The “people first” company was Auth0. The company that sent the email and terminated access instantly was Okta.

Fairly clear to me.

How can a company be "people first" when they sell out to a larger company who isn't "people first"?

This is a good question. A lot of people, all over the world, put a lot of work into something and getting acquired turns stock options worth $0 into options worth a lot more than that. It’s just my $0.02 but, knowing the founders and who they are, I’m fairly sure this was more about giving back to the folks that made it happen than it was a purely business decision.

Also, Auth0 was investor-backed so there was likely a lot of pressure to sell at the price being offered. I don’t know how all that works exactly but I can imagine that this kind of decision is made by more people than just the founders.

Ethics are tricky!

At billions of dollars in acquisition you'd think any employee wouldn't have financial stability as a top concern like mentioned a few times here.

Just off the top of my head:

- They didn’t know the purchasing company wasn’t “people first”

- The founders burnt out and needed an exit

- The purchasing company was “people first” at the time of purchase

I’m not placing a judgement on Okta here, by the way, because I know nothing about them. Just answering your question.

For a company I once worked, it was because the VCs held more than 50% of the company, and the founders - ultimately - didn't have a say.

The management was people first. The owners were VC. So maybe the original owners didn't care enough to interfere with the working management policy. The new owners do.

So.. "incidentally people first just until we can exit."

Auth0 was a much better place to work than Okta.

as a potential client, they were also night and day different. I had great sales conversations with Auth0, and they had so many easy to follow examples, tutorials, etc. Very helpful engineers on the call, who asked questions about our environments, etc.

A sales call with Okta just left me feeling dirty. It felt a lot like my sales calls when I was an Oracle customer. All about how many products they could push on us, no good technical explanations, and of course, huge pressure to 'sign this contract before the end of the month to get this great price'.

I wanted to go with Auth0, but then they got aquired, and we just said hell no.

Auth0 wasn't perfect (I would've like fewer pages), but it was pretty damn good. I learned a lot there and had one of the best managers of my career there. I also was the only employee in my country for several years and still felt very included. It was telling that I was able to chat with Eugenio myself even as a lowly IC. Okta's main claim to fame seemed to be a great sales team, though your explanation sounds like that wasn't great either.

It has nothing to do with being "people-first" or not.

Leaving terminated employees with access to sensitive systems is poor security practice.

That wasn't my point, my point was firing someone via email is heartless, and that employers should have the decency to speak to a person and let them know why.

The system access can still be removed at the same time.

Welcome to job life. What are you expecting from a company when they want to shun you out the door, hugs and kisses?

Companies never value you. Your just a ticket with a number associated to it. Harsh but prove me wrong.

I don’t think there’s a good way to lay people off in the remote work era. With emails at least you get a standardized message across. with all hands on deck Skype meetings you can come across as the devil by just mispronouncing 1 word. With Skype 1on1s you expose your remaining employees to embarrassment on TikTok like that one woman recently did.

You trusted them with that access yesterday, and they are not being fired for cause (eg. stealing company secrets), so why don't you trust them today?

This sort of thing only really happens in US companies (see lots of other comments in this thread on this), and maybe that should be a clue this isn't "security practice".

> only really happens in US companies (see lots of other comments in this thread on this)

That's not what the comments say.

> so why don't you trust them today

Because they heard about being laid off this morning and who knows what goes through the mind of a laid off person.

Exactly this. The company just subjected the individual to an enormous amount of stress that didn't exist yesterday coupled with the fact that the long-term payoff to them of "don't act like a jackass at work" has just changed a lot.

Yes. That’s the unfortunate part of being laid off. So to protect the individual from himself and the company from the individual it might be actually better to just lock people out.

Funnily, nobody has such empathy towards a company when the employee lays the company off. Then everyone is like „suck it up company, suck it up boss”.

I'm fairly certain when an employee lays the company off, they do them the same courtesy and immediately lock them out from their life as well.

Also, if you'd like more empathy, in both directions, there is nothing in the US _preventing_ you from extending an employment contract with a well-defined layoff & severance process. Most companies choose not to do so, to preserve options. Well, you made your at-will bed, you get to lie in it.

If you're a manager caught in the middle: Yep. It sucks. It's also predictably part of your job, so make sure you're compensated accordingly. (You can't manage for an extended period without being forced to lay off somebody at some point. ZIRP stretched that period, a lot. It's still a thing that's part of the job)

Fired employees are much more likely to do something malicious, either by sabotaging systems or stealing proprietary data. The incentives are totally different.

> You trusted them with that access yesterday, and they are not being fired for cause (eg. stealing company secrets), so why don't you trust them today?

Yesterday, behaving in a manner that would result in your continued employment had clear, short term incentives like receiving further income. The company had leverage in that if you were to behave inappropriately they could terminate your employment and take away that income.

Today, the company has terminated your employment and taken away that income. The only reasons to not be malicious are long term consequences (future employment prospects, criminal charges, etc) and personal values.

People in general are notoriously bad at aligning their actions with long term incentives or consequences (especially consequences). You're testing this out in this employee for the first time in a situation where they're under much higher anxiety and stress than normal and you no longer have any real leverage over them.

I'd imagine the difference in the US has more to do with the short notice period and lack of social safety net making being terminated a much more impactful event for the employee.

In addition to what others said, there’s also a compliance aspect.

Even if 99% of laid off staff will react fairly and reasonably, it only takes a few to do serious damage, potentially to your customers.

Even on a small scale, those laid off can cause some harm: “losing” things, getting extremely enthusiastic with decommissioning equipment, or even filling the company cars with fuel right before giving them back to the hire company.

> and learned an enormous amount about what it means to build and run a people-first company

He's talking about Auth0.

> And then it happened, I got the email. Slack didn't work. My laptop restarted and came back with accounts missing. It really, actually happened. And even though the writing seemed to be on the wall, I was still caught a bit off guard.

Talking about how that culture no longer existed -- it's fully Okta now. The Auth0 culture essentially erroded until it finally just no longer existed. This of course happened at a different pace across differnt organizations. Unfortunately, I'd say ours was probably one of the earliest to get hit.

---

As an aside, I was part of same team (also laid off), and had an especially unique viewpoint.

I joined Auth0 in 2020 -- months before the acquisition. I joined because of the culture and the amazing people I get to work with and learn from. I had a lot of fun and we built some amazing things. After about 18 months I decided to join a local startup, itching to get back to a much smaller arena, building something from the ground up. Applying all the great things I've learned in my career thus far. Long story short, as most starups go, especially during COVID, it didn't pan out.

I kept in touch with my old colleagues, now my friends, who approached me with a potential new opportunity. They did warn me things were different now, but I was excited to get to work with great people again.

Coming back it was starkly different. Gone was the magic that was once there. A lot of familiar faces were still around, but so too were a lot gone now. I can feel the beating of the Okta drums more loudly now.. there just felt a lot of separation between leadership and us dreamers at the bottom. I felt like I was just back at a corporate company now, more worried about writing OKRs and how they made my boss/division look good verses actually making our customers lives better. There was a constant dread in the air.. verses excitement.

It's strange, but in some ways its almost like a feeling of mourning. That meme about not knowing when you're in the good old days is very true. Goodbye Auth0 <3

> know that every right that you ever had was earned through a union

This really isn't true. Lots of these perks are because there was loads of money sloshing around, and a competitive hiring environment drove the culture to be as attractive as possible for employees.

Perks and rights are extremely different. Companies can't take rights away.

Well, laws create rights, not unions, as far as I understand things.

Not sure if you're just being obtuse, but: Workers' rights that are written into law are often there because unions lobbied for them.