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Comment by marme | Hacker News Reader

I love that he put "leaving the next" in quotes. He was leading that company down the drain and got fired, they just dont want to make it look that way. They have had so much bad press the past year, from nest employees complaining of a hostile work environment to customers complaining about products being intentionally bricked. This news is shocking only in that it took this long to happen

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Yeah I was laughing at the "it's never a perfect time to transition" and was thinking, well, when everyone hates you and wants you to leave is probably pretty close to a perfect time to leave.

Absolutely. When you're at a certain executive level, you no longer get fired, you get "asked to resign". No doubt Google was done with him.

You don't just get asked to resign, you get made an adviser for awhile and still paid! Tony will be an adviser for a set period of time and still collect a bunch of money, which will help him save face and probably prevent him from working for other tech companies for a specific period of time. My guess is that he will be an adviser for 1-2 years.

My guess is that this is a way for the non-compete agreement to be enforceable until enough things get fixed so Tony's knowledge about what is broken no longer matters.

How many times will he be on-site for advising?

Depending on the nature of the separation, Tony may never be at Google again. It really depends on if they left on semi-good terms or not. Tony probably won't be allowed the Nest team, but Larry may still value his opinions on where the products should go, even if Larry thinks that Tony is a poor manager.

Another recent example is Under Secretary Butch Blazer of the USDA. He "resigned" 3-weeks ago:

http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?contentid=2016/...

The press release conveniently leaves out the Office of Inspector General's investigation of Butch, his wife and his step-son regarding a marijuana investment promising $44 million in revenue. Nor the fraud, extortion and numerous scams by his step-son.

His step-son, Doug Fierro, is a "shaman"-

http://amazonshaman.com/about.html

"No doubt"? Really? He's been there 2.5 years which is longer than most founders stay on after acquisition. It's certainly possible he was fired. Maybe even likely. But I certainly have some doubt.

He's an "advisor". He has neither moved on to a more prestigious role in Google/Alphabet, nor has he started a new company (that he's announcing publicly), nor has he moved to a prestigious position elsewhere.

It's clear that he's been pushed out.

Curious why he would need to move to a more prestigious position? Most people realize by their 30s that prestige is a sucker's game; it's a way of inducing people to do things that aren't much fun and they wouldn't really want to do on their own, by lauding them with accolades from people they don't really care about.

Lots of people quit jobs and take some time before doing their next thing.

This is how it works at that level. You get paid to not make noise or give bad PR on the way out. (Too bad it doesn't trickle down to junior levels) In some cases the golden parachute is just ensure that people don't fight the change legally or otherwise. The good PR then allows them to get the next job.

I'm very surprised that word of Fadell's Jobs-in-training style didn't precede him. Was this behind his departure from Apple?

I would lol at someone who fired me expecting me to say it this way. If you fire me I have no further obligation to your doublespeak.

There's a lot of upside to saying it this way and really no downside except the dopamine hit of calling out the other party.

With this approach:

- He gets paid a lot of money to do nothing for a period of time.

- He exits "gracefully" from a perception standpoint (obviously any board considering hiring him in the future knows the backstory, but it is better than if Google were forced to fire him for gross negligence or something).

- Google minimizes impact to their stock price to the extent possible with this, since they want to preserve an image of having everything be copacetic and under control for the mass Main Street investors. Tony likely has plenty of their stock and thus a financial incentive to play along.

- Burning bridges is never a good strategy, and he and Larry are (were?) friends. Not a bridge I'd want to burn even if things didn't work out.

- The person that gets a company from Point A to Point B is often not the same person that gets a company from Point B to Point C. In all of this Tony may have recognized that (even if it was a tough lesson) and acknowledged he was not the best person for the job.

At lower-level/pay positions the stakes are much lower and it is much easier to conveniently leave a bad experience like this out of your resume, or paint it a different way. When the major media outlets cover your departure, ensuring every possible future employer knows the situation, you tend to play things a bit more strategically.

Not my style.

He'll also get nice pay for two years as a "special advisor", where he does nothing and gets paid his old salary. I'd write whatever blog post was fed to me for that gig.

You don't say it for them. You say it for yourself. You have nothing to gain by going around telling everyone you've been fired.

And you get to keep vesting. There's $$$ in it for you.

Honesty. Transparency. Accepting your mistakes and failures.

All qualities Tony Fadell is known for. Right?

People that get fired tend to not want to say that they got fired and prefer this sort of doublespeak.

That's why they usually couple it with some sort of a cash payoff / severance package for playing nice.

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