Zenefits Software Helped Brokers Cheat On Licensing Process
buzzfeed.com
buzzfeed.com
They were the consummate hackers, using screen scraping and automation to do whatever the hell they wanted. One nightmare example was when a bug in their "automated" system rewrote bank account information for tons of employees to just be the last 4 digits of their account number. Such a mess.
Even if this weren't a tightly regulated industry, you're dealing with how people are paid and covered for health conditions.
We didn't hire hackers[1] because that attitude just doesn't fit for certain classes of problems.
Hats off to the investigative journalism by BuzzFeed, uncovering some frightening immaturity pervasive in Valley companies.
[1] I authored this post about our hiring at the time: https://gusto.com/blog/zenpayroll-is-not-hiring-hackers/
This is one of the dark sides to having an entire engineering team in the 25-30 age range. They can sling http just fine, but sometimes don't fully grasp the consequences of their work.
It's more about heavily interviewing for alignment with your mission. If people care deeply about the problem you're solving — not just the technical problem, the people problem — then you're far less likely to have these issues.
I interviewed dozens if not hundreds of people at ZP and there were two red flags for engineers:
1) They only care about the technical problems. In this case, they're likely to make decisions more aligned with "that's interesting" than "that helps our customers"
2) Once we raised our Series A, we had a lot of applicants wanting to join a rocket ship. I literally heard that in an interview with a Facebook engineer who found us by "googling startups with 9 figure valuations." If you care about growth at all costs, you're going to cut corners and fuck over your customer.
Mission matters. Values matter. Interview for them.
His view, if I'm recalling correctly, was that hypergrowth makes customer problems more visible due to scale while making the company inherently more valuable. There was absolutely no downside to growing as fast as your imagination could manage - despite an accumulation of red flags, technical debt, and unhappy employees.
As you mentioned in your comment, values absolutely matter. I think Sacks gets this, but a company this deep in with so many employees is a big, unwieldy ship that's hard to turn.
I worked at LivingSocial early in my career and this is so true. There is a limit to how quickly organizations can grow (given our current understanding) and still be healthy.
Employee happiness and related metrics (e.g. retention) is the biggest indicator of health. I don't care that you hired 400 people this year. Can you retain 40 world-class people?
It is absolutely more rare to find younger people who are already aligned with that mentality. That's not good or bad, just a matter of fit.
So hacking is reserved for research project and the odd on-off script which gets nowhere further than my PC ;)
I've had hackers in my team, they've always been strong technically (they take risks so learn fast) but they have always been a net negative in the long run if left uncontrolled. But put them into the right environment and they can be very effective (as they tend to be very creative).
The question is will an ex-Facebook hacker accept being kept at arms-length production and treated like a junior developer? It works for me because there aren't any AAA employers here in The Netherlands.
https://twitter.com/williamalden/status/697898496314077185
<<I’m told that Conrad created this program based on a belief that 52 hours was too long to spend in training>>
The LMS has the actual license exam locked until you've clocked 52 hours inside of it, so the macro just ran out that timer until the broker could get directly to the exam. Scraping by an 80% on that license exam (especially with all of your colleagues around that have taken it already) is ridiculously easy.
Insurance companies are sticklers for technicalities and love to deny claims, so as a consumer I'd consider the 52 hours / 6.5 work days worth of required training to be an absolute necessity for an insurance broker.
Disclaimer: My current company got our insurance royally screwed up in the short period of time we used Zenefits thanks to their corner cutting, so I'm a bit jaded.
You don't have to be old to build things safely. You just have to care.
I recall that when Parker Conrad spoke at the Stanford startup class, he said that he'd been turned down by many VCs, at least one of which said "Well, if you were Twitter, this would be a different conversation." His take-away from that is "Well then, what can I do to become Twitter?" Only problem is that health insurance and 140-character text messages are wildly different industries.
In other words, when I picked MongoDB to store NowPublic SCAN data, before the word NoSQL was in vogue, even, then it was scanning various streams (including the Twitter gardenhose so many years ago) for bits of news and the ability to store lots and lots of small bits of text quick as hell was much more important than keeping all of them. Noone really cared about every single one, we were in the business of surfacing breaking news and we were a very small startup so not needing lots of expensive servers were a huge plus.
Obviously I picked a very different data storage model when I needed to store payment data at a TV station's video store...
We used Facebook as an example all the time. For them, moving fast and breaking things is a good value. If someone's status update got lost, that isn't ideal, but it isn't the end of the world.
When people don't get paid, that's a Big F-ing Deal.
It's an easy trap to fall into as an engineer. There are many cool problems to solve, but when you join a team you're agreeing to solve their problems. Focus on the customer.
Code is not written in a vacuum. The hardest part, for three nines of software problems, is not just getting it to work. It's architecture and building an engineering team that functions together. People are a major component of software development.
Their recent series A made them so cavalier; they landed money to do this, so of course it was right. It would eat into profits if they negotiated contracts to do it aboveboard.
The Valley has started to equate "disruption" with breaking the law. This is its natural consequence.
I get that moving fast and breaking things works for some products, but I wish more companies had the same attitude as you.
If you are ever looking for another opportunity, check us out http://seneca.systems
You guys should seriously consider using resellers and distributors btw. Gov't purchasing agents always request three competitive bids.
In fact, we managed to close a department in Miami in only six days--that's basically unheard of in local government software sales.
For the "empathy" value:
> Oftentimes, this means acknowledging weaknesses and having difficult conversations. Feedback should come from a place of love and respect, under the assumption that everyone has acted with the best of intentions.
May I ask how this differs from the management consulting practice called "front-stabbing"?
And for the "Don't Always Be Right":
> We recognize that experimentation is crucial to innovation. We will not accepts “it works” as good enough.
Being right may be orthogonal to taking risks + building a legendary product. Perhaps a better wording would be "Don't settle for just right"
I like your idea framing the quotes as an alternate telling. They were listed first out of habit (ex-philosophy major), but you're right that this is primarily our story to tell.
Empathy
The difference between front-stabbing and giving good feedback is one of maturity. If you've had many conversations with young kids, they are incredible at giving blunt feedback, but it's only funny because they are tiny humans. Some of what they say would be unconstructive coming from an adult.
Front-stabbing, to me, is someone trying to justify being an asshole. Your comment is a great example of the difference, of being honest and direct but mature. The opposite of the kumbaya culture isn't telling someone they suck, even if you do it because you want them to be better.
Don't always be right
This is my fault, I mixed too many concepts. This value is about not getting complacent with success or being afraid of failure. I don't want us to get it right every time, because experimentation (where the magic happens) involves making mistakes. As you point out, that failure isn't the same as taking the right risks. This value is counteracting our need to be perfect, about pushing back if we seem to always be getting what we expected.
Happy to dive deeper if I didn't answer your questions. Thank you for the thoughtful consideration!
Everything you said sounds fine, with the exception of what makes front-stabbing, front-stabbing.
I agree that maturity is important for giving constructive feedback; just as important, in my opinion, is closeness. That closeness is certainly achievable in a small startup, but the company scales, I have strong doubts that it will match the level of honesty Empathy, the company value, demands.
More to the point: when unleashed in a social context where all parties aren't friends, I believe that "true" honesty (concerning a person's work) will inevitably transform into front-stabbing (attacking a person via their work) .
If someone who I was not close with was uncomfortably honest to me in the middle of a meeting, in front of many other people, I would probably ask myself "Is this person saying this because I'm actually doing something wrong? Or is he just trying to make me look bad?"[1]
When many ears are listening and many eyes are watching, I know I would feel less inclined to reflect on her or his words, and more inclined to worry about my loss of face. Especially if this person has made a habit out of being vocally honest with others. In my opinion, maturity isn't 1:1 with morality; a person can act like an adult and also be ruthlessly ambitious enough to take advantage of and hurt others.
The deep, deep end of being uncomfortably honest among others in a workplace is a struggle session, where one person is in the middle of the room being berated by everyone else. No one wants to let it go that far, at least not initially, but I certainly believe the basic social lubricant of politeness must be valued, and applied in most contexts[2]
Privacy, maturity and closeness are the makings of a real heart to heart, where both sides can learn from each other. Missing one, or having any in deficiency and, as the company scales, the risk of front-stabbing grows exponential[3]. Said another way by a Wall Street Journal commenter: "You better not front-stab your boss."
[1] There was an article recently that surmised that all public apologies are purely P.R; any demonstration of heartfelt guilt is quickly exploited as an act of weakness, so the apologizer is as tightlipped as she or he can be. Can't seem to find it...
[2] Of course, the other deep, deep end is a Japanese firm where the knives are under the table instead of on the plates!
[3] It's 1:40a.m. in NYC so I hope I'm coming across as explaining my perspective instead of as some kind of internet troll.
In public situations, like giving a presentation or a meeting with multiple parties, a huge part of empathy is understanding people's sensitivity to being ganged up on or feeling embarrassed in front of other. Politeness, specifically around being less brutally honest in group settings, is meant to deter this.
Feedback, to me, is a 1-on-1 activity. Much closer to a heart-to-heart, which requires both the confidence to stand by your values and the vulnerability to be open to change.
I'll be keeping tabs on Seneca Systems regardless; best of luck to you, Mr Founder!
I like the idea of closeness but, as you noted, it is not always possible. I think that empathy is the right word, but should be better characterized. Empathy is trying to establish a connection, is to bring the two people close when giving the honest feedback so that it is perceived correctly. How to do it, that's another story.
One technique that I found very powerful is called feedforward. The idea is, instead of saying what someone has done wrong, suggest a way he could make it right the next time. Example, you sent an email without the attachment. I could tell you: "you should be more careful!" or I could give you a constructive idea, maybe creating a connection: "I understand that sometimes it happens to forget an attachment. I developed the habit of putting the attachments in the email before writing it, so I don't forget them". It is not a perfect example. But even if we aren't close, it gives you a sense of closeness, a feeling that I understand you, and I care about you.
The problem with this approach is that the receiving party should be receptive. I used this method and I received answers like "But I believe I was right because...". And this is the end. You could ignore the answer, knowing that your feedback was useless, or you could try to explain, but you have lost. Nevertheless, if the feedforward is ingrained in the company culture, it is something known and actively practiced (that means the example starts from the CEO), it helps to create a positive environment.
I'm not sure if that's what he means by empathy, or maybe his company uses a different technique. You are right: closeness, privacy, and maturity are essential for a positive culture were front-stabbing (or worse, backstabbing) is impossible. And empathy is the ability to bring someone close, especially when it is relevant to provide important feedbacks.
I like the idea of empathy being a bridge between two sides-- closeness helps in building that bridge. If the sides are way too distant, the bridge will inevitably collapse into the abyss. But if the bridge itself is made of strong stuff, constructed in good faith, then absolute closeness isn't so big deal. So long as trade of ideas can safely go back and forth across that bridge, in equal measure. I might be stretching a metaphor a bit there.
Feedforward is indeed quite powerful between two receptive parties; the last time I got a peer review the person I was doing with did it to me, which made me all the respectful of him.
"empathy is the ability to bring someone close" indeed!
http://mashable.com/2014/04/30/facebooks-new-mantra-move-fas...
Frankly, bugs with Facebook were trivial for the first few years.
Payroll, insurance those bugs cause serious problems that create substantial financial costs for your customers and possibly regulatory fines.
(This doesn't excuse bad testing or bad code, but it's not like the insurance industry has well-documented public APIs for Zenefits to use)
If you care about security and stability, that should have set off major alarms.
Scraping data and pushing to internal APIs in another product have no spec, so any tests you write are either wrong or not wrong yet.
Many of our California sales representatives received access to a software tool called a “Macro” that may have allowed them to complete mandatory online pre-licensing education courses offered by a third-party test preparation provider in less than the legally required 52 total hours. The Macro functioned to keep a person logged into the course and prevented the person from being logged out for inactivity. The Macro did not advance through the required material or quizzes in the education course -- the Macro only kept the person logged in. The Macro only pertained to the prelicensing education course and did not affect the broker exam taken later. Use of the Macro enabled -- but did not cause -- a person to spend less than the 52 hours of required time in the prelicensing course.
Ok, I have no judgement about the morals of this but I think the "hacker" mentality is hilarious.
I was at a Fortune 100 company that had an obligatory "security training" webcast that you had to watch and then at the end, answer some test questions. This was required to get a door badge and network id. Well, one programmer simply wrote a script to "watch" the video and automatically answer the questions. The manager knew we all used it and condoned it because the security video was out-of-date and irrelevant.
I can see someone at Zenefits using that mentality and justifying it because skipping the training material gave them no benefit to passing the actual exam.
[1]http://www.businessinsider.com/zenefits-using-secret-fake-tr...
I would normally applaud the hacker mentality of using a computer to automate stupid or repetitive tasks, as long as any dishonesty is limited to a white lie. Like the obligatory security training video watching. But running a compliance company that doesn't comply seems more fundamentally problematic.
But what's appears to be a refreshing break from what happens when big corporations are caught red-handed, is that the leaders responsible have been fired/disciplined, while the employees on the floor have been told they will not be punished (though they will be if such things happen again).
At least that's what I understand from the email reproduced in the BuzzFeed article linked in another comment.
Similarly, nobody goes to jail for using pirated software, securing users' data via security-through-obscurity, etc.
There are a lot of corners you can cut in the Valley before you've cut too many, and companies know this.
The real issue is that there is a designated time at all rather than just a test.
History won't remember that A did the right thing; only that B made it to their next round of funding and A folded.
> We have disabled the use of iMacros on the Zenefits network or on Zenefits-issued devices.
A Google for iMacros reveals software that does pretty much precisely what is described:
Generally I avoid rooting for others to fail, but I can't help but feel just a teeny bit of schadenfreude with this recent news. For the last couple years I've been rolling my eyes with each new piece of breathless coverage. The Zenefits people are talking about now sounds a lot more like the one I experienced dealing with.
http://www.bhorowitz.com/why_i_did_not_go_to_jail
In general, laws are not something you want to fuck around with as a startup. You can break proprieties, you can do things that will piss certain people off (you're almost guaranteed to piss off your competitors if you're doing anything interesting, for example), and typical business ethics assumes that everybody is looking out for their own interests and can advocate for themselves. But when someone has explicitly said where the boundaries are - and particularly if that "someone" is a government - it's good to respect those.
tl;dr: what Sharlene really went to jail for was more than shifting grant dates around (some by more than 60 days, which is more than a month last time I checked.) She appears to have changed grant and exercise dates both to increase income and to shift exercise income to long term capital gains, and then mislead auditors about these practices. Specifically, she want to jail for listing a false exercise date on her income tax return.
The point is, according to the reporter, what she went to jail for was more clear-cut than Ben is claiming.
[1] http://go.bloomberg.com/market-now/2014/02/12/dont-worry-ben...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20140309175428/http://go.bloombe...
"Since we had the same head of finance, we almost certainly would have been investigated.... The whole thing was a case of the old saying: “When the paddy wagon pulls up to the house of ill repute, it doesn’t matter what you are doing. Everybody goes to jail.” Once the SEC decided that most technology company stock option procedures were not as desired, the jail sentences were handed out arbitrarily."
So even if she did much worse things at her old company, the SEC could have decided that he broke the law too (even if in a less major way), and should go to jail too.
She did not go to jail for option grant backdating. She paid a fine for option grant backdating.
If you were honest with your auditors and did not lie to the SEC, you generally had at most an enforcement action and income restatement.
Aren't a substantial share of Uber's legal issues state-level employer vs. contractor issues (which also potentially have federal counterparts)? So I'm not sure they are a good example of a company restricting its testing of legal boundaries to the municipal level.
I think the difference between potential (and likely) costs and consequences is far more complicated that simply the level of government involved.
> Some examples of ethical behavior we expect from founders are:
> ...
> - Not using misleading, illegal or dishonest sales tactics.
> ...
Does this mean Parker is no longer a YC Founder, if the allegations turn out to be true?
Lets see how any customers were actually harmed by this.
That said, I'd never want to do business with a company that thought it could choose to ignore certain requirements, and deceive regulators about their fulfillment of them, even if they're stupid requirements.
If it is possible for someone to do the latter without the former, what purpose does forcing them to do the former serve? Some people will need 100 hours of preparation for the exam and some will need 10. Forcing the latter group to spend an additional 42 hours in prep simply wastes their time.
Also, as has been mentioned, it's partially a liability issue for the state and the company if/when they get sued. Part of their defense can't be that "Oh, well the state licensing exam is super easy, so I only spent an hour cramming the material before the test and then immediately forgot everything, so really you should be going after the state and not me." The required hours
As is the case with a lot of these kinds of things, one ends up without any value after taking the training compared to where they were before taking the training. If this is the case, the training is meaningless. The only way to asses the value of the training is through some kind of testing as part of or after the training occurs. This is like requiring attendance of driving school for traffic violations. It is very rarely the case that anyone in driving school actually didn't know the law, but rather they were skirting it and ended up getting caught. They are only in driving school to satisfy the requirements of getting the limits on their driving lifted (being licensed or being able to get cheaper insurance). The driving school ends up being a burden because it takes time, and doesn't necessarily end up making anyone a better driver (although, you could use the lack of further infractions as the metric that the training was successful, but there's a lot of other influences here).
If both the trainer and the trainee are phoning it in, does it matter? If the trainer is phoning it in, is the trainee really doing anything worse by also phoning it in? If the trainer fails at their job because they are providing pomp and circumstance, we end up at the same place we were without doing any training at all, even if the trainees do make a concerted effort to be trained. That is, the trainee could bust their butt watching this video, but in the end, no one has actually been trained.
This isn't meant to get the trainees off the hook for phoning it in, but let's call a rose an rose and acknowledge that there might not actually be much value in 52 hours of video watching.
- Hi insurance broker man. You did't follow regulation X when you did Y.
- Oh, I didn't know that, I wasn't told that.
- Oh really? It was right in that mandatory training program you took. See here on screen #7?
- Oh that dumb thing? Most people at my company just ran this script to get through the damn thing. I wasn't paying attention.
What happens then?
But I think maxcan's point is that at no point in the process has the cheating really lead to any actual consumer harm. Which is a pretty important point.
I understand it though to some extent - its more of a "cheating prevention" program, but I'll bet a very very very high percentage of test takers would find it a very large waste of time.
edit: which I think might not sound how I intend it. I meant to get at it not requiring a great deal of investment of time or other resources to become an insurance broker.
(There's an argument to be made that an inane hours requirement is unfair to people that must work long hours to support themselves, but in this case it was the company urging paid employees to spend their time otherwise)
That's not meant passive-aggressively. I completely get why naughtiness might be indicative of a propensity toward innovation -- it's a pretty straightforward and intuitive concept. I'm just wondering whether PG still puts as much faith in the heuristic as he used to.
If you've worked at a big, regulated company, you know there are tons of trainings that you have to do.
Often said training provide little to no value, other than covering the ass (CYA'ing) of the employer.
But what's worse: these programs will sometimes log you out if you're not paying 100% attention.
Everyone I knew working at our Big 4 accounting firm would do our real work while these "training" videos played in the background.
Some engineer likely thought s/he was helping everyone out. And rightly so...their time was likely much better spent in other places given their incredible growth.
I too created "macros" for the insufferable training they put you through, but it was for training videos on the "new" HTML4 standard and about the "new" invention ajax requests -- all while I was working on a team using angularjs every day.
>That was how executives discovered the macro, which Conrad had created based on a belief that 52 hours was too long to spend in training, the lawyer for Sacks said.
This isn't some perfunctory blah-blah training.
Unlike professions where you are expected to get a post-college degree and pass a multi-day difficult test given once or twice a year, all you need to become a health insurance broker is take some classes (in person or online) for a few hours, pass a test (which you can retake as often as you like) and pay ~$100. That's it!
Zenefits is large enough they could actually not treat licensing as a nuisance (gotta SELL SELL SELL) but could have had a full time in-person instructor give a week+long onboarding/training/prelicensing class for every new sales-person. You know, so that people who are expected to be explaining the intricacies of health care laws and pro and cons of $100,000+ yearly group policies might actually know a little of what they are talking about.
How many of those accountants didn't study ACCOUNTING for at least 52 hours?
It sounds like the real problem is that the test is grossly inadequate. The regulations should specify a test that's stringent enough. Specifying x hours of training isn't helping anyone.
There is not enough material there to spend 52 hours studying. You spend 12 hours on code and ethics, 20 hours on life, and 20 hours on medical.
The material is very simple. The hourly requirement is based on the offline classroom, but should be compressed for online learning.
I mean, I get it - power plays and all. But aren't they both responsible?
Let's say you are an engineer, take a new role at a company to work on their database, and then discover that one or your managers has stolen money, do you think you should be held accountable, assuming that you report the issue immediately when you discover it?
The board needed to hold someone responsible for this mess in order to satisfy the regulators that they're taking the problem seriously, and things are different now.
Effectively, the message they want to send is that the adults are in charge now.
There was no way Conrad could stay. Even if they could somehow hide any evidence that he knew about the violations (and they probably couldn't), it's very clear from his public statements that he had built the fast and loose culture the had allowed and sustained the problems. He had to go and the message needed to be that the company has no place for him anymore. He's not stepping into a reduced role, he doesn't have a board seat, it's over, he's dead to us.
Sacks has a different record. He wasn't there from the beginning, he hasn't been the public face of the "ready, fire, aim" culture, there's plausible deniability. And he has credentials to justify his position - Yammer, Microsoft, PayPal - he can be painted as a safe pair of hands.
And, since he's been the COO for a year, he can step straight in an take over without needing a handover period from Conrad.
The board need Sacks to stay on and be the new face of Zenefits. And they've decided that the regulator investigations are not going to find damning evidence against him. Maybe because he had no idea. Maybe because he was smart enough not to leave any evidence. Maybe because there's a paper trail of him reporting the issues up the chain in way that makes him look like the good guy.
You're asking the question "How can a COO not know about all this stuff, and not have had some responsibility over it?" and that's a good and fair question - the regulators will ask it too. I take it the board will be able to provide a plausible answer to that question when the regulators come knocking.
But that's not really the #1 question that the board's worried about. They want to know "who has the best chance of saving this company?" And what Sacks provides is:
- Plausible deniability
- Credibility in the market
- Credibility with the regulators
- Knows the business
- Can do the job
- Ready to start now
There's no one else with those credentials, so Sacks needs to take the job.
Once that's decided it's a matter of execution - almost literally. If Sacks is going to save Zenefits then he needs to look innocent, and blame Conrad for everything. That might actually be true, but that's actually not the key question for the board. They just need something that they can sell to the market and regulators.
The culture I'm referring to is the "give me complex software, and host and maintain it for me, but have someone else pay for it" culture.
Whether it's through intrusive ads, creepy data practices, and/or Zenefits-like shadiness, insisting that software should be paid for by anyone but the people using it is a disaster waiting to happen.
I'm founder of a startup building an application that is free (as in freedom) for small businesses. If future customers want us to support and maintain the software for them, they will need to pay for it the old-fashioned way. Any other arrangement would compromise both our customers' interests, and our company's integrity.
Zenefits was hiring people who worked at the Yellow Pages and Yelp, previously selling advertising, and was turning them into "insurance brokers". Apparently in very short order.
Healthcare is complicated, and assuming that it could be treated in such a careless and reckless manner, or that 52 hours of training is a waste of time, it is beyond irresponsible, it shows an incredible lack of respect for the companies that Zenefits is supposed to serve, people who are relying on them for advice on the most important benefit employers provide, and finally their families. It's shocking and sad that Parker, someone who survived cancer, would be careless with peoples lives.
If Zenefits ended up being the "hub" that millions of consumers within the USA had to rely upon, there would be a lot of people hurt by that.
There are lots of companies who not only struggled to get coverage for their employees via Zenefits, but some didn't end up getting coverage through them at all. I have heard direct from CEO's of some small but successful companies who very much wanted to support Zenefits, that they gave up on working with them after exhaustive efforts to get coverage that in some cases went on for as long as seven months. Not providing coverage for your employees for seven months, that's disgraceful. I can not imagine how the CEO's of these companies felt.
Parker had to go, as should Sam Blonde, his right hand. Parker just cared about scaling the business, at any cost, he didn't care about the collateral damage.
Who in their right mind thinks taking the time to design, then publish, a way to defeat a relatively straightforward education requirement is in any way a worthwhile thing to do? There is a level of ego there that goes beyond rational decision making: you aren't cheating the system for an advantage; you're cheating just because you can, because it makes you feel better than others. That's some borderline psychopathic behaviour really.
Did Zenefits employees really gain anything from not having to complete the required 52 hours? Was it really that big of an ordeal? Or was this a matter of just being smug about 'not needing' to do some very basic requirement they felt was beneath them? There is an element of hubris there that is unbecoming in and of itself.
These are (very minimal, really) licencing requirements. There is a minimal amount of effort that an employee should be expected to put in to do their job legally. The assumption is that exposure through time to the subject matter will increase knowledge. That may not be true in every situation, but it likely is in a majority; the rule exists. The exposure generated from choosing to "fight this battle" and losing is miles greater than any particular payoff achieved in victory. That alone indicates to me that the person in charge has a poor grasp of weighing risks/rewards, regardless of personal ethics.
Some things just aren't worth fighting because the risks in losing are so disproportional to any net gain from winning. This is a perfect example. A good CEO needs to know how to pick and choose the hills to fight on.
Lesson learned here: Not every component of your business needs to be disrupted. Some things aren't worth disrupting at all, really.
That was my first thought as well. I can see the appeal in streamlining (what at first glance seems like) an arbitrary process if the final exam is passed legitimately, but a one-time commitment of 52 hours at the start of employment (a good chunk of which you'd probably need to do anyway for the exam) barely seems worth bothering with. As you say, the risks are disproportionate - it certainly makes me wonder what other corners are being cut.
I do feel bad for their employees who may end up being blacklisted from insurance period for practicing without a licence.
Have you ever had to watch 52 hours of mandatory training videos? I think that could easily be more unpleasant than 104 hours of hard labour.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=buzzfeed&sort=byDate&prefix&pa...
The previous increment of the Zenefits saga was one of them.
I guess given that many of their articles aren't real topical here there is probably a penalty for the site, but it doesn't stop everything.
It would be nice if Buzzfeed had something like a separate subdomain for its non-trivial content, but I'm not aware of any such thing that would enable automated differentiation.
Buzzfeed is one of a class of sites that produce a lot of dreck as well as the occasional high-quality article. There are many such sites, mostly media outlets. HN's solution is to penalize them (a little) by default, but take the penalty off under different circumstances, such as if a moderator sees than an article is good or the submitter has a solid track record.
This has proven to be a reasonable compromise. The alternatives—not penalizing these sites at all or banning them altogether—are a lot more problematic, which is how we arrived at this strategy in the first place.
One of the things he said is that internally, Buzzfeed is actually three different groups.
One of them is a team of straight-up, legitimate investigative reports.
That's why every once in a while Buzzfeed break a big story and everyone sits around saying "Buzzfeed?"
Look beyond the brand and into the details and the journalist. Buzzfeed News is legit. Unlike a lot of media sources, they've found a way to be profitable and output quality articles.
I would expect similar penalizing treatment of other "mixed-quality" sources like Quora, Forbes, Techcrunch, Business Insider, etc.
But is the low-quality content being submitted to Hacker News? To my knowledge, I've never seen a traditional listicle in the /new page.
It's a bit of a lottery who gets the karma in any individual case, but in the long run it evens out. We would like to make the duplicate detection system give more credit to original submitters. I used to think that didn't matter, but have changed my mind, because doing that would incentivize users to find good stories that no one has submitted yet, and that seems like it would be in the community's interest.