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Comment by bastawhiz | Hacker News Reader

Maybe someone can clarify this for me, because I'm not sure I understand how this is possible: when the loans were announced, it was said that ~half of employees took the loan. But here, when 200 people were laid off, only a "single digit" number of employees that were let go had these loans. Even if that number is 9, that's like 4.5% of the laid off employees.

How is that possible, except by Bolt explicitly not laying off employees with loans? I don't know if such a thing is illegal, but "you are indebted to us so we'll give you preferential treatment" doesn't feel _not_ illegal.

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This is pretty straightforward to explain without any nefarious things going on:

  * You don't need to take out a loan to exercise your options until you vest some options, which would typically take a least a year
  * Bolt grew really quickly and so had a high % of employees with low tenure
  * The layoffs disproportionally affected newer employees, which is extremely common and reasonable

If the people laid off were mostly people hired within the last year who had no reason to take out the loan yet, then you'd get a result like what we saw.

(All that said -- these loans are an absolutely terrible idea and I think offering them is irresponsible.)

You need more facts - the loans may not be an even distribution across 50%; I expect loan support was skewed towards the upper part of the pyramid

Example - some staff may not have had loans/shares (eg; customer support, etc) and the loans may be for senior and up roles who have enough shares to worry about the high taxes on shares.

I don’t understand though, the layoffs affected a third of the company and eng was involved, how could 33% of the workforce be laid off with over half taking loans lead to single digit people in this situation? Numbers don’t add up imo.

If the company was growing rapidly, then maybe 33% of the workforce hadn’t vested yet?

Yeah, if they laid off new folks who started less than a year ago, none of those people would have vested. And in a rapidly growing company, the new hires can be a big portion of the company.

And are typically the mostly likely to get laid off.

> "you are indebted to us so we'll give you preferential treatment" doesn't feel _not_ illegal.

It's not on the list of protected classes in CA, and CA has at-will employment, so it's probably not illegal, but IANAL.

Also, as others have said, we're missing important information, but offering the loans was obviously sketchy and sets up a bad incentive structure.

Doesn't this from the article clarifies that?

Maybe the layoffs were mostly of newer, unvested employees.

Did they have significant growth recently? It's possible they're laying off mostly newer employees who may not have even vested yet.

(Not) Owing the company money isn't a protected class. Also, presumably they laid off newer employees who were there for the loans?

Could be simpler: the half of employees number could have been a lie?

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