Googler... ex-Googler

Your choice of verb tells a lot about what you think of your employees.

Also, surely if they were excellent candidates then you'd be doing your absolute best to keep them around?

> unions are just corporate blackmailing.

This is such an absurdly ignorant take that is hard to start educating you, it also depends a lot on what society you live in since your view on unions will be tainted by what you see in it.

In places like the Nordics, unions are one of the cornerstones of a free labour market, look up how Sweden has a freer labour market than the USA to learn something at least :)

In many cases problematic employees can and are removed from EU companies.

If your point is to score virtue point, keep at it, but if you actually want to change anyone mind, avoid terms like "is hard to start educating you", it just makes you sound like a douche

I don't even think it's possible to change someone's mind who already think that way, since it's purely from a point of absolute ignorance and I'm not willing to put enough effort to cite literature that could give them good starting points to understand something they are very likely not even willing to start understanding. They have a lazy position, I reply lazily.

They have an ideological position, based on ignorance, and from a single statement it's pretty clear they aren't curious and willing to change their mind.

Hence why I cite to look into how unions work in the Nordics, at least that is a starting point if they want to learn more about labour movements. It takes someone being curious though.

In the end, it was absolutely honest: it is hard to start educating someone who holds that position a priori and based on pure ignorance, and if not ignorance it's maliciousness, there's not much of a spectrum in this case.

Well to be fair excellent candidates are excellent on paper. It sometimes happens (not often, but not once in a blue moon either) that the candidate turns out to be completely unsuitable for the job.

You don't sound like a big company ceo. If you have a good reason, even as a small company, and revenue / affordability is one, you can fire people.

You just need to be able to pay them for min. 3 month if thats your contract length and as a business owner you should know how to calculate.

just to hammer this point home: Every mandatory employee benefit has a huge cost, and adding enough of them kills your economy. It makes it more expensive to have an employee than X many jobs can justify. That X grows every year, and that's X people who cant do that job and get paid money for it.

Why else do you go to work?

The fact that these things are seen as optional and unimportant explains a lot of what's happened to public discourse.

In your case, yes, you were absolutely a resource. This is exactly why companies of that size simply shouldn't exist - because they cannot not treat their employees as resources, with all the inhumanity this implies.

And again, work is a transaction. I’m perfectly fine with being treated as a resource when I was getting a quarter million a year and working remotely…

But, more importantly, a company that large is simply too much concentrated economic power (which then translates to political power). Even if it was all just robots, I'd still say no. Our political system is in shambles in large part because of these kinds of entities.

Our politics is in shambles because of religious nutcases, anti science, anti intellectuals, who are afraid of the country becoming majority-minority and straight out racism and bitterness.

Amazon has nothing to do with that.