This is also why people in France have stable, long-term jobs, instead of being fired by Wallmart every 6 months due to some war veteran scheme that allows them to save 0.1% on employee salaries.
In this particular case, if the man wasn't trained appropriately to handle international PR while doing so, the wrongdoing lies with the company.
The article itself seems to adopt a certain attitude that I really dislike. For one, I don't believe that the employee clicked accidentally. It really sounds like a lie. Then the arguments alternate between "it's not my job" and "Why should we care about China/other countries? Why should just tell them to f-ck off!". The truth is that both the US and the company seem to have an opinion. The employee, either due to negligence or ignorance, broke that line, and the company faced a backlash. It's not like China is exceptionally evil or something. I hate people trying to vilify entrire countries and politicize everything. It sounds like the author is just looking for a reason to bash China.
A lot of young people in France are on short-term contracts, precisely because long-term employees are hard to fire.
Imagine that you are a startup in France, with long-term employees, and suddenly you realize you screwed up, and you have to cut your expenses in half. Today, that means your startup is dead and all employees are screwed, but in the US, your startup continues with a much lower valuation. Which is better for the worker? There is no right answer, but in France, there's a startup-killing answer.
> you are a startup in France, with long-term employees, and suddenly you realize you screwed up, and you have to cut your expenses in half.
You dismiss employees equivalent to half of your expenses on economic grounds, and after the appropriate notice period (1 month for employees with 6 months - 2 years tenure [1]) you now have half the expenses.
If that's not fast enough, I doubt your startup would have survived for more than 2 months with an instant layoff.
Surely at-will employment is not all it takes to suddenly have lots of successful startups. Otherwise the US would have a more spread-out distribution of startups, instead of the cluster in Silicon Valley.
When you do get interviewed by French TV, I hope you won't pretend like this is a single-cause issue with a simple fix.
California's advantages are existing tech employers, wildly risk taking investors, and above average US workers' rights like banning non compete agreements. The EU has the first, none of the second, and I wouldn't know about the third.
> why the EU doesn't have as many startups as Silicon Valley
I'm french. I can't speak for sure about other EU countries, but I can speak about France.
The REAL and main reason why tech startups are less frequent here is cultural.
In France we have a HUGE problem with elitism & a widespread negative attitude toward anybody who tries to innovate/change/make things. It's a pervasive problem, I've been MANY times hit HARD by that problem.
Initiative is strongly discouraged (even if most people will claim the opposite): no matter what you do, a LOT of people will immediately give you _negative_ critics of all kind, sometimes mind-bogglingly stupid: "it'll never work", "that's not a good idea", etc. The more clueless they are, the most aggresisve they are about it. It's really hard to be motivated in such an environment, and of course it also has a direct impact when you try to find funds or associates...
Also, many people, especially the managers & the elites only see the BIG companies as being worth anything, despite the fact that small to medium businesses make the majority of employment & create the most value.
Add to that the HUGE problem that managers and all the elite (politics, leaders, whatever), salespeople, and many others, have an extremely TOXIC attitude toward people who DO THINGS. For instance I was given shit many times because while being a team lead I was involved in the programming part. To them, a manager does NOT get his/her hands DIRTY. Which is stupid of course and explains a LOT of the problems we have here.
And trust me, this goes very far, there is a real CONTEMPT toward people like me, who are the ones who build the products & services that bring all the money. I've been mocked to my face because of that by people (sales & managers) who have no clue about how to manage a project, a team, and even less a programming project... (And I've worked on HUGE telecom projects, not a couple of PHP pages). Same goes for everybody in my family, who are mostly scientists/engineers. This in turn creates a big dissatisfaction -or worse- in the people who are in the trenches, creating an awful "us versus them" mentality that kills productivity & often creates a very bad work atmosphere.
And don't get me started about the awful prejudices against programmers (and everybody involved in computer projects). It's REALLY bad! So bad that I regret choosing that field. Here also there is a huge contempt & all the ridiculous prejudices that you probably know about nerds, programmers, etc. (Of the hundreds of developers/SE I've met, I can count on the fingers of ONE hand the ones who somewhat fit the stereotypes, and those were people with severe mental issues, something not related to the job). Another BIG problem is the "programming is easy" B.S. This leads many managers to think that they can replace experienced people like me with cheap beginners, sometimes in foreign countries, with disastrous results (as I wrote above, I worked in BIG projects, with crushing responsibilities, not the stuff that beginners can handle by themselves even if they are good which was not the case because being cheap, they were not the best, not by a long shot).
The huge bureaucracy does not help either, but it's not the most important issue.
In case someone points out the few recent initiatives to encourage startups in France, let me repeat what I just wrote: the fundamental issue is ATTITUDE. Until we can fix that, everything else is basically useless.
> A lot of young people in France are on short-term contracts, precisely because long-term employees are hard to fire.
Having a long-term contract where you can be fired at-will any day is effectively the same as cumulating short-term contracts, so instead of a lot of people on short-term contracts, you just have everybody (100%) on short term contracts.
There is one big difference. If you have a long term contract in the US where you can get fired at will, you can still get a mortgage. If you're cumulating short term contracts in France, no bank will agree to let you get a mortgage or will make it very difficult.
This creates an underclass of people who are unable to buy their own house because of the employment situation
That's not the case in the US: employees have a lot more protection if they're a part of a "protected class". And, surprisingly enough, it works pretty well.
I, personally, have a limited ability to be a part of a protected class, but that appears to work out ok for people like me. I've been fired once, and I got a better job as a result.
> A lot of young people in France are on short-term contracts, precisely because long-term employees are hard to fire.
A lot of American workers are on short-term contracts, too, for nearly the same reasons.
> Imagine that you are a startup in France, with long-term employees, and suddenly you realize you screwed up, and you have to cut your expenses in half. Today, that means your startup is dead and all employees are screwed, but in the US, your startup continues with a much lower valuation. Which is better for the worker? There is no right answer, but in France, there's a startup-killing answer.
The risk that it will go out of business is part of working for a startup. It doesn't make sense to punish the rest of us to save a handful of startup employees.
Yeah, that sounds great... economic strife for everybody so that a few well connected college dropouts can get rich on "Uber for Food" or a viral phone game.
Startups are a form of volatile research projects that could be done better in a corporate environment. Startups provide precarious and unstable employment, and on average they fail and lead to unemployment.
I personally love working on new, potent ideas, but this is not a viable model of development for society. "Gig economy" is getting out of control, and it's better to kill the startups than to let people abuse the legal loopholes they require.
If you cannot provide a certain minimum of employment time, you shouldn't hire people. As for short-term contracts, they were misused a lot post-2008, but the situation is much better now and most people won't work under such contracts.
In "The Innovator's Dilemma" Christensen makes a compelling argument why startups can eat an established company's lunch, but it doesn't go so far as say innovation cannot come from established corporations or only comes from startups. There are examples where established companies have innovated. Three off the top of my head: Bell Labs as part of Bell Telephone made many critical innovations; Apple has also continued to innovate over the years. IBM isn't always thought of as innovating nowadays, but they've had a long history of not only patenting new ideas but also bringing them to market.
The top companies in the US are all new ones (except for GE). AT&T is irrelevant today, as is IBM after it got disrupted by startups Microsoft and Compaq.
Sure, there's turnover. And there will likely always be cycles like that. That only means that companies don't last or innovate forever, not that they can't innovate.
Out of curiosity, what criteria are you using for "top companies"? Looking at the top 10 of the Fortune 500 (http://fortune.com/fortune500/) and their founding years:
I'm not listing these as counterfactual, but only as an example. I know there are different ways of measuring "top" companies, and these are two. It's also arguable that these don't capture the idea of "top innovators". I'm interested in knowing what you're using. I'm probably missing something obvious.
I looked them up on Wikipedia. Good catch! Typo. And if I were consistent, I would have made a note on the restructuring as I did in a couple of other cases. The commenter apologizes for the error. ;)
I also checked Berkshire Hathaway (1889). It actually goes back to 1839. But does a series of mergers and acquisitions actually count here? The modern form came from Warren Buffett buying shares in it in 1962, and eventually buying them out years later. Buffett's version of the company has pretty much no resemblance to the company he bought out, they aren't at all in the same business, and he mentioned in 2010 that BH was more of a hindrance than a help.
My point (which I'll repeat once and then I'm done) is not that established companies never get disrupted or innovate forever, but to push back against the idea that established companies can't innovate (and that The Innovator's Dilemma contends that disruption is the only way innovation happens), which I took from "Innovation doesn't come from established corporations." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16665304) I don't see anything you've added that contradicts that.
Yea I'd disagree. Like the process of evolution, I believe that ideas and the mutation and the proliferation of those ideas are what leads to progress. More seeds.
Hey, I'm all in favor of you working on new ideas, but only within an existing corporate environment. But there's plenty of proof that that's a terrible way to advance society at large.
If a number of people(experienced/experts in a field) are willing to volunteer their time and/or capital in exchange for equity/patents/stock, then it's all good. My problem lies with externalizing the cost and risk to employees.
If they need something done and they can't guarantee long-term employment, they can buy commercial services for what they need. Engineering firms and temp offices will be happy to send you a secretary, a software solution or a CAD file with what you asked.
In this particular case, if the man wasn't trained appropriately to handle international PR while doing so, the wrongdoing lies with the company.
The article itself seems to adopt a certain attitude that I really dislike. For one, I don't believe that the employee clicked accidentally. It really sounds like a lie. Then the arguments alternate between "it's not my job" and "Why should we care about China/other countries? Why should just tell them to f-ck off!". The truth is that both the US and the company seem to have an opinion. The employee, either due to negligence or ignorance, broke that line, and the company faced a backlash. It's not like China is exceptionally evil or something. I hate people trying to vilify entrire countries and politicize everything. It sounds like the author is just looking for a reason to bash China.