Lambda School threatens ex-employee for coming forward
theverge.com
theverge.com
You can't sign a contract that allows someone to murder you -- there's case law supporting that.
But you can sign a contract that limits your future ability to speak freely.
Regardless of what case law says about this, a lot of people appear to feel that this really shouldn't be a thing, particularly when there's a large power imbalance between the parties, and when the more powerful party is obviously trying to hide evidence of malfeasance, embarrassing secrets, etc.
What is the moral thing to do if you're the less powerful party and you feel that your counterpart is acting immorally in offering you a contract like this?
Maybe the moral position is not to take the money.
Maybe it's okay to take the money and leak it anyway (assuming you think you can get away with it), because your counterpart is already irredeemably unethical, and all you can do is try to make the best of a bad situation.
I don't think it's always so clear cut. Contracts shouldn't always be considered sacred.
There's often social pressure to shut up, sign whatever they put in front of you, and take the severance money. It can be extremely difficult to go against this pressure, especially if you're not particularly well paid or powerful and the company is throwing resources at trying to fire you.
I'm not suggesting that she should or shouldn't have done what she did here, I'm just trying to push back against all the commenters blindly stating that "she violated her contract! what did she expect would happen?"
It's true, that's what happened, and that's what one should expect. But there's more nuance to how this interaction works, and I think it's a little disingenuous to leave it at just that, especially if you're going to bring morality into the picture.
For me it wasn't social pressure. Its 'at will' laws, employer can fire you for no reason whatsoever( unless its discrimination sort of deal), so ppl get what they can in form of severance.
I’m responding to your assertion that this is a simple open and shut case legally and she has zero recourse. You don’t know the facts and I suspect you’re not attorney. You have no idea whether that’s true or not.
Depending on her other financial situations she might be facing financial disaster including uninsured, life destroying, medical bills plus the inability to get any other position while visibly pregnant.
It's highly likely that she was pretty much obliged to take the money regardless of how she felt.
> You talk to a lawyer in that situation
Stop and listen to yourself.
Do you honestly not see how someone in this situation might not believe that retaining a lawyer is a realistic possibility for them?
Morally? At this point she's standing on higher ground than you.
I think this idea that she is pregnant this somehow not responsible has some terrible implications.
The top-level comment tried to describe the moral high ground as directly dependent on strict adherence to the letter of the contract. This is the key issue that I object to in this thread.
An action being legal does not necessarily imply that the action is also moral, and vice versa. Context matters. Intent matters.
Is it moral for a company to ask an outgoing employee to sign a non-disparagement agreement in exchange for severance? Maybe. Did the company misbehave when trying to fire that employee? Is the lawyer or HR person offering the contract aware of what happened? Is somebody that's part of this chain of events knowingly trying to use this exchange to sweep a scandal under the rug? Is the company trying to use the personal or financial circumstances of the employee as leverage to get her to agree to something she normally would not agree to (i.e. "pseudo-duress")?
If any of these things are true, I don't think it's moral for the company to ask for this exchange. Her decision to accept or reject the terms of the contract does not change this, especially if the company tried to use their position of power to influence her decision.
Now, is she acting morally in trying to break the terms of the contract? I don't think it depends on whether or not she's pregnant, but I do think it depends on whether or not the company acted morally in offering her the contract in the first place.
The moral math here is super simple. It's just karma. "If you act immorally towards other people, they might feel morally justified in trying to screw you over. Maybe they're right... maybe you had it coming."
Lots of people subscribe to this idea.
i was fired before with one day notice. It came as total shock to me since i had very good preformance reviews before that. I researched this a lot and found out that employer can fire you for no reason whatsover. They don't have to establish anything.
>trying to get rid of her without doing the proper legwork to establish that she failed in any measuable fashion.
I responded to this quoted comment sayin that employer has to establish poor performance. I was fired with any sort of "establish" and i found out that i couldn't do anything.
https://employment.findlaw.com/losing-a-job/at-will-employme...
Realistically being fired for being a pregnant female is a thing and being fired for being a white dude from Oregon isn't.
There is a grab bag of exceptions that vary by state. Please see
https://employment.findlaw.com/losing-a-job/at-will-employme...
I'll excerpt a relevant part
>Covenant of Good Faith Exception
>Recognized in a small minority of states, including California, this exception reads a covenant of good faith and fair dealing into every employment relationship. This exception means either that employer personnel decisions are subject to a "just cause" standard or that terminations in bad faith or motivated by malice are prohibited.
Lambda is based in CA.
Even hr at penny ante jobs establishes a narrative and documentation for reasons to terminate for good reason.
It's an HR nightmare to fire a pregnant woman, most would rather just avoid that particular claim and pay a few more months of salary
Re-negotiation happens between the two parties, one person can't simply choose to break the agreement becasue they feel it is fine.
> Now it turns out that every last bad rumour you head about Lambda School is in fact true
Source?
The purpose of an NDA is typically to penalize someone if they speak the truth.
This would have been the correct route
> Maybe it's okay to take the money and leak it anyway (assuming you think you can get away with it), because your counterpart is already irredeemably unethical, and all you can do is try to make the best of a bad situation.
No this sets you up for even more financial harm and makes you untrustworthy ... if you can't follow a simple agreement that you are freely signing how can I trust anything that comes out of your mouth.
> I don't think it's always so clear cut. Contracts shouldn't always be considered sacred.
If the contract is legal it should be - if your unsure if it's legal talk to a lawyer. Without contracts being actually enforceable if one party believes it's immoral then everything goes to shit.
The law does not dictate this. Repercussions that stem from breaking the law also have no bearing on whether or not an action can be morally justified.
You are talking about whether a position can be legally justified. The two are not the same thing.
You and I have a disagreement privately lets say over a potted plant. In the end we decide to part ways and I say here you can have the potted plant lets just never have this come out again I never want to hear about this argument again. You shake my hand and agree that's fair, take your potted plant head home and immediately call all of our mutual friends and begin to say all kinds of horrible things about me.
Who was the immoral one there? I'd argue the one who broke the final agreement
The entire point of a settlement / severance / etc is the two parties saying you know what we are done of this fight - here is what makes you feel happy to walk away from it ($$) and here is what makes us feel happy (to not have to hear about it anymore).
You're using a generic "disagreement" and "potted plant" rather than "employer tried to improperly fire an employee" and "$36,000 severance for a non-disparagement agreement." I think you're doing this deliberately in order to make the letter of the agreement seem more important than the details of what happened.
My moral calculus is explained clearly here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22533048
If your question is serious, then no, I don't think the immoral one is necessarily the one who broke the final agreement. In certain cases, the one who acted poorly first might be the immoral one. Signing and then breaking an agreement could, in some cases, be a response that is morally justifiable, even if it is illegal, and even if there are legal reprecussions. If the retaliating party takes it too far, then they might be the immoral one.
I'm making no claims about what was or wasn't morally justifiable in this particular story. But I'm shocked that so many people seem to think that a contract is sacred and that a person who breaks one is automatically the immoral party.
The actual circumstances of the situation matter more than whether or not a written agreement is broken. There are times when deciding to break a contract after signing it is morally justifiable. There are even times when signing a contract with the intention of breaking it later might be morally justifiable.
Is it really that difficult for people to come up with a contrived example here? Coercion? Duress? Extreme power imbalances between the signing parties? Implied threats? Lying to get out of a dangerous situation? Do people not even see these things as possibilities? It seems blindingly obvious to me that the circumstances matter.
While non disclosure has a valid use case to protect valuable business info from competitors its hard to argue with a straight face that it ought to be used to hide wrongdoing. Such an agreement is unconscionable and therefore invalid.
If they predicated her severance on compliance with an immoral and invalid clause that would appear to be their problem. The invalid nature of the clause doesn't require her to give the money back.
Its not illegal, every severance comes with that clause. Show me a single case where this was deemed illegal.
If you want to insist on that definition of morality that I would just invent a new word that has a more important meaning.
Maybe Lambda stinks but it would seem she chose to violate the agreement.
Maybe she was concerned about what she experienced later, but how much does someone care about a topic when they choose to make money by not talking about it....
How is that relevant here? She talked about it. Why would she violate an agreement and expose herself to legal liability if she didn't care?
Because she thought she could do it anonymously and keep the money and run? Not rocket science.
The point OP was making was that if she felt strongly about speaking out she shouldn't have signed.... and if she did sign for money to not talk she must not have felt that strongly about it.
You can argue specifically that she shouldn't have taken the money (I'll agree to disagree on that one) but the basic assertion here makes no sense. The desire for anonymity makes it clear that the violation of the agreement was not some sort of self-serving attempt to have it both ways.
People who have a bone to pick sometimes want to slam a spot just for the sake of slamming them if they felt burnt - rightly or wrongly.
I assert she didn't care because if a person truly had principles they wouldn't take hush money ... they would just speak their mind. If you take hush money, and then try to reneg on the agreement you instantly become untrustworthy in my books.
She did it anon because she thought she would have gotten away with slinging mud, when she got caught she came out to the public and tries to play a sympathy card about how she was 5 months pregnant.
Sorry this is case of someone trying to have their cake and eat it too.
Tons of bad anonymous reviews on glassdoor from people who got fired. I wrote one myself :D . Money is not the only benefit for bad mouthing your old employer
She didn't choose to make money by not talking about it. She took the money, then talked about it.
It's one way of fighting back in a situation where one party is financially superior to the other.
Legally, Lambda School probably has a good case for getting the money back, but it might be unwise for them to pursue it.
Hmmm, I thought that if you sign an agreement... it does not matter whether you "mean it" or not. You signed it, so it has to have some meaning.
Or, can you back out of a signed agreement by saying "Oh, I did not mean it"?
Not an expert, but seems dubious/shady.
Your honour you see I signed it so I could trick them! It was super sneaky - anyway so since I signed it left handed I don't have to honour it right?
People sign things without looking at them, especially when in desperate situations. Why adopt a stance that further weakens the position of the poor and unconnected, are the rich and connect not powerful enough already? Do we really need to allow "don't tell the truth" contracts to stand?
Lambda has been documented screwing people over. Of course they'd screw over their own employees. It's their modus operandi.
Lots of people immediately want to believe the pregnant woman is the good guy even though she broke a contract she legally signed and they know no other details ... but it's easy to hate on the company ... why is that?
People aren't sticking up for Lambda, they are sticking up for the basic concept of you are an adult... you signed a legal contract... don't come crying if you break it and there are consequences.
They're not even doing that. They're saying "We gave you money not to talk. You talked, so give the money back". That is an incredibly accommodating position. Overly generous, in my opinion.
If this is all there is to the story, then Lambda School is doing nothing wrong here. Seems like a lot of people (media?) are just looking for the flimsiest excuse to keep piling on.
Really regret ever spreading that advice and glad that none of my friends actually went into the program.
In the end, I'm really supportive of those who come into software outside college. I never went to college and some of the best developers I've worked with never went. What we do share in common is a LOT of effort beyond the minimum in terms of self driven learning and projects on the side. Open-source gives a huge amount of potentially highly visible work to demonstrate.
Yes, some may turn their noses up at someone who didn't go through a college program. Regardless of the path you take, you have to do more than just show up, and some really just don't have the natural ability to do certain kinds of work.
My advice to people is grab a book or two, and try to make something useful to you. Do it on github/gitlab if you can. It may be a crappy, one-off implementation, but you'll probably learn more than a bootcamp, and in the end you get something you and others might find useful.
You cannot just sit on your knowledge for 20+ years in this career path... some come close, but they hit a wall... I've also seen that when interviewing those with 20+ years of experience with nothing more recent.
In the end if you cannot/will-not grow, and this can include taking time during work hours, you won't succeed. When you're starting out, you have to bury yourself with learning to get a leg up for at least a few years. Later, you can get by with reading a few articles a day and maybe a couple experiments over a year. But you can not stop learning. And not putting extra effort in when starting out, to me at least, is a bad sign that you won't do well without someone holding your hand.
In this specific case, the student have a few GitHub repos of courses taken before enrolling in Lambda. One repo is in a different programming language. Would that help?
On the other hand I and others have been successful in utilizing a bootcamp as part of a career transition.
Like so many education things, effort and the skills of the students play a huge part in success.
Initial advantages sure, but you still have to be capable.
Good luck hiring from here on out.
So long as 'pg or someone doesn't double down on their love of them, at least, but that'd be incredibly unlikely.
Then again...
The problem with lionizing underdogs is that, if you take a broad enough sample of underdogs, they represent the general population, and the general population has its share of jerks and liars. We can't assume Lambda's former employee is good just because she is less powerful than the company.
But the story implies, with its choice of verbs in the headline (Lamba "threatens" while Baez "comes forward"), which player the reporter wants us to sympathize with. They could just as easily have written that Baez "breaks her word" or "defrauds" the company, while Lambda "enforces agreement".
I deeply disagree with the people questioning whether contracts should be honored, particularly after you walk out the door with the cash.
Whose argument are they not helping - your bleeding heart narrative?
> In my opinion Lambda has an ex-employee who left under allegations of performance despite allegedly not being notified and yet being 5 months pregnant and now Lambda is suing her for 36k which is a trivial amount of money.
You kind of leave out the part where the adult female who since she is 5 months pregnant should be really balancing all risks to her financial well being if she has been terminated signed a contract saying she wouldn't do X and then went and did X anyway.
> Do not SUE former employees. It will not end well.
Do not break contracts - it will not end well.
Essentially every knowledge work employee signs a nondisclosure agreement during their employment. Most who leave reaffirm the agreement in return for severance. So statistics of NDAs would just tell you how many employees an outfit has.
An employee who knows of actual lawbreaking can report it to authorities and be protected as a whistleblower. There's no protection for telling journalists that the company had execution problems.
That's the most cyclomatically complex, passive-aggressively voiced weasel wording I've read in a long time. How about a little respect for the English language, huh?
I sure hope they don't teach people to write code like they write PR legal speak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_voice
It also uses Trump's favorite template: It isn't, but if it is, it doesn't matter. That means it is, and it matters.
The main action in the other two (“we’d take” and “we can’t comment”) are active because “we” is the subject and acts on the object. A negative statement like “cannot comment” isn’t passive voice.
Also, passive aggressive doesn’t mean using the passive voice aggressively. It means assenting to some encroachment in a way that signals hidden belligerence.
Hopefully that was helpful (passive aggressive! Sorry.)
But, I'm not really sure why that matters - from the same article, it appears that she left because she was told she was not meeting some (perhaps) unknown performance plan, not because she had racist and sexist language used against her.
Sometimes it is best to keep quiet, is it not?
Yes, I do understand she got paid for her silence.