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Comment by smca | Hacker News Reader

(I work at Stripe and live in Ireland.) This article is written about Irish pension schemes. The mechanic that the article is talking about is standard practice in Ireland. And, in particular, it only applies to contributions by Stripe for employees who have worked less than two years.

Framing it as "clawing back" pension contributions is disingenuous (IMO). Stripe applied its stated pension plan policy. It would have been news if Stripe had deviated from its policy.

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The first tip off this was not in the US was the word "pension" which has long gone the way of the dodo bird in the US.

Things can be news to people even if they've been stated in a legal document somewhere.

Not only it is legal, it is also a standard practice where everyone else is doing it.

It is odd that Stripe is the only one who is criticized for it...

I’m not familiar with the Irish system but why is it standard practice to claw back contributions for people? What is the reason for enabling and doing this?

Their tax-exempt status is conditional on the pension fund being in action for at least two years. If they're given to you without that, they're no longer tax-exempt pension contributions but employee income which has tax implications for both employee and employer.

Yikes, that seems pretty horrendous law. In the the UK the tax exempt status comes from the fact you're locking away the income for, say, decades; and you'll be liable to normal income tax at the point of withdrawal.

It's designed to encourage people to save money into their pensions, to make up for decades of the government underfunding social security pensions. It seems really shitty to make that tax break conditional on job security.

Designed is a really strong word. The tax free nature of pension contributions come from the near impossibility of otherwise sensibly taxing annuities.

How should a post tax annuity be calculated? The simplest annuities can probably be done (e.g. pay 100k and receive 6k a year til you die). But, if you paid tax on the full 6k that would mean that the 100k was being taxed again. However, tax none of it and that would see no tax on interest because it was being paid through an annuity. That's before one even starts thinking about spousal benefits or inflation linking.

You get into some funny (and seemingly unfair) rules once tax exemption is involved. It's why you have limited rollover of unused FSA funds in the US--and the ability to rollover at all is relatively recent.

And yet HSA funds are the most tax advantaged of all. No tax going in, can be invested in anything that can be bought via Fidelity, and no tax coming out, if used for healthcare expenses at any point in your life, even for your dependents.

No one said laws have to be consistent :-)

This is normal in the USA as well. Most traditional (non-FAANG-adjacent) companies have 1-6 year vesting periods for employer contributions.

Also places with real pensions have similar vestment periods for the pensions, leave before then and you typically get your contributions back but certainly not the employer’s. Though those are rare outside government work in the US anymore.

I have had many jobs with no vesting in my employee match. Heck for my company I own, I follow the “default” path from guideline 401k, and my match to my employees vests immediately.

(But yes also had 1-2 jobs that the match had a vesting period)

I've never encountered a vesting schedule for employer contributions myself, but I've always been aware of their existence. I think one company I joined had 12-18 month vesting schedule that they'd just recently gotten rid of.

I wonder if it's more common outside of tech?

Definitely more common outside of tech. It looks like 72% of 401(k) plans have a vesting period, with the most common durations being 3 or 5 years. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/17/most-workers-wait-years-for-...

Amazon clawed back 401k contributions if you left before 2 years..I can't remember the exact timeframe.

Its not a claw back per-se. Under the Irish pensions laws an employee does not have the right to retain the employers contributions to a pension if they leave the position with the company within the first 2 years of contributions to the pension (does not mean 2 years of service. If you have a 6 month probation for example, the employer will not contribute for that time. The period is 2 years from the first employers contribution). Any employee contribution is fully retained by the employee. In this case, because they are being made redundant, the employers share of the pension is refunded (through no fault of the employee).

No it's not standard practice. It's done in some companies but not that many. For those firms that do this, most waive it for redundancies.

In all four large tech companies I've worked for, and my father's factory job, this is the up front stated policy on pension contributions.

I've worked in a few places with similar policies. Lots of companies will match your 401k contributions (up to a limit), but the matching funds have a "vesting" period (typically a year or two). Stock options are often offered under similar terms.

I don't see any reason for this article to exist other than to try to "shame" Stripe for doing what many other companies also do.

Do you work in PR?

lol this is flagged (and I can't seem to vouch) but the parent is a PR employee of Stripe and didn't disclose that until challenged.

Perhaps it's worth disclosing you're on the company's PR / Comms team and run the @Stripe Twitter account?

Why? The comment says they work at Stripe and live in Ireland, and they're just relaying factual information.

This is why I'm so wary of "tech press" news like this. Having a vesting schedule for employer contributions is pretty standard for a lot of countries, not just Ireland. So this has been going on for literally decades, all across the world, but it's only when a tech company does it that it is framed as "clawing back pension contributions".

I'm not saying this doesn't suck for employees or shouldn't be legally changed, but why are people OK with this practice for literally decades until a tech unicorn does it?

Disclosures aren't about whether or not the statement is meant to be actually factual, the whole story, and moral it's about giving people the information they need to weigh when they consider if that's the case. It's reasonable to say a PR employee's response has a high likelihood of being more biased than a generic Stripe employee's response, or at least biased in a different direction. Again that doesn't mean the response is actually "wrong" or just a partial picture or what have you but it does mean many people appreciate considering the possibility of bias when trying to come to a full conclusion.

I think expectation is that tech companies will be nicer. Pretty sure this comes from the belief that tech workers are unusually talented or rare, and so the worker-company relationship is more like a doctor or classical engineer, less like a factory worker or technician (Not that doctors and other professionals are treated with great respect anymore — it is just a matter of perceptions, people haven’t updated their viewpoints for the current brutally mercenary environment). So, these stories tend to float to the top.

It should be a story with real consequences for the company if anybody’s pension is yanked.

Because they took the time to disclose the parts of their situation that supported the point they wanted to make (work at stripe, live in Ireland), but disregarded the parts they knew would discredit them a bit (PR for the company). Also, coming to their defense from a throw-away is a curious choice.

> Also, coming to their defense from a throw-away is a curious choice.

Yes, it's all a mass conspiracy!! https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hn_throwaway_99

Fair enough, I should have looked before I added the snark - upvoted cause fun response. But the rest of my comment stands, I do think they selectively disclosed and working in PR would know they were doing so.

I'm all for disclosure and do so myself when commenting on things related to my company.

But...I'm curious what level of disclosure you feel is required beyond saying you work at the company? Personally I don't want to read a bunch of legalese on HN posts. There are enough critical minds here that chicanery gets ferreted out pretty quickly. In this case, there are also multiple posts from others saying that Stripe's practice is if not ubiquitous at least common in Ireland, hence unsurprising to those who work there.

edit: typo

I think generally you should disclose a. if you work at the company and b. if you are related to a project at the company being discussed.

If you are a professional PR/spin person for the company, you should definitely disclose.

You might have seen me on HN threads before. I've been at Stripe for ~four years and I'm happy to disclose that I work here.

If you're curious as to what I work on, I work on product updates via Stripe's owned channels, user issues, and other community-related efforts. I'm always contactable here (hnusername@stripe.com) or on Twitter (linked in my bio).

I'm also very happy to correct the record when misleading articles (or articles without necessary context) are published by the media.

Speaking plainly and truthfully about issues like this is critical to earn trust so "spinning" news would be contrary to everything I work so hard on.

This sub thread isn't about disclosing _whether_ you work there, rather, your job there. You answered the parent's "a" but ignored the "b".

Your LinkedIn, in stark contrast to your profile and your comment, says Communications Manager and "I lead community communications in EMEA. You can call it marketing".

My comment above reflects exactly what I work on at Stripe.

My role has a general title of Communications Manager (we have a ~flat structure and our roles aren't particularly descriptive). This role sits within the Comms team at Stripe.

The majority of my time is spent telling the stories of businesses that build on Stripe (and helping users). In other companies, this is often called marketing or just "comms".

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