Kraken Offers Employees 4 Months Severance If They Leave Before June 20th
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Sounds like a healthy corporate environment run by professionals. /s
A company choosing not to submit to popular politics shouldn't immediately prompt doubt of organizational health or professionalism.
They've clearly articulated their actual core values, and are offering very generous severance to employees who disagree. This is a sign of vibrant health if I've ever seen one.
> In 2019, former Kraken employees posted scathing comments about the company on Glassdoor, a website where workers write anonymous reviews of their employers. [...] In response, Kraken’s parent company sued the anonymous reviewers and tried to force Glassdoor to reveal their identities. A court ordered Glassdoor to turn over some names. On Glassdoor, Mr. Powell has a 96 percent approval rating. The site adds, “This employer has taken legal action against reviewers.”
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> That same day, he invited employees to join him in a Slack channel called “debate-pronouns” where he suggested that people use pronouns based not on their gender identity but their sex at birth, according to conversations seen by The Times. He shut down replies to the thread after it became contentious. Mr. Powell reopened discussion on Slack the next day to ask why people couldn’t choose their race or ethnicity. He later said the conversation was about who could use the N-word, which he noted wasn’t a slur when used affectionately.
It is absolutely childish, unprofessional behavior for a CEO to derail a whole company by creating Slack channels for sophomoric 'debates' about questions such as 'is it actually rude and shitty for white people to use racial slurs' and then just shut them down when the conversation doesn't sufficiently favor his view for his liking.
The BI piece is a bit less explicit about the CEO's ridiculous behavior.
[0] Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20220615180655/http://www.nytime...
It's also very good evidence for a Title IX violation, so, this CEO is an active liability for the company too.
Professionalism wasn't always wrapped up in bland, content-less corp-speak, and I'd be happy for more business communications to be more blunt and straight forward rather than more obscured.
But there may be a genuine idea here too. If you know you're going to downsize, letting people choose to leave will result in higher morale. It will also prevent some situations where the lay-offs caused those same people to quit anyway (but now the company is actually short some key employees).
But maybe Kraken managers are actually just assholes and the leadership is trying to pull off DHH.
So this could start an exodus of their top talent, unless the company’s compensation is way above par.
SW salaries have blown up this year and the last couple. Checking levels.fyi a lot of companies are increasing pay month over month. Plus stock packages based on tailing 30day ma means in a couple year those package could be real lucrative.
Plus you get 4 months of paid vacation to chill and toolup for the interview gauntlet.
It’s a no brainer. Always take the cash. The next round of layoffs might not be so generous.
Someone who leaves now will not likely get another job in crypto anytime soon, since the market is so bearish, there is a surplus of workers, and almost no-one is hiring.
In addition, many employers will pass over the employee who left their last workplace because of politics, no matter how it is framed.
As long as someone is fairly confident in their current job, to leave it for four months pay seems to me silly. (then again, I have a wife and kids, so I don't quite have the yo bro wing-it attitude)
I have a friend who is considered top talent in programming crypto. His salary is envious. His confidence in employment is low - he said there is no guarantees in crypto that any job will last another week, or what will replace it.
How and why would a potential employee know this? The market in crypto is in turmoil. Just say you didn’t feel that the company provided stability.
Four months to do whatever you want while getting paid to do that activity sounds great. Take 3 and live, then go back and find a new job in a month.
As an outsider, to me it seems like some Kraken employees are saying X,Y, and Z is wrong with the company. Kraken leaders say we don't actually have problems X, Y, and Z, and tell them to quit if they don't like it, because there will be no meaningful response to rectify X, Y, and Z, since the leaders don't believe those problems exist.