hn_neverguess
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.
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.
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.
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is clearly shitty, but at least they are going to offer a 4 month severance just if they agreed to hire you and then rescinded the offer.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.
- 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.
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....
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...
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_...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wonder what the business model here looks like. I suppose you could try to get government to provide tax incentives for donations?
The Greatest Generation was exceptionally patriotic, and I always assumed it had to do with living in a country that suffered much less industrial damage in WWII than other countries (which enabled a great standard of living while everyone else was still rebuilding). But I am starting to wonder how much of this has to do with just simply having spent a couple of years abroad and getting to witness first-hand how dysfunctional most other places are (during and in-between wars).
Why compare ourselves to China and not to a place like Argentina or wherever they take mid-day naps during weekdays? Because you don't want to fall behind in the global economic race. As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, there are going to be fewer and fewer protections for the local industries. For example, back in the 20th century it was possible to ban imports of various foreign goods, because those same products could be manufactured anywhere. But we're increasingly getting to the point where there are only 2 or 3 options for most of the tech products (mobile phones, computer operating systems, anything AI-related). In 20-50 years from now, things are only going to get worse. As a first-world country, you might still have a chance to be a relevant exporter in the mid and late 21st century, which will hopefully pay for the cost of importing everything else you can't manufacture locally. But you won't get there with siestas.
What would you define as the bottom of the barrel then? There has to be a sensible threshold that delineates between 1) "I encountered a lot of bad luck but I am motivated and want to get myself out of this situation and 2) I simply don't care. Most of the physically able that fall under 1) can get a job at an Amazon warehouse. For those in poor health, I will agree that the US is no match for other countries.
> 42k is a joke when your rent is close to $2500
You are approaching this subject as if living in an area where rents are $2500 is a right and not a privilege (the median rent in the US is $1,104 [0]). You might be shocked to hear that even in the most socialist countries in the world, there are gated neighborhoods and areas that are off limits to the poor (I experienced this first-hand living in a country that's often used as a socialist success story). I understand that not living in high-income areas leads to bad schools and a ton of other factors, but this is not a US-only phenomenon. Taking the necessary steps to remove the variations in rent is a strong step towards full-blown communism, which comes with its own set of downsides.
> and you get no benefits.
Nonsense, Amazon has surprisingly good benefits [1]. I am all for bashing Amazon's various horrible practices (eg: launching white-label brands that steal data from their own customers, total disregard for trademarks in their paid search bidding, etc), but when it comes to benefits, it will be hard to find a warehouse job with better perks.
[0] https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/average-rent-by-yea... [1] https://hiring.amazon.com/why-amazon/benefits#/
I have to wonder how people will look back at the current period. I really doubt we'll compete with the WW2 folks for the term "the greatest generation."
> Why are supposing that all rich people made their money through online advertising
If you replace "all" with "most," which is how I phrased it, then your sentence sounds like this:
> Why are supposing that most rich people made their money through online advertising
Ok now we're onto something interesting, but I can see how you might be still struggling with the phrasing. May I suggest to reformulate as follows:
> Why are supposing that most rich people made their money by selling something for more than they paid for it?
Perfect! So we just have to answer if in the context of most people who became rich, "online advertising" = "selling something for more than they paid for it." I would argue that you can sell things without advertising them, but you certainly have to make people aware that you're selling those things one way or another (and mind you, in the context of rich people, you have to do that at a very large scale). So when answering how MOST rich people attracted attention in 2021, and that AT SCALE, I think the above is not so untrue (you will certainly find many who ALSO used TV and other channels, but very few people with a TV budget had a $0 paid social budget).