Hacker News Reader

Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

Despite all the turmoil around the company, I've been using them for payroll and looking into more HR stuff through them, and it works really well. Much better than Intuit, certainly (which has cost me a fortune in late filing fees and other stuff, because they don't automate tons of stuff that ought to be automated and invisible to the end user, and I suck at doing taxes).

I'm surprised they need 900 employees to do what they do, though. But, I guess a huge part of their business is interacting with decrepit old systems used by insurers and states, and often require humans and fax machines and other such nonsense.

This is a pretty astounding turn of events; it's not something I've ever even heard of happening. It's certainly better than exploding under the pressure of investor lawsuits, I guess. But, aren't their still regulatory issues being investigated and so catastrophe is still possible?

View on HN

Zenefits works well until it doesn't. They botched a commuter benefit payment to me, and it took either four or five phone calls and me being pretty rude to the last couple employees to get it fixed. I couldn't understand how correctly crediting me my $80 was so difficult, particularly since it had repeatedly worked before.

Exactly this. In general they're great but when you have a problem it's a giant pain. One of our employees had a lot of trouble getting his spouse insured. It took them months to work it out.

Zenefits screwed up a bunch of our state registrations and payroll taxes. The worst thing was the hideous customer service in trying to resolve this.

> But, I guess a huge part of their business is interacting with decrepit old systems used by insurers and states, and often require humans and fax machines and other such nonsense.

Well, a huge part of their business was to have hordes of people selling stuff faster than they could get people to that point legitimately. Presumably, the hordes are still employed.

As a general point, as a consumer you can have a great time using a product no matter how many laws they break along the way, of course. My general counter-reaction to the romanticizing of "disruption" at HN is that I hope they get stuck with massive fines that drive them down to the ground. They could've had a good product and followed the rules.

It's worth noting that the rules in question here were specifically designed to protect incumbents from competition. It was very clear regulatory capture.

Regardless of how true that is or isn't, a business built on breaking the law is not ok. 59nadir is right, you can build a great product while following the rules. Disruption is awesome, but 'disruption' is not - and it worries me how often the latter gets unabashed praise.

I'm comfortable with the idea that people can distinguish between rules designed to protect society and rules cynically implemented to protect entrenched interests that have cozied up to government. The latter deserve to be flouted. That's how we eventually get rid of them.

There is a reason that pg looks for "naughtiness" in founders.

Naughtiness, rule bending, finding loopholes...there is a lot of gray area that we can all debate endlessly about.

Likely the automated test software they made falls in that area - and isn't what concerned me personally.

Willingly using unlicensed or wrong-state-licensed brokers though? Lobby for reciprocal/no licensing, work on a study course to make time-to-license faster, or just, you know...get your people licensed. As a business you follow laws even if you don't like them. Your hand waving an acceptance of fraud by zenefits - when they could and should have been in compliance - seems very worship-y and disruptors-know-best.

At least for me, it's less about worship-yness and more about disdain for what I see as overregulation. I certainly can see how others disagree with me here though. shrug

AirBNB broke rules to get where they are (craigslist spam comes to mind)

Uber broke rules to get where they are (spamming Lyft drivers with fake requests, operating in markets where a Taxi license was required without doing the paperwork or paying the fees, picking up people in taxi-only areas (like Chicago airports) ).

The sad thing about all of this is that punishments are often so weak, the game theory optimal play IS to break the rules. If you break the rules, succeed, and get caught.. you still end up winning. If you follow the rules and fail, you are still failed.

To make game theory sense of this problem, you would need extreme punishments. Like founders in jail for 20 years or executed. The problem with this, is clearly some new businesses broke rules by accident. Opps you accidentally sold 1 insurance policy in a state you didn't have a license, let's execute you - not cool.

Funny you mention airbnb and uber, two of the worst offenders that I avoid because they won't follow the rules. You are 100% correct on the punishments not having impact for the winners, a scaling system of some sort is probably needed and smarter people than I are needed to figure it out. It's also frustrating because the end goal - in uber's case, I can't stand 99% of taxi services and they deserve to lose business even in locations the regulation isn't an outright racket - is noble.

Zenefits _knew_ they were breaking the licensing laws and had a huge number of violations. It wasn't accidental, which would a totally different discussion.

Did you think Uber didn't know what laws they were breaking?

And sadly, even if 5% of us don't follow the companies that break the rules - the company still wins. I am a rounding error to them.

> I'm comfortable with the idea that people can distinguish between rules designed to protect society and rules cynically implemented to protect entrenched interests

I'm not. Or rather, I'm not comfortable that some player won't explicitly break rules while trying to use "But the rules are cynically implemented to protect entrenched interests!" as cover. Why am I not comfortable? Because I've met several of these people throughout my life.

Of course they'll want the protections when it's in their best interest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com