But when I play poker, I lie and deceive as well as I possibly can, without remorse or hesitation. That’s because lies and deception are part of the game.
Likewise, when I engage in an employment relationship with a business, I play by those rules.
It is complicated, and to a degree it certainly makes sense to act as though you have a commitment beyond what money paid has bought… but just like all companies do, when enough is at stake, you should recognize that it’s a business relationship and it may not be to your advantage to pretend a higher level of commitment exists between you than really does. It’s a tough call. Burning bridges you don’t have to is not good. Neither is playing the sucker for very long.
Edit: Yikes, I should have presented my poker analogy differently to be more clear!
Lying and deceit is good in poker, but definitely not in business, IMO.
In business the rule is something like this: Pretend that every sentence making claims about the future ends with "... assuming, of course, we either have a signed contract to that effect or nothing significant changes between now and then." That goes for your own statements and the other party's. I think you will do well acting truthfully with those caveats assumed (and avoiding those that don't act truthfully within those caveats).
A reply put it like this, which I like: present your "future-perfect-best self" and expect your employer/potential employer to do the same.
If you make these your rules, you're virtually guaranteeing you'll play with others who think similarly. There is another move at every poker table: get up. Not everyone is playing poker. There are companies and people who interview with integrity. The veteran advantage is in knowing who they are.
Metaphors suck, I know
The other brings machine guns.
Maybe there is such a thing as absolute virtue, and maybe the army of swords has found it. Maybe it's worth dying on this literal hill to defend the way of the sword. Maybe they believe insisting that the world "should" work some arbitrary way will make it so.
In any case, by fighting this way they've chosen to lose. By losing they've ensured the values they're supposedly defending won't survive—so what was the point?
If your actual true goal is to preserve the way of the sword, you bring artillery and tanks and wipe the other army off the map; then you go back to your way. Or make alliances in which your swords can serve some purpose, or use diplomacy to keep the war from starting. Just anything that's not the least effective strategy.
If your goal instead is to feel Right, you fight as Real Men do and guarantee the way of the sword is extinguished.
There is no world in which you fight with swords against machine guns while ensuring the continued existence of the way of the sword. (There's an echo of the paradox of tolerance here.) You have to choose between defending it effectively, preserving it as much as possible in the world that actually exists, or doubling down and losing everything on purpose for nothing.
It's tempting to insist there is such a world, but that's just insisting on the way of the sword, again, except about possible worlds.
Further, you have dehumanize the attacker. They have agency and don't have to attack in the first place. Even then, your analogy fails because you can disengage from the "attacking force" (quit or not accept an offer) without surrendering in the theater of operations of the professional world.
I try to be good. I'd like that from others.
But when your bubbles intersect and you're in the same game, competing directly, other people's ethics absolutely do constrain the ethics you can choose for yourself while remaining effective. I'm not saying you should sacrifice your principles; I'm saying you should mind the difference between sticking to your principles and winning, accept they aren't the same, and not insist they always are or would be "if everyone just." Because everyone won't just.
Your principles may make you better as a person in some way (they really might!) but that doesn't mean they'll make you win. Not admitting this will make you less effective at defending them.
Maybe I'm getting away from the point of the thread, I don't know.
I guess in my analogy the war has come to the army of swords, like it or not. Team Machine Gun could have chosen to be nice. They didn't, so what now? The answer cannot be, "Well, then they're bad." It doesn't matter if they're good or bad: they're here. They don't care what you think. So what do you do?
And the American Service-Members' Protection Act…
If there really are no sword hills to charge and it’s all machine guns - then I don’t mind going down that way. I can’t imagine that environment is anything but depressing anyways.
That's not the way I took it, but if you're right I wouldn't disagree. Sometimes you can play a different game. Though strategies designed to win will outcompete and replace ones that aren't, so you may not have that option in the long run.
> You have to choose between [...] or doubling down and losing everything on purpose for nothing.
If you choose to double down you might get lucky and win, or some outside-context thing might happen and who knows. There's a range of not-impossible outcomes. The outcome doesn't justify the strategy unless the strategy produced it.
The unspoken rule is that things can change dramatically in a few hours and each party should deal with it - which means it's also totally ok to back out of the offer you received and move on.
Startups have "aspirational" speaking where they say they're using revolutionary "AI" and yadda-yadda to do such and such - even if they don't have any of that and there's nothing actually on the roadmap for it. It's a lie. You may want it but you don't.
If I say I have a billion dollars and fly to the moon on weekends - am I lying if I don't actually? In your words - no. I'm being "aspirational".
It was true when they made the offer, time passes and things changed, now it's not true.
It's a lie if it's false when you say it - not if it becomes false in the unpredictable future.
Yes, absolutely. It’s called integrity. I just bought a house, probably at a loss, at the top of the market, and could have backed out because the economic situation is no longer looking as great. I could have easily used a BS contingency to get out of the contract. However, I made a handshake agreement and asked someone to upend their life for me.
My own code of ethics is to do what I say I will. Maybe it’s not the most game theory thing to do but at least I can sleep at night knowing I was an honest person. There are things in life more important than money.
Not only this, but I think even in purely self-interested financial terms your ethical approach is superior over the long term.
Over time, truth and honesty offer a compounding positive spiral.
You make better decisions because a) the inputs are free of lies and b) you make them carefully knowing you will own the consequences.
Reputationally you garner trust which makes possibilities available to you (collaboration, quid pro quo, and low-friction litigation-fee business relationships) that are not open to unethical people.
How about Coinbase withdraws the offer AND gives the former-future-employee some money to reflect the fact that Coinbase really did want to hire them but now genuinely can't AND that this change has a real and negative impact on the former-future-employee?
Like, a payment on the order of a month or two of living costs (not just "Sorry, and here's $100")
Sure that's expensive, but it's still cheaper than hiring the person for months of time, what with salary, benefits, office and equipment costs, etc.
> This decision is not a reflection on the highly talented people we had extended job offers to. We will apply our generous severance philosophy to offset the financial impact of this decision.
Look at this from the angle of an insurance company pricing in risk. For example, I might consider a job paying 500k TC for a 1/3 risk that the company goes bust in 2 months. I might also accept an offer for 300k at a company that has a 1/10 risk of going bust in 2 months. And there are a lot of people who would accept working at a company that pays 150k for a 1/100 chance of going bust in the same timeframe.
The thing is, the overall compensation for all of the above scenarios is exactly the same, but the risk is priced differently. Unfortunately some companies are deceptive, and don’t fairly articulate the risk to candidates, which can wildly swing the market value of their compensation. When expectations doesn’t match reality, people feel like they were taken advantage of.
Just one or two months? Banks insist on 6 months of expenses these days when you apply for a mortgage with an offer letter in hand because they know that shit happens all the time.
Here's the kicker: companies have a very good idea of the financial shape they are in. It's just not possible that there was a sudden downturn in fortunes between the offer letter and start date. Except if a round of funding fell through, but an honest man doesn't hire on promises.
The corollary is that these days everyone is a crook.
It was true when they accepted the offer, time passes and things changed (e.g., got a better offer), now it's not true.
Isn't this exactly what's happening if you accept an exploding offer and then later rescind your acceptance if you get a better one? The job offer was the best you had at the time, so you accepted it. Somewhat unexpectedly you later receive a better offer, so you have to rescind the first.
I'm not necessarily saying I agree with this practice, but I do agree it's pretty close to what Coinbase is doing with the roles reversed.
Edit: to be clear, I don't mean things like knowingly lying beforehand, but if circumstances drastically changed, I would 100% expect companies to rescind outstanding offers, so I similarly wouldn't hold it against a candidate for rescinding their acceptance if their circumstances changed significantly. It's reasonable to expect both companies and candidates to act in good faith, but it's unreasonable for them to face significant hardship just to honour an offer if their situation changes.
Replace companies with jobseekers.
Some jobseekers don't do this sort of thing. That others do doesn't justify making this sort of choice with every jobseeker.
I've talked to recruiters who have been rude to me for refusing to "give a number" as in my expected salary/wages. I also do not recommend accepting offers and then backing out. However, I submit that there is no company, even if you founded it yourself, that deserves your loyalty forever.
Are really people so asinine to believe that hiring managers aren't lying through their teeth the entire time they talk to you? I guess HN is full of people who are naive or have malicious intent.
If anyone here thinks their manager truly cares about them (and you work in SV) - you're naive.
Your advice is not universal. Consider broadening your sample size.
When it comes to being “default alive” there is _zero_ consideration for the human impact. I could not agree more strongly that there’s all sorts of social mores around employee behaving well but virtually zero around executive behavior (you put an exclamation after CEO as if it should be surprising, when the opposite should be).
I’ve read these CEOs brag about “generous severance” that turns out to be 3 weeks.
WSJ reported less than a week ago Coinbase execs netted BILLIONS in PERSONAL profits to execs in the last year. Think any of that money could have been used as a rainy day fund to not fuck over people who resigned from their last job expecting to start at Coinbase?
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/coinbase-leaders-net-1-2-bi...
The amount of apologism for tech execs who act so selfishly over and over again, while the cogs are held to these insanely high standards of behavior, is infuriating.
Call a spade a spade. Brian Armstrong is a selfish piece of trash who dumped hundreds of millions of his company stock for his own profit while reneging on people who took his company’s word for what it was and put their financial health in his hands.
I’ve never been a cog. I simply refuse to. I take jobs where I’m valued and treated well, and I leave those I don’t. This is entirely possible if you make it a high-order goal. There’s nothing naive about it; I’ve made a good living this way for 30 years.
That's an incredibly privileged position. Sometimes, people resort to various tactics, including embellishing and ghosting to get ahead, especially when they feel like they have no other choice.
That doesn't excuse it, but it happens anyway.
What's important to remember is that the power wielded by the company and the employee is not symmetrical, so they have to be treated with a double standard. A company will always be better equipped to lose an employee or handle a rejected offer after a round of interviews than an employee in the reverse position.
Often it is also position that was earned by hard work and delayed gratification. You make it sound like OP is in such position purely due to luck but he obviously made some right choices along the way.
In my case, I have always acted with the highest personal standards of Ethics and Integrity. Frequently, the favor has not been returned, and I have had to learn to deal with it.
I will say that my Integrity was directly relevant to my career. I worked for a Japanese corporation, and they knew they could trust me. My employees also knew they could trust me.
It's entirely possible to live in the corporate world, without surrendering your moral backbone.
I talk about this with my son. A long reputation for consistent, ethical behavior is difficult to get, easy to lose, and impossible to over-value.
To be honest, I don't understand why any competent manager would lie; any high-performing individual you hire is going to bounce as soon as they realize they've been lied to. Always be honest about the current state of your team and you'll get people who want to help you succeed.
So, when they ask you for the budget, do you give them the highest possible comp numbers in your budget?
I don’t naively believe all or most companies do this. But I have been a hiring manager at two that do.
This is easy, honest, transparent, and gets both parties off to a good start. If I do my research well the range is pretty close to the market for what I need. If the candidate wants more they can either argue with me, or say goodbye and find another position.
Do you put in transparently (after all we're talking about being honest and transparent here) in the job description so that candidates know beforehand how they'll be judged?
Do you let the candidate apply again a year later? if they have grown and learned a lot then there's certainly no reason not to hire them this time.
If so then yes, your process is honest and transparent.
All the rest of it, absolutely yes. I don't hold a grudge if someone fails an interview, unless they're truly an asshole, or dishonest, both of which are exceptionally rare.
A human relationship with your manager with mutual care is possible.
The thing to understand is this: your manager is not the business.
Unless you're working in a truly tiny company, they operate under their own set of constraints and will have to make decisions they're not really happy about. If that means firing you or low-balling your salary, then sure, you may not care much for that distinction in the hurt of the moment. And maybe they really are out to get you.
But if you treat your manager like an antagonist, don't be surprised if they end up doing the same to you.
(HR is a different story)
The rest who want to stay are only there because they're making incredibly high amounts of money thanks to being at the company just before it went public. (They joined 5+ years after the company was founded - hardly part of the original gang)
Has no one ever been a manager? Have you never worked with managers who had to do these things? I've known many managers who admit to having to do all of these things. Some of them are proud that they did it - some are ashamed because they didn't want to but ultimately had to otherwise they would've gotten fired.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether you do it because you enjoy it or because you have to - what matters is that you're doing it and someone is on the receiving end.
Genuinely - how many of you have ever done hiring while searching for a new company yourself? HN is truly full of the self-indulgent and self-righteous to think they're not doing this themselves or that this is wonderful to be around.
There are circumstances where this is ok and others where it isn't. Is it ok to hire for a company that you're retiring from? How about one where you can't continue to advance but you think is a great environment? What if you were at a startup that got acquired by a megacorp and you focus on hiring people who enjoy a big company environment?
IMO, so long as you are transparent about the pros and cons of the position, it's perfectly ethical and reasonable.
How often are people genuinely leaving companies because they think it's a great environment but it's just not for them? How often? 80%? 50%? 1%? (I'm guessing closer to 1% than 50%)
But at this point in my career I'm likely much more deliberate than average about making sure a role is giving me what I need as well as more deliberate than most managers about trying to find good all-dimension fits for my positions.
welp, this one's mine now. thanks :)
>In the light of all his burning bridges, Vimes slipped his hand back into his hip pocket.
Off topic but I wonder if current state of the art AI is able to come up with such metaphors. Or if there's research in that area.
- Immigration / relocation issues
- Partner / significant other (can't find a job, doesn't like the location. etc.) issues
- Health issues
- <Received a better offer but used one of the above reasons> issues
I've had candidates not show up on their first day and email in that regretfully they won't be able to start. Everyone was bummed, but no one wrote down their name in a list and shared it.
"Burning bridges" are very exaggerated.
For comparison, I would have never ever reached out to you again. And if I met you in the hallway at some other place, I would have made sure that everyone knows how I feel about you.
Most people who worked at one FAANG also eventually work at one more during their careers. So if you screw over one FAANG, you'll have a hard time at 40% of FAANG.
It doesn't stop there. God forbid you live in the Bay Area, and you and I perhaps cross paths at a party, Burning Man, or any other event. And for crying out loud, you better not be connected to me on Linkedin, because people will be reaching out for backchannel references for the rest of your career.
The tricky thing about all this is that you'll never know. People will just magically stop responding, when you felt that things were going great. In my career of 20 years, I've probably been professionally disappointed in something like 4 or 5 people, and I can definitely think of 2 who have resurfaced in my life one way or another.
Tech is a huge space when you're starting out. But as your career accelerates and you end up gaining more visibility, that same space becomes very small very quickly. I would not mess with my reputation, as a matter of principle, but also as a matter of prudence.
Do you have a "burn book" of people who have wronged you or something? How would you even realize it's the same person a decade down the line? Why would you even care?
StillI agree with many others here on: don't back out on a whim, only for a very good reason. Life happens.
But let's see if the inverse is true as well. If you deeply deeply deeply cared about your job (eg: it's your startup and you have exactly 12 months of runway, but it takes 4 months to source, vet, hire and onboard someone), would it matter to you that someone cheated you out of a third of your runway?
The truth is likely somewhere in the middle. That should answer why someone who is likely to reasonable care about their job and would likely experience a serious setback in their work would be really upset about the OP's actions.
It takes an average of 58 days to hire an engineer in the US. [0] Add to that another two months to onboard them. [1]
> Offer them half your company if that's what it takes.
Wait - so someone accepts a job, implying that the comp was fair. And then quits a week before a start date without any notice (OP's story). Were you recommending that founders should pre-emptively give away half of the company on top of the original offer just to prevent the possibility of any one random person acting dishonestly?
[0] https://resources.workable.com/tutorial/recruiting-kpis [1] https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-to-onboard-a-sof...
Whining about talent shortages gets annoying. In every case, I ask if they’re recruiting outside the region, recruiting employees from HBCUs and women’s colleges, considering candidates with non traditional backgrounds, etc and the answer is always “no.”
Your shortage is self-created more often than not.
I also don't think accepting an offer and later declining because you found higher comp elsewhere is dishonest. No salaried employee (where I live at least) signs a contract agreeing to work for any specified period time and I've never promised or been asked to even give my word to stick around for a set period of time.
It truly is for one very simple reason - you accept and the hiring manager tells all other candidates that the company is going with someone else. If the person then flakes out, the company is in a difficult spot because the best candidates have several offers and as soon as you're out, they confirm with their next best option.
> I've never promised or been asked to even give my word to stick around for a set period of time.
There are reputable and less reputable companies. What Coinbase is doing is clearly shitty, but at least they are going to offer a 4 month severance just if they agreed to hire you and then rescinded the offer. Again, a shitty thing to do, but even so, you'll notice that they were not contractually required to pay anyone anything for rescinding the offer, and yet they are going to do that. Why? Because reputation matters.
I still think you aren't fully taking into consideration the lack of symmetry of power in the employer-employee relationship and are expecting too much from employees while guaranteeing them so little.
Now if it is a random person easy to replace giving away 1/2 would be crazy.
58 days is under two months and a startup could hire someone within a week. I've seen someone apply, the owner chat with them a bit, hire them and they were driving across country the next day. Not every founder has those abilities to sell the candidate and have the judgement and believe in themselves to hire on intuition. If you can't do that you might fail where others succeed.
People want things both ways. They want the flexibility of at-will so they can drop someone immediately, but they also want the employee whose work will make them very wealthy to be “committed” and “in it for the long haul.”
I engaged with you on a good faith basis that you're genuinely curious about the point I am trying to make. The above comment makes it clear that you're just trolling.
> and a startup could hire someone within a week.
The act of hiring someone _can_ take far less than a week. But it shouldn't. You also shouldn't be driving cross-country for any random startup you just met yesterday. If you haven't yet realized that hiring is not a competition in expediency, I doubt I can change your mind in a single HN comment.
And if circumstances change, so does that implication.
I am not implying that there are no good reasons why someone should bail out after accepting. But you should have a very good reason for doing so. Someone else's offer that's $5k higher is not one of them.
Conversely, your company should also not fire you just because someone else showed up who is willing to do your job for $5k less. There's a certain amount of common decency that can be expected from both sides - if not for ethical reasons, then at least for practical reasons of not destroying your reputation.
In this light, yeah, that's a reasonable take. Except, frankly? Workers know that this isn't the case generally. "Common decency" isn't. And folks with power have the primary obligation; that would be employers.
I wouldn't bounce from a company over a $5K delta, but I would absolutely expect employers (most of them--I'm quite happy working where I do, where I don't feel that way) to take that low-hanging fruit at my expense the second something gets tight; expecting folks not to take that account is asking them to stick their neck out for the notion of a "professional reputation" that most people don't care about.
"Feeling a bit less wronged" is one thing, "making sure that everyone knows how I feel about you" is quite another.
- we're looking for new members for our camp and this guy shows up.
- a female friend meets him on a dating app and tells me about him.
- this guy is being considered for a lateral move within his next company, and the hiring manager is a friend of mine.
- we're on the fence about keeping this guy or letting him go.
- etc, etc.
But regardless if founder or employee, I don't see why we should lie about people misbehaving. If I know someone is a bad apple, I am not going to lie about it - especially if I can prevent someone I care about going through the same ordeal. I also don't know why I should change my mind about someone just because some time has passed. People don't change.
It's frankly pretty appalling that I have to spell this out to you. I suppose you didn't think much of the Me Too movement? While clearly not on the same scale, the fundamental societal mechanics that justify outing perpetrators of sexual harassment are the same ones that justify outing people who break contracts. The society would be a much better place if people knew that karma is real.
It’s a double-edged spear. Eventually someone you dislike will have a VC deal pending; if your defamatory comments cost them the deal (or even appear to have had a role), that person will end up owning everything you have and everything you ever will have after a massive court judgment.
And on the flip side, VCs dislike investing in people who are in litigation or who have faced it. You will have to do a lot of explaining about why you were sued, and if there was a judgment against you, it’s hard to imagine your professional judgment not getting questioned.
In short, while you say that now, I highly doubt it actually would be the case were this hypothetical a reality. You'd have to be incredibly thin-skinned and vengeful to carry this much weight to something so minor.
Attorneys love actions like those active career sabotage “revenge” tactics you’re describing, and sooner or later, someone employing them will learn the hard way.
If they’re lucky and get smarter, they’ll end up just having to write a public letter of apology they share with the world (including those they defamed the former employee to). It will have a negative impact on their own career and probably sink their chances of ever raising money again.
If they’re less lucky or unwilling to address an attorney’s letter, they’ll end up having to pay a fat seven figure settlement, attorney’s fees, and a letter of apology. VCs will be most unimpressed.
And in some cases, if they’re willing enough to go to court, they’ll be facing having their communications subpoenaed, their professional network subpoenaed and deposed about the comments, and will end up with a seven or eight figure judgment including punitive damages. VCs won’t even reply to their communications, and anyone deposed will associate the angry would-be saboteur with legal trouble.
For every you that wouldn’t hire the parent posters, there are hundreds of managers that will.
No part of the hiring loop at major tech companies for ICs that I am aware of involves checking references. We definitely don’t do that as part of the loop. Our entire hiring process is based on how well you do in the interview.
That being said, especially with the acceleration of remote work (I live on the opposite coast) Opportunities are vast.
Small companies may hold it against you and you may never have a chance to work their again but what are the odds they have a matching role and would you ever apply again.
The industry keeps getting bigger. I have never run into anyone I ever worked with in any other company.
I don't think it really matters.
The chances of seeing someone at a party or burning man or a ghost reference (they want your opinion on someone you never worked with?) is literally 0.
If you told everyone/everywhere it would make people question you.. why doesn't this great candidate (you wanted to hire them) decide to back out. What is wrong with this manager/team.. bonus is if you are successful impacting their career they can personally sue and take everything you own.
I would like to believe that your professional growth outpaces the growth of the industry. For example, if in year 1 you knew 10 other engineers, hopefully by year 10 you met many more - to the point that the ratio is higher than the growth of the industry in that same time period.
> I have never run into anyone I ever worked with in any other company.
That's not the question. The question is: "did anyone at your new company take a minute to search your social media accounts to find out if they have any shared connections?" Hint: if you got the job, it doesn't matter. But what about all the other times when you didn't get the job? You would have no way of finding out. On that note:
"71% of Hiring Decision-Makers Agree Social Media is Effective for Screening Applicants" [0]
> why doesn't this great candidate (you wanted to hire them) decide to back out. What is wrong with this manager/team
Nope, if a candidate accepts and backs out a week before their start date (as explained by the OP), that's 100% on them.
> if you are successful impacting their career they can personally sue and take everything you own.
Just because it's a corporate best practice to respond to official employment references in such a way to minimize the risk of lawsuits, it in no way means that 1) confidential backchannel references are done the same way, and 2) that speaking the truth violates defamation laws. For that to be true, you would have to 1) tell a lie, 2) know that it was a lie, and 3) for that lie to cause damages. I have never done such a thing and will never do - but I have spoken the truth while giving backchannel references. Two very different things.
https://www.prweb.com/releases/71_of_hiring_decision_makers_...
If I work with 100-300 people over a 5 years period the number of new companies would be in the 10,000+ range. The growth has been crazy.
Those reference checks target companies on your resume not positions you didn't accept.
This is happening more often because of long hiring cycles where candidates invest so much time in multiple rounds that offers and deadlines often do not align. I use to be able to target one company and find out quickly (one interview, maybe a test) if there was an offer. It literally takes 4-8 rounds where any one round can knock you out.
Having said that I've never pulled my acceptance. Once time I quit after the first day.. One small room that was so crowded it wasn't going to work (the interview happened elsewhere). The first few months are a trial for both parties.
Well, see, I don't even need to work with you to know I wouldn't enjoy it :). Spiteful much? And guess what, I bet the tech industry is big enough that it will never happen, so cheers.
1. Most people never gain any amount of visibility in their lives, and that's fine. But why prevent that from at least being a possibility? What if it turns out that you have something interesting to say and there's a ton of people who want to hear it (eg: you become a VC or an expert in something). Not being able to benefit from having a personal brand should the opportunity present itself would be a hell of a bummer. You'll notice that I am being very careful with my own identity when giving unpopular feedback.
2. Sure, in 2022 it would be hard for a startup in Iowa to learn that you screwed someone over in Florida. But do you really want to bet that the same will be true in 2042? In the last 20 years, we went from no social graph at all to a social graph in every slice of our lives. What are the odds that in the next 20 years we won't see continued progress towards transparency and accountability?
Reputations have never mattered more, and will only do more so in the future.
Even if this individual or this company was exceptionally vocal about your betrayal, do you really think it would "prevent having visibility into your life as a possibility?"
The arguments for this are all over the spectrum, but I think _Most_ people fall into a moderate stance of, if you accept and offer and something substantial and unexpected changes your situation (an incredible competing offer, an unexpected opportunity, health or spousal related issues) then you should do what's best for you and not let loyalty to a business and a people that you don't even have an established relationship with yet have a negative impact on you.
As evidence by the Post here - Companies will make the same decisions when exceptional circumstances arrive.
I would also argue that anti-corporation/anti-business sentiment in the USA has never been more prevalent with r/antiwork in the spotlight, ridiculous inflation, a new outburst of unionization (e.g. starbucks) and CEO's under fire (Elon/Bezos) that a reputation for making tough decisions for yourself and not exhibiting loyalty where its not deserved might gain you more fame. Especially if some "SV Startup CEO" corroborated your story for you.
I guarantee there's at least one person per FAANG who never wants to work with me again. Probably a dozen others in different companies.
... And yet, here I am making seven figures and receiving a request or two per day to interview with various tech companies. If one won't hire me, 3 dozen others will. I have a pool of 100+ colleagues who would be happy to provide a glowing reference.
I do not think it matters nearly as much as you think, unless you live in a smaller city and limit yourself to only working locally.
What, you’ll be so personally slighted that this person made a business decision that you’ll ensure to disrupt everyone else’s time at burning man/a party/ any other event?
And what appears to be a "business decision" could be a serious setback for the person on the other side of this transaction. Granted, as a startup founder, I am more exposed than someone at FAANG, but don't fool yourself - either way, someone wasted a lot of time and money on giving you a shot, and more importantly, they declined all other candidates. It really is such a selfish thing to do, and while sometimes you have no choice (health, etc), I didn't get the feeling from the OP that he felt particularly bad about it.
So to get back to your original question - no, I wouldn't give you a pass because you showed your dirty side in a business context. And if I thought you were dishonest, I would assume that your dishonesty extends across all facets of your life, and I would think I'd be doing my friends a favor by letting them know.
Yeah, sucks, that's life, if that triggers you emotionally you have no business running a startup.
But there are three caveats:
1. That last statement is only true because most of the people who start or join a startup don't see a material increase in the value of their equity. But a little known secret in the startup world is that you only have to be right once. It doesn't matter one tiny bit if your previous 5 startups failed, if the 6th one ends up finding the product market fit. My batting average is pretty poor, and even so I am way ahead of anyone I grew up with. You only have to be right once.
2. People think of startup success as this all or nothing thing, where you're either super poor or super rich. In reality, if you give it your best and do a decent job, even if you end up failing you'll be getting calls from people who you would have never met in any other way. For example, I failed with a startup about 10 years ago and ended up at Square only because of that exact same failure. There's no way in hell it would have happened any other way.
3. Most startups are run by first-time founders, and most first-time founders are still early in their learning process. A direct consequence of that is that they are cheap. But every once in a while you come across someone who's had one or two big exits, and I guarantee you that they are thinking differently about comp. In PG's words, Apple could have given Steve Jobs 95% of their equity to lure him back, and it still would have been a great deal for them. Experienced startup founders know that, and they have levers that FAANG doesn't. There are two senior people in my current startup that I poached directly out of FAANG.
2. Sure, startups are a fine place to hone your talents, show your worth, and network. Same as any other type of workplace. Who's to say you wouldn't have met someone else at a big company who could've gotten you into Square?
3. For every serial entrepreneur who truly has a knack for it and truly learned along the way, there are those who are persisting in error. You're combining your first and second caveats here, describing the possibility of networking one's way into working for a quality experienced founder who will be your lottery ticket.
Nothing wrong with startups, but this is just another set of hoary old truisms more optimistic than the previous one.
Let's do the math. YC has had 378 exits out of 4314 investments [0], so roughly 9% so far. Most investments have been made recently enough that those companies are still baking, so let's double that number to 18%.
The only other number of you need is how likely you are to get into YC. Their overall acceptance rate is 1.75% per application[1], so if you apply three times with the same startup, you get to 5.25%. That figure includes literally everyone and their grandmother, so let's assume you're deciding between a startup and FAANG. Well, FAANG's acceptance in late stages of interviews is around 15% [2], so your YC acceptance chances are around 33%.
Combine 33% and 18%, and you get 6% per lifecycle of a startup. If you try that with four startups, you're at 24%.
Is 24% a good deal? Well, it depends on the upside and the opportunity cost. Let's assume it took you 16 years to build 4 failed startups. In that time period, you could have earned around $5m at FAANG ($300k/year). Of course, things could have also gone wrong (bad manager, your screwed up, layoffs), so let's peg that chance at 80%, which gives the opportunity cost of $4m.
The average YC exit is $24m (not taking into account the whales, which ballooned the overall YC portfolio to over $300B) - the $24m seems like a pretty conservative take [3]. That yields almost $6m upside, not including dilution. Hard to guess what the average dilution is, but I bet you it's higher than 33%, which would have been the breakeven point. Darn it, startups suck! :)
[0] https://www.cbinsights.com/investor/y-combinator
[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/investors
[2] https://www.teamblind.com/post/Whats-fangs-interview-selecti...
[3] https://www.shawnngtq.com/projects/y-combinator-startups-ana....
If I join any of the BigTech companies (FAANG - Netflix + Microsoft), as a mid level developer, I’m guaranteed to get a $1 million+ four year offer and I don’t have to wait on an exit and pray for a successful exit. I can sell my RSUs at every vesting event. The average startup takes 7 years to exit. I would have also been hypothetically missing out on one of the greatest bull markers and seen my earlier grants more than double over the last five years.
I left out Netflix because even before the stock tanked, it should have never been grouped with the 1 trillion+ BigTech companies.
> Capital One / Eng NewHere1
> 23 Comments
> How many people interview vs get the job ?
>
> My guess /estimates (avg company wide)
> ...
Or some other post behind the login wall?
A bad reference is probably worse than no reference.
So for me personally, I don’t have time to risk on startups when I can be certain that my RSUs will be worth something when they vest and I can sell them and diversify. Even if they are down 25% year to date.
On the other hand, I mentored an intern last year, who got a return offer of $150K and can live anywhere in the US - right now he is staying at home rent free. This already puts him in the top 10% of income earners in the US.
In three years, he can be making $250k- $275K. Three years after that, he can be making close to $400K-$500K. But he will need to switch from an IC if he doesn’t want to switch from consulting.
Because of the time value of money, it makes much more sense to make as much money as possible while he is younger and avoid startups like the plague unless they can offer as much in cash as he is getting in cash+RSUs.
You are looking at things from the founders side. I am looking at things from the employee’s end. It’s your company. You should be passionate it about. From our end it’s a job.
As far as finding “product market fit”, how often has a company found product market fit, and a larger more profitable company came in, put a department on duplicating the effort and crushed the upstart?
We saw it in the 90s with Microsoft and we see it today with Facebook. Even Netflix isn’t immune. It’s being outcompeted by Warner Bros and Disney.
Everyone likes to point to Apple and Amazon. But they are the exception not the rule.
You can easily let someone go any day of the week? Well, I can also leave any day of the week. If you don't want this sort of liability you can hire me with a contract.
You call me dishonest, I call you hypocrite.
I'm not taking sides here, but am curious to see your argument.
If you were to do that it says more about you than the person in question and would not look positively on you.
With an attitude like that, I guarantee that you've burned plenty of bridges yourself.
There are better ways to deal with adversity in the world than to go on the attack and threaten people’s livelihoods. Even if their decision impacted you adversely, it doesn’t give you the right to fuck someone over in retaliation.
I hear this a lot but the job market indicates the opposite. Given sufficient skill and availability everyone is hireable. In your world Jacob Applebaum is giving back rubs to Damore under a bridge somewhere pulling on two ends of a food stamp.
It's Damore. And he's working, as far as I know.
As for "bad reputations": at Google, and I assume at most modern companies, if an applicant came in who worked somewhere you worked at the same time, you got an automated email asking you to rate that person. I don't think I'd even call that a "backchannel."
How much influence did that have? Don't know.
I always knew when the bonuses had gone out at Oracle, because I'd get a flood of reference questions for people trying to leave Oracle.
Thanks, fixed
IOW, do you really think that Damore is the exception to the rule?
I additionally think that trying to compare someone rescinding an offer with Damore and co is irrelevant when the actions are nowhere near equal, and therefore the reactions would also not be anywhere near the same.
The point that was being discussed was whether or not "bad reputations are hard to repair". GP argued that this is not the case and did use an example of someone who got a bad reputation and (to my understanding) has not managed to establish himself in a prestigious position as the one he had.
Shrug. I could be wrong, I'm terrible at these things sometimes.
Stepping out of an offer isn’t something that most people will bother telling anyone about. The bar seems to sit somewhere around setting a server room on fire.
Ah yes, literally burning the bridge (if the servers utilize a network bridge).
I've been on both ends of this, as an employee a few years ago and now an employer. I'm not sure if assuming the worst in all employers and putting in the bare minimum/acting unethically to avoid being "taken advantage of" is the optimal way to act.
It pushes away the good companies that will reward loyalty and drive, and attracts unethical companies who have an adversarial relationship with their employees.
Same goes for relationships - if you assume that the person you're going to marry is simply going to take your house and kids and build your relationship about minimising feeling stupid if/when it happens, you're not going to have a good time.
Which are these companies that "reward loyalty"?
I can't name a single one in the US market. Every single company cares about one thing only: its bottom line.
They will retain any employee as long as it's good for their bottom line. Once it's not: adios.
I've never heard of a company retaining an employee due to their "loyalty". Maybe it was a thing in the previous century?
I assume they hired me because I could help make them money. If one day that assumption isn’t met and they need to lay me off (been there done that), I call my wife, I call my network to tell them I’m in the market. There are no hard feelings.
But also don’t trust your employer. Require important stuff in writing and contracts, don’t expect your employer to give anything extra for hard work / overtime (unless it’s in contract), don’t rely on “promised” benefits or rely on your employer to do anything they don’t have to.
And also, if you get another offer which pays 200% after accepting, or one which requires you to quit immediately, you might want to break loyalty. IMO this should go both ways: the company and employer should expect the other party to “betray” them if there’s a huge bonus like that. In fact all of this goes both ways and company/employer should have a decent, “loyal” relationship to an extent, but never put too much trust into each other.
* the other exception is toxic workplaces where your boss is being an asshole to you. Although in that case you should be trying to leave ASAP
Is that mercenary? Yes. Do I like it? No, not really. But in the USA where I live it's virtually universal policy with private employers.
Why wouldn't I behave exactly the same way if another company offers me 1.5x the salary?
edit: Since I can't delete my comment now, I just want to apologize that I read your message too quickly and missed the 50% salary difference part. Come on, there's ethical and then there is crazy, of course you leave and take the other offer if it's 50%, that's common sense and any hiring manager should understand it. But that's not really commonplace and you can handle it in a professionally ethical way.
I'm joining a business, not the Knights Templar.
Don't let profit driven corporations brand themselves as "family", or any other concept which deserves moral consideration.
In general I agree with this, but the situation described usually happens when offers have expiry windows. I'm sorry, but a job offer is a major life step for me, and when a hiring manager frames it like a TV infomercial with a countdown timer, he's dealing on a lower moral plane. After all the time we both invested in this process, I don't deserve a slick sales maneuver. It's like how I would not stab anyone either, but when you raise a block of wood overhead and menace at me, it's self defense. I have my long term career arc to preserve, including opportunity costs: unsolicited hostile negotiating tactics thrown at me will meet a defense.
I have a hard time reading this as anything other than "it's OK for companies to rescind agreements but not OK for employees to". Consistency requires that it's either acceptable for both employer and employee to do that, or unacceptable for both. (Personally, I lean toward the latter.)
No, you are accepting to work for a business that is legally bound to prioritize the interests of the shareholders over those of any employee. They will always, always be "rude" to you if that's best for the people whose money they're spending to employ you.
I 100% agree with you on your broader point. That said, this is incorrect. There are no laws that stipulate a business must put shareholders above anything else. There _are_ laws that say employees get first dibs on accrued pay in the event of a bankruptcy, among other things that businesses must do on behalf of employees.
Ref: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
In jurisdictions with at-will employment (like California), most full-time jobs explicitly have no guarantees or commitments from either side about how long an employment offer will last. If your ethics are instead based on supposed implicit norms (like "it's rude to change your mind on a job offer" or "it's rude to leave your job before the recruiter/hiring manager gets their bonus" or whatever), then I think it's entirely reasonable to examine 1) whether those supposed norms actually even exist, 2) what the source of those norms are, and 3) whether those norms systematically favor one party over another.
>Coinbase has some specific issues that aren't indicative of a broader industry probem
I have seen examples of this from several FAANG companies.
Corporations are not people. They don't have ethics. The most they can have is an ethical culture or guidelines - which still doesn't preclude them from doing anything.
The power imbalance is just too great. Don't be an as**, but don't be naive, either.
Companies are interviewing multiple candidates for a single spot, it’s insane not to expect reciprocal behavior
Ethics is a scam by the powerful to control everyone else.
I don't love my kid because of ethics, I love my kid because I love my kid. I'm not kind to my annoying neighbor because "it's the right thing", I'm kind to my neighbor because, despite his being annoying, I appreciate his friendship.
Ethics that you're advocating for exist so people running companies an take advantage of you, full stop. If it's more important for you to feel smugly superior, good for you, but I don't buy into it. I'd rather minimize how exploited I am.
You don't have to buy into someone else's definition of "ethics" in order to life a full, happy life, which involves loving your community and being kind to your neighbor. The rejection of mainstream ethics doesn't mean you have to be a monster, it just mean you're going to stop being manipulated for the benefit of someone far more powerful then you who never even paused for a moment to consider ethics.
edit: obviously I'm being a bit hyperbolic here. Spinoza and de Beauvoir both establish fairly exquisite ethical systems. But by en large "pop" ethics is a scam that is asymmetrically followed to the advantage of people in power. Quick example: Music companies want you to consider ethics when pirating music, but absolutely never bring up ethics when it comes to decisions around artists that could potentially increase profits.
I simply put myself in the shoes of the other person and ask, how would my decision make them feel? I may be even more selfish, in some interpretations, because I think that behaving this way impacts others, and pretty soon you have a culture of respect and empathy, which I think is good for everyone including myself. So I am acting towards my own benefit.
I haven't read Stirner or Spinoza much, but it seems like common sense to behave ethically in the way that I've described. And maybe you have a point with Stirner regarding your later music piracy point, because I don't pirate music, and I don't do it for any reason other than I feel my integrity is worth more than any song. I don't care at all for the major labels' thoughts, I do it for "selfish" reasons and maybe it's egoism. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And why would you hobble yourself into a disadvantage and even potentially take a multiyear hit to your life because you have some vague notion of objective ethics? That's just letting them take advantage of you. They bet on engineers thinking the game is not rigged.
You aren't accepting to an industry, you are accepting to a hiring manager. And it's just rude to act this way. Exploding offers aren't great, and if you have a problem with them, then simply don't accept them. You miss some opportunities this way but you feel better when you look in the mirror. Regardless, as others have noted, Coinbase has some specific issues that aren't indicative of a broader industry probem. They seem to be handling this as well as can be expected given those problems.