Real story of “Yelp Girl” who called out CEO for low pay
backchannel.com
backchannel.com
Using the word responsibility changes the meaning of this. How about we use a different phrase:
> Why [should the company care] if you can afford to work for them or not?
Because that's the point of working for a company.
Not in the most of the civilized world, no.
That someone agrees to something doesn't mean it does them any good. And while everyone is (or should be) free to accept bad deals, other people should be banned from proposing at least the most harmful ones. Hence the laws and regulations regarding employment, salaries and so on.
Well, this is from a European perspective, where there actually are such laws.
Here's how the hiring process went for this particular job: she walked in off the street and they hired her the same day. Does that sound like the hiring process you're familiar with for any job with a career path?
If Talia had applied at McDonalds and then complained the way she did, do you think her argument would be more or less valid?
Everyone has different priorities and there's no shortage of companies putting a priority on profits/growth over taking the time or risking costs associated with looking out for others within our company or communities. I've avoided discussing Talias case because I think the problem is bigger than that. Even McDonalds shouldn't pay poverty like wages for their area. Even McDonalds can spend the time to find out if they're hiring a person just looking for supplemental income.
Also, maybe the turnover wouldn't be so high if they paid better.
If enough consumers decide to stop doing business with a company because of the company's behavior, then that's also a kind of market demand. The article gives one example of such a customer, though it's unwise to extrapolate too much from a single data point.
If you want to understand why some people are afraid to speak out about the situation, you needn't look further than the backlash that Talia herself got.
Fixing real-estate prices by deregulating land usage is number 1 thing government can do to help poor people in bay area but they wont.
> "I can't believe Yelp forced their employees to move to a different location just so they could keep paying them lower wages."
In Canada CN move their head office from Toronto to Calgary. They paid for the moves, gave everyone a one time extra bonus plus raises. They saved billions and not that many complained.
Are you talking about the CN railway whose HQ is in Montreal...?
Fly them to SF and buy them a month of housing if you're worried about the in-person-break-in phase: the result will pay for itself.
I'd imagine their employees would rather have that job than no job. Otherwise they'd just quit right?
2) A lot of millennials would rather live near poverty in SF than living middle class in Kansas City. I think that is nuts, but it's no sweat off my back.
2. In life we have a responsibility to understand what happens when we put people in difficult situations, even if they don't. Sometimes your employees get trapped. They start out trying to make it work, but find themselves in trouble. For example: http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/online-vancouver-ads...
But that sort of move requires a great deal of corporate maturity. It's okay to overspend in the name of short-term convenience when you're still kind of a startup.
Interesting quote for Backchannel to highlight since they did a feature on Greg Gopman, whose internet "fame" was definitely not temporary.
Greg Gopman is a trash fire and continues to pour accelerants on himself.
The pricing of Bulleit is sometimes weird: I was in Vegas last year and a 750 of Bulleit was $60, but, a 750 of Woodford Reserve was $35.
Assuming this is a joke, I would pay to watch your stand-up comedy.
I can't understand that logic at all.
Also - very few places in the US where you can manage without a car and driving.
So she's making a deliberate choice to live in an expensive area because she wants to vs. needs to?
Should she be complaining then?
I'm not going to excuse her rant or her poor decision making skills as she navigates her way through life. What I am going to sympathize with is the fact that she had a rough start in life and precious few examples around her to show her how to make good vs. bad decisions. I meet plenty of people like this; people who are unprepared for the rush of responsibility they carry when thrust out in the world to care for themselves. Most of us at least know what we should be doing even if we don't always do it. We had an example. I don't think this young woman had that benefit and now she is learning the hard way all of the lessons she should have been learning long ago.
So may very well be a spoiled-brat entitled millennial, but I'm more inclined to suggest that her story is a lot more complicated than we've been led to believe, even given what we've learned about her upbringing from this article.
(Side note: one of my buddies is now retiring from the US Marine Corps; I didn't find out until I heard from someone planning his retirement party that before he joined the Marines he'd been homeless. When I tell you that he's one of the most inspiring and intelligent people I know, I'm not exaggerating. BE KIND.)
I don't need examples to conduct basic arithmetic to show that I cannot afford somewhere to live. There are millions of people with similar or worse upbringing who actually learn something from that upbringing and decide to not do dumb shit that has a high chance of introducing financial ruin.
You're saying that you wouldn't make the mistakes she has made because you'd know better, right? You'd use math or logic or any of your abilities to make the CORRECT choice, right?
You're completely missing the fact that it's not YOU that's got the burden of making those correct choices, but HER. And she is having a hard time doing it despite her best efforts.
Somewhere in the world, there is a guy judging you for screwing up because HE knew better than you did when you made that last mistake you made. And boy....THAT one was a WHOPPER. What were you THINKING?!?!
No, I'm saying that was red flag number one. She then made a series of mistakes that led to her current situation. All of the facts were available to her when she signed up for the job and instead of accepting personal responsibility, she pointed the finger at her employer. She would have a leg to stand on had she been a long-term employee that got caught up in rising rents or something similar but that was not the case.
I have empathy for everyone who gets caught up in bad situations that are out of their control. I do not have any for someone who willfully enters into a situation and blames someone else for the outcome. If I'm unable to sustain my current state of living with a job I voluntarily chose, how is it anyone else's fault but my own?
> Somewhere in the world, there is a guy judging you for screwing up because HE knew better than you did when you made that last mistake you made. And boy....THAT one was a WHOPPER. What were you THINKING?!?!
When I make mistakes, I accept responsibility, learn from them, and try not to make them again. I do not try to publicly shame someone else who could at best be described as indirectly contributing to my situation. I'm quite okay with anyone judging me because I only have control over what I do in a situation and if I let something like that affect me, I could potentially miss out on gaining experience that can only be learned through failure.
YOU learned to accept responsibility. SHE didn't. YOU learned to acknowledge your mistakes. SHE didn't.
Now she IS learning and she's learning it the HARD way instead of the EASY way, namely, by haranguing from the Internet Mob.
Buddy, you need to really think about this. Are you so callous that you can't see that there wasn't a single person in this girl's life that showed her how to stand on her own two feet? She'll either learn or she won't. It's going to be hard for her either way. Are you so indifferent to someone's struggle that you can't at a minimum think about how hard it must be to live their life and be thankful you're not similarly burdened?
I'm not disagreeing on the fact that she had a tough childhood. All I'm saying is that blaming other people for your shortcomings should not be encouraged. You're talking about a struggle when I see a young white college-educated woman. Do you know how far ahead that puts her in this country? Struggle is getting pregnant in high school and living in section 8 housing without a chance to dig yourself out of it.
Got it bub?
That lady who is stuck in Section 8 housing with a newborn you just mentioned? She's WAY better than the DRUG-ADDICTED mother on the street who has to prostitute herself to support her habit. That drug-addicted prostitute? WAY better than the victims of human-trafficking here in the USA and abroad. Those victims of human-trafficking? THEY are way better off than the women of places like sub-Saharan Africa who are quite literally dying of starvation and disease that could be treated with simple low-cost medications if not for the enormous problems of distribution and diversion.
So, since you're so hell bent on piling-on to this mob attacking this woman, why not instead have a modicum of sympathy who might be struggling to keep from being their own worst enemy? Is that so much harder to do than to have sympathy for the drug-addicted woman or the runaway who is now a human slave?
You seem to be arguing that we should only discuss things that are positive and supportive, and that in seeking the truth of the situation we should ignore anything that is not "kind"
Please try to avoid sarcastic terms of endearment in your response, if you choose to make one.
What I'm suggesting is that we all keep in mind that ANY of us could have started from where she started. I reject the premise that "The Internet" somehow gives us license to judge someone through the narrowest of lenses. You and I (nor anyone reading these words) aren't even remotely qualified to pass judgement on this person.
And please refrain from instructing me on what terms I can use in the ordinary course of discussing something I'm passionate about. I don't speak to anyone in any way online that I wouldn't when directly in their company.
I did not loose my job or end up poor but I bet that guy is thinking "what an idiot, what were you thinking" not knowing how this did impact me.
Prob a poor anecdote but damn did I learn my lesson. Especially since it impacted me financially.
We all make mistakes, financially or otherwise. The point is that we should learn from them and not keep repeating them.
It's easy to lose sight of our humanity when we live comfortable lives, isolated from the people who don't. We make ourselves succeptible to compelling narratives to make us feel more secure about ourselves, and more justified in being unkind or unempathetic to others.
Of course, you can always find an idiot, but I've never heard of anyone who rents without a credit check.
You're a damned fool if you think they don't run credit and income verification in the most competitive rental market in the world. Apartments go off the market in a day here fairly often.
>Everywhere, people questioned just how poor Talia was. She defended the prosciutto-and-brie biscuits in her Twitter feed to a Quartz reporter after critics interpreted it as a sign of secret wealth; she said the ingredients were a gift from a date. Vice wanted to know why she had a bottle of Bulleit bourbon — she explained she needed it for mint julep cupcakes for work.
Yeesh. Poor people can't have nice things in more ways than one.
One observation from growing up poor, around lots of other poor people (but not something I noticed in people who I'd classify as falling into "true" poverty) is the crazy amount of money that gets spent on absolute bullshit in some desperate attempt to make the life-suck less awful.
I could list some examples, but the stereotype of poor people with expensive shoes or lots of cheap jewelry or whatever is often partially true.
Part of the problem of being poor is lack of self-control and lack of planning and how that all culminates into a endless party/bling lifestyle. This is why education is seen as the solution to being poor, not necessarily a lifetime of handouts. Income distribution hits the laws of diminishing returns pretty fast. Some people, unfortunately, can't accept this for political reasons, hence all my drive-by downvotes.
I can't imagine making birth control pills OTC and free of charge would be more expensive in the long run than a steadily increasing line for welfare checks and SNAP benefits.
Edit: if one person can explain why they are downvoting me, I would love to listen. Otherwise I assume you all think I'm shitty because I think birth control should be available to everyone, especially people who aren't ready to have kids.
And then there's the fact that being poor actually impairs IQ.[1] And that hopeless feeling that leads to immediate pleasures over long-term goals. [2]
1 http://www.citylab.com/work/2013/08/how-poverty-taxes-brain/...
2 http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/your-bra...
An interesting takeaway was that in Cleveland, conspicuous consumption of premium sodas and cigarettes were far higher than anywhere in the nation. I suppose when you're really that poor, you'll do - or buy - anything to feel that you aren't.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/opinion/sunday/what-peo...
It's not even about that. It's that being poor is expensive. So, here's an example: when I would buy shoes, which were usually boots (I lived on a farm), you could get a pair at a place like Sears. They were maybe, I dunno, $20-$30 at the time. They would fall apart within a year. Every year, let's say, $30-$60, just on replacing my shoes. Then, one year, I decided to save up _all_ of my money, including gifts, and bought a pair of Doc Martens for $120. Those shoes lasted me for almost a decade, because they were significantly higher quality. $12/year, actually cheaper than the poorer quality boots. But that wouldn't help if I couldn't put the $120 together to actually buy them, which was true most of the time.
A lot of being poor is like this. You can only afford cheap stuff, and cheap stuff breaks a lot and needs to be replaced often. It's expensive to be poor.
This is fairly bullshitty and something I question as to being real. My immigrant family has always bought cheap shit. $30 shoes from DSW or wherever lasted a long time. Our clothes from Sears lasted forever. The expensive stuff wasn't for quality, it was for brand and social signaling. That $800 Gucci purse isn't bought because its durable. There's simply not a price/durability relationship in fashion.
>and bought a pair of Doc Martens
Of course leather boots last longer, that's a serious edge case that has no bearing on the norm. I don't know anyone who regularly wears boots on a daily basis and its unrealistic to pretend its a normal footwear for most people. Heck, most people can't wear shoes that like long term as its uncomfortable and can cause foot issues. Middle class people don't sigh in relief about being able to afford hipster boots, they just buy the same sneakers they always did.
In fact, its pisses me off that at my wealth level how easily shit breaks. My fancier clothing wears out faster, my more complex lifestyle means more handymen and repairs, etc.
>It's expensive to be poor.
Its really not. When we were poor we just didn't buy into the consumerist lifestyle. We just kept stuff forever. The problem is some of the poor people in my neighborhood would buy into it and bought all the blingy shit with their money instead of saving or trying to work their way out of the poor neighborhoods.
I'm glad yours was better than mine.
(Also, again: I lived on a farm. Boots were a much more practical form of footwear than sneakers, though I did, from time-to-time, get sneakers instead. They fell apart even faster.)
Lasted a long time doing what? Doing farm work every day will wear out shoes a lot faster than just walking around in the streets.
> There's simply not a price/durability relationship in fashion.
You need a certain minimum price to get a certain minimum quality, simply for materials expenses. Stuff can't get cheaper than that, even if there's nothing stopping you from slapping a "premium!" sticker on it and selling it for ten times as much as it's worth.
> Of course leather boots last longer
Leather boots can last longer. You can have crappy worksmanship with leather boots too – sure, the leather will last forever, but if it's poorly done, it'll fall apart after a year or five anyway.
It's not just boots, anyway. Computers (Thinkpads and Macbooks last forever, you don't hear anyone saying that about the $200 notebooks off Walmart), appliances (a good washing machine can survive their owner while a cheap won't last 10 years), …
>and bought a pair of Doc Martens Of course leather boots last longer,
Look at this: http://drmartensforlife.com/
Coach (bought my GF a wallet for her birthday once, ~$250) and Gucci have similar policies.
More expensive stuff definitely lasts longer, in general.
> $30 shoes from DSW
These shoes aren't cheap, they are what is called "seconds." They have design flaws. I buy shoes from DSW because they are $300 shoes for $60 because they are missing a stitch. They are still technically $300 shoes...
> Our clothes from Sears lasted forever.
That's fine, but Sears is mid-ranged. If you buy something from Walmart it's going to lose the wear-ability very quickly. Maybe a polo would be fine, but a Jacket, pair of shoes, or pants will not hold up like something a few times more expensive will.
> Middle class people don't sigh in relief about being able to afford hipster boots, they just buy the same sneakers they always did.
Middle class people generally buy $100-$200 Nikes.
> My fancier clothing wears out faster, my more complex lifestyle means more handymen and repairs, etc.
??? What? What are you buying, exactly?
> Its really not. When we were poor we just didn't buy into the consumerist lifestyle. We just kept stuff forever.
Very-cheap end things don't last as well as mid-ranged things do. It's a fact. You won't be buying new TVs, but the consumables you buy suck: watches, jackets, the food, your cars, dishes, forks and knives, computers (for work), so on... which leads to you purchasing them more often.
It doesn't mean the HIGHEST END stuff is much better. You have diminishing returns. But, it's very tempting to buy the CHEAPEST when you are poor.
And with little possibilities to save up money, you'll have to rely much more on credit financing for emergency expenses, which drives up "unnecessary" expenses further.
I was without work a while back: I was near-devastated by a double-whammy parking ticket (total ~$100) I had gotten.
I delivered pizza as a job, and the car that I had to do the job broke down. I couldn't afford the repairs, but I also didn't want to lose my job, so I junked it, and took my savings and managed to find a 12-year old car with 255,000 miles on it for $150. Rural areas have lots of old junkers lying around.... that car lasted a month, until the engine overheated and destroyed itself mid-delivery. Before cellphones, I had to hitchhike back to the shop. But in that month I managed to make a couple of hundred dollars, and buy an okay car that lasted me another year or two...
I am glad that I was lucky enough that my hobby turned into a profession that pays well.
For every think like workboots or tools, there are things like clothing or kitchgoods were quality doesn't save you money.
A bigger issue is just poor longterm thinking. Poor people will buy a six pack of toilet paper for 3 bucks instead of buying 24 for 9. Sometimes it's not even lack of longterm, thinking, they may need that extra six bucks or they'd miss another payment and incur 15 dollar late fees.
And of course impulse control. We all know people who live paycheck to paycheck, but if they got some extra money they'd spend it on absurd shit. Not even stuff like booze, but like schlocky walmart stuff.
I don't blame them, you can't really save your way out of poverty anyway. Might as well YOLO it.
> There is no way rare situations like that really add up to that much savings.
> A bigger issue is just poor longterm thinking.
And most goods aren't like quality workboots. You can a steak knife at walmart for nearly free. Or you buy some expensive one. Sure the later is better, but you'll never have to replace the walmart one. It's not going to break.
You can go buy clothing at goodwill. It's not going to last appreciably longer than new clothes bought at H&M.
And so on, and so on...
It was terrible, threw chains and all kinds of other issues. We tossed it and bought another and then another. All terrible for different reasons, one of which caused me to have a fairly serious accident.
Finally, they went to Sears and bought me a proper youth bike, which lasted until my early teens with nothing more than a couple replacement tubes.
The whole thing cost twice as much as just getting me a decent bike to start with.
It's almost like being poor is some kind of weird edge case our software doesn't handle well and the result is a constant series of poor decisions.
Edit: Whoops, read that wrong. She actually lives in Concord and worked in SF.
You've got that the wrong way round, she was living in Concord, and without a roommate because...
> Her only lead on a roommate had fallen through, and she wanted to take time to find someone who she “wasn’t afraid would murder me, because I don’t really know anyone.”
I'm sorry, but her insecurities are 100% her fault. Are we supposed to feel sorry for her because she moved to SF on her own? Almost everyone I know did that!
OK...I just did. I found nothing less than $1500 a month, even expanding my search radius to include Marin, the entire east bay, and all of South San Francisco. The average nightly is $179.
Of all the things in her post that you could choose be self-righteous about, her rent is the one that makes the least sense. Her budget was realistic. She wasn't living in luxury.
People blow my mind. Stand up for something better than poverty, and you get attacked not just from the top, but from the bottom as well.
https://www.airbnb.com/s/Concord?checkin=05%2F01%2F2016&chec...
In case you hadn't noticed, there are only 13 listings below $1000 on that AirBnB page. Five of them are bunkbeds at "Casa Hacker". If we expand the search to $1500 a month, we get listings like "Very Comfy Couch for 1-2 People" (omfg) and "Bunk Bed in Shared Room" on page one. The average is $3477 a month.
Again, I draw two conclusions: a non-AirBnB one-bedroom in Concord for $1500 looks like a pretty good deal, and the people who are criticizing this girl's living situation are totally ridiculous.
Those hostels and other rentals available in that price range are a short term solution to finding an ideal roommate situation rather than jumping right into getting a one year lease on your own right off the bat.
I'm curious, do you think someone at a company in charge of updating the twitter feed should make as much as the CEO? Or the sales reps chasing down leads and bringing in business? Or the developers building the platform? How and why is the job she signed up for more valuable than the on-demand cab drivers who help bring people to work each day and are also forced to compete for decent housing situations in a city where one bedroom costs $3000 a month on average to live downtown?
In your comment you say you have 'roommates'. So to be clear, you saying that you share a bedroom with at least two other people? And you consider this normal for an adult in a developed country?
Is this really the situation in SV now? People who are "DevOps Consultants" have to share bedrooms with random strangers just to afford to live?
It is in San Francisco. So people commute. Public transportation is awful (the actual rides are fine, frequency and coverage are the main issues), so traffic is terrible.
Edit: despite the name, you don't share bedrooms. You share a home.
Let's say you lived 10 miles out of the city. How long would it take you get get to your job by car?
In NYC, 10 miles can be a ~1hr commute even by public transport.
By train, it takes me an hour each way, every day.
You can either share the bedroom, but more commonly, one of you sleeps in the living room. Sometimes you can put up a fake wall--sort of a room divider--to make two bedrooms.
It's not really normal, but it's done in absurd high cost of living cities like SF and Manhattan, NY.
Then again Americans do it during college, so I'm not sure why I think it's so weird a young adult would do it. But I think it's weird.
Throw in the uniquely American problem of employee-provided health insurance (with no insurance for low-end employees), and you have a real recipe for suffering. A friend of mine once worked in a call center for a major phone carrier. In order to qualify for health insurance as part of her job, she had to spend six months as a "manager". "Managers" didn't actually manage anyone, and had less authority to solve problems than regular customer service reps. The job consisted of taking the calls of people who screamed "I WANT TO SPEAK TO A MANAGER!!!!", not so much for authority but for a target to yell out their frustrations. Her job, then, was to get yelled at, all day, every day, and not be able to do anything to help the angry people. For a sensitive soul, it was torture.
Welcome to America.
In the US, the only time having a true roommate (two beds, one bedroom) as an adult is normal is in a college dormitory.
Beyond that, when American's say "roommate" they really mean "housemate", just as you suspected.
But, rent has risen to quickly in the Bay area, that it is increasingly common for adults to share rooms, not just houses/flats. It's completely abnormal and indicative of serious problems in the housing market in SF. To my knowledge, this is not a common occurrence anywhere else in the US. When it does happen outside SF, it is usually among the extremely poor, which often includes recent immigrants.
As far as my affordability goes, I could manage a one bedroom in this city if I wanted to be living month-to-month and live in the Tenderloin. Someone with the similar responsibilities that I have who is more senior in their career likely has more options.
When I did a startup in San Francisco in 2008, I stayed in a shared house in South San Francisco with immigrants. I was informed after the day I moved in that I wouldn't have access to the kitchen. My rent was $500 per month.
I know things are more expensive now than they used to be, but I just clicked over to Craigslist and found hundreds of listings for less than $1000 per month for a room in a shared house.
Here's one:
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/roo/5557466505.html
And that's in the middle of the city.
Here's the search...they're all over the place:
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/roo?max_price=1000
I'm sorry, but I was over 30 years old before I lived by myself without a roommate. This is just plain entitlement and whining.
Then the stress of life wore her down. She should have moved into a shared apartment earlier. Also later. But when you're poor and stressed, everything is hard.
Maybe she's entitled. Maybe you lack empathy. I suspect both.
I lived a year and a half in Washington DC on $1000 per month. My living budget for working on the startup in SF was barely more than that.
I don't really care to be lectured about stress either. Living in SF and trying to do a startup was the most stressful part of my life, and at one point my doctor told me if I didn't get out I was going to die at 30. I was the sole technical founder of a startup, and I happened to have severe tendinitis in my forearms, which I had to work through. I didn't have enough money to actually get treatment or go to physical therapy, either.
But were you ever Talia?
Your experiences were not hers. Similar, maybe. But not the same. Drawing on your experiences without empathy means you are making decisions from the wrong data set.
And that is why memory without empathy serves no one but yourself.
She had a solid full-time job making more than I did, appears to be healthy, and signed a lease for an apartment on her own. By any measure that I see, her life was both more luxurious and less stressful than mine at the time.
If you can point out one aspect of her life that wasn't self-imposed and that ended up being more of a hardship than when I went through, I'm all ears. But so far it seems like all you're saying is that I can't criticize because I'm not actually her, which seems silly.
I make observations. I then compare those observations to previous observations to better understand people. This helps me understand others better, just as it helps me understand myself.
We all have moments where we look back and realize we made bad decisions. It takes no effort to think "I should not have done that." Ditto for other people. Does that change anything? No. Does it inspire better decisions in the future? Maybe, if one is willing to learn. But simply judging what someone should or shouldn't do instead of listening and learning solves nothing.
We are all human beings. We all have hopes and fears and strengths and flaws. Just remember that the next time someone is not very nice to you.