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.
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?