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Comment by mcny | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for pointing this out. For those reading, an archive now exists https://archive.fo/CJF9r

the original comment is at https://medium.com/@ben_73928/as-one-of-the-team-members-let...

Some tweets from Christmas Day : https://mobile.twitter.com/clickyspinny/status/9451788438908...

> @joshelman do something. Help us. Two days notice before a holiday with no compensation for the fact that not a soul hires during these weeks. You have the $ to pay severance when you terminate 70 people. So you decided on letting us all get screwed. You need to help us.

Okay, there's possibly some reason for sympathy here. But how much were these 70 people being paid? How much did they save? How many of them could have been in a position to have a month or more of cash saved as an emergency fund? It's smart in any situation to save for a rainy day but especially so when you're working for a startup.

It's unlikely any of the employees are truly broke, they're just (rightfully) complaining about not getting a reasonable severance.

It's likely that several of these employees are legitimately broke (for reasons beyond their control, not because they're bad at adulting), but they conceal it. Signs of weakness harm your negotiating position.

Honest question: What normal circumstances would lead to anyone making six figures being broke that doesn't involve bad adulting?

Paying off student loans, medical bills, emergency car repairs... basically anything that might deplete an emergency fund or where you might have dipped into this on the assumption your job wasn’t about to be made redundant.

Children.

Are you calling these people children, or suggesting that children eat up emergency funds? I suspect the latter.

Not having much of a savings, and moving to the bay area after getting a bay area job with a bay area salary (wow!!), only to realize that you also need to pay for bay area rent (WOW!!!).

If said person has animals, children, or a spouse it becomes even more complicated.

This question makes it hard to believe you’re of adult age. Just about any adult should be able to imagine reasonable circumstances in which they could make “six figures” and still struggle to (e.g.) make rent.

This is almost the definition of bad adulting. If you make six figures, there's so many ways to live in the US within your means. Of course you can create difficult circumstances for yourself by paying 4k in rent as the sole provider, but this is irresponsible.

What's the deductible on your health insurance, my dude?

protip -- that fucking deductible resets 1 January, so if you were to get hurt in late 2017 and the treatment spanned calendar years, surprise, you pay it twice! One of the reasons I left my last shitty startup job is the deductible was $6k, ie a month's take home wages. That's not real health insurance.

That’s a nice hill and all, but you don’t have to die on it.

I don't think you appreciate just how crazy Silicon Valley, and by extension, most of the rest of California, is. You don't really get an option to not participate in the craziness if you live there. Your only real choice if you want financial sanity is to not live there. Naturally, it's difficult to work in a SF-SV-based startup if you don't live there.

So we're not talking about responsibility anymore, you're moralizing on people's life choices. There's no way to responsibly live in SV without being already rich.

Location, location, location.

Now, if you can get into a remote position, awesome, but I could see living in SV or NYC or similar and feeling middle class pangs at low 6 figures.

I've been one of those people. Sending money home to parents who were barely holding on to their home, and with health conditions that insurance terminated coverage for, combined with rent getting jacked up, a $4000 emergency room bill I couldn't even pay, and my own health issues creating a vicious cycle of lower productivity, more stress, worse health.

This isn't even an uncommon occurrence. I had coworkers (at one of the big 5) who were making pretty decent money who were still in the hole for similar reasons.

Have some compassion man, jeez.

A good friend's brother was badly hurt. Insurance is fighting paying for things. My friend has paid about $40k so far, and he was laid off two weeks ago. Even if you earn $150k in the valley (which btw is really only $95-ish k after taxes), that's a lot of money. The dirty secret to health care in the united states is the good providers can not serve you if you don't have the right insurance.

My partner worked in an industry that laid off 50% of their employees. It took her 8 years to get close to her old salary. No matter what anyone says, the reality is very few of us are truly prepared to have our jobs/industry vanish.

My brother who doesn't earn much money had significant health bills for one of his kids. I hadn't planned to spend that $10-$15k.

My idiot nephew road a dirt bike on a road (against all his parents' rules) when he was 15 and didn't have a license. He didn't look both ways, there was a truck coming, and he was hit by the truck. His parents had to buy the guy a new truck because my nephew wasn't licensed to drive, and pay the deductibles for several surgeries.

At least the employees were paid for each day that they worked. At least five contractors were not paid for work dating back two months.

> CEO and investment team ignored the negative aspects of the $700 lock and didn’t see that the competition would be able to provide the same features (and more) at less than 1/2 the price.

If Ben realized this, he should have never worked at this company in the first place. It sounds like it was a failure of a product strategy.

A $700 lock is a product offering, not a product strategy. A strategy could have been "start with a $700 offering at the top of the market and work down," but that's not something they tell you on the way in, and even if they do, it's no guarantee that the execution will/won't work.

Whether you want to call it an offering or a strategy, Ben doesn't claim that the failure was due to any aspect of the business model other than a) price, and b) competitive risk. Both of these were risks that existed (I assume) at the time he joined the company. So he can't blame management for failing to assess these risks any more than he can blame himself.

> A strategy could have been "start with a $700 offering at the top of the market and work down," but that's not something they tell you on the way in

This is absolutely the kind of thing you should be asking about and they should be telling you on the way in. As an early stage startup employee you are basically an investor. You should deeply understand how the businesses you are joining are going to work, and if they wont tell you you should consider it a red flag.

I have been lied to on the way in. You hear about all this incredible stuff coming down the pipe that just needs a little more work. After a few months you figure out that that cashflow was 1/10th of what was implied and the pipe is dry.

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