The first time I'm aware that Meta is taking back signed, FTE offers
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I've heard stories of folks that accepted job offers, only to have circumstances unexpectedly change shortly thereafter, or to have a better offer come along. And I've seen these people have a lot of stress and guilt about wanting to rescind their acceptance.
Just remember, it's just business. I guarantee Meta (and all other companies) are just treating it as business, and you should do the same. I'm not at all saying be rude, and it's important not to burn bridges, but remember that when push comes to shove a company will never show you loyalty beyond what makes economic sense and what is legally necessary, and you should do the same.
Meta's management famously lacks character. Please don't use them as a baseline for right and wrong.
As automatons, corporations cannot have morals, because they simply follow their programming. You, a flesh and blood human, should feel no obligation to a corporation for any actions they take, for the same reason you don't write letters to a bollard thanking it for stopping a car that might have hit you.
When I say corporations have motives, that is shorthand for “the human leadership of this company has motives which control their decision making and cause them to make decisions which point the corporation in a certain direction”
Yes, it's poor form and rightfully burns a bridge, but it's not a contract. Let's not expect people to treat employers any better than employers treat people.
Most contracts in the tech industry are at-will in both directions with usually only 2 or 4 weeks notice (if any).
I disagree. Privately owned & profitable companies have plenty of leeway to practice loyalty to their employees beyond what is economical and legal. Even in the unprofitable tech startup world, if it was all about the money, you'd see people getting laid off right before their vesting cliffs, but that doesn't happen, which is to some degree an expression of good will.
what does loyalty have anything to do with ethic? Like being loyal is right and not being loyal is wrong?
*, ** For some definition of "these days" and "most", based on first-hand factual knowledge of the FAANGs (except Netflix with their special approach to comp), various "unicorns", and a long list of US-based companies modeling themselves on and/or aspiring to be the next FAANGs and unicorns.
3 months, 4 months...
Companies in the US don't have to give any.
In general, how is an employee or prospective employee supposed to tell which companies are going to be loyal ahead of time? Private companies can choose to be loyal out of a sense of good will, just like employees can, but unless both parties have some credible reason to trust the other, it's just self-defeating to do so because then you're just volunteering to end up on the rough end of a cooperate/defect outcome.
Looking back (this was 10ish years ago when I was still a n00b), they had definitely given me too much equity based on my experience. If you don't grow as fast as the business grows, you will get booted. Even if you're a cofounder (one of the cofounders "left" about a year later too). Business is business, especially in America.
From what I've seen, it's normal to have vest-immediately terms for anything except voluntary departure or at-fault termination.
Except it sorta does. You can’t casually lay people off but companies absolutely optimize around payouts.
Amazon, for example, famously had an average tenure of less than two years for outgoing employees, with a vesting schedule that heavily increased after 24 mo.
Conversely, Google famous link doesn’t like to cull underperforming employees. They have a front-weighted vesting schedule so underperforming employees get an effective pay cut.
I've asked many recruiters and HR professionals this exact question but all of them said there is no such thing as blacklisting. Its not worth their time and effort to maintain an industry wide blacklist of candidates which Sounds borderline illegal.
The world is too busy and too chaotic to really care that you decided not to join a company or that a company decided to withdraw an offer. Life goes on.
But it also depends on the size of the industry. Smaller industries where everyone knows each other, people will talk about a candidate pulling out, and stop extending that person offers.
As for blacklists, if you're a douchebag you'd better be real good at something, because people never forget that, and in no time you have a rep. Anyone who has been around for a while has names on their DO NOT HIRE list, and if those resumes run across their desk it's instant reject.
Despite the messaging constantly broadcast by HR departments, it really is just business, unless the organization is horribly dysfunctional. There are vindictive individuals out there, but you don't want to work for those people anyway.
I’m not surprised to see large soulless corporations acting like large soulless corporations but my preferred solution to this problem is not to become cynical but to go work with people who have some values.
I don't know if I agree with you. I've had big successful companies give me way more than I believe I deserved. I've had small companies screw me over (or at least tried to). I don't know if a hard-and-fast rule like that works for everyone nor every situation. My suggestion is to treat a company only as well as it treats you -- which is probably a good thing to do in life in general. Relationships should be reciprocal. For many of us who've worked for a while, I am sure there has been instances where companies or managers have gone out of their way to take care of us. Even at the company that tried to screw me over, my manager cared for me beyond what his job entails. For new offers though, since there is no history with the company, no one should feel obligated to accept an offer if there is a better one that comes along or if the potential employee have any misgivings about the company.
Respectfully, it sounds like you didn't know your worth and should have held out for more. Large companies have seriously big bags of cash to give to their people. Money's only worth as much as you can eat though, you can't take it with you.
A small company where you will be a profit center can give you significantly more money than a large company where you will be a cost center. Even if you’ll be doing essentially the same work at both companies.
The often mercenary attitudes in tech aren't great, but not all companies will behave the same.
Though I would still say it’s probably usually fine to back out of an offer. Just take the normal care you otherwise would and be kind about it. Don’t just ghost them or be a dick.
https://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/the-emphatic-use-of-...
> Quotation marks can also highlight that a word is being used somehow peculiarly – a writer may wish to indicate irony, inaccuracy, or scepticism, for example; used this way, they’re called scare quotes.
A lot of people use them merely to offset metaphors... though this usage is often discouraged (much to my chagrin, as I do it often ;P) because your audience can usually be expected to figure it out themselves and it is almost infantilizing to offset them constantly (though, in my experience a lot of people don't know idioms or usage and so it can be helpful).
In this case, I believe the idea is that if you tell a bunch of people that public companies like Meta don't give a shit about you, and that you should never feel bad about going back on something you agreed to, it effectively "punishes" other more reasonable--maybe even privately-held--companies... but it isn't actually a punishment (of course) so you use quotation marks to add distance.
(That said, I don't personally think you should ever have to feel bad about suddenly disappearing or deciding you don't want to do the thing you thought you could do: working should be consensual, and it is almost never the case that someone is absolutely screwed if you don't take the job; and in the cases where they would be you probably know and it is almost certainly an extremely short-term problem that you can negotiate how to handle. I am just responding not to the idea but to defend the usage of quotation marks.)
There isn’t really a word for what I meant, but punish is pretty close. “Actor A does something wrong, so it’s ok to punish actor B” is how I characterize the parent poster’s statement.
It's all about circumstances.
/s
I hope your realise life is more complicated. Yes meta may do this sometimes, but as an employer I’ve been fucked over plenty of times by flakey people. So what. You should judge each and every person and company for they are and their situation.
Sure there's nothing criminal about it, yet it's unethical from many standpoints.
If companies get wind of candidates doing this in mass, they can escalate the game even further.
That is, make offers to candidates and continue to shop for better candidates, knowing they can just pull the rug from the first set.
This game will be lose-lose.
Most companies won't do that by default, but when push comes to shove, they care about the bottom line much more than the person. Plus they have almost all of the leverage.
I agree with the GP because the power imbalance is too big. They're also not saying people should screw companies over all the time. Just to not feel guilty if/when it makes sense to take a better offer.
But let's say it's a startup that put considerable effort into hiring you, and turned down other candidates, and you reneg just because you got a slightly better offer? You'll probably burn a few bridges.
First of all, it's ridiculous to equate Meta with all companies. The mistake to watch out for is treating a company as a human being, and expecting the relationship to have similar social dynamics to that between natural persons. Companies are not humans, and the bigger they get the more apparent the truth becomes. However, in negotiating a job offer, you will also be dealing with humans, and your reputation very much matters on what those humans think as a result of your actions. Ghosting Meta (or any other mega corp) is not a big deal, they will forget you in 30 seconds. On the other hand, if you do this to a smaller company, especially one that is very resource constrained, they may be putting a lot of eggs in your basket, and backing out last minute could materially hurt them in a way that they won't soon forget. This could very much matter down the line, because even if the company goes out of business, the leaders there will likely still be around and may pop up on hiring committees/reference checks you least expect.
Or if you are in a smaller market - people talk and word spreads faster there. This may not matter to those who are not in it for the long run but if you are, be careful.
The question is this: if you have excepted a job offer, and you get another job offer you prefer, is it unethical to back out of the original job offer?
The answer is no. But clearly you have to contact the original employer, explain the situation, and apologize. Again, no one, not one person, is suggesting ghosting.
This is the danger of fixating on the economic rearview mirror. And few things are more rearview than hiring and layoffs.
Leading financial indicators such as yield curves and oil futures are painting a very clear picture and it's not good.
Care to elaborate?
Oil futures have also been down which is similar.
The countervailing element here is that the economy is slowing down from a very fast clip: unemployment is historically low, job losses are pretty subsector-specific and tech employees are quickly finding new jobs elsewhere in the economy, the financial sector is healthy, and consumers aren't seeing the kind of destruction of wealth we saw back in '08. As a result, I'm still cautiously optimistic -- for whatever my opinion's worth -- that the Fed can manage a soft landing, though the ambiguous nature of current economic signals means that monetary over- or under-shooting is quite possible, leading to either a hard recessionary landing or continued inflation (noting that cost-push inflation due to factors such as COVID and the Russian war in Ukraine are not really manageable through monetary mechanisms, so hang-on inflation is likely to continue to eat away at economic performance).
No, yield curve inversions have preceded each of the last 8 recessions (9 if you count 20-year to 3-month inversion), they've also occurred multiple times in that period without recessions before the inversion resolved, so they are not a reliable indicator of recessions (their absence is, by that history, a reliable indicator of not-recession, though).
If you accept Harvey's definition, then the major misses were the minor 10-2 inversion in the summer of 1998 (which prompted a quick round of Fed cuts that may have avoided a mild recession); the persistent inversion of 2000, which correctly predicted an economic slowdown but not a recession (in the US, anyway); the February 2006 inversion, which was in response to Fed attempts to cool down the housing market, which bit us a few years later; and the summer 2019 inversion, which I think was a true miss, though COVID pretty much upended any "normal" economic cycle, so it's possible that absent pandemic-era stimulus we might have had a mild recession. (Src: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=YAvs and https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=YAvv)
As you say, it's an imperfect metric by any light, even though I buy into the less-strict traditional prediction model, so take it a bit more seriously when the lights start flashing. Regardless, for what my opinion's worth (which ain't much), I think this is looking more like '98 at best and '01 at worst, at least as long as the Fed doesn't overshoot and slam us into the tarmac.
Inversion means that bondholders value short terms more than long terms. That happens when the future is uncertain. If you think rates will go up substantially in a couple of months it's better to buy the short term bond and then later roll to the long term bond then to buy and hold a long term bond which will increase in yield as the prime increases. (Increasing yield is bad for bond holders).
It's not clear to me. Can you please explain?
Advertisers.
Who makes advertisers spend?
Consumers.
What happens when consumers are unemployed?
...
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312509...
2009 was tougher, where revenue growth slowed to 8.5%
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312510...
This all while unemployment rocketed upwards
As they are today with GCP, security, user assurance, and everything under Alphabet not labeled Google.
Yes, ad makes up a huge %age of revenue for Aplhabet, but it’s not the only dish at the buffet.
2008/9 are not a good comparison because they were smaller companies and so much ad spend was moving from offline to online.
Maybe Meta would have to stop spending a fortune on VR if revenue declines, but it would take a lot to hurt them.
Any idea what the new headcount is doing? I can think of very little change in their services over the last handful of years, but apparently they have doubled in size in the last five! At best I could point at waymo, but they've gained 2k compared to 70k. And they already gutted stadia but that was never very big.
While 120,000 people may have been recently laid off at high profile tech companies, that's only 0.07% of the jobs market. (and many of them are highly employable and have new jobs)
If you think it's wrong, there are other measures of household economic activity that can be used in conjunction. For instance, if people lose their jobs, they're going to spend less money, which hasn't happened yet (at least through Nov '22): https://www.bea.gov/news/2022/personal-income-and-outlays-no...
Economic data just out showed that wage growth is slowing. For normal folks that sounds bad, for economists it means inflation is finally being tamed.
What good is making more money if your money becomes worth less? The hard part is selling people on why stopping the status quo is actually a good thing.
The crazy prices of cars and homes was a great example of mania that was unsustainable.
if you believed inflation was rapidly coming down now it would not be the time to get bearish on stocks
Inflation is not rapidly coming down, it is stubbornly beginning to ease.
The upshot is that while CPI is probably over-measuring inflation today, and we're basically back to baseline, earlier in the year we were probably running closer to 11-12% inflation with the real housing numbers.
There will be pain because there's always pain to come with the mind bogglingly good times? I mean I and so so so many others in tech have done well enough in the last 5 years or so to weather quite a bit to understate the tech market leading up to this. Sure there's going to be unlucky folks who enter the market at the tail end of the current round of musical chairs, but even the doomsayer admits the long-term is up so...
The only people I feel bad for are those who missed out because they were too busy thumbing their noses down at the crowd.
Speaking of musical chairs it feels like people want the bank to keep playing as the ship goes down. Will we recover from it? Almost certainly we will, but the pain inflicted on many during that time will not be fun. We have an new generation in the workforce that has really only known prosperity for as far back as their conscious memories stretch.
If money was my profession then you'd best believe I'd be capitalizing on this. Look at Citadel's profits from last year, despite being initially caught off guard, and losing a fair amount, at the hands of folks from Wall Street Bets.
I do wholeheartedly believe this downturn will be worse than 2008 and 2000, perhaps on the levels we saw during the 1970s and 1980s, or slightly worse. I don't believe people see this as even remotely possible and that, I believe, is dangerous.
> There will be pain because there's always pain to come with the mind bogglingly good times?
There was never anything interesting about being able to call out a 2008 or a 2000 because every single year in between them someone was always saying this was going to be the year of "tulip mania come roost".
People would see dips in 2010 and point to them as obvious proof that 2008 was just the tip of the iceberg, and they had about as much to go on as you would if you weren't able to pull up a graph of the years that follow today.
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What makes it interesting (read: worth saying out loud) is if you can put your money where your mouth was and actually bet something, then win on that bet.
But saying stuff like "Pain inflicted during that time will not be fun"... well duh? You're telling me that a correction after the market rallies 400% in a decade that included a world-shifting global pandemic is going to be painful?
I don't know, I guess I just get rubbed the wrong way by broad gesturing with nothing being put down on it when it comes after a period that has literally been defined by the same.
The last decade has been so much of it in fact, that at this point even another "1970s or slightly worse" wouldn't cover the losses we've been promised.
https://www.yahoo.com/now/morgan-stanley-michael-wilson-says...
This question was also raised when layoffs were first announced as it was noted there is difficulty doing layoffs in certain European countries and particularly challenging if you're actively on-boarding people at the same tie. Not sure how much this applies to the UK.
I think what I was alluding to was that I'm not sure if they did any cuts in the LON office during their first layoff announcements due to potential labor laws as it relates to incoming folks.
With these rescinds, perhaps they are gearing up to do actual layoffs.
If you’re at a company less than 2 years, your employment can be ended whenever, so probation doesn’t serve any meaningful legal purpose, it’s just an arbitrary structure a company can use to review employees and delay granting additional benefits. While you’re on probation, you’re still a true full time employee.
(Employment tribunals adjudicate whether dismissal is fair, and dismissal for protected characteristics is never fair, regardless of length of service - e.g: you can’t fire someone because of their religion)
Personally, I would never implement probation in my company because it is a stressful process for employees that provides zero value to employers (unless they want to stress out their employees).
My understanding is that it's difficult to do both, as they need to prove that the new role can't be filled by someone impacted by the layoff.
Here is my advice to anyone, particularly in this market: when you accept an offer, don't quit. Do not quit until you've started at the new company. Before you start they can just rescind the offer. After you start they need to fire you.
Remember you can just quit with no notice from your old employer. Is it ideal? No. But a lot of employers will have you doing nothing the last 2 weeks anyway. It'll just be handing off stuff and twiddling your thumbs.
But most importantly, the company won't hesitate to rescind an offer or fire you for reasons that have nothing to do with you, even when doing so puts you in an extremely precarious situation (eg you may lose your work visa and have to leave the country).
The company isn't your friend. it's a business and you have a business relationship. You're just terminating it, just like they can and do.
We aren't on this planet for long. You are entitled to a small rebellion once in awhile, particularly if it is merited.
Or try out having 2 jobs for a week before deciding if you want to put in a 2 week notice at your old job, quit the new job, or continue working at both.
I see some people rejoicing about Meta possibly declining, but unfortunately, this is a general trend and is bad for everybody in the field. I'm personally very worried about this recession.
(I didn't get laid off)
Naming and shaming, Insomnia Cookies in Philadelphia, PA didn't want to pay more than $100k for me full-time, which was already a non-starter, but they baited-and-switched an ostensibly full time job with benefits into a 90 day contract-to-hire arrangement.
You put a bid om a home and then try walk away usually means you get sued.
[0]: https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/labor-employment-law/job-...
Not trying to defend Meta, they are gonna be just fine without me arguing in their favor on HN, but isn't this just the other side of the "you can quit any time you want without a warning" coin? Yes, rude and shitty to do, but I feel like it goes both ways, and it is kind of difficult to defend one without defending the other.
There is some minimum notice period I guess.
e.g. as a private citizen in germany you have the right to return whatever you buy online, for whatever reason within 2 weeks.
I'm not aware of similar rights if it is a B2B transaction.
Yes, this is the result of at-will employment, and you're understanding the dynamic correctly. It sucks that it's legal
Generally, an offer that has not yet been accepted does not create a contract, so probably not.
If it has been accepted, maybe, though in an at-will employment jurisdiction, probably not for the loss of employment, but maybe for reliance damages in some cases.
You might forfeit your earnest money, depending how the offer is written. But there are ways around that, and that's part of why some people advise having an attorney help write your offer. An attorney will include escape clauses that a realtor might not. Of course if there are too many escape clauses, your offer might get rejected, so it's a balancing act.
People back out of home deals all the time. For example, if the seller counter-offers your bid price, or asks for any other change in the offer, you can just drop the whole thing.
Obviously, before you actually have a signed contract or if you have a contingency in your contract, you can back out without a problem.
Usually the other way around. You can’t make someone buy but you can make someone sell. The buyer may lose their downpayment if they walk, but the seller can be sued to achieve “specific performance”, forcing them to sell if they get cold feet.
Even then, you can generally get the earnest money back if appraisal or inspection fails.
I did a quick search on twitter and linkedin and found multiple posts about offers being rescinded from various types of jobs over the last year and even earlier. So much catastrophizing from these voices online. If you keep talking about everything leading up to a recession, you're gonna have a recession.
plenty of jobs to go around at non-sexy companies that pay decent and have decent benefits not trumped up benefits like free food etc, that other workers don't experience.
once we start looking at software engineering as another "blue" collar office job then things will normalize.
Five years from now, Facebook will be trying to hire a new grad and Google will just steal them away with a lower offer by pointing to this incident. Facebook will have to throw even more money at new hires to get them to stay.