Better.com CEO fires 900 employees on Zoom call | Hacker News Reader

Better.com CEO fires 900 employees on Zoom call

maggrand.com

420 pointsjimgordon448 comments

I know this sounds horrible but in the days of covid and working from home, what are companies supposed to do if they have to lay off large amounts of people?

Make them all risk their health to come to an in-person event, only to be fired? Drive to every employee's house to fire them in person?

It obviously sucks but I don't see how, in 2021, this is any different from the kind of thing that would happen all the time in mass layoffs.

This is a good point. At least they got a face to face. I had members of a team just get a slip in the past.

I think one of the bigger issues was that the CEO made it all about him on the call.

Should’ve taken notes from Carta’s CEO when they did a RIF. Took ownership, and expressed both remorse and gratitude for the folks let go, instead of making it about themselves like a narcissist.

I find it strange that the CEO gave no one any warnings or any second chances. if that many people were doing what he claimed there was obviously a culture created to allow that.

I personally think he's trying to lay off expensive workers and outsource them and this is a lame excuse attempting to gas light and blame the employee.

Yeah if they brought them in and someone (depending on how many it could be inevitable) had COVID... just to fire them.

I'm not sure I see that as being better.

It should probably be handled one by one via Zoom with the persons immediate manager and a representative from HR.

But think of all the money saved by the company! /s

No, because once you let the first person know on their 1:1 meeting there will be miscommunication / rumours, and everybody is going to be somewhat aware. However some people are going to have 1st party information, and others have heard of the rumours, and those people will feel offended to not have been made aware like everyone else.

When this happened to me, we knew ahead of time in general, and waited for individual meetings, and it all worked out. As it is, there's still miscommunication and rumours while all the now-locked-out people meet with HR and return computers and such.

This is how it happens normally in non-covid world. There is no reason you should fire everyone publicly by the CEO, likely someone the employee never interacts with. The person also needs to know the next steps, for instance if they'll get paid of for vacation days, how to sign up for Cobra (if in the US), etc. You can cut off access prior to notice. Ideally they would all be done within a short period.

I've been around when a firm did a mass layoff. It's unpleasant and of course there are rumors and of course people are offended, but this is the correct way to handle it.

> This is how it happens normally in non-covid world

Not for me. I have been a part of two layoffs - the first one in 2010 - and witnessed multiple more since then. It's always been an "all hands" conference by the CEO to let everyone know then afterwards followed by a 1:1 to tell you about severance options (if any), Cobra, etc. Not the other way around.

Which would take days while rumour flies and chaos reigns.

Ideally yes, but 900 people? Before you’ve reached the end of that list you’ll have created a lot of fear among the remaining people.

I worked for a company that did individual firing with a manager and HR, it was no where near 900 people, and it still took the better part of a day. It was absolutely terrible for everyone, not just those who where to be fired.

Goldman Sachs regularly lays off 5% of their 40k workforce every year. It all happens in a short period of time. They somehow manage to do it.

That's still almost half the number Better.com fired (9%), and Goldman Sachs has a procedure, if they do this every year.

I was wondering that too. I think ideally you would have a 1-1 video chat with someone. But at such a big, 900 employee, layoff, maybe that wasn't easy to do.

I think the CEOs affect on the call made it worse. It was very strange to hear him say stuff like "last time I had to do this, I cried. I hope to be stronger this time." It felt like his focus when laying off 900 people was too much on how it made him personally feel uncomfortable.

Off topic but this might be the first time I've seen someone use the noun affect correctly.

emotion or desire, especially as influencing behavior or action.

I had to look it up, I wasn't even aware affect had a noun definition - I had believed it was only a verb. TIL

I heard it a lot in psychology classes in college. People can have a "flat affect."

I imagine 900 1-on-1s could not be done quickly and word would spread very fast that firings were ramping up around the company. This would cause a whole lot of stress for those not being fired, just waiting for a call.

Given the alternatives, the 900-wide bandaid-ripping-off method seems best.

I was curious and did some math. A five minute zoom call is not realistic; you probably need 15 minutes per person. If my math is correct, and if no one was even a minute late, it would take 225 hours to lay those people off sequentially, assuming 24/7 meetings. If you had 15 managers making those calls, it would still take 15 hours to complete all calls. Let's call that three business days, during which no other work gets done anywhere in the company.

I once worked at an employer who performed five rounds of layoffs in the space of a few months. I cannot recommend that method.

I agree with you, the 900-wide bandaid was the only practical option.

Is it realistic to have just 15 managers for a 6000 employee company? That would mean 400 employees per manager.

I freely admit that I pulled numbers out of a hat, just to help me visualize the problem.

I think I agree with this. For one thing, if it's 900 1:1 meetings, the job of coordinating their loss of access with IT would be impossible. Mistakes would be made, you'd have people with access to chat and email after they were fired, people realizing they were fired because they lost access, rumors flying around, in some ways it would be just a more chaotic version of what actually happened. At least in the Zoom call everybody could see that nine hundred other people were sharing their fate.

On the other hand, the CEO sounds like an asshole and seems to have been using some kind of intrusive work surveillance technology to blame employees for the layoffs:

> “You guys know that at least 250 of the people terminated were working an average of 2 hours a day while clocking 8 hours+ a day in the payroll system? They were stealing from you and stealing from our customers who pay the bills that pay our bills"

A fine point if true, but how does he know which people were working two hours per day? And who else should be blamed if it was such a widespread practice? The answers to those questions won't reflect well on him.

I think it's unlikely that people didn't already know something was coming.

Last time I got laid off the CEO said that he knew it was hard for me, but also wasn't easy for him.

Which is true: firing people is one of the hardest managerial tasks, but it's tone deaf and disrespectful to make it about the manager's feelings. Shows a lack of maturity.

idk, some people might take small comfort in the fact that an actual human feels bad about it. who knows?

imo all this "right/wrong way to fire people" is mostly bikeshedding. by far the worst part of being fired is the part where you don't have a job anymore. letting affected employees know as early as possible and paying severance are the only material ways to alleviate that.

It's not inappropriate to be apologetic or sympathetic. But saying "this is hard on me" is basically asking for sympathy from the person you are putting in a very stressful situation.

Even more so when the sentiment is literally "You know, last time I had to do this kind of thing I cried. This time, not so much."

I’ve been in mass layoffs. Having bosses arbitrarily come up to desks and then having that person return fifteen minutes later and repeating that for the entire morning is much worse. It’s anxiety inducing, even if you didn’t get the ax. I’d rather have an all-hands and get it over with quickly.

Same here. Never as big as 900 people, but I've been both laid-off and still-employed following maybe a dozen events. I have been laid off four times, both done as part of an en masse event and as a series of 1:1s. It's probably just a personal preference but I think the impersonal nature of the mass layoff is TONS less stressful. Just rip off the bandaid.

One time I was in a meeting during a "series of 1:1s" event, and a colleague opened the door and said "It's all done." and left. We weren't sure for a minute if he meant the whole company was all done, and we should pack up and go home, or if they were done with the layoffs and we weren't getting let go. It could have realistically been either one, but we ended up still having another couple years worth of paychecks.

My first time was at a startup; maybe 80 people. We had an all-hands meeting on a Friday afternoon, and everybody got an envelope on the way out. Some people's envelopes were fatter than the others. Friday afternoon was perfect timing -- most of us ended up at the brewery across the street. Fortunately in 1998 everything in tech in the area was super hot so we all landed on our feet pretty quickly.

The worst I have heard was a VP coming down to the bullpen and had workers stand up , count off in ones and twos. Twos were instructed to grab a box and clear their desk in 15 minutes, while security guards loomed.

If you can hire 900 people with personal interviews, you can lay them off with one too.

That is probably the simplest, best, clearest answer to this whole mess I have heard. Nicely put.

Same with calling people "the unlucky group", that felt really disrespectful.

In addition to that, I find it respectable that the CEO made the announcement himself directly to those concerned, although the way he communicated it might not have been that great.

He could have delegated to the direct managers of those concerned and HR.

Call them individually. It's not the fact it was done by zoom that's surprising/unusual, it's the fact it was done en masse.

And they had to hear the CEO say he cried the first time he did this, without knowing what it is about. Why is he talking about his feelings? Perhaps his assistants were fired too so there weren't anyone to check his speech? Crazy.

IMO the issue is that this is right after a funding round.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/30/better-com-gets-750m-cash-...

Probably a condition of the deal

That would probably be the case. Its not unknown for companies to get funding on those sorts of conditions.

Right, sounds like an attempt to do a PR stunt.

That seems like an odd argument to make. They probably only got that funding because they agreed to slim down their workforce.

I was subject to a mass layoff in spring 2020. They did individual vid calls with all affected individuals. It was only a 10m call, with two people from a couple levels higher in the org than me, and an HR rep, but I appreciate that they took that time.

The Zoom call part isn't really the issue, although individual Zoom meetings would have been better.

> In another email obtained by Forbes last year, Garg wrote:

> > ‘You are TOO DAMN SLOW. You are a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS and…DUMB DOLPHINS get caught in nets and eaten by sharks. SO STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME.”

Is there a link to this?

It's in the posted article.

At the end of the article

Sadly, no. There is a quote from a section of it in the linked Forbes article, though.

We'll have to wait for it to show up on https://twitter.com/TechEmails

That is very surreal to read, for some reason.

This is what seems right to me. It's not the virtual nature, it's the lazy mass group layoff that's objectionable and disrespectful.

If you're being laid off, you probably have a lot of questions. A 1:1 meeting would allow for that.

Hell, 10:1 would be okay and 1/10th of the price.

Disagree. Why make the HR team go through 900 individual calls? At the same time this will leak and other employees will learn that they might get fired before they get their own call. Recipe for disaster. Just rip off the band aid.

Presumably the 900 people already had leaders that could talk to them.

Each manager would have to make that call to their laid-off reports, or the next manager in line if the manager is being laid off too. Maybe after that it would be ok for HR to have larger meetings with those affected to sort out the details.

“or the next manager in line if the manager is being laid off too“

What if the whole chains are axed? Recursive "or the next manager" could easily lead to exactly what happened: a CEO lucky to have a pandemic voiding all expectations to do something like that in person.

I think it boils down to leadership is really about managing relationships. This method is just too impersonal for most people, just like breaking off a romantic relationship via text is generally considered weak and frowned upon.

Wait, you're not supposed to break up over text? Since when?!?!?!

I'm almost certain this is a joke. Right?

Yes. My apologies, I thought it seemed obvious.

I suspect it is rare, though I suppose not impossible, that anyone needs to break off 900 romantic relationships at once.

I understand your point, but if there aren’t subordinate leaders below the CEO who can perform this function, I suspect they have organizational structure problems.

I believe a good approach would be to have those first line leaders (who actually have that relationship built with their subordinates) break the bad news and then the CEO speak to everybody and own the decision.

Why would you need to text?

Surely after seeing your relationship status change on Facebook, they would understand?

> Why make the HR team go through 900 individual calls?

The entire reason companies have hierarchical power structures (in theory) at least, is so that information can be passed along with the log of the company size.

Having every manager have 10 min call with each direct report, or in the worse case a team meeting, would be much more human and could accomplish the task of notification in roughly the same time window as an all hands firing.

You got it right up until the point where you think it’s to pass information from top to down. It’s not. It’s to pass information from the bottom up.

Tbh from the quotes it seems Vishal Garg is not only incompetent, but also a bit of a shitgibbon. Not sure if 1:1 meeting would help in anything here.

Ah, I didn't mean a 1:1 with the CEO. A 1:1 meeting with your leader or an HR person.

The problem is that 900 people is a lot of people. Imagine all managers scheduling meetings with their reports to tell them, then the managers themselves are probably being let go, in the meantime it would create A LOT of stress not knowing whether you will be called in for a meeting or not, just sitting there seeing people being let go around you 1 by 1. The whole process would take a week just to have a proper meeting and give everyone decent time to process and ask questions.

In a way, I think this is better - it's quicker, everyone knows where they stand, there is no uncertainty about it.

However, I do agree that

1) the communication from the CEO could be better

2) people should be given an opportunity to then still ask questions, either for HR or their managers(if still employed).

Companies do massive layoffs all the time without large meetings to tell everyone at the meeting they are fired. It isn't that hard.

It can be done and it isn't hard for the company. I'm going to float a guess that you haven't experienced a mass layoff where they pop your coworkers one by one over the course of the workday. It's very painful and takes a very long time. Anybody who has been around for one would almost certainly take the mass layoff over 8+ hours of constant worry just to lose your job at the end anyway.

I have been around for a number of mass layoffs, and you are right it sucked. It will always suck, there is no way around it.

It doesn’t have to take all day. Managers meet with the people being laid off in the morning. If it is too large to do 1on1, you can do small meetings with a few people and their manager.

Point is that it should come from your direct manager (or the closest direct manager in the chain if managers are also being laid off).

For large US companies there are rules (Warn Act) about how you make people redundant

> Imagine all managers scheduling meetings with their reports to tell them, then the managers themselves are probably being let go…

Yeah, I imagined all of this and it seemed like exactly what a competent company would do.

Leave it to HN to argue that having a shitty mass layoff through Zoom is better than having a 1 to 1

It's absolutely not better than having a 1-1, and I never said it was. But I will argue that it's better than waiting a week to have your scheduled "mystery call" with your manager while you see everyone around you being laid off left and right. It would have been stressful as hell, and in that sense yes, finding out in a single call with the CEO is "better". I'd still like to have a 1-1 with my manager to discuss either way.

Imagine all managers scheduling meetings with their reports to tell them

I was in a company that had a mass layoff (well, it was getting bought for IP/assets and a few employees). I found out about it from my boss one morning, knew I was getting laid off, then scheduled meetings with my direct reports later that day. It was pretty easy to find time to schedule the meetings since it's not like anyone had any project work to do any more.

By mid day the cat was pretty much out of the bag and everyone knew what was happening, but I and other managers still held the individual meetings.

Managed to hire most of my my former direct reports at my new job.

> It's not the virtual nature, it's the lazy mass group layoff that's objectionable and disrespectful.

Is it? I can plausibly make the other argument that not having to do it yourself and offloading it to middle managers/HR is also "objectionable and disrespectful".

I've been on both sides, but yes, just my opinion. On the other hand, this is newsworthy because it's unusual. I suspect it's unusual for a reason.

If the CEO didn’t want to seem like he was passing the buck, he could have had an all-hands meeting afterwards and explain it was ultimately his decision.

Unlike when someone is being fired individually, in mass layoffs there simply are no individual answers to questions - any questions are either relevant to everyone and should be communicated in a mass manner, or they are questions which are not answerable at all. Any proper questions that have a reasonable answer would absolutely deserve that answer to be made to everyone else in the exact same manner, even if they don't think to ask that question.

Any questions about "why" are reduced to essentially "your individual job performance and role does not matter, it's just that this business unit ceases to exist as of yyyy-dd-mm". Any questions about "what next" are answered by "Here's the details on the severance conditions for you - the exact same as for the other 899 people".

Better.com CEO Threatened to Burn His Business Partner Alive. Now He’s a Billionaire.

Last fall, employees at one of America’s fastest-growing startups began making anxious phone calls. They believed that CEO Vishal Garg—a volatile entrepreneur with a history of disgruntled business partners—had been giving huge amounts of equity... https://www.thedailybeast.com/bettercom-ceo-vishal-garg-thre...

Nice, when we started playing with some financial engineering we also noticed that vesting could be any unit of time.

So we did grants with super low cost basis (it was very early there was nobody else to placate), and the recipients did 83(b) elections to recognize the income at the low cost basis, so when they exercised at fair market value soon after it wouldnt be income at that point in time, only capital gains when they sale (which is offsettable much more easily than income, or gets a lower tax rate if you hold it ling enough anyway). This just nullifies a big income tax bill.

Fun game, if you know what you’re doing. Expensive annoying game if you dont.

I don't think that was the point of the linked article

Pretty sure it was the threatening someone to burn them alive

oh, right, that.

it also presented the shareholdings and the compliant ways of transferring consolidated ownership in a negative light

I know this looks bad but I generally appreciate manage giving clear warnings like this before firing. I have seen firings in companies where employee had no clue that the manager was not happy with him. I know this type of warning is the thing that would get published in the press by disgruntled employee and so managers couldn't give negative feedback and in the firing speech managers just tell that someone is not a good fit for the company or some other HR shit.

I think you can warn people about their performance without using abuse.

Abuse? Really? Is a single email where someone vents frustration for 2 lines actually abuse?

Yes name calling - 'dumb'.

Say a couple has a good relationship. One day, Partner A has a bad day at work. A comes home and screams at Partner B: "you're dumb! you're slow! why isn't dinner ready? you're a dolphin!"

Partner A was just venting frustration after having a terrible day. Is that abuse? YES! Unequivocally, yes.

There is no excuse for insulting, yelling, or otherwise treating other human beings as lesser than. It's abuse, always, even one time. And frankly if it happens once, it's very unlikely it isn't a repeated pattern of behavior.

Yes, in my opinion it is. Think about abuse in other contexts to put it in perspective. If a teacher in the middle of giving a homework assignment had said the same thing, would that be okay? What about a police officer who pulled someone over during a traffic stop? What about a customer at a drive thru saying this into the speaker?

This is not a random person on the street corner shouting at other random passers by. This guy is in a position of power over the people he is communicating with.

Absolutely right. You can smash a good relationship in a few seconds, even if it was one that took years to build.

> Think about abuse in other contexts to put it in perspective. If a teacher in the middle of giving a homework assignment had said the same thing, would that be okay? What about a police officer who pulled someone over during a traffic stop? What about a customer at a drive thru saying this into the speaker?

Calling a group of people "DUMB DOLPHINS" on an email chain ... Inappropriate, un professional, dis-respectful all seem like a better way to characterize it.

Its like the reverse of when Prince Andrew described Jeffrey Epstein behavior as "Un-Becoming". There is probably a better way to characterize it.

I dunno. Seems clearly abusive to me from someone in a position of power. This wasn't said among friends at a bar or by or about someone unrelated to the people in question. It was their boss, or bosses boss.

my heart goes out to all the victims of abuse, but not the ones that one time were on an email chain and their bosses-boss called the team they were on a bunch of "dumb dolphins"

I didn't know verbal/emotional abuse requires a minimum word count! Please tell, what is the magic number that serves as the threshold?

I knew you would get downvoted. HN is a weird mixture of professionalism and childishness. Getting angry at two lines without context/relationship with manager is all I could expect from here.

In what context would it be OK for a CEO to send ENTHUSIASTICALLY YELLING e-mails to employees telling them they are SLOW DUMB DOLPHINS and to STOP EMBARRASSING ME STOP IT STOP IT RIGHT NOW...?

Also how would our knowing more about the CEO/employee relationship here improve our perception? The most "positive" thing I can think of is, the employees are so used to it they would tell us something like "oh, that's just CEO, he communicates really passionately". That's not actually positive, though. It's Stockholm Syndrome. [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

> I knew you would get downvoted

Hold on though. You don't have the full context/relationship between GP and the people who downvoted them. It would be irresponsible for you to jump to conclusions about Hackernews or those commenters based on just a one-line grayed out comment.

If you think allowing someone with a massive power differential to call you dumb and degrade you is not abuse then you have been working and some pretty terrible places and I hope you find somewhere better.

Agreed, to characterize it as such is a dis-service to people who have suffered abuse in the workplace.

"You're moving slowly and dropping tasks. That is impacting the business and we are losing customers. This needs to change by next month/quarter/whatever."

vs.

"YOU ARE A DUMB DOLPHIN BLAH BLAH BLAH"

Massive difference.

The former is a warning rooted in a sincere desire to lead the org/employee towards positive change. The latter is verbal abuse that accomplishes nothing but placating the ego of the abuser.

The context here is the mortgage market is declining as rates rise. These are people who mostly were performing but there's no longer a market fit.

It's possible to be really clear without going ad hominem. Reality is usually already harsh enough. I'd prefer the first with a clear indication that the company will probably not be able to continue keeping to employee since they need to save a lot of costs. So the person can get a new job in time. IMHO it should be the minimum standard for anyone working in management to maintain a respectful and clear communication.

What warning? 900 people were let go without any warning best I can tell.

In what way is that message "clear"? It reads like a temper tantrum from a pre-teen, not a manager providing negative feedback to an employee.

The funny thing is that sharks are more likely to be eaten by dolphins (especially orcas) than vice versa. And sharks also get caught in nets.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/killer-wh...

I guess Garg is just as weak on marine biology as he is on leadership and business ethics.

Perhaps he's got some breakdown on how dolphin intelligence impacts those stats given his emphasis on them being dumb dolphins

I imagine it as a callback to some company wide training or team-building exercise or corporate culture story where the keynote/"message from our fearless leader" was some sort of dolphin parable.

But maybe I'm giving him too much credit.

Given that he threatened to staple his business partner to the wall and burn him alive, you are probably giving him too much credit.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/bettercom-ceo-vishal-garg-thre...

to be fair, he was talking about DUMB dolphins.

You are more kind than I would be.

I bet this dude talks a lot about alpha wolves too

He is the Sigma Wolf.

Correction: Omicron Wolf

Not to fixate but this is kinda interesting to me. I very much believe orcas will kill and eat sharks, but dolphins do too? I didn’t see a mention of it on the article.

Orcas are large dolphins.

Well that’s news to me, very interesting. But they’re a member of the dolphin family. When you say dolphin people think porpoise hence my confusion. Thanks for the info!

You can't really fire 900 people on individual Zoom calls. After the first 10 minutes everyone will know what their meeting is about and it makes the problem worse. People will be texting their managers begging for information and the manager will have to lie for a day or two until they are authorized to say in the meeting.

Those logistics are no worse than the equivalent in person.

This was done at my previous company near the beginning of the pandemic, where half of the company (about 1200 people) were laid off, entirely with one-on-one calls. It worked well and I appreciated it personally.

But the anxiety of waiting all day, as you watch your coworkers slowly drop, and send their farewell emails... wondering if you'll be next... I'd rather find out all at once.

> After the first 10 minutes everyone will know what their meeting is about and it makes the problem worse.

Huh? It’s not a surprise birthday party. I’m not sure why a key goal would be that each fired person is taken completely by surprise.

Obviously to spare the poor manager the hassle of being asked if they will have a job in two days or not

That's actually the goal in most firings so employees can't use their access to sabotage things on their way out. You have IT revoke their all their access once the meeting starts.

The reasons why may not be obvious if you're not a manager or haven't run a large organization before, but the simple truth is, "employees" are not a magically ethical bunch of people simply by virtue of being the underdog and poor and downtrodden and being all fired and stuff. You do not want a significant number of employees running around who are either uncertain they are going to be fired for a significant period of time, and even worse, you don't want a whole bunch of employees running around who have a pretty good idea they're going to be fired in a couple of days, because some fraction of them are going to take advantage of their access to wreck things up for the company. Wrecking things with technical access, wrecking relationships with companies... there's hardly anyone in a position in a company who couldn't do quite a bit of damage if they know they're out the door anyhow. All you have to do is be sure to keep it under the threshold where it's worth getting the legal system involved. (e.g., more "wreck relationships with customers" and keep the damage difficult to quantify and less "set the place on fire during peak business hours").

If a company told me they were going to fire me in two weeks, the worst risk the company would be taking is that I might just decide that they can't fire me in two weeks because I quit. I wouldn't do any other deliberate harm on the way out. Perhaps that's most people.

It certainly isn't all people, though.

Maybe it would be nice if we could all get along well enough to see being fired in some period of time as just business and not worth lashing out. Then again, maybe your sympathies lie with the employees lashing out. But in that case, the company has no choice but to get you out the door with as little warning as possible, to defend both itself as an abstract entity and all the rest of the employees.

This is one of those things that seems to be an institutional part of Americans quitting or being fired from jobs, but it's far from universal.

In Germany (and I believe most of Europe) several months notice is usual (three months minimum), and typically people keep working until the end of that time (aside from taking unused vacation). Sure, motivation suffers in that time, but don't think the cases of employees taking revenge on their employers is any higher here than in the US (in fact, I suspect it's less).

This is how it should be in the US

In some cases, you will be escorted off the premises immediately, then paid to stay at home until the end of your notice period. This is mostly for people with somewhat sensitive jobs, though (research, sales, some management positions) and probably more common in finance than elsewhere. And usually imposed no matter what side initiates the departure.

It’s literally extremely common for companies to inform people that they will be laid off weeks in the future. Companies often have entire facilities that get shut down with months of advance notice.

Not to mention that temporary jobs are also extremely common, so this explanation that the only thing ever preventing employees from sabotaging their employer is the hope that they will be employed there indefinitely is pretty clearly insufficient.

You can’t explain this as “managers/executives have no choice.” They have the choice, and they sometimes choose the option that they determine is easier for them. Not surprising, of course, but also not worth defending.

My understanding is that in those cases, the employees are generally offerred a significant severance package that is conditional on them not causing any problems until the day they are laid off. This way, the employee still has something to lose.

Most people wouldn't cause any problems, but a small fraction will cause trouble if they're put in a position where they feel harmed and can retaliate with no consequences to themselves.

In my previous work, people wanted to remain on good terms because they were good jobs they were hoping to return to once economic conditions were better. It also helped that they were unionized so they got a reasonable package to make ends meet in the interim.

> If a company told me they were going to fire me in two weeks, the worst risk the company would be taking is that I might just decide that they can't fire me in two weeks because I quit.

Maybe that's just a German thing, but here you'd (usually) be loosing the severance pay and some social benefits if you quit instead of being fired w/o direct cause.

In Canada/Quebec too.

Right, some people will be jerks, so treat all employees like criminals. That's why I left my last job. Got tired of seeing people escorted out by security. Talk about a toxic work culture.

The company could let employees in on key decision making and thus not create the environment of distrust and paranoia. Why is it ever a surprise how the company is doing? Solely, solely to keep employees ignorant of matters concerning their livelihoods. A company has the choices it cultivates for itself.

That is very American company thing. Non American companies dont do "escort you away the very same day" thing.

> because some fraction of them are going to take advantage of their access to wreck things up for the company.

These stories always float around, but this is quite rare and depending on what “wrecking” means, could end in jail time for the ex-employee. Most are capable of making that connection therefore most don’t. Yet the fear and treatment from upper management for this mostly fictitious hypothetical still runs rampant. There’s even a high profile case of an ex-Ubiquiti employee having a real good time because they wanted to extort their employer.

The goal there is to minimise the time spent waiting for the other shoe to drop.

After all, if you know layoffs are happening, and your boss schedules a confidential one-on-one meeting with you tomorrow, how well are you going to sleep tonight?

And what of the people who aren't getting fired - you can't really reassure them their jobs are safe before you've told the people whose jobs aren't safe. So you'll be keeping them in limbo too.

Of course, no amount of careful management is going to make people enjoy getting fired (except perhaps a generous voluntary early retirement package)

If the element of surprise is important, then you set up one-on-ones with all employees regardless of whether they will be laid off. Probably going to want to talk to the ones staying, anyway.

Have you never been at a company that has had layoffs?

I was at a company that did ~400 people layoff during pandemic. The place didn't even have a great culture but everyone, even people remaining (> half the company) got a one-on-one chat with their manager.

There was, of course, a company all hands later.

Sure people know what's up, but it's dramatically more human to have your manager call you and tell you a.) you are going to be okay or b.) we're very sorry this has happened, it's been a pleasure working with you, please use me as a reference anytime you need. We even personally called each candidate we were supposed to hire.

Company wide zoom as notice of layoffs is grotesque.

Not only is the all-hands layoff grotesque, but the guy spent a few minutes talking about how hard it is to fire people.

“I did this before and I cried”

assuming they did a 20 minute meeting for each employee thats 233 hours or 29 business days to fire all 700 of them...

he would have to fire 1000 people to cover the cost

This reads like a solution to a twisted elementary school math problem, but:

Assuming 1 manager for 10 employees, that's 90 managers each doing a 3h20 minute block of 20 minute meetings, allowing all to be fired in one morning.

What if the manager is also getting fired?

That's the cost of doing business, you keep the profits and in exchange you don't treat your employees like fucking garbage.

He didn't even need to lay them off, according to the article. He just wanted "a fortress balance sheet going into the holidays"

From the employees' perspective, who wants to sit around in angst for a month while your friends and colleagues are dropping like flies, wondering if you're next?

One and done is the way to do it in my opinion. Dragging out bad news seldom works out well.

You can pass out layoffs across the whole company in a couple of hours through the same infrastructure you use to pass out work items, KPIs, and paychecks

Your unspoken assumption: A company of 6000 employees only has 1 manager/HR rep capable of talking to pink slip recipients.

Exactly. Hire 20 extra HR people to make that firing faster. Then fire the 20 HR people. It's simple.

Just over 233 person-hours of work isn't 233 hours of work. Assuming team sizes average 20, that work can be spread across 35 managers, requiring less than a business day to complete. Even assuming 900 people as mentioned in the headline, that's still less than a day's work. Larger-than-average teams may require more time, but this could still be easily accomplished over two business days.

Now do the math on all the less important meetings that you have every day.

Got his metaphors wrong:

"The Dark Secrets That Dolphins Don’t Want You to Know"

https://slate.com/human-interest/2009/05/the-dark-secrets-th...

Now this is just moving the goalposts. Can someone please help me understand what I’m supposed to be outraged about? It seems to be a confetti of grievances meant to evoke an emotional reaction.

I guess your ok with the CEO of the company you work for calling you a dumb dolphin? Lol

This dude is embodiment of why we created agile. What a childish way to look at engineering.

Product: "What are you working on?"

Engineering: "That is up to you. What is important? The answer can't be everything."

Product: "Why is it taking so long?"

Engineering: Here is what the developers expect it to take. It will almost certainly take longer. When are we supposed to get X project done with our current workload? What falls off? If we crunch we will lose our best talent who will leave to go do the same work for more pay somewhere else.

Do it the way AirBnB (or most other companies) did it: announce that large scale layoffs will be happening due to X and Y reasons, and that the individuals losing their jobs will be contacted over the next week. Then someone phones/zooms them individually and answers questions and lets them know right away what'll happen.

This isn't about Covid, this is about the CEO making this easier on himself. I'm guessing he expected that if the video leaked, he would look sympathetic because he did it personally and talked about how hard it was for him.

How is waiting days for a potential meeting to be scheduled in better?

That would be the most unpleasant week of my career, regardless of the outcome. I'd get nothing done and probably be interviewing by the end of it.

Agreed. You give employees a heads up that the layoffs will be occurring, which both sets expectations with those who are affected AND also allows those who aren't affected to understand what's going on.

Then you take one of two approaches: If the CEO feels strongly that the news should come from them personally, you do the Zoom call, and then affected workers immediately meet with their managers for individual communication. Or you skip the Zoom calls and have the managers deliver the news.

Obviously, you want the time between the "heads up" meeting and the meeting with the affected individuals to be short, maybe a day or less, so workers aren't spending too much time in dread mode. But it reduces the feeling of having been blindsided.

Spend a week waiting if you get a call or not? I'd prefer the mass zoom call to that shit.

The nice way to do it would be to send an email to everyone immediately telling them whether they are layed off or not, and schedule a personal one-on-one call with a manager or an HR person to answer any questions.

Probably the least worst way of doing it, but still creates an enormous amount of stress for everyone, regardless of their ultimate status...

Each person being laid off deserves a private meeting with their manager where they are told this. The fact that they hired 900 people they now no longer need is a failing of the CEO by itself. If they work remotely, it can be a zoom meeting.

Being told in a meeting with 900 people by someone you don't know is rude and tells me that anyone in leadership in this company are people I would not like to work for. The fact that he was more concerned about his feelings than the feelings of the 900 is even more evidence that this person has absolutely no empathy and managing people is the wrong job for them.

>The fact that they hired 900 people they now no longer need is a failing of the CEO by itself

How so? Business circumstances are constantly changing

You don't hire 900 people over one Zoom call. At some point, you have to figure out if you are hiring too many people, so you don't end up in a situation like this.

If you’re letting go of 900 people, for the average person their manager is also being let go. In a good amount of cases, probably their manager’s manager.

I think it was a good call for the CEO to do it instead of outsourcing to HR or a COO. He didn’t try to hide behind another exec. Anyone being let go - especially at the holidays - is going to be pretty pissed about it, and it was the right thing for the CEO to take the slings and arrows for it instead of an underling.

> I think it was a good call for the CEO to do it instead of outsourcing to HR or a COO.

There was actually a movie about these outsourced "downziser" organizations/consultants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_in_the_Air_(2009_film)

Office Space, anyone?

Yes, but even there the consultant made a point about making the transition as smooth for the fired person as possible. The whole point was not to stir up negative emotions, which by their very nature are unpredictable.

Sure, but the client still pays the consultant for economic reasons: soften the emotional blow to the employee being let go in order to soften the reputation blow to the company. If the employer does not care for reputation (or, what seems more likely in this case, key persons might actually like that particular type of reputation), why would they pay?

Taking the slings and arrows for it by entirely protecting himself with a one way call?

Nice meme

Doing this hierarchically is already a solved issue:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Joz-tAsJ6as

Part of the 1:1 meeting basis is to address any concerns and address return of assets or information.

In the Before Times, there might be a group meeting, that would typically be for a department or site. It would be followed by a 1:1 with a manager (whomever is left standing in the chain of command), or (fairly frequently) with an outsourced consultant (see the film Up in the Air for reasonably accurate depiction of this).

Better did ... Worse.

While true, you could do it in waves - task low level managers to inform their directs, then task the senior managers to inform the middle managers, and so on...

That's how you make all your most hireable employees leave ship first. If you want to retain some those are usually the ones you'd want to keep.

Counterpoint : this is going viral. The aftermath of that is going to be hard to measure in simple terms.

"As your manager, I'm sad to tell you this, but you are fired. But so am I! It's not you, it's the company."

Lets think it through.

Even if each person is given 5 minutes of personal time with the person doing the firing, at 8 hours per day assuming no breaks, that's 5 * 900 / 60 / 8 = 9 days. Almost two business weeks. That means that 900 people will have a zoom meeting scheduled two weeks ahead of time, and while they wait they see that everyone who goes into that meeting is fired.

Does this sounds like a better way of doing it, to you?

No, that doesn't sound like a better way, but it does sound like you aren't particularly grasping what they are proposing.

Your algo can easily be parallelized by increasing the number of people firing.

Heard many stories of it being done this way. Extreme anxiety for everyone as people wait to see if they get called in.

My point exactly.

Taking the time to do it with respect for the individuals, rather than treating them all like interchangeable fodder?

Yeah, that seems better to me.

If they have to fire 900 people, you think they only have the bandwidth for 1 person to fire them? 10 People its down to a work day, 20 is half that again..

This was horrendous optics, basically asking to get shared virally and draw more attention to the bad situation the company is in. The CEO made it about himself / the company, that's all people are going to get from Google searches for a time to come. Managers could give them the news en masse as efficiently and infinitely more humanely.

Isn't that 'employee privilege'? People who are in business for themselves often lose clients without notice. Employees easily forget how much they are shielded from the market.

Well… yes? Employees trade lower revenue for greater stability

But, the query wasn't about stability. It was about emotional support.

yes, of which you expect more when you enter an employee-employer relationship than when you are independent

I'm not sure that's wise.

I know that the zeitgeist is to say “your employer doesn’t care about you, don’t care about them etc”, but honestly in my experience the employer-employee relationship is much more stable and human than a contractor-client one

It's a buffer against the market. Nice when it works, but you can't count on it fully. Sometimes the outside world leaks through. I don't think anyone wanted to fire 900 people at once in this situation.

No. At mass layoffs it's better to do it instantly and en masse because otherwise you cause massive anxiety in everyone, including those who will stay. It's also why multiple rounds of layoffs are a bad idea. Just do everything at once and move on.

Usually people still need to do something in the period before they are actually laid off. With these kind of calls it's scorched earth from there onward and I would question everything everyone does which is counterproductive.

Not for these roles, I don't think. You can just lock their laptop and call it a day, which is what they did. This is fungible labour.

The CEO doesn't really pass the "fit and proper person" test does He

Not to mention the CEO spent more time talking about how this is impacting HIM. When you're laying people off, this isn't about you. Noone cares about you, this is about the people getting laid off. You need to be concerned about their feelings, what you're going to do to help THEM.

I've worked for multiple companies that have had major reductions in force at times. When folks get laid off in a group, it has never been done 1:1. Usually the group getting let go is told all at once separately from the rest of the company. It's done per team or per department, so if you're a software engineer getting cut, you're told at the same time with the other software engineers getting cut, but yes usually the guy that runs the department will be present.

I think the virality of it comes from this guy's general tone, e.g. a prior email in which he wrote:

> You are a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS...SO STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME.

but I agree that there's nothing obviously good about being fired in person. I prefer my difficult conversations to be as impersonal and private as possible. I remember being flabbergasted when a firm once scheduled a call with me to tell me about the outcome of my interviews -- the outcome was that I did not get the job! -- and wondering why it couldn't have just been an email. Ditto with a part-time job for which, on my final day, I was called into the office for a morning meeting in which I was let go; this which happened to take on 03/02/2020 in midtown Manhattan.

What a weird turn of phrase. Comparatively a dumb dolphin is pretty smart still.

The company I used to work for, made us all drive into the office and then fired us all last November. It was just after a lockdown here in the UK

A few years ago a German telco company did that to their uk subsidiary:

1 First made the uk subsidiary bankrupt and went into administration

2 Called every one to a mass meeting said your redundant

3 oh there's no £ - pick up the RB2 form to claim statutory redundancy from the UK tax payer.

I think it is just that the upper management doesn't value the time or feelings of their employees. They could have done the meetings virtually on an individual basis or in smaller groups. They just didn't want to spend the time to do it

To me this story is more about the CEO's poor leadership and lack of empathy. Laying people off is something companies will have to do, and in this time of WFH companies will fumble around trying to consolidate on the best way to do it. But the CEO consoling himself in front of everyone whose lives he's upending is completely tone deaf.

It's rumored that he followed up this call with an all-hands to instill fear in the remaining employees. And he also admitted to going on a Blind tirade to shift blame for the outrage onto all of the individuals who were let go.

I would never want to work for this dude.

> in the days of covid and working from home

I don't see how covid plays into this, unless this is suggesting that, pre-pandemic, it was common practice for CEOs to call 900 people into a single auditorium just to tell them that they're all fired. That sounds like a great way to end up hanged from the rafters on your own necktie.

Not uncommon in these circumstances? Everyone gets an all-hands invite, some people get room A, some get room B. Then the only uncertainty prior is which side is which.

I was thinking same but apparently the CEO is a complete arse [0] - perhaps the reaction is because of the messenger not the act itself.

[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidjeans/2020/11/20/mortgages...

There is no right way to layoff 900 people simultaneously, in the same way there is no right way to break up with someone who doesn't want to break up with you. There are just bad ways and worse ways.

If you try to give everyone a 1:1 zoom call with their manager, the inevitable outcome is that the rumor mill starts turning and everyone spends the day terrified for their job, because the layoffs happen in a drip feed rather than all at once.

I say this as someone who was laid off remotely during covid, as part of a large layoff of hundreds of people. I was told I was laid off by slack message, with a follow up zoom call later in the day with my manager and their manager. My manager had four or five such calls to make that day, each lasting at least 30 minutes.

I was an unpleasant process, but I understand why they made the decisions they made.

This Better.com layoff in particular sounds awful not because it happened over a Zoom call, but because the CEO is being incredibly unprofessional and badmouthing 900 former employees. That decision is not only in awful taste, but also has a likely strong negative effect on the ability of those 900 people to find new jobs easily.

Yes but what if the CEO is right and people were really tracking 8 hours of work a day and working 2? Isn't this a reason to be upset?

Not really because this isn’t your biggest problem then. Leadership must be exceptionally poor at this company if you hired almost thousand employees who don’t care.

This CEO has the audacity to de-anonymized himself from a toxic comment on Blind, imagine that.

He is made to be controversial

I mean, I get firing employees on a Zoom call. It may be one of those unfortunate necessities. But the way this person did it is terrible.

> “This is the second time in my career I’m doing this and I do not want to do this. The last time I did it, I cried; this time I hope to be stronger,” Garg says early in the video, before noting that he is laying off "about" 15 percent of the company’s workforce just before the holidays. More than a minute into the call, Garg says, “If you’re on this call, you are part of the unlucky group that is being laid off. Your employment here is terminated effective immediately.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/88ggy3/ceo-feels-terrible-ab...

He's prioritizing his feelings about firing people when talking to people who just lost their job. As a billionaire, he's hoping he doesn't cry while talking to people who hope that they can find a new job before their savings dry up and they can't pay their bills or eat.

What an out-of-touch asshat this CEO is.

No , use email and don’t use corporate speak.

Going off at a tangent better.com issues mortgages and just got a $750MM cash infusion and they are still looking for jobs to fill. Make what conclusions that you can possibly have.

Isn't biggest issue in this debacle is that Better tracks its employee's activities? To quote the CEO: “You guys know that at least 250 of the people terminated were working an average of 2 hours a day while clocking 8 hours+ a day in the payroll system? They were stealing from you and stealing from our customers who pay the bills that pay our bills. Get educated,” "

It is likely there were HR reps or even managers of the fired individuals. Those managers could have spoken with the people. There doesn't need to be a zoom meeting of almost a thousand people getting fired.

I agree that you outline why its hard to layoff so many people.

Let's asume you were just laid off, you and everyone else now have 5-10 questions that are specific to you that you want answered right away.

How do you do that in a 500 person zoom call?

With one on one meetings, this is trivial.

Now you've setup a situation where you still need 500 individual meetings. I"m not sure a global zoom call did them any favours or helped them at all here.

> I"m not sure a global zoom call did them any favours or helped them at all here.

the benefit is that everyone knows upfront whether they were fired or not, rather than having rumors swirl around the office for a week.

If the comments in this thread is any indication, you can't please everyone. Do it in mass and some people will be pissed off. Do it 1:1 and others will be pissed off.

This CEO violates all the rules of communicating bad news. It needs to be short and to the point, and should definitely not include self pity ("last time I was crying").

I have been part of a mass layoff via Zoom. You’d be surprised how easy it is to do with empathy and respect.

When it’s handled with empathy and respect - much less likely to make HN front page though.

> Make them all risk their health to come to an in-person event, only to be fired?

“Risk their health”?

Grocery store workers have been coming into their office the entire time and I don’t see them dropping like flies. Same with Home Depot employees, and any other “essential” business.

It requires a hell of a lot of privilege for tech workers to think they are entitled to stay home “to protect their health” while all these other people go in. It’s treating people like they are expendable…

TBH this looks like a toxic place to work at. If i had such a CEO i would look for another job. I hope that they all find a new and better jib and the toxic CEO gets what he deserves.

doing it over zoom isn't the problem. see airbnb https://news.airbnb.com/a-message-from-co-founder-and-ceo-br...

overall just more thoughtful, 1:1 with their senior leader, made an employee job board to help get hired, severance, equity, etc.

```

Here is what will happen next

I want to provide clarity to all of you as soon as possible. We have employees in 24 countries, and the time it will take to provide clarity will vary based on local laws and practices. Some countries require notifications about employment to be received in a very specific way. While our process may differ by country, we have tried to be thoughtful in planning for every employee.

In the US and Canada, I can provide immediate clarity. Within the next few hours, those of you leaving Airbnb will receive a calendar invite to a departure meeting with a senior leader in your department. It was important to us that wherever we legally could, people were informed in a personal, 1:1 conversation. The final working day for departing employees based in the US and Canada will be Monday, May 11. We felt Monday would give people time to begin taking next steps and say goodbye — we understand and respect how important this is.

```

Drive to every employee's house to fire them in person?

No, but like the sibling commenter said -- you can at least aim for a bare minimum, of, you know, class.

Like an individual phone call. 10 minutes should do it.

Really, it's not that hard, or expensive.

In my mind it wasn't as much the large group vs individual. It's how he did it. He made it about himself, which is rule #1 no no about firing or laying people off. No one cares about how you feel and if you cried last time. You're not the one losing your job. Put on your manager pants and be there for the employees.

> I know this sounds horrible but in the days of covid and working from home, what are companies supposed to do if they have to lay off large amounts of people?

This isn't about a Zoom call.

This is about companies taking massive, quick capital to rapidly expand head count at such a rate to which this inevitably occurs.

It lacks responsibility, care, empathy, or even the slightest bit of concern for those that have invested their opportunity cost of being a part of your company.

He could have just sent an email. I would rather that than a zoom call. Or have your immediate manger let you know. I watched the video, it seemed more like he was looking for sympathy at how hard his job firing people was. No one cares, they care that they just lost their job.

Airbnb laid off 25% of the workforce, that has widely been regarded as a model for layoffs 1. Every employee had a zoom 1:1 2. Employees were given several months of pay, benefits, and allowed to keep their laptops 3. Employees were allowed to vest their stocks for the next window 4. Airbnb created an alumni, portal, slack channel, and a resume book to help them find next jobs 5. Founders hosted several zoom calls for impacted and non impacted employees. The last one was a 10 min standing ovation to departed employees 6. Airbnb also created a policy with a right to first job to former employees

This was the right way to do layoffs

As others have pointed out, the Zoom part isn't the big problem here. The delivery is.

Just for starters, within under a minute he's made the whole thing about him. Comments like, "Last time I cried," and, "I hope I'll be stronger this time," are grossly inappropriate. Nobody gives a shit how he feels, nor should they. This isn't hard for him, it's hard for the people he's firing. He shows a complete lack of respect for his now former employees by making it all about him. He should have made it about them. He should have showed them some compassion and respect.

Then there's the framing, the room, and his body language. He's miles away, barely looking at the camera, and constantly referring to notes printed out on paper. Not to mention he looks casual to the point of shabbiness, both in his dress and his demeanour, and there's distracting clutter around him. This is not hard to get right: sit directly in front of your laptop, and close enough to show head and shoulders only; look directly into the camera; have your notes on the screen and aligned with the camera so you don't have to keep looking away to refer to them; above all, STOP TALKING ABOUT YOURSELF.

I could go on but the short version is that the way he handled the situation - a situation which for many of those losing their jobs would probably put them in dire financial straits - was extremely unprofessional and disrespectful.

This guy is a narcissistic asshat of the lowest calibre when you look at his online presence. This is entirely in character for him.

Yeah, funny you mention that. I did a bit of digging after I'd written that comment and, well, he's certainly said and done some quite unsavoury things.

To anybody affected by this layoff, my company Placement.com created a Better.com Alumni Job Board [0] to help smooth the transition. We've seen over and over how much easier it is to get a job at a company where:

1. You have a connection (or can build one easily)

2. The company recognizes the companies you previously worked for

Targeting companies that ex-colleagues work at is a powerful strategy! So we made this board for everybody affected. Also, if you are interested in talking to a career coach, I'm happy to give a free intro session to everybody affected here. Just email me sean@.

The lack of empathy shown in this situation is intense and I hope y'all know that there are amazing companies that will value you more waiting with open arms!

[0] https://www.placement.com/boards/bettercom-alumni-companies

Never let a tragedy go to waste

> The lack of empathy shown in this situation is intense

You're right! ;)

One of you is trying to help these people find their next job.

I have a few qualms with this comment:

1. For a person who just lost their job, you can already search for such an opportunity yourself quite trivially by getting a resume, editing it locally with notepad, and then using email to send it. From Windows or Mac, this resume could be accessed through built-in software.

2. It doesn't actually replace a new job prospect. Most people I know choose to promote their startups themselves or promote them somewhere online to be able to gather users, but they still carry pre-formatted advertisement in case there are opportunities. This does not solve the employment issue.

3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

I’m confused by this comment. Are you arguing that the GP is engaged in unethical behavior, engaged in bad business, being insensitive, cluttering the thread with a low-value contribution, or some door #N that I’m failing to see?

The latter

The poster seems to be trying to draw a parallel between his comment and an infamous post that I made nearly 15 years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224), or maybe just to make me feel bad. I personally don’t think the tones of the two posts are comparable at all. My post has been quoted out of context for the last decade or so, though, so it’s not surprising to me. (Ask yourself, what did “app” mean in my comment?)

Several people seem to expect that I would be embarrassed by my comment or regret making it, but it honestly doesn’t bother me at all. I, HN, and even the world have changed a lot in 15 years.

Anyway, I’m pretty satisfied with where life has taken me. I’m certainly not going to sweat someone combing through my post history in a vague attempt to dunk on me after pointing out that they’re being a bit of a shithead.

So do you have a problem with the placement.com service, or the GP promoting it?

Because shifting goal posts does nobody good.

Wait, what's the implication with this comment? I feel like you haven't thought through this satire completely.

The "joke" (deserved or not) with Brandon's comment about Dropbox is that it's widely perceived by a lot of people to have turned out to be wrong. So why are you formatting your argument to look like it's the same comment? You want to overlay the other person's argument into Brandon's comment if you're trying to mock them or make them seem out of touch; you accidentally executed this all backwards.

Doing it where you're pushing back against the offers to apply instead makes it seem like you're making a joke criticizing yourself for being out of touch with job searches.

There seems to be a bit of a bug, or confusing element. It appears that Change Everything, Inc. and Facebook are linked together somehow. It says the company is Facebook, but the size and description appear to be for Change Everything, Inc.

All fixed thank you! This was a data collection error – looks like one of our data vendors sent us very incorrect data.

(Sent from a new acc because my account is on noprocast)

Just checked out your website: Seems like a nice idea. One thing that looks shady though: it is hard to understand the costs. So, there is $19 for an intro session, $99 (with bulk discount) for reviews, and also 'credits (used for what?) and this information is scattered around different FAQ entries. When companies make me work to understand what I will need to pay, or worse (appear to?) not tell me until I have made an initial expenditure, then I become very wary.

Don't be ashamed of being upfront about costs. If you're worth it, then you're worth it. If you're not worth it for someone, then you will only get a bad rep by tricking them.

Very good feedback – thank you. We are working on a new homepage that spells it out as clear as day!

(Sent from a new acc because my account is on noprocast)

If you feel bad, make it free

I know it’s just an anecdote but as a customer I kind of believe this.

I just completed a transaction with them that had to be extended beyond the rate lock window. For about 10 days there was a daily back and forth where they asked me to provide some documentation. I would provide the requested documentation and about 12 hours later I would receive a task of uploading the same required documentation.

The document was a 50ish page legal document that required someone to look at it. It’s clear nobody was actually spending any effort on it. Even calling my loan officer wasn’t getting me anywhere. It wasn’t until the deadline approached that they called me and wanted to get it all sorted out and they extended my rate lock.

The way management handled this looks horrible but if there’s any truth to these employees essentially stealing wages from their employer then they’re lucky they’re just being fired and not being prosecuted.

Assuming it's true...

900 employees:

1: stealing wages

2: being able to do so

3: doing that rather than their jobs

Is a systemic issue. It had to start long before almost a thousand people decided to commit a crime. Assuming it's true. I tend to not trust framing that comes from the top end of a power imbalance.

edit: This isn't Twitter. Don't stop at 1 and decide you read enough to go off on someone. Read the entire comment.

That’s a fair point and the article does mention only 250 of the employees were doing 1:4 hours of work to payable hours.

From my experience it’s clear things are broken there. Where the blame lies etc is anyones best guess.

> 1: stealing wages

why is Better.com using that language? all that workers can do is sell their labor time, while the property-owners they work for do not (since they earn rents from ownership). in this case, the workers create and develop some intellectual property (software), yet do not own the fruits of their own labor and are instead paid a wage. in other words: workers work on things that are not democratically held in common ownership (even actively made artificially scarce as an intellectual property).

my point is: we could argue the workers are rightfully taking back more than what they are paid under our current economic system, since the property-owners take too much to begin with; they steal — to use your word — by not sharing the (intellectual) property, the source of wealth.

edit: i've edited to clarify that I am responding to the definition of the word stealing used by Better.com. as Kye/OP pointed out below, this is not Kye's personal definition for the word stealing and it was terminology they copied verbatim from this current context (used by one of the parties involved).

If an employee is selling their time to answer customer inquiries and is not, in fact, answering available customer inquiries, what else would you call it?

Incompetence? Slacking off? Lazy?

Fraud would be another term.

But as others have stated this should have been taken care of earlier. To fire them and then give the excuse afterwards meant they allowed the actions to happen.

If it happens as frequently as claimed? I'd call it total managerial incompetence. Call metrics are well defined and it is easy to see if someone is doing no work. If the line managers are slacking off like that, what does that say for their management (and so on and so on)?

Breach of contract, or at a stretch maybe fraud if they were actively misleading someone. But definitely not theft.

Thanks for calling this out, moreover that’s not what wage theft means:

> Wage theft is the denial of wages or employee benefits rightfully owed to an employee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft

related fun fact: wage theft by employers is the largest category of theft in the US by a large measure [1].

[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...

Time theft by employees well over an order of magnitude greater than this.

https://www.epaysystems.com/time-theft-facts-and-stats/

Much of "time theft" is covered by people struggling to focus continuously for 8 hours at a time 5 days a week. That's not theft, that's unrealistic expectations.

This article talks about things like timesheet fudging and practices like 'buddy punching', not getting distracted by a news article here or there, or getting a non-work phone call between the hours of 9 am and 5 pm

Given that companies typically want to maximally exploit their employees while paying the minimum wage they can, I don't really care about employees doing a little exploiting in the other direction.

Of course it depends on the company - I think people tend to do this kind of thing when their employer is hostile or exploitative. People typically respond well and work hard when they're treated fairly.

Read the rest of the comment. I am clearly not in favor of that framing. I was going along with it for a moment to demonstrate why it was a bogus framing.

ah thanks Kye. i've edited my comment.

I'm sorry, if you feel like you're not being paid enough, the solution is not to commit wage fraud against your employer.

There are plenty of employee-owned companies out there that would fit your ideals, people can work for them if they want that ownership. Or start their own. Otherwise, no, they don't get to own the output of their work. That's the way it is.

> I'm sorry, if you feel like you're not being paid enough, the solution is not to commit wage fraud against your employer.

i'm pretty sure you did not read the second part of my comment as you did not engage with it's argument (that the definition of the word 'steal' is political). i don't think saying "I'm sorry" and then stating your opinion is an argument.

> There are plenty of employee-owned companies out there that would fit your ideals, people can work for them if they want that ownership. Or start their own. Otherwise, no, they don't get to own the output of their work. That's the way it is.

It's not about ideals, it's about the core logic of our current economic system: the accumulation of capital by one class.

Idealism or whatever can't do anything to fight back against coercive and alienating capitalist property relations where one class (property-owning) benefits at the expense of another class (the working class).

Since you mentioned it, the reason I didn't engage with your argument about the word "steal" because I think it's frankly ridiculous and clearly not worth arguing about. We share no common ground, so we will never agree.

"Wage theft" in these terms is a thing only in the US. In legal terms, and in most of the developed world, "wage theft" is the unlawful denial of wages from employers to employees.

It's usually called time theft when employees are on the clock but doing things they shouldn't be doing.

Messing around isn't illegal.

Calling it "theft" is a way to try to tie it to something widely considered illegal, which is unfortunate.

I'm not talking about messing around. Humans aren't machines.

Fudging timesheets and practices called "buddy punching" are what I'm talking about.

> Fudging timesheets and practices called "buddy punching" are what I'm talking about.

as someone else already responded to you: "I think people tend to do this kind of thing when their employer is hostile or exploitative. People typically respond well and work hard when they're treated fairly."

> It's usually called time theft when employees are on the clock but doing things they shouldn't be doing.

This is what you originally said.

Clocking for another employee, that is time card fraud, not "time theft". "Time theft" is not even a legal term.

There is a recent push to coin the term "time theft", in order to group anything that may not be considered working during work hours as a "crime".

An employee may commit fraud by not working and still collecting wages, which is a crime, but this tends to be used as an excuse for employers to make it look that any work time used for non working matters, is illegal. Break a bit longer than usual? Time theft. Taking a personal call? Time theft. Pooping at work? Believe it or not, time theft.

There are plenty of examples out there where managers try to curb and reduce employee breaks, even with ludicrous signs advertising "how to avoid committing time clock fraud" [1], and also plenty where those employees get canned accused of "time theft", but if you live in the US, in an "at will employment" state, it is enough that the reason is not illegal for an employer to do so.

But again, there is not such a thing as "time theft". "Time theft" is a made up term to scare people into total submission while at work.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/mf41ia/i_work_for...

There is no such thing as time theft, please don’t make legal terms up

Not really stealing though, is it?

If the work wasn't there, or they found a way to 'game' the system, then that is on management. I'm sure all of us goof off at some point during the day/week - it just seems that these people were able to do it a LOT.

But yea, if you aren't doing the work assigned to you, then you can't expect to keep being paid - but stealing it is not.

It’s theft if they sign a time sheet saying they did work they didn’t.

It’s not theft if, say, their management didn’t have enough to work on or created processes with lots of bottlenecks.

Just fyi, in Romania the wage is a worker’s right, so they can’t ask their money back no matter what.

Back office (paperwork reviews and processing) was/is done in India, hence the time zone latency. They tried to make up for it with the web app, but mortgage banking relies on too many people processes (title, survey, appraisal, underwriting [even with automated underwriting and “Day One Certainty”] etc) to wring enough efficiencies to scale in a SaaSy sort of way.

I was in the middle of a refi with them during this and took my business elsewhere. Maybe their SPAC go public plans are running out of runway in a rising interest rate environment.

It is also heavily automated. I used to work for a company that sold a document management package that was integrated with a variety of high speed scanners with OCR and for a time almost all of the new business was with US banks wanting to speed up the processing of mortgage documents.

After talking with one of the customers we were all very sure that the US mortgage business was in trouble. Not 'crashing and destroying the economy' bad but on unstable ground.

where did you go instead? i was halfway through uploading all my stuff to Better

https://www.aimloan.com/

(no affiliation)

So essentially the management was so incompetent they failed to notice their employees were underperforming. For how long? And did the responsible - management, and probably also the CEO - get fired?

I concerned that you're jumping to prosecuting employees for the systemic failure of a company to operate well.

Without being privvy to the company's internal state, how could you possibly differentiate between management problems and deliberate staff malfeasance?

I you have ONE incompetent or crooked employee, then sure, the employee is the problem... But if you have 900 incompetent/crooked employees, I think it's much more likely that you have a management problem.

If all those employees were truly so awful, why did Garg wait til the mortgage market started cooling off to fire them? Or could it be that the company has been poorly managed for quite a while, but it's more emotionally convenient to the CEO's ego to blame the workers rather than address his own shortcomings?

>why did Garg wait til the mortgage market started cooling off to fire them

When the tide goes out, you find out who is swimming naked

I just experienced the same thing! It was so frustrating to see that no one was looking over the documents. Finally I took a day off and sat on the phone with them all day to figure it out. It was a worse process that dealing with an actual mortgage broker.

> The way management handled this looks horrible but if there’s any truth to these employees essentially stealing wages from their employer then they’re lucky they’re just being fired and not being prosecuted.

Not excusing laziness/fraud, but it’s an open secret that billable hours from consultancies of all ilks are wildly overstated.

Garg is documented in this article as abusive. This is a fact. Now given that he has a track record of abusive behavior, I wouldn’t believe anything negative he’d say about the layed off employees.

The CEO is in charge. He mishandled scaling the company, and so the blame for the failures of the company fall to him. Even if there was massive fraud inside the company, that’s still the CEO’s fault for letting it get so bad. Abusive failures always blame everyone else.

If I want to charitable, maybe he thinks by trashing a bunch of people that lost their jobs, will stem the loss of morale by the remaining employees.

Either way, it’s gross.

> but if there’s any truth to these employees essentially stealing wages from their employer then they’re lucky they’re just being fired and not being prosecuted.

Do you think the company just happened to be extremely unlucky and only hired dishonest employees?

If your company is at a stage where your support employees are only working 2 hours a day, and where a customer cannot get support for what they need in less that 10 days, it's an issue with the management and the organisation, unable to provide motivation to their employees, or the condition they need to work effectively, it's not bad luck with hiring.

And thinking that just firing those people is going to solve the issue is burying their head in the sand. Maybe the ones that didn't get fired will work a bit harder in the short term, driven by fear, but on the long term it can only get ever more demoralizing.

> ...only hired dishonest employees?

Apparently this is 9% or 15% of the employees (there's some discrepancy). So not "only".

I agree that it's on management if employees are only working 2 hours a day and getting paid 8... but one of the things management can do about it is lay off the excess employees. Either they aren't needed or they need some different people.

9 percent of your workforce isn't going to work 2 hours a day, man. Almost nobody can handle being that much of a lazy, sleazy piece of crap. What probably happened is that the idiot CEO decided to check productivity via some BS metric, then discard all the time his employees had to spend on anything else

I've been on the receiving end of that before, it's infuriating.

> Almost nobody can handle being that much of a lazy, sleazy piece of crap.

What are you talking about? Entire countries have been doing it for decades before ending up bankrupt.

Do you have examples? This sounds rather a lot like a racist stereotype unless you’re using “entire countries” to mean something more like corrupt elites misdirecting people who don’t have alternatives.

USSR, for one. Are you accusing me of being racist against myself?

That was actually the country I had in mind with the second part of my comment because the emigrants I’ve known always made it sound like the problem was squandering productivity rather than innate laziness — if your boss is corrupt and incompetent, and you don’t work harder because you know there will be no benefit from doing so, “lazy” doesn’t seem accurate.

A similar story revolves around the American South. Southerners used to be stereotyped as lazy until indoor plumbing & antiparasitic drugs eradicated hookworm and air conditioning mitigated the climate’s impact on office productivity. “Lazy” was, well, a lazy way to characterize a more complicated situation.

And if the 10-15% range was true, that’s a major management screwup. A couple of bad hires, sure, it happens but when you’re talking hundreds of people there’s something systemic at fault, which is solely in the realm of management’s responsibility to hire and monitor.

Based on the excuse he gave to Forbes I’d bet you’re right. I’d especially believe some kind of internal inefficiency – e.g. having everyone need to have sign-offs by someone in an understaffed role – or simply having inefficient internal processes meaning that what he thinks is a 2 hour task actually taking much longer.

Another possibility would be something like having over-hired either due to misjudgment or to look like a bigger business to investors and then blaming the workers for not having enough work to do. I remember seeing that from the dotcom era, along with people who were very proud of 7 figure Oracle clusters handling hundreds of transactions per day. Senior management was so focused on IPO riches that they allowed if not actually encouraged it.

I had some similar issues with purchasing a new house through them. It was obvious no one was actually reading the documentation, or even actually listening when I asked/mentioned things ahead of time that I thought might be issues. The things I pointed out early on did turn out to be more complicated.

There was even an issue where I went for a higher rate to get credits, and suddenly that number changed - and no one mentioned (or even seemed to notice). Only when I noticed it, was there anything done about it.

It really seems like the US-based loan officers/team does not look at your file at all unless directly pinged by you.

What is there to believe? There is a video of it happening in the article

Yeah, we went through better.com for our refinance because the rate and fees (no loan origination fee!) were the absolute best but I saw a bunch of reviews saying their contact with Better simply ceased and they couldn't get their loan finished. Luckily, we didn't have that issue and our reps were great.

Better killed our deal this Summer.

TL;DR: ALWAYS USE A LOCAL LENDER.

For some reason they cancelled our inspection without telling us or the sellers. Worse, they told the inspector that the inspection was cancelled because we were changing lenders.

The listing agent eventually called the inspectors to find out what was up and the sellers were furious when they heard we were changing lenders. We were accused of all sorts of bad faith tricks to keep the home under contract.

Better’s lie set the tone for the rest of the transaction. We missed all of our deadlines, the sellers walked away, and we were stuck. It got so bad that our agent refused to try to resurrect the deal with a new offer.

I eventually convinced a local lender to guarantee that she could put a loan together in less than 26 days and made our agent bring a new offer to the listing agent. If he hadn’t, I would have done it myself.

The sellers were suspicious so they set a new closing date that was months later than the original. We’d already packed so we had to live in a completely NYC apartment with boxes stacked floor to ceiling for months (I had to pack my desk just to make room for our boxes. Instead of a week or two, I had to work on the floor all summer. My back and neck still hurt), AND my gf missed her first Summer in the Midwest (where Winter is the best 8 months of the year.)

Better was awful. This is just one story, there are a few others from the months we had to deal with them. If a mistake is made Better is not structured to recover from it. They just blame their byzantine process and babble about how x, y, and x departments are on it, but, no, you cannot contact anyone in those departments.

Always use a local lender.

I’m so glad that we’re not going to be sending money to Better for the next 30 years.

I would also like to point out that there is no actual proof that there was the type of employee shenanigans he talks about.

He also says

"The 43-year-old CEO said that the “market has changed” and that the company had to lose weight in order to remain agile enough to adapt to the evolving housing market, which appears to be cooling after a pandemic-boosted boom."

So maybe the 'people stealing time' comment is just an excuse so he doesn't feel bad about cutting so many people?

How do you know there’s no proof? Not like they’re gonna write a blog about it.

According to an article posted by this other comment[1], the CEO is quite the psychopathic liar, so I definitely wouldn't put it past him.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29461957

I am basing it on the article. If the company had proof of the claims I would assume that they would publish them or detail them to the people writing the article.

In the absence of anything to back it up then one has to treat it as an untested claim.

Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof. If they had such a large number of people who were actively lying about doing work and, presumably, faking the records that’s the kind of thing where they’d be firing lots of managers and maybe even referring them to the police since it was an organized activity, not giving them weeks of severance.

I doubt they paid the Indian employees well but multiplied by hundreds of people that’s still a large enough number to get an auditor’s attention, especially if you’re in a regulated industry like mortgage banking.

Managers who allowed this clearly aren’t doing due diligence in key areas and that would make it pretty likely that there is fraud or negligence happening elsewhere, too. If you legitimately had this massive a problem, you’d want to be out in front of the questions from regulators and banking partners. Treating it as a simple layoff and only mentioning that later does not sound like a prudent finance company CEO.

Comment's gone now, but a video was posted:

game_the0ry 5 minutes ago | prev | next [–]

Video -- https://youtu.be/M8RV8E01HO8

EDIT: After watching the video, somehow the vest makes it even more offensive. I don't know why, maybe someone smarter than me knows.

I've always thought that the worst thing about a plane crash would be the 30 seconds before you hit the ground when you know what's coming, but it hasn't happened yet. In other words: if you ever have to do this, get on with it. He wastes like 9 weasily hedge sentences before dropping the news everyone on the call could already have guessed was coming. Just get on with it. None of that preamble was necessary.

I don’t want to micro-diagnose his intro, but I think about half of his intro was needed. I don’t need to hear about how this is the second time or how hard it was last time, but I do think a few sentences of context serves as a “hey, pay attention!” intro to the news.

It needs to never be about the manager (CEO in this case) doing the termination, but a few sentences of intro is standard and appropriate I think.

I almost deleted my comment after I wrote it, because, like, I get that he's probably also nervous and it's not an easy thing to do. You're probably right that some kind of "pay attention!" intro is necessary, but, yes, I'd definitely advise skipping over all the stuff about how hard this is for him.

Getting fired is bad enough, but if it's being done by someone bad at firing people it's the worst. Moneyball had some solid advice:

"Be straight with them, no fluff, just facts. 'Pete I gotta let you go. Jack's office will handle the details.'" That's it.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTjhHrcyiQI

I didn't watch the video myself, but as a general advice this is a very bad idea. People you give the bad news to shouldn't be caught unaware by it, they should at least suspect it and have some time to get used to the idea. There is nothing worse than expecting a good news (raise?) and then learning the possibly devastating one instead. My experience at least.

I'm sorry if that happened to you but entering a meeting hoping for a raise and getting fired instead means there were several big communication issues with your manager.

What was he supposed to do? Have 900 people come in to the office in-person? Send individual emails?

With the number of bullshit meetings companies have, it wouldn't be too hard for each direct manager (+ HR rep) to inform employees individually instead of in a mass-firing video.

It's an extraordinary sacrifice to be asked of 900 people. Yes, he was supposed to do more than just tell a bullshit sob story how "last time he had to do that he cried." Fuck him.

If you have hired 900 people that have become "useless", it is your duty as CEO to treat each firing with respect and understand that it might cause a ton of stress for some. What the fuck are you even paid for if you can't even do that job, after overestimating the amount of people required by that ungodly amount in the first place?

I am astounded by how many people in this thread lack any basic semblance of empathy.

>Yes, he was supposed to do more than just tell a bullshit sob story

That's what I'm asking. Specifically, what do you personally think would have been a better approach to let go 900 people?

Send a direct deposited and generous severance on Friday.

Monday, have in person meetings with these departments, with the financial reassurance that the parachute is firmly installed on their back to have the next 6 months to comfortably find new accommodations.

The last step is optional, but in the past I've seen these CEO's have previously arranged a soft landing place in other businesses for the people they have to let go. Just because their position at this business went up in smoke doesn't mean their skills went with it. Lining up at least an interview with a competitor would have been classy.

In what world can a company that has to lay off 900 people also afford to pay them for the next 6 months?

It’s a terrible situation for the employees (and better US employment laws would certainly help) but none of your suggestions are even borderline realistic.

Are you familiar with the industry this company is in? Right now they are printing money with the current economy. This is absolutely feasible.

Abide by the WARN act for one

I don't really get the outrage here. It's absolutely terrible for the employees, as all layoffs are. Maybe they could've just sent an email.

Even SpaceX did a mass layoff couple of years ago.

Wow this guy comes off as a jerk that I would not want to work for.

"Last time I did this I cried. This time I hope to be stronger".

This is not about you - the CEO who has taken no direct responsibility except for empty words.

The first half of this video seems like "I know you are losing your job and that's a sacrifice I have to make."

I don't think it's the vest as much as the fact as you can see his legs and how he's slightly slouching. This is simultaneously too casual (like you're sitting next to someone at a table instead of across a desk) and too assertive (he's like in your face slightly spreading his legs). Also:

- making it about himself ("I cried last time") as others have mentioned

- the last couple sentences are pretty bad. You get to say "lucky" one time and that's it. You're the one making the decision: did you just spin a wheel? "More lucky, more successful in your next endeavors", which is publicly dunking on people by saying they are being let go for performance and not economic reasons.

>>Garg told Fortune that a month earlier, the company began to review employee productivity data, including missed telephone call rates, number of inbound and outbound calls, employees showing up late to meetings with a customer, and other metrics.

>>“You guys know that at least 250 of the people terminated were working an average of 2 hours a day while clocking 8 hours+ a day in the payroll system? They were stealing from you and stealing from our customers who pay the bills that pay our bills. Get educated,” Garg told Fortune.

Wait, they only started reviewong employee data ONE MONTH ago?? Thats some serious management incompetence.

What's with this weaselly language, too... "At least 250 employees" also means "No more than 250 employees". If it was more, they would have just said the bigger number to prove their point.

Which means the other 650 employees they fired did not have productivity problems, and they're just trying to blame their workers to avoid admitting to management problems.

Obviously this is "hey HR we need to layoff 900 people, what can we do to make it their fault?"

Maybe it's a reasonable cover your ass move but comes off very slimy.

It's in the context of having just gone on a massive hiring spree in the last year+, and the market starting to cool off.

I had the same initial thought, but it sounds more like this was about measurement of the recent hirings, not overall.

Still not great.

250 were 2 hours per day. This leaves a lot of room for workers <8 hours.

Can you find one employee that truly works 8 hours a day?

Lmao underrated comment

You found me.

You are 100% productive for 8 hours a day?

Not who you're replying to, but even if I'm not 100% productive I'm also not ignoring phone calls, and showing up late for meetings. All while billing my company for OT

"The consulting way" is to spend 12-14 hours at work to be productive for 9-10.

Similar to crunch, but crunch can be more brutal.

Also probably you arent as effective if you just worked for 8 hours, you are still productive though.

It's performance based (not entirely timeclock based), so it's more useful as a relative metric.

(Although, missed calls, etc, suggests actual availability problems separate from productivity.)

Which doesn't necessarily mean anybody was truly working 8 hours per day, but it does suggest that the top/satisfactory tier of employees averaged 4x the productivity for the same number of hours on the timesheet.

A 4x multiplier like that isn't explained by a normal distribution curve.

Of course, there's a huge gulf of possibility, and he definitely creates the impression that those 900 people were fired for being bad employee... But I'm awfully concerned that you're so willing to take this guy at face value, uncritically.

You know what else he doesn't say? The median, mean, & mode of his workforce's productivity (hours/day)? Also, how have those productivity numbers changed, over time?

What if the mortgage market is slowing, and his company is ASSIGNING LESS WORK to those 250-900 employees than it did, previously? That means his market is drying up quickly, and his company may be at risk... Better not let the media know about that!

What if the median/average productivity of his entire workforce is only 2.5 hours/day, because it's so poorly managed that those people aren't being given useful tasks to do? That would mean management is incompetent, and we DEFinitely better not let the media know about that!

>But I'm awfully concerned that you're so willing to take this guy at face value, uncritically.

Thank you for the concern. I'm not taking anything at face value, just pointing out the logical inconsistency that if 250 are <2 hours, then 650 must be >= 8 hours, which is how your comment read (to me at least).

Who knows what the real story is and we certainly don't have the information required to make an informed opinion.

>Which means the other 650 employees they fired did not have productivity problems

No- it just suggests/implies the remainder had an average productivity of greater than (2hrs-value/8hrs-pay).

That doesn't mean they were or weren't still performing below expectations. The fact that they were selected for layoffs over the retained employees suggests they were the lowest performing segment, regardless of whether that relatively low performance was satisfactory in an absolute sense or not.

>What's with this weaselly language, too... "At least 250 employees" also means "No more than 250 employees". If it was more, they would have just said the bigger number to prove their point.

And using this logic, if those 650 employees were collectively productive enough to generate a net-positive value, they wouldn't have been fired.

So relatable, I myself slacked off at least a few weeks total since the pandemic started. And some of the people I work with have very ... odd response times, even when I ask about things they're very engaged in.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29437642

Copying my comment from there:

C suites tend to want to personalize messages by adding context to how they feel, but in cases of such severely negative news it's always going to come off badly. "Firing people hurts my feelings" is a moot point unless you've slashed your and the rest of leadership's paychecks.

I'm mixed on the method of putting a bunch of people in a meeting and the CEO telling them directly they're being laid off. In some ways, I think it's much better than slowly pulling employees in and letting them know 1:1. In those cases, word about the layoffs travel much quicker than the layoffs, and people will spend all day with dread about whether they are laid off or not.

In those cases, word about the layoffs travel much quicker than the layoffs, and people will spend all day with dread about whether they are laid off or not.

Yes, it's a trade-off.

But the upshot of the depersonalized mass firing rituals is that they feel like an extra slap in the face to those affected (in addition to the very existential issues they're suddenly forced to deal with). And plus, to the outside world, it just looks bad.

So the balance of considerations would seem to favor 1:1 or small group settings, if at all possible.

I find disgraceful that this guy is putting the blame on his employees.

It is clear that:

1. There is no way competent managers would let 15% of the workforce slip so hard, that they are fired for "performance reasons", and

2. If these performance measurements were valid, most of the now fired employees would have been fired long time ago.

Any normal company has quarterly performance reviews, and management has to follow on those. If he only just found out that 15% of his employees were "lazy" or were "stealing wages" (not a thing), but waited until the end of the year, he and his team were being negligent.

> There is no way competent managers would let 15% of the workforce slip so hard

Possible, even likely, that 900 layoffs probably encompasses some less than competent managerial staff?

And that is fine. Where are their managers, though.

And this isn't a turtles all the way down thing either. This is the entire point of a hierarchical system. Everyone's performance is monitored and checked by the layer above them up until you hit the CEO.

Sure, it's not crazy to have 10% underperformers at any given company, someone has to be below average. But regular pruning doesn't involve mass layoffs like this.

People in this thread are acting like it has to be a 900 person meeting or 1:1 meetings.

Middle managers should be able to lay off their own reports in small group settings.

Even if this is impractical upper-middle managers should be able to lay off like-grouped employees in groups of ~10-15.

A mass lay-off is not an opportunity for the CEO to play the victim and talk about his feelings and how hard it was for him, when he did not take a paycut to keep a single of those employees on.

I'm 26 and I know this. Jesus.

Many folks here are talking about the CEO and how the termination process was carried out, but I'd like to know if this is any sort of indicator for where the housing market is going.

Zillow was just in the news for suddenly laying off about %25 of its employees and taking a ~$500m loss.

Do any of you believe these companies have insight into the near feature that indicates a notable downturn in the market?

They probably just see that the Fed going to raise rates and realize that there are going to be less mortgages handed out which means less customers.

It's seems clear the Fed is going to raise rates at some point, but the question is "by how much".

I doubt the market will be affected too much if rates are increased yet stay below 4%. Many houses in my local market are selling in under a day; a small increase in mortgage rates won't tamper that demand to any great degree.

Better is operating at a loss in order to give rates that are unmatched by the market. Rising rates means that less people will be refinancing since the markets rates are comparable to what they already have. Better has signaled they want to go public which means they're going to have to at least not lose as much money. This points to needing less support staff since they'll have much fewer customers.

The answer to your question is "yes".

Zillow did some really stupid stuff that caused them to need to trim the waist a bit.

Could be worse. There were mass layoffs in one part of my company many years ago. About half the people were fired and the other half retained. HR mixed up the packets for each group. The not fired got the packets destined for the people being fired and vice versa. It was a disaster.

Wow, that is pretty incredible. I'm 54 years old and I do believe that might be the worst layoff story I've heard.

One company I had just left laid off half the staff. HR said there was an offsite meeting and divided everybody into two buses. One bus went to a offsite location to get laid off, the other went to a different offsite location where the layoffs were socialized. The buses went in different directions.

I got a bunch of messages from my former team during the bus ride; half were on one bus and the rest on the other bus. They were texting each other (and me) and quickly figured out what was going on, and which bus was the layoff bus.

Then they all had another half hour on the buses ...

That's rough. My last company put a meeting on everyone's schedule for 5 minutes in the future. As we walked to where the meeting was we realized our invites had different rooms. I'm not sure if anyone accidentally followed the crowd without noting they were assigned to a different room but I'm sure that would have been awkward. I was one of the people laid off (I just hit my 3 months there) but interestingly enough was hired back the following Monday (layoffs on Friday) because another engineer who wasn't laid off was actually just about to put in his 2 weeks notice and he recommend me to fill his position. Needless to say, I'm like a cat on a hot tin roof anytime I get a last minute meeting invite.

>‘You are TOO DAMN SLOW. You are a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS and…DUMB DOLPHINS get caught in nets and eaten by sharks. SO STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME.”

Sounds like there's a problem at the top too.

There's no way employees could be more embarassing than this kind of non-leader being in a leadership position.

For a CEO something's got to be wrong, he doesn't seem like the kind of operator who has any business trying to be responsible for any employees whatsoever, and should be kept far from any decision-making activity.

Actual businessmen have known better for centuries.

It gets worse. He went on Blind afterwards to really make his voice heard: https://fortune.com/2021/12/03/better-com-ceo-attacks-laid-o...

Everyone keeps bringing up the $750MM that the company raised and juxtaposing that news with the layoffs. But I don't think people get that the money probably came with many strings including reducing costs (read people) as well as the CEO getting a new boss in the form of an additional board seat.

Regarding telling 900 employees they were fired over a zoom call...well you can't buy class I guess.

Don't really understand the outrage over this video. Sure, he could have been more eloquent and talked a bit less about how it affected him. Though, nothing he said or did in the video is worthy of this attention in my opinion.

Do people expect them to bring everyone in and fire them in-person? Even if it wasn't a pandemic, why would I want my time wasted like that? Just tell me I'm fired and email me any info about severance, insurance, etc.

It's also funny that this person finds it surprising given the company and the org within that company they were working. Refi loans are not a stable market.

The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpjqbvLkPUw

There is a pretty good movie about a consultant whose is hired by companies to fire people. Including a scene where an employee is fired over a Zoom like thing, but the consultant is actually in the adjacent room (they are testing this system).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_in_the_Air_(2009_film)

Remote fire scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIexe6aa14w

> Garg told Fortune that a month earlier, the company began to review employee productivity data, including missed telephone call rates, number of inbound and outbound calls, employees showing up late to meetings with a customer, and other metrics.

I mean, data driven decision making is actually pretty great!

I'm curious how many people here would disagree?

That being said, who here thinks the CEO had a complete picture of the performance metrics? Or perhaps he was operating from an intentionally incomplete data-set to self-fulfill a prophecy, or some other ulterior motive?

The insult at the end was the most telling. It was all from his point of view: “YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME.” That’s not building a team, so no wonder people were not motivated to get their jobs done.

Feeling gratitude for not having one of the many many shitty jobs out there.

There's up to 900 people who might want to have their shitty job back

Shitty job for temporary. Nobody wants to stay forever. Rest of the employees know now what to do

》organization would provide four weeks of severance and one month of full benefits, as well as other coverage as part of a package.

I find this sort of honest and refreshing. My goverment fired people without any severance or unemployment benefits, with way more BS!

4 weeks severance is a pittance, even by US standards.

Err, by law they need to give 60 days notice of a mass layoff (or pay the equivalent.)

Not sure how they are getting away with 4 weeks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...

“You are TOO DAMN SLOW. You are a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS and…DUMB DOLPHINS get caught in nets and eaten by sharks. SO STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME.”

That last part, “you are embarrassing me,” suggests an element of narcissism. It personalizes the feedback, something every leader should avoid doing.

Also, all caps suggests shouting, which suggests a lack of emotional control, something leaders sometimes pretend to do strategically, but a good leader never does this accidentally. (I give an example here: https://demodexio.substack.com/p/the-hearts-of-men-american-... )

Good feedback is specific and individual. What Gary said, in this example, is almost scientific in how precisely bad it is. He is emotional and non-specific. If a worker has made a good-faith effort and failed, this kind of ranting doesn’t help the worker, and if the worker is operating in bad-faith, then you’ve encouraged them to continue because you are shouting at the room rather than singling them out, a fact which convinces them you don’t know which workers are operating in bad-faith.

"Dumb dolphins"? Hey, dolphins are some of the smarter animals out there... That's an ignorant remark.

Dolphins are notoriously imprudent mortgage lenders though

They also have a habit of blowing all their money on instant lottery tickets.

>man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

According to the immortal Douglas Adams they just have more pressing concerns.

Dumb dolphins are not as smart as average dolphins though. They are dumb.

This is only somewhat related, but a couple years ago somebody at my company who many people had worked with and liked (he'd been around for a long time) died unexpectedly over a holiday weekend. Our management decided the best way to disseminate this news was to hold an all-hands where they announced he'd been found dead. (OK, they used the term "deceased" so it was slightly more formal)

I probably won't ever forgive them for that. That kind of news is extremely personal and they shouldn't have called us into a room to tell us in front of literally everyone else at the company. I don't need or want my coworkers to see how I react to death -- what if I'd burst into tears? I certainly had felt like doing that.

Honestly even though he was really well-known, the best way to handle it would have been to send an email out (like they did for everyone else who passed) and then have an optional get-together where people could reminisce if they wanted to. Preferably in an informal environment like a bar or restaurant for happy hour.

Curious what other people's experiences have been.

https://www.tiktok.com/@benmarshallstyle/video/6926261120005...

> "the market has changed, as you know"

For someone who is out of the loop, what does this mean?

Rising interest rates + rising house prices = fewer mortgage applications

What an absolute load of bollocks from a company that just raised $750M.

wait, didn't we have that subprime crisis, because rising interest rates caused people to default on their mortgages? Will we have a rerun of this?

"We aren't making as much money"

Better.com makes money by selling housing loans to investors in the secondary market. Mortgage rates are quite low in recent days, so there are fewer potential customers.[0] Interest rates are also quite low. [1] This means that, while Better used to save customers a decent amount of money, that gap has compressed which makes new customer acquisition tough.

(this is based on some quick research, so please correct me if I'm wrong about any of this)

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=NUh

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS

The buying boom caused by covid is cooling off.

This is a management failure through and through. Whoever is running customer success and support is at least more responsible for that kind of a situation if the accusations about productivity are true.

Its simply not possible for people to hide with that level of systematic underperformance if they have the tools to measure it and the goals are clear and transparent. If you take span of control into account, this means at least 3-4 layers of management werent monitoring performance. At all.

"Last time I did it I cried"... yeah sure. Not that it's easy to fire anybody, but having a Zoom meeting with someone that fake is not helping by any means.

I don't really see the problem with this. Yes, it was somewhat cringey but other than that... what was he supposed to do, call them all individually?

So, we have a dumb CEO who couldn’t manage his employees to the extent they were idle most of the time. How is his salary not “stealing from customers”?

I can see where you might argue that telling 900 ppl simultaneously that they're fired, over zoom, does make sense, but there is an element of true cowardliness about how this fellow went about it. He's not vulnerable to any real human backlash in this context, whereas a manager or CEO saying the same kind of shit in a one on one meeting would.

Gross. At the end of the day you don't have a job but its at least nice to have a little dignity left over.

How would you prefer it was done?

Most people don't have suggestions, they just have complaints. If you've never been in the position as a business leader where you are forced to lay off employees then it can seem capricious.

I've had to lay people off. It sucks. I didnt do it over zoom or make anonymous accounts and blame them for it online.

Again. Gross.

There's a template. You invite the company into an all-hands. You tell the entire company. During that, account lockouts are happening. Then, you have individual appointments between the individual manager and HR (sometimes, HR+). The meeting itself is short and gives the details of the separation.

Yes, it will have to be a zoom call, but the CEO does not make it about themselves, and sticks to a script that's been rehearsed and checked with multiple humans to show empathy and humanity.

You can tell the survivors that some of the people who were cut were poor fits for the company and any details you want, but sometimes it's the details that show low emotional intelligence rather than the fact of the call itself.

thanks, yeah I was watching the video and noticed the recipient of the call frantically typing, likely knowing that account lockouts are coming.

I'm an engineer at Better.

This past week has been surreal. We went from verge of IPO to trainwreck. Instead of celebrating with my coworkers, I'm trying to help them find new jobs. Some folks on here are saying "it's covid, it has to be done over Zoom". While true, there are so many things that were unnecessarily horrible about it. He didn't have to do it ill prepared in a messy room. He didn't have to offer severance that ends in the middle of the holidays (rumor has it he wanted to offer no severance at all). He didn't have to insinuate that the people who got fired were a bunch of cheats.

Our CEO's mouth and arrogance finally caught up to him. This has been inevitable, ever since the articles last year about his past.

He's a classic brilliant asshole. I personally think the company is really good. At least most of it is. He deserves credit for that.

But he has no idea how to run a tech company or a traditional company of this size. He has failed to build a full executive team. We're a "tech company" without executive product or marketing leadership. The only execs who stick around are the ones who can handle his abusive and erratic behavior. Some of them are really good, but we also have leaders in positions way too big for their capabilities, who owe their position to being favorites.

The strategic mistakes that led to this layoff and the horrible way it was conducted are 100% his fault. What's public is like 5% of the story. If you could see our Blind forum, you'd see how much worse it is. And I'm sure there's plenty that isn't on Blind.

Speaking of which, we found out through the press on Friday that he's been commenting on Blind for months, without fully identifying himself (https://www.google.com/amp/s/fortune.com/2021/12/03/better-c...).

If the company wants to get back to winning, he's gotta go.

If that was my CEO, I'd have been working 2 of my 8+ hours and trying to get away with it, too. Probably have another job at the same time.

That it took him so long to realize that it was happening shows he's incompetent, not just an asshole.

So, not to give away too much information about myself (sorry), but this seems somewhat reminiscent of what happened to me in 2019. The problem is, they didn't set up their Zoom server very well and I had the worst time logging in, as it was having trouble handling the load, so I logged in, in the middle of the call only to be laid off, lol =)

https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2020/09/02/big-fish...

I wonder how the people on the zoom call have reacted to the situation.

You can hear the woman who filmed it's reaction on the video, it is not a pleasant one.

Oh I can top that. I worked for a startup that was acquired by a mega-conglomerate a few years back. They told us that there was an important meeting Monday at 8 AM and to make sure to be there on time. So we all showed up, dialed into the remote meeting (phone call, not even zoom) and it was a recorded message informing us that we were all terminated effective immediately and we would receive details of severance via personal email. Oh yeah and it was the week before Thanksgiving.

Everyone is focusing on HOW the news was delivered. To me, this is not relevant. What people should be focusing on is WHY.

The company is set to go public via SPAC at a $6.9 billion valuation. It just got a $1.5 billion infusion of cash last week.

Tell me again why the CEO and the executive team isn’t among the 900 people getting laid off?

https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/01/better-com-lays-off-9-of-i...

“On Nov. 30, TechCrunch reported that the company was getting a cash infusion from its backers sooner than expected. Blank-check company Aurora Acquisition Corp. and SoftBank decided to amend the terms of their financing agreement to provide Better with half of the $1.5 billion they committed immediately instead of waiting until the deal closes.”

> To me, this is not relevant. What people should be focusing on is WHY.

Totally fair that to you it is not relevant. But that doesn't imply that people should be focusing on what you think is relevant instead of what they think is relevant.

The delivery of the message is super toxic from a labor relations POV and I think a lot of people care about that, as a lot of people sell labor to employers in order to survive.

https://nextmortgagenews.com/news/better-attracts-up-to-1-5-...

Looks like a new B2B / SaaS pivot

“This is exactly the time for us to lean in and accelerate our customer-focused product innovation, and grow our B2B business, which we believe provides us with greater defensibility in a tougher mortgage market,” said Better CEO, Vishal Garg

Better.com has been a great experience, visually, and process-wise. However none of that matters if the final rates are much worse than you can get elsewhere.

A touch off-topic, possibly, but does the pandemic signal a divide between "old-world" and "new-work" or "Point A" and "Point B" when work life (leadership, work, ethics - personal/business etc) were vastly different landscapes?

Maybe this has been asked and answered and I just haven't come across it, but it seems there are wildly different approaches before the pandemic and after.

Just a thought.

When you go to management classes you learn to not lay off people this way. That one should talk to each employee individually. At the same time. I have been at workplaces where a message been sent out like that a company must lay off 20% of the staff. I have seen the amount of stress it causes among the staff and especially if it happens several times. Me personally would prefer the axe.

Yeah, it sucks to get that mandate and execute a lifeboat drill ( Who are we saving ). Problem is that a lot of the high performers you end up saving are out the door in six months anyway

wow that is big lay off, but how they decided what 900 employees to lay off wtf? could they give them some opportunity to grow within the company for some different role? I mean on the other side this is really shit news, but giving that 3 months of benefits and paycheck is kind of Ok i guess in this situation so people can start looking for another job.

From the article:

>> “As we started to slow down our pace of hiring, we saw some alarming statistics and a number of our customers were not getting the service that they deserved from our teammates,” he said.

So the people at better.com said they looked at the data they had on employee performance.

> So the people at better.com said they looked at the data they had on employee performance.

Well worded. They looked at the data they had, whatever the heck that was. It sounds like a large part of this was in the sales and success org, given the reference to customer interactions and inbound/outbound monitoring.

The charged language "stealing" seems really defensive to me. Even if they were stealing do you really want to publish how bad your managers were dealing with it proactively?

From an economics perspective you can justify mass lay offs and you can say that there is no perfect way to do it, but there are a LOT of red flags for a CEO who already has a history of red flags. Maybe they shouldn't be in charge?

If you are a CEO, you have to rehearse the delivery for something like this. Even more now that these videos are certain to become public. To me, this video says that he's a mediocre leader. If I were on the board I would seek to replace him.

Indeed. I don't think the company should be slammed for this but his delivery was really poor here.

> If you are a CEO, you have to rehearse the delivery for something like this.

Yup. This video has a "Oh hey, didn't see you come in. Welcome to my personal cafeteria. Since I have you here, just wanted to let you know you're fired" vibe.

I thought the same. So say you are in a situation where you can't offer people 1:1s to understand what happened - which sounds to me like the people laid off were more or less chosen at random - but let's say you literally have to do it like this.

At least don't do it so disrespectful. He talks about his feelings but he seems mildly awkward and a bit bored at best, seems like all the preparation he put into this is to remember a few talking points. Makes me think laying off 900 people took him a grand total of 90 minutes (from decision to announcement).

I don't know anything about the company, but looks like one going down to me. Very few companies can get away with treating people like that at a large scale.

Feels like there is a culture issue here isnt it? If so many employees are not performing or missing duties, something is wrong.

I know people are worried about peoples feelings over all else and that is important, but after the shift to everyone working from home I bet every single person here knows that one out of every 10 of their coworkers is not performing. Hell I question question if they ever work at all or just collect their check, let alone perform well.

How is it even legal to fire someone on a Zoom call? Don't know about the US, but every European legislation I know of requires firing notice to be in written form. In Germany even E-Mail or text message is not enough, it has to be written in a piece of paper.

In the future we can deep fake this. "Hello $employee_name, you have been working for us since $hired_at, regrettably we chose to terminate your contract $immediately. We will pay you $this_much_money and $these_benefits."

Wasn’t there another company that recently did the same thing or is this that?

Having been a part of executing a layoff like this in the past, I have to say the cybersecurity and corporate concerns of not doing it all basically all at once is gargantuan.

That being said, this guy botched the delivery.

He (Vishal Garg) also threatened to burn his business partner alive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28708745

Ahead of public market debut, Better.com lays off 900 in 3 Minutes

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29416101

>You are a bunch of dumb dolphins

That has meme written all over it.

In my opinion, everyone is focused on the wrong thing. HOW these layoffs occurred is not as important as WHY.

According to various sources, the company is about to go public at a $6.9 billion valuation. On top of that, it just got a $1.5 billion cash infusion.

Can someone tell me why the CEO and the executive team aren’t getting laid off, too?

https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/01/better-com-lays-off-9-of-i...

I believe Better.com also offers 'unlimited' vacation.

Someone recorded the firing on tiktok, it was poorly delivered.

2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29441244

For those out of the loop, this is really a story about the insensitive communication track record of Better’s CEO and less about the zoom firing per se.

I like this management style, quick and dirty! No meddling or prodding. The people know where they stand and not waste time in limbo.

A union probably couldn't have stopped the layoffs but it could have made landings softer.

I hope each of the fired employees sue him and he gets himself 900 lawsuits to handle.

ever fully read your employment agreement and the notice of binding arbitration?

Given arbitration costs, 900 arbitration suits might also prove a challenge.

Man, if I ever need a mortgage again, I'm sticking with my credit union.

Dolphins are much smarter than sharks. It's Garg who is being dumb.

There's no good way to fire 900 people effective immediately.

Well, I will never consider career opportunities at Better.com.

In related news, the company changes its name to worse.com...

Glad I got a great rate before they're going under.

It could have been a mass SMS message, so I guess this is a little bit better, at least the managers get to see the look on their faces and the sobbing part of it to make it more emotional and real.

So did the managers for those people get fired first?

What a piece of shit.

Keep it classy!

How does a mortgage company in an era of low rates and insane demand need to layoff anybody?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com