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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

yeah, so he's a bad boss. that in and of itself is not a crime.

I get it. People are pissed off about not having a job and the no severance is just salt in the wound. Lashing out at the CEO is obvious and justifiable. Stretching that ire into the CEOs personal finance is not serving the cause in a meaningful way. Absolutely, bitch&moan about his Insta posts. Bitch&moan about the fact the CEO wasn't willing to sacrifice some salary as a gesture to offset. Lots of examples of how badly this CEO handled this. Definitely will not look good in his future CEO job interviews.

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No one said anything about criminal liability: this is just about being a scumbag. A CEO is a receptacle of trust: they get to see things rank-and-file don't get to see. Leveraging that information asymmetry to profit at the risk of people who put just as much (in a lot of cases more) effort and skill into the success of the company as you do may not make you a criminal in a legal system that has decided a few decades ago to commit civilization suicide by grinding away labor protections, but it sure does make you a scumbag.

Live in modest house and give the people who sacrificed for you like a week of severance or something. Anything.

apologies for introducing a new phrase into an emotional conversation. I didn't mean "is not a crime" in the literal sense of the word. It's just a phrase used to mean things other than criminal activity are causing someone to receive attention like this.

It's not just about him spending money. It's about him clearly not doing everything he can to fix the situation.

When you're buying a boat and spending all your time sailing as you are supposed to be putting together a deal to save the company, and then that deal falls through, people are going to wonder if maybe there was more you could have done if you hadn't been buying boats and playing.

The "doing everything [you] can to fix the situation" won't work if the other party isn't interested. For all we know, this may have been the case. And there are many valid reasons for someone to focus on their personal life. My point is, we don't have the full picture.

His personal life came at a cost of a hundred people’s personal lives.

It absolutely is. When your boss asks for overtime and weekends to support the company in a startup culture, they take the most valuable thing any of us has. The exchange is about more than money and time: they are also expected to pour their time and effort into this one idea with similar, if not equal, sacrifices. They sink or swim with you.

This putz was too cowardly to lead honestly, and too incompetent to get a deal done to protect the livelihood of his team. If he knew he was checked out, he could have explored restructuring and letting the team buy in, maybe allowed them to reach out to their network and replace him. Instead all those hours of effort were reduced to nothing while he ran away from his responsibilities.

Fuck people like that, and fuck their boats and their Instagram feeds. They steal time away from our families for no benefit to us our society at large.

Exactly. Well put.

If you as a CEO feel burnt out etc and can't be bothered anymore to run the company and can't find a buyer, but the folks who joined your company are still invested because they believe in the vision, then let them buy the company from you. I'm sure some arrangement could have been made, even if you're not getting the millions you were expecting.

At least you'd protect your personal brand when you go and do your next venture.

But the way Ryan handled this is really poor - especially those sailing boat shots, while his employees had to worry about finding the next job.

Poor leadership and he totally burnt his personal brand imo.

Edit: typos / clarity

What it clearly demonstrates is that the CEO was far less invested in the company than those who worked for him.

What the attempts at building a norm along the lines of, "It isn't a crime, so people shouldn't talk about his finances" is about attempting to keep people from noticing that is almost always the case. It is class-defense, and what won't look good in future CEO interviews is that he was gauche-enough to draw attention to the difference between incentives-in-theory and the real world.

I don't understand, why are you so eager to nitpick the exact manner in which some anonymous Treehouse employee gets to critique his fucking asshole of a CEO?

Because it cheapens the argument. Complain all you want on the fact you have an absentee CEO where the employees are struggling with the decisions that were made while said CEO is galavanting around. Absolutely, complain away. The CEO does not owe the company money to fund severance packages. To comment about that is just lowering the signal to noise ratio.

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