Six months of severance per fired employee is a rounding error. If you're doing things right and hiring properly, less than 2% of the people you bring in should ever be fired anyway. So you're talking about 0.12 months (just 4 days) of salary per employee. Again, a rounding error.
Also, the sleazy tech company alternative (to severance) of PIPing the employee for 2-3 months is more expensive than severance, because of the effects on morale to force the manager to run a kangaroo court and the team to deal with a walking-dead employee who's probably pissing on morale intentionally (I would).
France (and, more generally, Europe) has its problems but that is not even on the top 20. Social class fatalism is more of a problem, and that's reinforced by the fact that (unlike in the U.S.) it's very hard to get even moderately wealthy by working. Programmers and lawyers and doctors make less than here, and costs of living are higher, which means that born social class imposes a ceiling. European countries are far better places than the U.S. for the poor and working class, but the middle-class people who want to rise further tend to come here. This is even worse in parts of Asia, where the idea that you can get rich by working is laughable.
Six months of severance per fired employee is a rounding error
For a marginal startup founded on a Mastercard and only tenuously on the right side of the border between life and death six months of severance is not a rounding error.
1. Don't found a startup on a Mastercard. If you're bootstrapping, pay for it out of consulting income. Stop believing the HN party line that failure doesn't have consequences. It can and, for many, it does.
2. Feel free to ignore #1, it's your life, but don't hire employees if your "funding" is a personal credit card. Really, don't. You're all kinds of not ready to be responsible for other peoples' income.
3. If you really can't afford a 6-month severance, then pull connections and give an amazing reference so he'll take that as his severance. Let him represent himself as employed, pay him during the gap, and have him line up a better job than the one he has already. Don't have the connections to place someone out on terms that he'll accept? Then how the fuck are you ever going to get funding or a first client? Take the message and hang up the phone.
I quite agree with that statement. I can talk about the French case since I'm French but I don't know about Germany. There is a lot of obstacles for a startup that you will have compared to other countries but I would not say that firing someone is one of them, it's just that you need a reason to fire someone, you can't just fire them like this. One of the main problem for me is the taxes which are ridiculously high but the most critical point in my opinion is the bureaucracy. The amount of paperwork is so high that you need to seek for advices all the time, the system is really really over-complex, it takes ages for the administration to process stuff, the bureaucracy is really killing the country. I still discover stuff every year I did not know about, if you never lived in a country like this, you have no idea how badly it can affect the economy.
First of all, Europe is a huge continent with a very diverse population. Secondly people in every country have different levels of risk tolerance. Thirdly social class is not so big issue. Of course it depends on country for example Scandinavian and Central European countries don't have social class systems as much developed as in UK.
Do you have any evidence of the fabled American social mobility? The faith in it is high, but recent things I've read seems to indicate that it's more of a dream than reality. But it's all too disorganized for me to find any sources off the top of my head.
All it takes for people like Europeans to move to a place like America is to believe in the dream. It doesn't really have to be real.
Also, the sleazy tech company alternative (to severance) of PIPing the employee for 2-3 months is more expensive than severance, because of the effects on morale to force the manager to run a kangaroo court and the team to deal with a walking-dead employee who's probably pissing on morale intentionally (I would).
France (and, more generally, Europe) has its problems but that is not even on the top 20. Social class fatalism is more of a problem, and that's reinforced by the fact that (unlike in the U.S.) it's very hard to get even moderately wealthy by working. Programmers and lawyers and doctors make less than here, and costs of living are higher, which means that born social class imposes a ceiling. European countries are far better places than the U.S. for the poor and working class, but the middle-class people who want to rise further tend to come here. This is even worse in parts of Asia, where the idea that you can get rich by working is laughable.