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Comment by cl42 | Hacker News Reader

"Oops, burn!" is not an excuse. Keeping silent without telling your employees is not an excuse, either.

There's a reason so many investors and employees try to promote a culture of transparency at a company... Because to do anything less is a sign of (a) gross incompetence, and (b) greed.

It is often extremely uncomfortable to stand in front of your employees and say "Hey, we've got 3 months left unless we hit this milestone. Let's work together on this and if you can't commit, we'll help you deal with it." It sucks to say and feels terrible, but better than an overnight blow-up.

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This is an easy thing to say, but I can understand why a leader would choose to do otherwise. The risk that employees will give up and bolt thus turning failure from a likelyhood to a certainty are very real. You can't just ignore that.

Do you warn employees and possibly risk losing those with a low risk tolerance? Or do you hide this from them and lay them off with the legally minimum notice and possibly no safety net?

I prefer to be a leader that promotes respect and care for employees, and assume the former choice is thus a better one.

While I totally agree with you, I want to bring up that many successful leaders have no respect for their employees. (Jobs with the collusion, Armstrong with public and humiliating firings, etc.)

Of course, that is not to absolve these startup founders for all their wrongs, I just think we really should hold the big folks like Jobs et al. accountable for the shit they do before we start piling up on these young and inexperienced founders.

Have you every actually been a leader in this situation? I dunno, maybe you have and you followed through. If that's the case, then all the high fives to you.

But I sure haven't. And I look at it and I see a 10 out of 10 management challenge. You've got the weight of the world on your shoulders as a leader here. The lives of your employees, the faith of your investors, the very life of a company you've put your all into for years. And in this case the CEO was a first time founder with (rumor has it at least) not a lot of support from her board.

Maybe she did the wrong thing. Maybe she didn't. But this shit ain't easy, and I'm not one to judge too harshly.

I will say that I have actually been in this situation and have chosen to be transparent with our employees. It was really, really hard but it was also the right thing to do, in my mind.

Thanks for the comment about board support, harryh. There is another angle to this, which is that the investors / board should also be there to provide support / help as necessary. If they didn't do so, that is also very unfortunate.

You see:

1. I am not gonna be transparent because hey, emloyees can bolt.

2. Oh, I effed up.. let's fire them all in cute little email w/o notice.

Yeah, that's great!

I am very (twice) familiar with getting screwed because founders don't want employees to bolt while there is still a chance of recovery. The good thing was that they had the good sense to let me go before all the money totally ran out, so I was able to bridge my way to the next job, which I really appreciated.

If your company's in that position, the only ethical thing is for all employees to be well-informed of that, in advance.

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