalism.
Google used to watermark internal emails using non-visible Unicode. It would catch people copy-pasting things to the press. (This was circa 2010; I don't know if they still do it.)
Printers and copiers have hidden "tracking dots" that can ID the specific device used. Introduced by Xerox in the mid 80s and not known to the public until 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
Sorry but this wouldn't be "next level" spyware.
I do remember world of warcraft using some funny trickery for their screenshots too. embedding client info into the screenshots, to figure out who took it. (If the player was under NDA or similar)
https://www.ownedcore.com/forums/world-of-warcraft/world-of-...
difficult to spot if you didnt know what to look for
> Google used to watermark internal emails using non-visible Unicode. It would catch people copy-pasting things to the press.
How does that even work? I assume the unique identifiers are generated along the lines of https://zws.im but do they send a different version of the same email to each unique recipient? Or does the watermark get inserted by some email client when copying text?
It was the former, a unique ID per recipient.
Neither of those things would be picked up by a camera taking a picture of the screen or printed document.
Invisible unicode and tracking dots probably won't be captured in a highly compressed jpeg photograph of a screen, though.
iPhones, Pixels, and Samsung phones have been defaulting to HEIC for around five years now, so it’s unlikely that compression alone would prevent tracking dots or other unique noise or patterns from being preserved. Steganography is a well-established technique that can definitely survive through photographs, even under compression. Variations in fonts or typography could be used for tracking too. There are plenty of creative ways this could be achieved.
Yes, but as long as the journalists don't reshare the photos (or the content verbatim), they can't be traced back to you.
While its certainly possible, its also highly unlikely.
> Additionally, after the story was published, TikTok enabled a feature that now alerts everyone in a company-wide Lark channel — a Slack competitor from TikTok parent ByteDance — when a screenshot is taken.)
Luckily their employees don't have phones.
It's rare that a single sentence can tell me so clearly whether or not I'd be willing to work at a company.
The actual article could be misleading (it's not obvious if setting their RTO status to "natural disaster" status means they expend their sick days or not), but this is so clearly petty micromanagement that there's really no ambiguity.
Employees are penalized for PTO if they cannot work from home (e.g. wifi issues, evac orders)
If they can still work from home, they can use the "natural disaster" exception.
If they are working why do they need an exception?
Because they normally have mandatory work-from-office days during which you're not allowed to WFH. So now you can get an exception for that
I might take a dozen screenshots a day for various reasons not connected to communicating with journalists. This seems like a low signal to noise way of monitoring employees.
And I thought the years I had to use Amazon Chime was bad….
Import Chinese companies, get Chinese working conditions.
To be fair, US working conditions are pretty bad compared to EU. Sure, Chinese conditions might be worse, but US conditions aren’t good to begin with.
US working conditions are better, in the sense that we get paid three times as much.
Salaries are only better for certain fields in the US though. If you are working in a grocery store in the US vs EU, you would be better off in EU. And you wouldn't have to worry about falling ill and skyrocketing healthcare costs.
And lose that advantage the moment you need to go to the hospital.
In certain areas of the US maybe. I believe the average wage in the EU is actually higher than in the US. Need to look up the Source, which is hard because I'm on mobile right now.
To be fair, this is a company in the U.S and the people are working in the U.S so it is in fact - U.S working conditions, if you imported the company to the EU it would not be EU working conditions because those working. conditions would be illegal.
OK evidently 2 people are unhappy to hear these conditions would be illegal in the EU and have downvoted.
To be fair, EU working conditions are pretty bad compared to Canada. Sure, Chinese conditions might be worse, but EU conditions aren't good to begin with.
Never in my life have I heard this.
I worked in both EU and Canada.. and no, lol, Canada does not have better working conditions. Less vacation, longer working hours, less ‘protection’ for employees vs employers.
To me, that is an absurd statement. Speaking as someone who has work in EU countries, the US, UK, and Australia, the EU was by far the best for “working conditions” (holiday, flexibility, benefits, overall working environment). I’ve never worked in Canada, I admit, but know people who have.
??? Everyone I know in the EU gets like 4x more vacation than most people in Canada. And work 30-40% less hours weekly.
This. Canada is between Europe and USA
What? EU has way better conditions than Canada
Didn't realize Amazon is a Chinese company.
Judging by the stories people have told online over the past few years, it sounds like a pretty standard american working condition...
Though i gotta be honest, i have no idea what the rules are where i live (Denmark)...
Seems like a company operating in the US according to US employment standards to me.
We’re free to increase our employment standards, we just have to outbid the American oligarchs for political power.
Did you know that there is actually no US federal requirement for lunch breaks or rest breaks?
I mean this is basically how Elon and Vivek want Americans to work. Otherwise the H1Bs are coming to take your job.
This is how millions of Americans already work. Millions have no paid sick time at all (and even unpaid sick leave can be iffy) and millions more get less generous PTO than this.
The only remarkable thing is that this policy is bad for a tech company. Tech is special because demand for specialized workers is high and supply is low. But in most other industries, this would be standard behavior.
Workers in other industries deserve better, but it’s also important to remember that the HN bubble isn’t the norm.
Just to back up your comment with a citation.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-state-of-paid-s...
Jason, the alleged "lefty" on the All-in podcast is on record as really wanting to get this going here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system
Not sure why you’re being downvoted. Elon has been pretty blatant about how he thinks Americans are lazy for not essentially living at work.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-chinese-workers
>Otherwise the H1Bs are coming to take your job.
Cool, let's just accelerate to the inevitable lawsuits when the government questions why so many Americans can't get work but we're importing more people than ever.
Give Trump's whole narrative, that will be an interesting show to watch.
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I don’t think you can generalize anecdotes to apply to a nationality.
This is an oversimplification. One should of course take great care not to use generalizations to promote group-based hatred, but this is in addition to the fact that it would be naive (and impossibly restrictive) to declare nationality generalization forbidden. Nationalities, cultures, and many other set-formings of humans have salient features, on average, for better or worse.
You’re ignoring the context of my comment. They’re implying that Indians are second-rate engineers, not that they have a cuisine that uses lots of spices.
Acknowledging the nuance on this issue is hard, because a lot of people will call you a literal nazi for doing so. But that is a position which, ultimately, entirely denies the existence of culture as a concept.
Is there any data, not anecdotes, that H1B drags wages or working conditions down?
US Tech has the highest salaries world.
This compulsive need for data is such a mental crutch. Reason from first principles. Use logic. You don’t need to be spoon-fed data from a scientifically rigorous study in order to deduce basic cause-and-effect relationships.
That's not a "crutch", that's "I'm going to imply your lying while I pretend to be reasonable".
There are sub-$60K H1B jobs. That's below my $55K starting salary as a fresh grad which, after adjustment, is $100K today. That was in an era when CS grads were pulling $100K with no experience so by no means extravagant for the time.
We've had decades of STEM hype but somehow can't produce college grads to do entry level tech work?
Econ 101. If an employer can pay someone less to do the same job, they will.
https://www.epi.org/press/a-majority-of-migrant-workers-empl...
As a small amount of data, my asking salary has never been less than the highest paid H1B at a company plus another $30k/yr, and I've always been offered more than I've asked, despite the H1B position being more senior. That doesn't prove wages being dragged down by itself, but it's evidence of H1B workers being paid less than the legally mandated "actual wage", and ECON 101 can take care of the rest in terms of the expected effects on the market.
The plural of anecdote is not data, but at some overwhelming quantity it is as demonstrative as data.
I don’t understand why people on this forum, who are 90+% in favor of remote work and don’t believe physical presence in an office matters at all, believe they companies will choose to replace H1-B employees with different people when they can simply hire those exact same H1-B employees at a quarter of the cost when they are forced to return to their home countries?
The H1-B logically displaces offshoring, not citizens. Otherwise it’s a massive coincidence that the H1-B visa happens to be used overwhelmingly by the industry that has seen the highest increase in salaries by far for Americans over the past 2 decades.
So you do bring up a very common line of thinking (and, I think, a common one that isn't expressed often in such topics).
Firstly, you seem to be conflating H1-B with obtaining a foreign contractor. That's an accounting burden, often comes with time zone issues, and does damage to a company's return-to-office agenda unless they are hired for something completely divorced from other teams. This puts the contractor in a considerable position as they can maneuver with effectively zero oversight. Great for the contractor, bad for the employer (at least the first time; after a rapport is established it could be fine).
If that's not what you meant, then the engineer(s) being hired are from a staffing agency or similar. But now you are at the behest of who the staffing agency pulls for local talent and their ability to retain said talent. Often, while incoming engineers can be vetted the employer doesn't have the latitude of choosing any engineer from the region and plucking them like they would s contractor or H1-B.
An H1-B gives the employer the best of all worlds at the cost of sponsorship. The employee works for them and has considerably less options as many companies do not sponsor H1-B visas, so they have less opportunities. Between the value of the US dollar and engineers being salaried much lower elsewhere you could likely pull an H1-B for half the price of a US engineer and in many cases they would still come out very well ahead. As well, by bringing them to the US you fix any time zone issues and RTO questions.
FWIW, I think a lot of US engineers tend to have a negative view on both being in-office AND having compensation reduced; I think most would be fine with a reduction in comp if it meant remote work - but most companies seem much more interested in maximum control AND minimal investment.
I more or less agree with you, but there’s a third path that you left out: expanding their footprint in other countries. For example, pretty much all major tech cos have offices in Hyderabad, India.
Oh, definitely, and that does resolve a large class of the problems that people have with H1-B visas! However, it's often a non-trivial choice to go that route so it excludes the majority of companies that still want access to talent. As well, even if a company does have such a footprint there are still compelling reasons they could make for wanting to bring that talent stateside long-term (i.e. a particular team is only located in the US).
Time zones are still a thing to workaround. It's easier to import them or to nearshoe. Tech in south America is there but not super plentiful.
But you're missing the real reason. It's not about salaries by itself. It's control. People like musk would even pay H1b's more than an American when they lack the leverage to easily hop to another job or can threaten to end their visa if they get uppity. Even under American soil, he can coerce them to work to the bone easier than a citizen.
This is the (very common) fallacy that disagreeing with something, or considering it immoral, is equivalent to not believing that it will happen (if not prevented somehow).
Rough given how little PTO they have for a tech company to begin with.
Our HQ (over 3k people) is in the LA area, CEO posted on slack offering up to 10k for any fire related relocation costs during this time.
I thought Amazon was the shittiest company in tech. But even they give you 20 days PTO and 3 personal days a year and 10 sick days.
It look like that has just changed maybe last year? When I left in 2023 it was still 15 days
Which company? That sounds very generous.
I would bet Spotify.
Spotify has its US headquarters in LA?
I’m pretty sure they have a big office in the Arts District. I listen to a lot of Ringer podcasts and the hosts are often talking about the crazy benefits Spotify offers.
Probably EA
My uneducated guess is snap
EA's HQ is in the Bay Area (Redwood Shores)
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This is why we need our governments to protect the people.
It is exuberantly clear that some companies will treat their workers with the minimum amount of decency up to the point of illegality, or past that if they can get away with it.
How about an “asshole employer” gov program? Society needs to fight back against those doing harm to society.
A wet dream that will not become tangible reality in near future. The inexistent labor protections are one of the major economic drivers of USA. When companies can lay off whole departments nilly-willy (we had some discussions here on HN), they can take on riskier endeavors than their European counterparts at the same cost.
Partner works at a county agency. There are 1-2 weather-related days off you can use, but if you experience more weather than that in a year you are free to use your vacation or take unpaid time off. This applies also if the job site is closed.
The goverment is effectively the employers. They can override everything they don't like or can't find a way around. If it ever seems otherwise, you're missing part of the story.
They can, but it's slow and easily bribe able to change 2 or 3 minds to override the entire shebang.
In this case the other government is the employer.
Can’t say I’m surprised given how ByteDance is their parent.
There’s a Netflix documentary called American Factory that illustrates just how different the work culture is in China vs the U.S.
Hope they change their mind and give these folks free PTO.
The employees should unionize in response and demand better benefits and support during emergency situations.
This is the kind of abuse USA citizens think is: deserved, earned, self-inflicted.
>TikTok’s LA employees have 10 paid sick/personal (PSSL) days per year in addition to 15 PTO (paid time off/vacation) days… as TikTok’s strict return-to-office policy requires employees to work from the office a minimum of three days per week. (The days of the week are chosen by the team and can’t be swapped for other days if needed.)
Is this amount of strictness normal for the large tech companies? I’ve only worked for one - Amazon - and my position was “field by design” and didn’t come under any RTO mandates until this year. I left in late 2023.
Some user here called “cma” commented twice about how “this headline is libel”.
Both comments are now deleted/taken down. Do we have a Chinese gov shill in the mix?
No, just someone who realised their mistake, I think.
Edit: I mean yes of course, this is the internet, but I doubt that’s what cma was doing.
Are their sick days limited? If not, no harm done?
10 days per year.
Wait? In the US you can have "limited sick days"? But what happen if you have something bad and must be off work for 6 months? Who pays you?
Yes.
In a few states, there is a state-run short-term disability insurance program that pays if you are sick. Some employers offer short-term disability insurance as part of their benefits package, which is also available to purchase privately. If you don't have this, you are on your own in the short term. If you or a family member are sick, your employer must give you job-protected unpaid leave for up to six months.
If you have a long-term disability, which is expected to last longer than a year or result in death, you are eligible for Social Security Disability payments and Medicare health insurance from the federal government. Again, some employers offer supplemental term disability insurance as part of their benefits package, and it is also available to purchase privately.
You either have savings or you pay for this as part of your health insurance electives.
https://www.adp.com/resources/articles-and-insights/articles...
You can even have accrued sick days, starting at 0. Catch covid week 3 at Amazon? You'll start having problems above and beyond the illness in a hurry.
There's a separate short term disability (STD) benefit and ppl can still receive a certain percentage of their income when on leave. FMLA for longer absence
Yeah I got sick, had diagnosis from a doctor, and they denied my claim for a bunch of bullshit reasons. It took them 2 months to finally tell me I was denied. Just to recieve a fucking fax took 24-48 hours. They delay and delay as much as they can and will pull every trick to deny you. Then when they finally deny you, you just get a letter and your only way to appeal is by mail. They don't even have the decency to make your "representative" call you and tell you. Insurance is a scam.
FMLA is also only good for 12 weeks a year. And FMLA only says that they can't fire you or cancel your benefits for being sick or caring for a family member, it doesn't give you any other benefits.
And these don't actually count towards them according to the article text, not headline.
??
> TikTok’s LA employees have 10 paid sick/personal (PSSL) days per year in addition to 15 PTO (paid time off/vacation) days
> This week, TikTok’s LA staff are being asked to use their personal/sick days if they cannot work from home due to power or Wi-Fi outages, or if they’re under evacuation orders ... This leaves them fewer days later in the year to use in case of an actual illness or other personal emergency, like staying home to care for a sick child.
You might want to re-read TFA rather than reposting the same wrong information in every thread
How are other companies handling this?
Today my employer’s HR sent out an email telling everyone to put their family’s safety first and work can wait.
And I kind of did a mental “well, yeah… you’d have to be a real ghoul to think otherwise,” perplexed by the very idea that HR would feel the need to say it at all.
Guess I was wrong.
Some people will willingly work themselves into a mess without their employer’s help.
I worked at a place where I made the 24/7 schedule for a team. Part of my job was to make sure everyone took a minimum of PTO.
Lotta people would take none, ever if given the chance.
In the early days of my career, I took very little PTO and didn't mind at all. I was young, no dependents, and was growing by leaps and bounds. Forcing me to take PTO would not have been beneficial, as I wouldn't have utilized it properly.
Now, today is a very different story, and I use it responsibly, but I'm at a very different stage in my life.
> would not have been beneficial, as I wouldn't have utilized it properly
I don’t doubt it, but the employer does get to decide how long you’re at work…. even in the hopes that the employee might make a good choice.
> Forcing me to take PTO would not have been beneficial, as I wouldn't have utilized it properly.
Just so I know, what’s the proper utilization of PTO?
Sibling comment mostly nailed it for me. I was self taught as a programmer and improving my skills (and generally enjoying programming) consumed me for several years.
The whole point of compelling people to take PTO is for the mental health benefits associated with not working- decompressing, resetting, call it whatever you want. I didn't have other hobbies, didn't have money for traveling, and didn't have anyone to do those things with. My social circle was more or less as obsessed as I was. Most evenings were spent watching TV together while we worked on our laptops, either on side projects for fun or actual work.
Had I taken more PTO, my behavior in my off time would not have been any different than that of my work time. I wouldn't have gotten the benefit supposedly derived from being forced to take PTO. The one exception was a few days off to do some home renovation work that I didn't want to try to fit into evenings or weekends.
You have a limited amount of time in your life.
It’s your time, you can use it how you want.
The way you want to use it is how you end up using it. You’re welcome to use your time to do things that others see as destructive. Of course there may be consequences.
I do believe in forced PTO because it creates an opportunity for someone to think about what to do with that time (which like you said, hopefully many people choose to use that time to decompress or rest). Up to them what decision they make. It tells a company what happens when a specific person is gone (Is Kelly the only one who knows how to do X? Is Chris stealing?).
I think there’s possibly a company culture argument where you don’t want a person on PTO logging into Slack, grabbing Jira tickets, going to meetings, or whatever. In that case you maybe end up firing the person if they cross whatever line too many times. But of course if the person is valuable enough, you might look the other way. Or your culture might be such that you don’t care. Up to the company.
not GP but I assume they meant they would still do work very similar to their job, or the job itself. This is very common for lots of young techies who don't have huge social circles outside of work, but arguably not a great use of time off.
You’d be surprised (and horrified.)
AT&T wrote me up for missing pages while I was battling cancer! And I supposedly had std/ltd/fmla/etc. my current job , which I’m grateful for beyond words , would just about be sick at the idea of treating anyone like that.
What else are they gonna do, they’re probably happy they’re relevant for once.
[dead]
I don't see what the problem is.
Taken at face value, it's hideously evil, and we should fight as hard as possible to prevent this ideology from intruding any further into the culture of American employers or employers of American workers.
If there is context you feel is missing, you should add it.
The ideology that the employer-employee relationship is fundamentally one where labor is exchanged for money? The most I expect is, "Don't worry about things at work. Take care of yourself and your family. You are welcome to use any accumulated leave you have available, and your job will be here for you when you get back on your feet."
My perspective may be colored a bit by working in an environment with strict labor cost accounting where labor is accounted for down to the tenth hour (even for salaried-exempt employees), and there isn't some magical slush fund that can be used to pay for what would otherwise be unpaid leave. We do have "disaster leave" for salaried employees, but it's on a "work extra hours over the next X weeks to make up for it" basis, where X is a reasonable number given the nature of the disaster. For run-of-the-mill "snow days," it's typically 4 weeks. Taking PTO is also an option, including running up to a 40-hour negative balance. Thankfully, I don't have to deal with any of these RTO shenanigans.
> And yet, TikTok’s LA-based employees are being told to either continue their work from home or use their personal/sick days if that’s not possible, while the company’s LA office remains closed due to power outages caused by high winds.
In other words, in this case, employer is unable to provide a safe work environment (i.e., is not even "on their feet" at the moment) and their answer to that is to force employees to compensate for it using their own time off.
I would call this behavior vindictive but in my book, to be vindictive first you need to have a soul.
A natural disaster is neither the employee's nor the employer's fault. If a business's operations are interrupted due to a natural disaster (or for any other reason) and it cannot productively use an employee, it is appropriate to furlough or lay off that employee until operations can resume. Impacted employees can seek temporary or permanent employment elsewhere and, if eligible, apply for unemployment insurance compensation. The one-week waiting period for unemployment insurance is waived as part of state of emergency declarations.
If an employer wants to pay employees to stay home and do nothing because no work is available, potentially to avoid losing valuable employees, they can do that, but they are not expected to. If working remotely is feasible, it can be mutually beneficial to both the employer and employee, but like everything employment-related, it's also voluntary on both sides of the deal.
> If a business's operations are interrupted due to a natural disaster (or for any other reason) and it cannot productively use an employee, it is appropriate to furlough or lay off that employee until operations can resume.
1. Even in a logistics level, that's pretty much an abuse of "salaried" positions. Especially exempt ones. You get to suck out 60-80 hours of someone's time, but when they need to not get burned alive it's suddenly "furlough"? No.
2. A business that cannot survive for a few weeks without production is one that deserves to shit down. Individuals that don't have a savings is judged as unsafe, but companies can getaway with that behavior? It's a double standard.
>they can do that, but they are not expected to.
I'd definitely look up state laws about this one before spouting as fact. Federal may not care, but states have an incentive to not lose their entire workforce because businesses don't want to support the econimy in an emergency situation.
This is such a cop out.
You're one of those people saying the system is set up a certain way, and it can't be changed. It was built by people, they can fix it and figure out how to make it work.
I don't give a fuck about your accounting system. These are real people that work for your company, not numbers in a computer. You can't figure out how to give them some paid time off during a huge rare disaster like this? Figure it out, and fuck this whole attitude.
Making people make up their work time during a disaster. Fuck me... seriously?
> there isn't some magical slush fund that can be used to pay for what would otherwise be unpaid leave
There is.
There actually is, but it isn't the employer's responsibility. It's called Unemployment Insurance. The one-week waiting period is waived as part of the state of emergency declaration.
What would you do?
Let affected people take time off work without requiring them to use sick hours or PTO.
Are they being paid during that time? If so, what’s your limit on that?
Your limit is how long it takes them to find somewhere safe for their family. I evacuated and got back online later that day. Several leaders reached out to me to ask if I needed anything or if I wanted to take time off. In response, I feel more allegiance, and want to work harder. I love my job even more than I did 3 days ago.
Treat others how you would like to be treated. Respect breeds respect.
I’m happy that your org seems respectful and humane. That’s incredibly rare nowadays.
Ideally yes. And the limit is until things are stable.
But if you need a discrete answer, probably a few months? If we're in an emergency situation as a tech industry for more than a month, something much dire than business has happened. Many tech companies rebounded from COVID in a few months times.
> this ideology from intruding any further into the culture of American employers or employers of American workers.
Are you doing satire? This is already the status quo for American employers. Do you mean American employers of the labor aristocracy? It is hideously evil, but your wording conjures the idea that US company culture hasn't been corrupted (even with the "any further" part). It has already gone too far. The only thing that's truly interesting to me is that it's a Chinese-influenced company and China hasn't used the last decade to do socialism diplomacy through TikTok.
It's out of touch and callous.
The problem is evil sociopathy. Ironically, you can't see it.