I was with you until this line. The valley has been producing sustainable companies for decades. Some companies fail. This is the way things go.
As for the irony, I could not agree more.
But then, I've never been one to beat around the bush when it comes to parting ways with an employee who's clearly not working out on the team.
For small startups, firings have an effect on the entire company. Absolutely make the right choice and let someone go if you have to, but it still has an amplified cost across the team.
I personally take responsibility for the emotional cost on the candidate. Asking someone to invest themselves in your company and then letting them go is a rough experience for the employee. It is the manager's responsibility to not churn and burn through people.
Missing out on a good one sucks, but in the best relationships both sides will wait for the right timing if necessary, in my experience.
As an early ZenPayroll engineer, I'm biased but also informed. That company was a shitshow from day one. Their recklessness caused a few sleepless nights for our team including one time they overwrote every bank account number (by scripting our front end, after asking SMB users for their passwords and storing them in spreadsheets.) This caused tens of millions of dollars in failed transactions. For _payroll_.
Rule 1 of startups: build something people loved. The last line of the article:
They are the epitome of what's wrong in Silicon Valley, not what is right. Not caring about employees, setting a bar for professionalism as high as a reality TV show, and, to quote Thomas Hobbes, "restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death." Not to mention ethics violations and breaking laws that (unlike Uber and taxis) are on the books to protect protect health insurance.This was not a grey area.
The Valley has yet to prove that it can build sustainable companies. We can get to about 6 years of hyper-growth, but outside of that it is really questionable. Look at Square, Twitter, and Box post-IPO or the myriad large startups that refuse to IPO. You've got Google, Apple, and Facebook, but that's hardly proof of repeatable success.