Engineer wins $1.9 million in "wrongful hire" suit against Seagate. | Hacker News Reader

Engineer wins $1.9 million in "wrongful hire" suit against Seagate.

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118 pointspavel_lishin46 comments

"alleges Seagate knew that the position for which he was hired did not actually exist, but falsely represented that it did so in order to use Vaidyanathan’s credentials to better market one of its divisions to be sold to another company"

Wow. This happened to me once, many years ago. Never thought of suing over it, but I am still angry about it. I'd prefer not to get into all the details or name names, but I had published some papers in a specialized hot domain that was highly mathematical, and owned some modest but important IP. This company hired me, and then trotted me out in meetings with suitably impressed clients to get three multi-million dollar contracts. Once they had the contracts, they dismissed me. They also tried to steal my IP despite our licensing agreement, but that's another matter. They are now out of business, but they did so by leveraging the existence of the development contracts to flip the company to a bigger company that didn't realize it was buying a pig in a poke. The three owners of the privately held company were sociopaths who then took off with the acquisition money.

So details are a little different, but basic idea is I got shafted in the same way as that guy. I was hired only to be a prop in a scam where my existence as an employee was only used to screw over clients for money as part of a larger scam to sell off a company to another company for profit and pocket the money.

It's very cool that Minnesota has a law prohibiting lying to people to get them to come work for you. I wasn't in Minnesota and am fairly sure that I wouldn't have had any case even if it had occurred to sue over this specific aspect of it.

I know you prefer not to name names, but I think it would benefit a lot of people to be on the lookout for the three owners of that company.

I'm sure there is someone out there, who would create a new throwaway account and reply to this comment, who had a similar experience with the same company, and who would name the company and owner names.

I think he's done the greater service to everyone reading by not naming names. The likelihood that anyone on HN will end up doing business with these three is very unlikely. However, there is a good chance one of us would run into someone employing the same tactics. That's what we should be on the lookout for.

>However, there is a good chance one of us would run into someone employing the same tactics. That's what we should be on the lookout for.

Being on the lookout for that would not be inhibited by knowing the names of three people who did it.

He said he's not going to name names. Let it rest.

It's frustrating that we watch this same argument play out every time someone anonymizes the details of any story. We don't need to litigate this point. If someone says they don't want to reveal details, it's rude to try convincing them to change their mind.

I'm not asking for names (nor addressing the OP in any way whatsoever), I'm just trying to understand aculver's comment. It seems not to make sense.

He said he'd prefer not to. There's no harm in my gentle persuasion. If you're getting frustrated at a natural human interaction, maybe you need to step back and figure out a better way to handle that frustration.

In the long term, the problems that led to it IMO should be fixed if possible.

>Being on the lookout for that would not be inhibited by knowing the names of three people who did it.

Only in the sense that you might think you're avoiding the entire problem by only avoiding these people.

I suppose that that is a...plausible irrationality. I wasn't attempting to account for such things. But sure, it's good to mention it explicitly.

I'm not sure that's true.

Without the names, "being on the lookout" means that you have to look at everyone and think about whether or not they're using similar tactics (i.e. "they could be anyone"). With the names, the first step of "being on the lookout" is checking the known-bad list, which could make you less vigilant with everyone else (i,e. "at least I know this person isn't one of them"). That It would be an irrational mistake to make, but I suspect it would also be a common one.

>a law prohibiting lying to people to get them to come work for you //

Isn't fraud a general prohibition in most legal jurisdictions? Why would it matter that the company personnel committing the fraud were doing so in the arena of employment as opposed to sales or whatever?

[IANAL] Technically, there was no fraud. They made a job offer, he accepted, and they (most likely) properly compensated him within the bounds of the offer. So, in terms of that specific business transaction, there was no intentional deception made for personal/business gain (they made good on the job offer), or to damage a specific individual (they paid him according to the employment contract). Employment being at-will in most of the US, Seagate was completely within their rights to let him go anytime they wanted, for any reason. There's no case, there. Seagate was not playing fair, but they were still within the bounds of the law.

However, the actual intent of creating the job in the first place was done under false pretenses, and MN has a specific (albeit old and obscure) law against that.

> Technically, there was no fraud. They made a job offer, he accepted, and they (most likely) properly compensated him within the bounds of the offer.

Without having seen the job offer, or knowing what exactly he did for them, we can't really say, can we.

No, we can't, which is his point.

The parent commenter is simply observing that "fraud" is a harder case to make than a specific violation of a statute narrowly tailored to exactly this guy's case.

Given the obscure statute which won this guy his judgement, it seems reasonable to assume he had better legal representation than is available on an HN thread.

Actually the actual law broken was not the creation of the job, but the inducement w/o due disclosure to the applicant:

"181.64 FALSE STATEMENTS AS INDUCEMENT TO ENTERING EMPLOYMENT.

It shall be unlawful for any person, partnership, company, corporation, association, or organization of any kind, doing business in this state, directly or through any agent or attorney, to induce, influence, persuade, or engage any person to change from one place to another in this state, or to change from any place in any state, territory, or country to any place in this state, to work in any branch of labor through or by means of knowingly false representations, whether spoken, written, or advertised in printed form, concerning the kind or character of such work, the compensation therefor, the sanitary conditions relating to or surrounding it, or failure to state in any advertisement, proposal, or contract for the employment that there is a strike or lockout at the place of the proposed employment, when in fact such strike or lockout then actually exists in such employment at such place. Any such unlawful acts shall be deemed a false advertisement or misrepresentation for the purposes of this section and section 181.65."

https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/?id=181.64

Basically you can't say, "Here's a great job and we have huge plans for your career" -- knowing that you plan to fire him in 9 months.

>Technically, there was no fraud. //

FWIW I didn't look at the specifics of this case I was merely responding to the parent comment which implied that there had been a fraud.

My query was with the suggestion that such fraud would only be unlawful/illegal if there was specific statute against fraudulently engaging an employee and that if there were not then such frauds would be of null legal consequence for the perpetrators.

Incredible, just earlier today I read this strip (and of course wished to post it on HN):

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-12-24

Just drives home the point that you have to do your research before joining a new company, I'm not criticizing you at all, by the way, its just the more I have thought about software businesses the more I have realized how people can be used in this sort of fashion. I've gotten myself into an untenable situation before with a startup where I felt misled, for me, however I was able to quickly move on and I didn't have any IP that was exploited, so it wasn't that big a deal.

If I had a dollar for every time someone wanted to "hire" me just to be able to qualify for a given government contract, I'd be a millionaire.

No, not really, but I'd have a meal at one of the ludicrously expensive restaurants down the street from my office.

Many times, when I said that I didn't have the time for a freelance job, they even told me I wouldn't have to actually work. All they needed was to present my name so they would qualify. I wouldn't even be required to be present at client meetings.

Of course I refused.

OTOH, had I accepted, I could possibly be a millionaire. Either that or be in jail. ;-)

Normally I find a lot of these lawsuits frivolous, but on the surface this sounds completely legitimate.

It's obvious he wasn't just another engineer, but rather someone with very specific skills and credentials such that his employment caused other parties to enter into business, sign a contract, etc.

Coupled with the fact that this wasn't a simple decision for the guy and his family (up and move from Texas to Minnesnowda), Seagate obviously made some short-term decisions that were quite underhanded.

Makes one wonder -- what was a reasonable threshold time that Seagate needed to employ the engineer before this lawsuit didn't have merit?

I'm not sure that a simple "months on the job" threshold is sufficient to decide wrongdoing here. From what the article says, it seems like Seagate misrepresented the position to the engineer. Given that, I think a better standard would be to look at the job listing and the communication that Seagate had with Mr. Vaidyanathan, then compare that with what he was asked to do.

I don't read him as arguing that there should be a simple "months on the job" test, but rather observing that if he had been employed for, say, 24 months before termination, he probably wouldn't have made his case; a reasonable group of people being likely to conclude that 24 months constitutes a bona fide employment relationship and not a parlor trick.

Yes, it does seem like timeframe is a key consideration here.

Didn't mean to imply that timeframe for the position was the only consideration. But the article didn't imply that the job description was different from what Seagate offered, but rather than his employment was simply terminated.

Unless I'm reading that incorrectly.

Great for Vaidyanathan and all, but what I really dislike about this article is this "wrongful hire" neologism. Seagate committed fraud, and calling it "wrongful hire" makes it sound so much weaker. And maybe I'm just paranoid, but the author of the piece definitely operates on the employer's side of these relationships (read his bio), so half of me wonders if this is intentional.

Fraud is the general class of crime committed, and wrongful hire is a more specific categorization. I don't see the problem here.

Because it sounds, until you dig into it, like a flagrant violation of common sense. Most people will not dig into it. They'll just say "how ridiculous!", as I almost did, and at best will get an inaccurate picture of things. This may help them make bad decisions down the line, as other people have suggested on th subthread.

Maybe I'm unusual, but that "how ridiculous!" reaction is the only reason I read the story in the first place. It sounded crazy, and made me curious as to exactly what had happened, whereas with a simple "fraud" headline I probably would have skipped over it.

> that "how ridiculous!" reaction is the only reason I read the story in the first place

Sure, but I'm not talking about the first time you hear the term, I'm talking about if this happens to become more widespread. Don't underestimate the power that comes with naming something... people really don't think beyond the label for something they think they are familiar with, and this can have a dramatic impact on the way they feel about it.

I agree and think it was intentional. It won't be long before politicians are mocking "Companies have even been successfully sued for wrongfully hiring someone." as a pretext for cutting employee protection laws.

Hopefully we'd be able to claim that they were wrongfully elected, and get them recalled.

But then they could sue us.

FTA "Vaidyanathan alleged that Seagate knew that the position for which he was hired did not actually exist, but falsely represented that it did so in order to use Vaidyanathan’s credentials to better market one of its divisions to be sold to another company."

I wonder why his employment didn't transfer to the acquiring company if Vaidyanathan was so important to the success of the division being sold.

Maybe the deal didn't go through.

Something similar happened to me during the dotcom era. I was poached from a very nice job at an airline by someone I did work for on the side who always paid well. The salary he offered me was about 20% higher, plus he offered a massive cash payout over the first few months. I quit my job and joined this company, only to find out that the cash was based on his businesses selling a lot of equity to a large company, and I was part of the deal. The deal fell through as I joined, probably because it became apparent to the investor that the guy was a crook. I was paid a third of my salary for several months and left with a lot of debt. I really should have sued when I was back on my feet again, but I didn't really want to deal with this guy any more.

Forget 1-year warranties, if Seagate actually did this they are morally bankrupt.

I wonder if he will even see $1 of that award though and how many years later.

The intention of this law is good for employee in spirit but I wonder if companies will now be reluctant to have clear career paths in fear of a lawsuit.

In this case they wanted a "big fish" type of engineer, they have to compete to get this type of employee because the guy has weight in the industry. I don't see how a company can not present a clear, desirable path to a prospective employee of this status and still expect to attract "high caliber" (whether perceived or real) talent.

I don't get why he had to sue under that law: fraud is fraud and bait and switch is fraud too.

See my comment above. IANAL, but "fraud" looks like it would be a very hard case to prove.

IANAL, but "bait and switch" is usually a specific thing; for instance, in Illinois, it's covered by the Illinois Consumer Fraud statutes. The general concept of "baiting and switching" is not automatically considered "fraud".

To win a fraud case, this person would need to cite specific material false statements provided by Seagate, and then additionally establish through a preponderance of evidence that those misstatements were made knowingly with the intent to trick him. Since they actually gave the guy a job and paid him for 9 months, that could end up being hard to do.

Note also that this cuts both ways. You probably don't want every business to find itself in the situation of having to fend off fraud claims any time it dismisses someone after less than a year's employment, or being in the situation of not being able to terminate someone for performance after having relied on that person in a sales process somewhere.

" bait and switch is fraud too"

That doesn't make much sense....they offered him a job with a salary and he got there and was given a job with a salary. Not like he got there and they had a car with a sandwich waiting for him and a note that says "Sorry :(".

Bottom line, bait and switch is a consumer law not employment law.

If they knew at the time they the job was only temporary (i.e., they had planned in advance to dispose of him after a short time) yet they presented it to him as a "full time permanent" position ... obviously it's not the same as the classic car dealership B&S, but it doesn't seem like honest dealing either.

What about the flip side, an employee who takes a job knowing that it isn't permanent and will jump ship giving the first opportunity (which could be in as little as 6 months). Is that wrong? These situations are always possible because most (if not all) states are at-will states.

I'm thinking in your scenario the employee probably didn't entice the employer (under false pretenses) to terminate whatever their previous arrangement was and relocate to MN, with a much smaller job market.

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