Flexport is rescinding a bunch of signed offer letters
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I get a ton of push back when I suggest this, but am I being unreasonable when I am trying to look out for my own interests when I know my employer wont? My employer can weather a few bad months, but some people can't lose income for more than one month.
Or are most employees are too scared to piss off some people they might not ever see again anyway?
Huh? How do you control the workload of your team, especially as a departing IC?
Do you mean you're a manager who piles on the work then quits?
The workload is determined by the employer, not the workers.
The professional world is smaller than you think. A few years from now you may want a job with someone who works with someone who knows your old boss. They’ll ask for a reference because it’s so easy to find these connections in the era of LinkedIn. When someone leaves a company without notice, that tends to become the thing they’re remembered by. And it’s not a good look.
The risk of a rescinded offer is vanishingly small. Choosing to optimize to avoid that tiny risk in exchange for a near guarantee of damaging your reputation is not a good trade.
You burn bridges when you leave anyway. I have never had go back to an old employer, and I have worked at a lot of companies.
Personally, I focus on building new bridges, rather than maintaining old ones that don't lead anywhere new.
At any rate, you're not just burning bridges with companies, you're burning bridges with people. Your team mates are the ones who get royally fucked over when you leave with no noticee and (therefore) no handover. They're also the ones who have the choice to invite you along for the ride when they land roles in cool new companies, or to block you if/when you apply to those companies.
I only don’t provide positive references or don’t bring with shitty people, even if you’re exceptional talent.
The analogy is flawed, because the "old bridges" can move and wind up along your path forward.
But I have worked for a previous manager again. He left the original company too, but set up contracting as an outside consultant to the software we built. He'd hire me to do some of the work as needed. Great gig for him, not bad for me.
That's not that rare of a setup if you're working on large B2B software packages.
That's favourable for both parts. Your former colleague that hires you knows you and your qualities. And it's also good for you because you have some edge in the negotiations because you know you have a strong sponsor.
There is always an upside of being a good colleague with the largest amount of people. That increases the chances you're finding yourself in this favourable networking situation. And it also makes life better for everybody involved when it doesnt
Not usually and you shouldn't.
> I have never had go back to an old employer
People do go back to old employers. I've had old employers reach out trying to hire me back.
The most important point though is that it's people, not companies. Those people will move around to other companies and you want them to try to hire you again.
I tend to put stock in giving two weeks of notice as I think it's polite. That being said, I've never had the rug pulled on me, either.
Everywhere I worked at:
- if individual is not performing, people spend months trying to help them gear up before even considering laying them off
- if large layoffs are happening, there's time and severance. Even the ones we see in the news and perceived as sudden and unfair, the notification may be unexpected, but you're rarely laid off effective tomorrow.
> in my neck of the woods.
> Everywhere I worked at
You:
> Wrong
How can you tell them they are wrong in _their_ experiences?
Hell what about that mortgage company where people found out they were laid off because they couldn't log in to their fucking laptops?
Google's layoffs: 16 weeks severance + 2 weeks per year employed + accelerate 16 weeks GSU vesting. https://blog.google/inside-google/message-ceo/january-update...
Amazon retail workers: 60 days of employment in which they aren't expected to come to work. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/google-amazon-microsoft-meta...
Etc. The idea that companies would "never give anyone 2 weeks notice" is deeply unconnected from reality.
The idea that companies would never give anyone 2 weeks notice is probably closer to reality than the inverse of that assertion.
You call it generous, Germany calls it the law (depending on tenure, with some other European countries having a similar timeframe), and somehow non-FAANG non-tech companies are also able to stomach it. This is obviously very influenced by a very high demand for stability in Germany, but I also find it crazy how little people in other countries expect from their employers.
Anecdotally, for experienced devs, it is something that is commonly demanded and granted. For entry level positions it's quite common, but more and more people are asking for it quite early in their careers (even outside of tech).
This is significantly less generous than FAANG layoff severances.
However, I think you're going WAY too far in the other direction to suggest that "no severance" or "only two weeks of severance" is closer to true than not. I've seen a lot of mid-sized companies give 30 days of severance.
One thing people, and it seems this is a problem among the higher paid HN espcially but not exclusively, is tgat money is not everything. And comparing life quality based on how much money someone has is quite frankly pretty sad. And something the truely rich couldn't care less about.
Oh, and I forgot, us poor underpaid Europeans tend not to have student debt in any shape or form. Also something to consider.
As some one in the US, I'd rather have the EU safety nets compared to the US unemployment rate.
It's more or less the same reason they typically don't give notice to people in those roles when they're getting laid off and just surprise them with it out of the blue. There's slightly less risk you'll say or do something harmful when you're the one who chose to leave (and if they have half a brain, they should realize you could already have done whatever you were going to do in the previous two weeks too), but it happens a lot.
Not my experience at all, from many high-level roles with access to everything. I've always stayed at least 2-3 weeks for a clean transition.
If your company would like that to be different, they have the option to offer you a contract that stipulates notice periods for either side. (And that means you are guaranteed employment during the notice period, IIRC). They chose not to.
So they are ipso facto OK with you leaving without notice.
Getting severance is better than a notice period anyway because you can get a new job and still get the money.
So I can assume that there will be contractual severance allowances in my employment contract?
Maybe, but not in the last several I've signed, with large and small companies.
Less an issue at a big enough company though so there’s that.
Giving notice is risk aversion.
However, the opposite is true: Rescinded offers are extremely rare. When it does happen at a company of reasonable size, it’s so surprising that it’s a headline like this one. We’re here talking about it because it’s an extraordinary occurrence, not a common thing that happens all the time.
When you over-index on rare risks like rescinded offers, you start to lose sight of what you risk by doing things like quitting jobs without notice. Your professional reputation may end up mattering more than you think some day, and disappearing from a job without notice is the kind of thing that people remember you for.
Refusing to give any notice because you might possibly have a 1-in-10,000 rescinded offer reminds me of my grandmother-in-law who refused to fly on an airplane out of fear of airplane crashes. She definitely avoided death by airplane crash, but in the process she missed out on a lot of vacations and family events.
Don’t overindex on the rare thing.
I know that HN zeitgeist, weirdly, in some strange way likes to be "interchangeable cogs in a machine" (focus on standard easily employable tech stack, avoid learning company-specific stuff, change jobs frequently, be easily replaceable); but in a LOT of companies leaving with no notice puts everybody (coworkers, management, business, client - real human beings) in a crazy bad spot.
Many large companies have a checkbox on whether a leaving employee is rehireable. I've seen enough people leave then come back, that it may not always be as ok as it seems to burn those bridges - not to mention that in some ways industry is surprisingly "small" - people move and bad reputation spreads. If Bob asks Fatima who worked with James, should he hire him - you can bet this'll come up. And if that feels like a low hypothetical risk - it's a lot higher than risk of rescinded offers.
Not my problem.
Luckily for them, I stay because I practice overemployment.
You can certainly make it less abrupt in other ways - let people know beforehand or such, but if I showed up on Monday and one of the other senior folks on my team just was gone with no notice and didn't talk with me again, it would be hard to just treat that as normal.
I'm saying this from experience of people doing things as mundane as just moving to another team within the company with little to no notice. Yea, it "fucked management", but I also had to spend 3 months dealing with the mess they left behind, and inherited half-working code that they clearly had neglected because they knew they were about to leave.
Labor solidarity isn't just "I screwed capital so it's all a positive". You have to... I dunno, support your fellow laborers. I certainly don't think it's some moral failing to have abandoned a job with no notice, but implying that this is just "fucking management" is missing how much it can really pile stress and bad conditions onto the fellow employees you leave behind.
Maybe it's never bitten you, but I know if any of the folks I've worked with who have disappeared with no notice from my team asked me to work with them, I'd be having a hard time trusting them. Maybe they don't care, and they think I'm some corporate stooge or whatever, but when you're totally fine throwing me into the machinery of capitalism to advantage yourself, what would stop you from doing that again?
What do you do to management when they hurt you this way (firing/reassigning team members without notice)? How do you fight the corpos? What are some techniques you've come across to cause pain for management that somehow doesn't harm labor? Why aren't your complaints just the voice of management saying that I harmed you (when another way of looking at it as that I liberated myself. Are refugees "throwing their countrymen into the machinery of tyranny"?)?
That is a personal choice and perspective you make, comfortably from a throw away account.
Nothing I'd recommend, and just for loosing employment, but also for mental health.
All that of course goes for two full time jobs. One full time job and some side jobs are acceptable. And unfortunately for some a necessity to make ends meet.
A lot of the overemployed don't. They are trying to walk a fine line and do the absolute minimal required to remain employed at each job. They also care a lot less about being fired from one job since they a fallback.
This is totally a response to the employer side. When companies are laying off people en masse with little regard to either performance or years of service rendered, they reveal themselves to regard their workforce as interchangeable cogs. We are living in a market that encapsulates the adage, “your company will let you go without a second thought.”
For centuries, organizations have been adjusting themselves to ensure that all employees are as easily replaceable as they could possibly be, not to mention outright powerless.
I recommend watching the Netflix documentary "American Factory". If I recall correctly, there's a low-level manager who tried to turn himself indispensable at the expense of the company's workers and he showed a lot of surprise once he himself was fired.
Also, employees will dump their employer the second they can. Let’s not pretend this is a one-way street.
Do you think gratuitously firing employees doesn't leave them in a bad spot?
How come that a family needing to pay rent and make ends meet doesn't benefit from the same level of concern you're giving to a manager having to go through the trouble of replacing an employee?
What code are you talking about? Either you're referring to worker protection laws or collective bargaining agreements. If you're not referring to either of those, you're just projecting personal expectations that no one meets.
> If a company lays someone off and gives them no severance, you would judge that company more harshly than if they had given them severance.
Your frowns don't pay a man's rent.
> Similarly (...)
There is absolutely no similarity. At all. If a worker gets fired, he loses his livelyhood. If an employee quits, a few employees have a to-do item in their task queue.
You're talking as if companies don't hire people dedicated to hiring and firing.
So now we've got people saying, "Hey, don't worry at all about making your employer mad," in an environment which favors employers over employees. It's shortsighted, unless we return to ultra-hot job market in a year and this is a one-time difficulty.
You might think your employer is horrible, but it’s the ones that smile and stay how great the company is that will get hired.
When you NEED a job, people will go back to being company-pleasers.
That being said, your relationship is with your, former and current, co-workers. I am rather good in blowing bridges up if I think someone else put them on fire first. But even then, I took great care of who was on the other side, as much for my own sake as for the sake of my reputation and relationships with others.
Because even if you don't give a single f** about your employer, your co-workers will remember as would you. Especially if all of a sudden the job market is favouring employers again.
But now it happened in FAANG so it burst the bubble of the proportionally few who used to feel special.
Like, let's say we're in a world in which everybody is just a hard-edged economic realist and no sentiment or loyalty ever gets involved in anywhere. That's the world where you don't want to piss off your employer.
It's the world where employees are super valuable and coddled where all this, "well, I'm just showing them what it feels like to be me" is a viable tactic. That's the world where they care about your reciprocity arguments.
The point of building a good professional reputation is not for the benefit of employers everywhere. It's for you. To the exact extent that you think that employers are faceless soulless monoliths that don't give a shit about you is the extent to which you should stack the deck most in your favor for getting hired. If reference calls are going to be like, "Hey, I think that Bob has a really good heart and a ton of potential," then okay, maybe your minor indiscretions are NBD. To the extent that reference calls are, "I would not hire Bob again," that's when you really want them to say, "I would happily hire Bob again."
At any rate, all of this is trading in hypotheticals. I don’t actually favor quitting with no notice, but in such an extreme case, I would assume it was done with sufficient justification that one’s colleagues, perhaps even one’s direct manager, would be sympathetic to the quitter.
And FAANG is not all tech.
It would be nice, though, if you had some certainty of some support, though switching jobs inherently entails some risks. If you're recently hired and there are to be layoffs in the next month, you will absolutely be on the chopping block. I'd love there to be something like unemployment insurance, except effective immediately such that spectacularly bad luck while switching jobs doesn't ruin you (and ideally that imposes some penalty on the hiring employer, who recklessly hired you and put your well-being at risk) and large enough to maintain people's fixed costs. That's more of a <10% risk in a down market (I'd guess... <1% in a good market) than a plane crash risk.
- Rescinded offers - Delayed start dates
Unfortunately, people's ability to maintain professional behaviors is entirely dependent on those behaviors working out. When Visas and other critical life factors are on the table, you can't blame someone for being protective.
Totally. It's just like a black fly in your chardonnay.
As a manager I’ve always asked people to go home immediately throughout my orgs, though. I appreciate when people offer notice and I’ll pay them for a period to be available if we need it, but ultimately:
* a dead body stinking up the team doesn’t help
* if you need someone for two weeks to transition work, you aren’t managing your teams well to begin with. Everyone should be important but no one should be indispensable.
The moment I realize I cannot be loyal to my team anymore, and there are different eeasons for this, it is time to step back and think about what to do next.
This is potentially illegal. Look up "tortious interference".
> or maybe you want to keep the relationship going to leave the door open for future employment opportunities
In my experience, my boss is usually pissed about me leaving anyway, even with 2-week notice. And then they try to backfill my position ASAP anyway.
> the industry is small and many people bump into one another more than once in their careers.
I switched into tech from a very small industry. Tech is huge in contrast to a lot of other industries. And people bumping into each other has a smaller affect than interviewing for better job.
I am not here to convince you to give notice, but only stating the reasons people do give a courtesy notice. As always there are people who don’t see the need to observe certain courtesies, but they are the exception not the norm.
I do always find it odd when a not-megacorp company has dozens of open positions for various departments. Surely they can’t actually be hiring for these jobs simultaneously, and it’s just a hiring strategy to attract talent that might otherwise not be aware the company exists?
e.g. if your hiring manager says "If we could get someone on our team to cover either some of the devops or some of the backend dev, our one 5-year-tenured person on the team who is doing both could focus on the other." Now you've posted two roles for one opening; devops engineer and server software developer.
As a candidate I have the opposite experience with companies that advertise a long list of roles, like Flexport's "200 open roles".
If I see a company with a large number of slightly different roles, for example each specialising in one of the company's numerous obscure products, or some slightly diferent aspect of the process, I have no idea which one(s) to apply for and I end up skipping that company entirely, even if I like the company.
Red Hat is like this. Before the IBM acquisition I was interested in working there but I couldn't figure out what to do with the enormous list of product-specific ad activitiy-specific roles I could theoretically apply for. A recruiter was unable to help; they just wanted to know which ones interested me. Well, about 50 of the roles look interesting and suitable, but... so I didn't apply.
While different places do things differently - the role you apply for isn’t necessarily the role you are hired into.
Once upon a time, I was asked to do a tech interview for a candidate. I was told we’d already decided to hire him - the purpose of my interview was just to give management feedback on which of two different roles he’d be better suited for.
If you get overwhelmed by choice and prefer when companies are small enough that you don’t have to make choices like this, working for a big company probably isn’t for you anyway.
If you want a heuristic to overcome this decision paralysis, pick the first one that looks remotely interesting. Apply for it. Applying for something is better than applying for nothing, for obvious reasons.
But personally I have no real problem making choices or decisions, quickly if necessary. I understand the usefulness of making decisions when there's no particular reason to favour one or other.
It is more that the ocean of slight title variations, especially when there are lots of obscure products I've mostly never heard of or obscure departmental processes, make the roles (and the products I'd be working on) seem narrow, tedious and overly corporate. They make the jobs and the company feel offputting for me.
I also want more of my skills and knowledge to be useful and used, so roles that seem like they're designed to only do one thing in a narrow skilll area, perhaps to appeal to people who think they only have one skill area, are offputting. (Note to ad writers: Long lists of tech skills and products does not help with this. Showing variety of things the employee could work on if they want to does.)
Feelings and impressions are part of my heuristic for deciding which companies I find interesting enough to invest my time and energy in.
I don't agree that applying for something is better than nothing. It certainly isn't obviously better.
Some people take the "apply to hundreds of roles" approach to job applications. I'm the opposite (so far; it could happen).
I'm very selective, and apply research and intuition before proceeding with any potential role or equivalent. Impressions from job ads or other materials, including the company's website and reputation, how they present, what they make, who their customers are, and their attitude towards open source, IP and personal side projects, are an important part of that.
That's feedback I'd like to give to any would-be employers and hiring ad writers who are thinking they need to list hundreds of variations of roles to attract candidates, perhaps thinking candidates are combing through for narrow matches. It's going to put off some candidates.
(In the last 20 years I've also found the best jobs have been ones where I didn't end up sending a CV or résumé, but a recruiter hooked me up with a company without one, or by knowing a person who is in a position to hire. Due to that I now see "if interested send your CV/résumé", or an online application form, as a red flag suggesting a worse job, though I wouldn't assume that it is; it's just a signal. But that's another story.)
I gave up after 4 of them. A month later, I've heard nothing back on any of those.
So I think that's a great policy, if you have enough money to cover the periods when good staff are cheap and available, and your vacancy list is short. You don't have to fire the dross, because you don't ever hire dross.
How is this at all different from how literally every hiring manager in the world thinks of themselves? Literally no one is going to wake up in the morning and think "wow, I'm OK with whiffing on a candidate for my team."
If you need a database developer and some junior person who has a couple of indistinguished but relevant jobs on their resume shows up, do you take them over the person who has no database development at all but a decade of lisp with some very high powered firms?
Some firms will choose the latter because they believe highly talented people can adapt. Some don’t.
For some companies the job is "maintain the team at X people, so when we're below that hire the best people we can find in a reasonable time, and when we're above that we close hiring".
It's a way to get around salary disclosure laws, as well.
That fine specimen of humanity goes on to say, in the same breath “we are fine, we have money” so clearly they were not pushing bankruptcy, and would have been in a position to help out those they screwed over so brutally.
I’m making it my mission to figure out the combined business interests of their board and c-suite, and make sure that I’ll not use those products if at all possible.
Like firing someone
I don’t know how you don’t get blacklisted after something like this.
More constructively, it would seem the perfect time to demonstrate model behaviour.
I’ve wanted to comment on job listings many times, but it’s part of the deal of being on HN. This isn’t just here for fun, it’s here to promote Ycombinator and further their goals.
Who knows which one it is but I wouldn’t want to work with people like this. An easy solution is just let people comment on job listings, it will soon prevent abuse and allow people to get clarification and learn more about the work environment.
[1] Meticulous (YC S21) is hiring #3 engineer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37286598
[2] Meticulous (YC S21) Is Hiring #3 Founding Engineer in London. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31657187
Not a great look for anyone who read these comments...
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flexport
The takeaway for me is "Yes, YC has a nice forum, but they're not a reputable organization."
News reporting (not the protagonist's Tweet) hints at a more plausible explanation than a hiring freeze that was somehow being ignored by everyone involved -- that the person Tweeting is just reneging as part of aggressive moves:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/08/flexport-ceo-ryan-petersen-r...
> Two days after returning to run Flexport, founder Ryan Petersen said Friday that his logistics company will rescind 55 offer letters and look to lease out office space across the U.S. as it tries to get its “house in order.”
“I found out last week that we had 200 open roles and had signed 75 offers. Upon learning this, I fired the CEO. I regret that I now have to be the one to deliver the bad news.”
[0] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/flexport-founder-ous...
Don’t let the SV propaganda fool you. The implicit contract betweeen white collar workers and employers has been gone for quite some time. Employees should always prioritize what is best for them.
[1] https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1700114432792363016?s=4...
[2] https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1700108412024127569?s=4...
It is possible for management with poor relationship with the board and ex-CEO/Founder and issued offer letters without board consent or awareness.
Approval may not be necessary depending on how the options are structured, for example phantom stock plans wouldn't need board approval per se since no actual stock ( or option for it) is issued.
Actually, that would be the Lucid: https://www.forbes.com/wheels/best/electric-vehicles-for-ran...
> and the reusuable rockets at SpaceX are managed pretty well
My understanding from talking to multiple people at SpaceX is that Elon isn't really involved there. He shows up and says "do stuff" and they say "yes Elon" and then just do what they were doing anyway.
Besides, it seems like most of his focus is on Twitter these days, which is clearly circling the drain.
Edit: I'm not defending it and it's just anecdotal; but it's definitely what I've seen/experienced.
That was very generous, but it's not at all unheard of. There are people who were on her team who got more than 12 months. They had been there quite a bit longer.
https://archive.is/t2Wsr - "We're going to help them find jobs. Can't just give out cash tho."
https://archive.is/RAWQp - "Flexport has $1B in net cash. But we're far from profitable right now and will be laser focused on profitable growth from now on."
Flexport CEO resigns a year after joining logistics company (150 comments)
Also, you need to establish that Dave Clark performed poorly and should have known the company could not afford these jobs.
We cannot prove he performed poorly because we do not have enough information. Claiming he performed poorly because he left/was fired does not work because lots of people are unjustly fired. Even if the firing was in some ways justified, it is very possible that this is not a black and white situation. It could be he had a vision, executed on his vision, did a good job delivering it, and then the board and founder decided they did not like it. This does not mean his vision would have failed. It just means the board and founder thought getting rid of Dave Clark and taking a different course would probably lead to a better outcome.
Your basic argument does not work because you assume Dave Clark deserved to get fired and that he somehow knew these 75 offers were bad for the company. You do not prove this.
My guess is Dave Clark did his best, thought he was taking the company in the right direction, and was let go because the board and founder disagreed. I do not think punishing him is justified because it is not clear he did anything wrong.
So those students have to get some job for the time being, work there till it's time to quit and then join "BigCorp". Not many are going to do this since it's too risky, especially now. This is if "BigCorp" is still ready to accept them. I personally know two people who got their joining dates pushed back by 6 months
"The clinic has been sold to new owners. They are reviewing finances and rescinded any job offers, including yours. They will allow you 30 days to repay your relocation assistance."
Oh hell no. He lawyered up. He'd sold his home. Wrapped up his, and his family's life. Had an offer and a contract.
He didn't end up repaying his relocation assistance. And his "new" "employer" ended up paying three months salary and the closing costs on his house for the inconvenience.
A pittance because now wtf is he supposed to do?
It is quite funny to see how communication is measured on the same scale used for the action, in this case letting go, even before they started, a sizable number of people. But it is the same for politicians, right? "See, they are such great orators, a moving speech like I have rarely heard!", we often read or hear.
The problem is that the tweet took 10 minutes, while many, those whose offer was rescinded, must now to work for days, weeks or months to unravel the giant cluster-f that somebody--not the current orator, the one before, even if the current one is the founder and sits on the board--has deployed.
It was (most likely) not the previous CEO who personally decided to hire 75 people, and silently made them offers.
And saying that "we had hiring freeze for months" but in next tweet "I've been CEO only for 18 hours". Isn't that CEO job to decide if hiring/firing needs to be done? Who was in charge of the company then? You, but not in the title?
Especially considering that before being the CEO he was the ... Executive Chairman of the Board, i.e. the person that the CEO reported to!
"I have no idea how this happened."
That's not refreshing.
- Forcing employees who were hired as remote employees to relocate for RTO
- Rescinding offers
- Layoffs with seemingly little connection to performance
What I'm trying to understand is do companies not think these actions will limit their ability to hire in the future?
Are they:
- Hoping that future candidates have short memories or they can hire new grads who don't have other options?
- Calculating that the job market will stay slack for a long time?
- The C-suite has short time horizons and thus see these problems as someone else's future problems?
- Something else?
Obviously companies will do these sorts of things if faced with existential threats, but the recent trend seems far more widespread than this.
Omar: All in the game
It's not like devs aren't gonna jump ship when the cycle shifts back in the other direction.
Edit:
RTO is a hill I think devs should be prepared to die on. If every dev is not ready to fight for Remote, don't be shocked when it's not even an option as the years go by. Covid gave us a gift, and it's precious. We have to fight to keep it.
Remote or Die.
I had devs quit because we went remote. I have other devs still here but expressing a clear preference for more of an in-office experience.
Not everyone has the same preferences and not every dev wants to work remotely. We shouldn't be surprised when those differences of opinion play out in the remote vs hybrid vs in-office spectrum.
In-office work will realistically be seen as a niche when it's all said and done imho. Similar to LAN parties. It's not the way most people want to do things.
Time will tell I guess. But thanks for your anecdote, I hope as time goes on, we begin to see what a niche anecdote it will become.
I also get the impression some folks here just kinda… aren’t comfortable with written language. Reading or writing it.
It’s so weird to see, but some of the folks who’ve been living this kind of job-life 10+ years, now I get how they think remote can’t possibly be as productive as in-person—but it’s mostly due to dumb mistakes that are also harming collaboration in the office. Most of them have no idea the place is doing things so entirely wrong, or how much better it can be with some simple tweaks.
They will win this fight if the Remote or Die crew doesn't get loud.
It also, separately, masks it—people working in-person, but hobbled by bad communication patterns, at least look productive.
I’m not claiming this is good, mind you, but that it’s made me understand at least one (I suspect large) segment of the “remote can’t be as good as in-person” side of the argument. If this is how they think “serious business” should or must function, no wonder they’re skeptical of remote work. Meanwhile they’re actually just organizationally bad at communication, in general.
In-office had a long time to evolve (half a century I'd say). Remote work kind of only had the COVID years. It's a baby in an incubator. The RTO stuff is kind of like infanticide. So while I understand your perspective, from a war point of view, we have no choice but to protect this baby. They want to cut this experiment off asap. Every little anecdote, every little corporate RTO plan, every little CEO saying shit, is just chipping away at such an infant life.
Give it the same chance the office bullshit had, which was decades. I kind of have to be militant about this. Thanks for the other side, but this baby gotta be kept alive.
If your team sucks, your team sucks. Doesn't matter if you're in office, or out of office.
[edit] to explain, I’m using this information to push the organization toward improvements that I can sell without mentioning remote work, but which, if adopted, will surely cause people here to notice a smaller difference between WFH days and in-office days. It may take a while, but this should reduce reluctance to allow long stretches of, or indefinite, remote work.
Covid is over, so unless we start fighting better about this, they are absolutely going to chip away at this.
I cannot tell you how many meetings I've had where someone told me I "wasn't communicating clearly" and I asked them to read the unclear message back to me so I could understand what would make it clearer for them.
And then I find out they can't read, at least not fluently. They either skip key words altogether or mistake them for other words.
I'm convinced fewer than half of American adults could read a random book out loud, fluidly, without preparation.
Only 12.5% of the population scores in the levels 4 or 5 (they had to group them together because there were so few is my guess). This is a disgrace. There's no reason why every adult should not be able to read proficiently. We are talking about reading, not some obscure skill.
I wonder what these figures would be in Cuba. From what I remember reading, they were much higher because of widespread literacy campaigns.
Edit: Found the source of this figures (https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/oecd-skills-outlook-...) which has data from more contries in the OECD. Japan scores the highest, followed by Finland.
The reason they did that is called out in endnote 3, "This analysis combines the top two proficiency levels (Levels 4 and 5), following the OECD’s reporting convention (OECD 2013), because across all participating countries, no more than 2 percent of adults reached Level 5."
The PIAAC definitions of each level are here: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp?section=1&sub_... and I would estimate that extremely few daily tasks would require (or even be aided by) level 5 literacy proficiency.
You often end up with multiple documents (several emails, pictures, logs). There's often competing information (customers are speculating about what's wrong, but they likely include lots of other information because they don't actually know). And you definitely need background knowledge about the product.
Add in translating that into a bug report for the engineering team? A successful high-level customer support agent needs level 5 reading ability.
But my experience asking questions of my teammates in the company Slack channels tells me very few of them are even actually at level 3.
This is exactly my observation on zoom/meeting heavy cultures
A lot of people cannot put their wants & desires into the written word.
With a lot of these people I end up taking contemporaneous notes in a slack message to then send back to them.
(Also, in the home I grew up in, I never had a private bathroom, nor did my parents. What kind of luxurious abode do you live in, and why do you assume that everyone has the same living conditions as you?)
This cardboard box living individual here has such terrible living conditions he longs to breath the air of commercial real estate. Does your bathroom have a stall? No right?
If you rent, your apartment comes with a private bathroom. If you have a roommate, at most one other person shares it with you. That's a pretty private bathroom. You ever been on line to use the bathroom before in the office? Do you think its fun to take a shit with 10 other people in the bathroom with you? lol
Stick a desk in the corner of your apartment and voila, home office.
I've avoided talking about negative impacts from others' WFH because I don't want to encourage the company to take it away from them.
Hybrid is tough to do right to prevent problems like this from happening.
I think the ideal model is 100% remote, cover the costs of a coworking space, do mandatory onsite sat least biannually, give people optionally the resources to meet with each other more often than that, and promote a culture where you meet frequently to collaborate remotely. Like we use Donut app on slack to randomly pair program every week and it works great
The ones that didn't : - Lonely - Impossible home environment to work in (noise/kids/distractions/lack of good physical environment)
I reckon it would probably even out in the long term to about 9 out of 10 preferring to WFH.
[edit - should I add I left ~18 months later to start my own SaaS and love WFH, can't imagine ever paying rent on an office again]
A comment like this making claims about what happens when you see actual numbers should link to some actual numbers...
Anecdotally, my social circle is increasingly preferring hybrid, which loses one of the most-frequently-touted benefits of remote (make your home wherever you want, even potentially super cheap real estate). IMO remote will likely hang on at bigger, cog-in-assembly-line type information jobs, but some sort of frequent in-person meetups will be hugely valuable for high-ambiguity/collaboration/creative work. For me the difference between "0 days in the office and nobody within a hundred miles" for three years and now "1 day in the office a week" has been huge, productivity-wise.
This is some vanilla scrum master bull shit, this isn’t how products or code get built.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/remote-work-statisti....
Note that this is Forbes, who is probably going to be biased towards in office work so the actual numbers from an unbiased source would probably be even more dramatic
> For me the difference between "0 days in the office and nobody within a hundred miles" for three years and now "1 day in the office a week" has been huge, productivity-wise
Why draw such a false dichotomy here? This doesn’t feel like an argument in good faith. The company I work for does onsites twice a year and gives people optionally the budget to meet in person once a quarter beyond that pretty much anywhere they want. I’ve never felt that I needed more than that to do high impact work
So while you should choose work for your preferences when you can, you shouldn't let companies gain advantages like under compensating in-office workers. After all, they've already mostly taken away actual offices for individuals.
This fight could be fought on that principle alone.
There's already resistance from companies with leases and cities with "empty" downtowns. I'm hopefully the change will stick despite that.
It's been "easy" for a long time, and lots of cultural practices built up around hiring and managing staff that look "normal" to people who got into the industry in the last 10 years but more of an aberration for those of us who have been around longer.
We've had a lot of bargaining power as a profession. We still do, but we'll have less. So I think you'll find that, yes, future candidates will have short memories. But more than likely, they won't need them, because a lot of these companies will simply cease to exist.
Just check the consulting, the finance, the O&G businesses. Similar hostile practices, no problems with hiring.
> - Hoping that future candidates have short memories or they can hire new grads who don't have other options?
Yes. Need for $$ outweighs desire for individual dignity. There's always someone out there willing to take your shitty job, as long as you're willing to wait. And why hurry? Just keep squeezing your current employees in the meantime.
> - Calculating that the job market will stay slack for a long time?
Repeated prisoner's dilemma. There's no reason to start hiring aggressively if nobody else is.
> - The C-suite has short time horizons and thus see these problems as someone else's future problems?
What problem? How does it actually affect their performance or their company's performance?
> existential threats
On the other hand, they won't stop doing something that's perfectly profitable and effective unless there's an existential threat.
When money was easy to find and nobody cared about profits, companies could afford generous operating policies that inspired confidence. Now they can't.
This may impact their ability to hire in the future. On the other hand, they will remain in business.
In those situations, it's not always a waste of everyone's time. Some candidates (not all, to be clear) start out the job search process with salary expectations that are very unlikely to be easily met compared to 2-3 years ago.
The recruiter in the scenario above was probably hoping the candidate's salary expectations would settle down toward the lower end of the spectrum (which clearly didn't work out for anyone in the specific example above, but it works often enough for it to be a not uncommon practice)
Edit: To be clear, I think it's pretty lame to mislead candidates and I don't advocate for this strategy. But it happens. When I personally interview someone who has salary expectations higher than we're willing to pay, I tell them upfront on the first 30 minute screen call and simply tell them to reach out again if their circumstances change. (They often end up reaching out a month later)
However, ability to sue doesn't mean one will. Considering the inconvenience of it all. That's why I simply do not believe a single word until pen is put to paper(or a digital certificate signs the contract) and I act accordingly.
I had a situation before I was made 2 offers. I wanted to accept the second, but I dragged on telling the other guys until I had the contract signed. It feels "wrong" to do this, but I recommend this to everyone. It is in your best interest to do that just in case your preferred company tries to screw you over on some clause in the contract(that's exactly what happened BTW, I could negotiate from a position of power precisely because I had the other offer). Large companies will not blink before screwing you over so why should you afford them the courtesy of politeness a person should get? Large companies are not people. Yes, people work there, but most of these people if you knew them privately would probably give you the same advice.
Running out of money or going out of business also limits your ability to hire in the future.
First responders sometimes apply tourniquets and emergency trauma surgeons sometimes amputate critically injured limbs, even knowing that those have potential or certain downsides for the future of the patient, but aid in survival.
Companies in critical condition or facing threats to their survival may logically do the same thing. If you agree with that, it seems not too far a leap to conclude that taking these same actions while merely under a more moderate threat and wishing to avoid entering a critical condition may also make sense.
The economy is growing more slowly than in the past, but it's still growing, companies everywhere are issuing stock buybacks and acquiring other companies, regulators are rushing to get out of the way, new tech on the horizon shows incredible promise, consumers are - for the most part - continuing to buy/lease/rent new products regardless of EULAs and subscriptions that are enormously profitable, P/E ratios are stratospheric...it would seem like outlooks have scarcely ever been better for employers.
Why, then, would they be in survival mode?
I think it's fine to want to turn the ship around if you think it's going in the wrong direction, or if you think the current course will lead you directly into a storm.
These offered candidates would instead be in danger of layoffs in weeks or months if their offers hadn't been rescinded, so why kick that can down the road? Maybe the new CEO is already planning a round of layoffs for existing employees, so again, why wait?
edit: I missed that Ryan is offering no compensation to the people having their offers rescinded. That is unethical.
Every single one of these rescinded offers _is_ a layoff , just one that is extremely hostile to the worker.
Frankly, this should be illegal or at least cause for civil restitution. It shows immense hostility by management of flexport and every potential future hire should not give them the time of day indefinitely.
At the very least HN ought to stop running their hiring posts.
Stock buybacks -- indication that investing in business is seen as having lower, maybe even zero or negative, ROI
Acquisitions -- again, natural growth of company less favorable than consolidation. Which could mean that market isn't growing.
Regulators -- I don't know that this claim is well-supported across the board. Would seem to need to be quantified in a very case-by-case basis. There certainly are industries that are examples of the opposite.
New tech on the horizon doesn't generate income today and no one knows for sure exactly which tech to invest in now
Consumers are already cutting spending and about to hit a debt wall later this year; COVID stimulus is pretty much all spent
P/E ratios is a sign, perhaps, that people don't have other places to put there money
Not saying my interpretations are correct, just that there are other sides to your indicators.
Flexport’s financial situation doesn’t seem great:
Sounds like a great work environment.
Economic disruption in China would be the macro thing. They have real estate issues and large youth unemployment apparently.
More likely they are looking towards an IPO, the market for which is about to reopen if we don’t have any major economic disruptions before instacart and arm list. CNBC squawk box and Cramer talk about flexport a lot so Monday will be interesting if they cover it. It’s already on the general cnbc website.
If I were in Peterson’s shoes I’d get on that show early next week for damage control.
The new CEO was the Executive Chairman of the Board, one and the same. And also the person that the old CEO reported to.
I think the lesson we can all learn from this is SAVE MONEY, and assume bad things will happen.
IMO hiring be done with a more medium term (6-12 months) mentality based on available runway, and sending out an offer and then rescinding on it usually is a symptom of bad organization where department heads are hiring without CFO buy-in. Maybe just freeze hiring and do layoffs when runway goes below certain level?
And that is why when I was recently looking for (contract) work I insisted to have "work from home" out in my contract. Despite looking for wfh from the beginning and multiple verbal and email assurances when it came to sign the contract I got one that said "office based". Of course I said I'm not signing. A week of "but we have a standard contract", "but we can't change it" ensued. Eventually they did change it.
I recommend persevering to anyone else in similar situation (if you have other offers of course).
Larger companies really, really don't like having terms vary across their non-executive level employees. And, arguably, for good reason.
Employer went remote. After a while they decided we’d stay that way. At contract negotiation time I told them I wanted my contract amended to specify that the role was remote with no expectation of any time in the office. They wouldn’t because who knows what the future holds.
Well, I knew what I wanted my future to hold and it wasn’t compatible with anything but full remote.
Found a remote role with a company that already had its employees spread across like 6 states and three countries. My contract, without asking, said the role was remote with no time in office. Regardless, I wouldn’t see them demanding RTO any time soon—whatever location they picked they’d be losing probably 2/3 of their staff, or paying to open tiny one-person offices all over the place.
In hiring others, so many people I talk to spend a lot of time in the initial call asking about the remote thing. They’ve clearly had the rug pulled out from under them before.
I’ve had a few people now bail partway through the process because they got a great offer from some other company only to come back a week later asking if we can pick back up because it was a bait-and-switch and the final contract specified hybrid or fully in-office.
I just don’t even understand the thought process behind that from the employers… like, do you really think you’ll get to the offer stage and the person will go “Well, I really wanted remote and they lied to my face, but hey one in the hand I guess I’ll start planning a move halfway across the country. shrug”.
If you can say, "They made a huge change to the terms of my employment. See? Right here, when they hired me, it said 100% remote role," then they're still on the hook for the charge even though you "voluntarily" quit.
(Source: Spent a couple years adjudicating UI claims early in my career.)
Any time any company does any one of the 3 actions you mentioned in your post, it should be an automatic name and shame and a large ding to their reputation.
I don't think it will be sufficient to curb such behavior entirely, but shining light on it is a good first step.
It is more surprising there is not a longer history of companies breaking these pinkie promises.
This is already covered by promissory estoppel[0]. Anyone affected by this, who can show that they quit an existing job or turned down a different offer, should have access to civil remedies - Flexport would be responsible for making them whole for any damages they suffered as a result of relying on Flexport's promise of employment.
I'm not a lawyer. There may be some caveats for these particular people. But it is a well-recognized remedy for this type of thing[1].
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel
1: https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/labor-employment-law/job-...
For majority of startup, not getting another round of funding, or the rounds are much smaller is an existential threat.
I guess most people still dont understand what high interest rate is doing to VC or in fact to the economy.
I could imagine that in a bull market candidates would ask for offer acceptance bonuses before quitting their current jobs as a form of assurance. And this issue is even more severe in countries where 2-3 month notice is the norm.
Lol at that shamelessness in asking. What sort of drugs is this guy on? You seriously screw and fuck someone over once and still expect them to come and help you on a different day? Insane greed right there.
They may or may not be right, time will tell.
As I see it:
- there is higher supply of talent than demand for talent
- offer enough money next time and see all the doubts disappear (come on, there are companies with a terrible reputation that have been around forever and employ tens or even hundreds of thousands of people)
- companies need to survive now before thinking about tomorrow, especially a company like Flexport, which appears to be quite fragile from a financial standpoint.
The relationship between employees and employers, especially when the latter are big companies, has always been more adversarial than cooperative.
In this context, I don't expect my employer's best, and in return I certainly do not give my best. A lesson I learned after having been let go. It has worked fine for me since then.
Flexport's behavior was not good in this case but I suspect a lot of future employees will still choose to work there if they make attractive offers.
It's pretty messed up that this happened in the first place. But it's another level of ineptitude that even the the CEO has no idea how this happened?
Everything is negotiable, you just have to ask.
I'm sorry, but getting a guarantee of 9 months of salary for anything is actually extremely hard when negotiating contracts.
You also seem to be confused about the prevalence of "employment contracts". Aside from a few executives, most employees don't have employment contracts. Your offer letter is not an employment contract.
Software devs have no union to back them up, and in a tight job market there are many desperate candidates who would sign the employment agreement as-is within minutes of receiving it.
Instead of weird fantasies about power that doesn’t exist, how about we acknowledge the skewed relationship between a(n) (prospective) employee and an employer like the rest of the civilized world and do away with “fire at will”.
If something like this happens in the EU, then it’s likely the company would at least be on the hook to pay the salary for the duration of the initial contract that was signed (often 6 month minimum). I say likely, because of minor variations between countries, but it’s a given in most countries.
In the United States and many other countries, most people don't have employment contracts.
Your offer letter is a not an employment contract.
> so it should be fairly easy to add in a clause that states "If this offer is rescinded for any reason after it has been signed by both parties, {{COMPANY}} agrees to pay 9 months of the negotiated salary to {{EMPLOYEE}}"
This is a wild fantasy.
In what world do you think a company would agree to 9 months of salary for a rescinded offer? Maybe if you're taking a CEO role, but not for an average employee. I have no idea why you think "it should be fairly easy" to get a company to agree to this.
Let's assume for a second that you got a company to agree to this 9 months of pay for rescinded offer clause. If they wanted to rescind your offer, they'd take one look at that clause and decide to hire you for 1 day or 1 week or 1 month and then lay you off.
In this case, it was the founder, so his upside is huge already from stock. Call that pay if you like, but I think it's a bit different.
It’d be a largely symbolic punishment, let’s be real, but unethical behavior like this shouldn’t be allowed to pass.
Didn't they remove commenting on those posts a year or so ago? I used to remember being able to comment on them, but I don't think you can anymore...
Edit: yikes 9 years
And here he is explaining why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32586658
> The short version: job ads are boring. [...]
If YC doesn't denounce egregious unprofessional behavior, then it teaches other batches that it's allowed. Also: Qui tacet consentire videtur. (Silence gives consent.)
CEO of a company with $1B in cash after they "accidentally" hired 75 people who were due to start on Monday.
Source:
(I’m always baffled at these really poorly handled layoffs - most companies doing layoffs will need to hire again at some point, potentially in a competitive environment. The internet exists; people will look it up.)
Even reddit lets you comment on advertising posts.
I don't care if Flexport offers foosball. I do care if 20 people say "I was hired, and they pulled my offer three days before my start date."
It is not surprising.
This shouldn’t just reflect poorly on Flexport leadership but on their investors. Especially because the more time you spend in Silicon Valley you learn that your “scrappy startup” is really a product division of the VCs who really call the shots.
Pay close attention to what you hear from pg, Garry Tan, Michael Seibel, etc on this issue. Very very easy to talk ethics in the abstract. Real ethics and integrity are defined in exactly tough times like this. And if you see the cowardice that I expect like we saw with DoorDash, keep that in mind before you “Work at a Startup”
That’s not how the VC mind is wired. A bad investment loses money, a good one makes money. That’s all.
I’m looking in from the outside, so who knows, but it seems like level of ambition early YC was filtering on brought this dark triad shit into the bloodstream and that in turn shifted pg’s worldview.
pg is obviously ambitious, but inherently “get to the top at any cost” people don’t spend a bunch of time writing books about Common Lisp and learning some painting and hanging out in art galleries a bunch. Part of what drew me to HN and the essays and the whole thing was a wholesome attitude that kind of said “work hard don’t try to game the system”, at least in the beginning.
On another note, I think other companies will have more class handling this. The way the CEO has worded this came out as quite dismissive and douche-baggy. I can understand a company messing up (of any size, who doesn't?).
* who said anything about currently employed, what??? good relationships are forever
* if you use your imagination, you can easily find other consequences of leaving with drama, like not being invited to a new startup your ex-colleagues launch
* you personally might enjoy burning bridges and get away with it so far, doesn't mean it a good practice. When you are e.g. in the layoff shitter, every tiny bit helps.
Being given a promise of a job may have put Flexport on the hook for damages.
> Local politics do not seem to matter to the new formulation; the law on the ground in Texas, New York, California, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and others is much the same, and it is not Section 90. [1]
1: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4117874
Not saying its not worth exploring, but I wouldn't expect much out of it.
For a lot of software developers, these damages are not small.
In addition, the case is pretty clear cut and lawyers are very likely to take it on contingency. You also might find Flexport amenable to negotation on something they're likely to spend a bunch of lawyer money on only to lose anyway. This is especially true if they risk going to court and creating a blueprint for a bunch of people to come after them.
Some significant fraction of that salary for the minimum period you could have been employed by the company without violating the promise. If they hadn't rescinded the offer but had fired you (other than for an illegal reason, like racial discrimination) shortly after hiring, you would have no damages,so even to the extent the promise is binding under an estoppel theory, the damages will be limited.
> Or, if you sold your house in preparation to move, there are also pretty obvious damages.
How is it market value sale damages? You traded an asset for its market value, there's no economic loss.
You’re virtually guaranteed to burn your reputation among your former coworkers and ensure that the one thing they remember you for is taking a new job and giving negative one weeks of notice. Is that really worth avoiding the vanishingly small risk of a rescinded offer? Do you really think the old job wouldn’t let you keep working there if you gave 2 weeks’ notice and then rescinded your notice?
I think you’ve got your risk model backwards. If you optimize too much for rare outcomes, you start missing the bigger picture.
The good news is that in my experience this simply isn't a thing. Not even a little. The industry is so fucking big you'd have to be incredibly toxic to somehow lock yourself out of it. Burned bridges? Were you really going to go back to the place you were so unhappy you left with zero notice? Folks you have real relationships with will understand. Who gives a shit about the rest?
At least, from my side I couldn't care less about how much notice my coworkers give the company; it's the excellence of the work that they did while they were there that makes up the core of my impressions about them and puts them in Universe A.
Give 2 weeks if the situation isn't toxic, but in my experience, notice is completely optional.
I understand still WANTING to work, of course, but you should be in a position to pick your own colleagues, projects, and schedule.
Well F** that shit. Companies might treat you like shit, but I'd never judge a coworker for making the best decisions for their own life. That said, I've also never been surprised when a coworker puts in notice - pretty sure they typically tell everyone but management.
People, especially white collar employees, don't like to think of it as Employer V Employee but it is. Companies will lay you off without warning when it isn't profitable. You still don't get to say bye or off-board to other coworkers. I won't hold it against my coworkers for doing what they have to. It's just a job, and at 5pm it disappears until morning. A coworker quitting shouldn't impact you so much that you think less of them.
It's gotten increasingly common to see rescinded offers lately. If companies aren't punished for that behavior, then the rare outcomes become common. I've never seen a 2-week notice period on an actual employment contract for either party.
There is the calculus that the PR and legal costs are not entirely predictable and could be higher, so why the the risk if we have the cash.
If you are at a megacorp, you are a number, and a variable in a bunch of spreadsheets. Nobody cares about you beyond that.
If that person's manager was not my manager, I was not even told after they were laid off -- I found out when emails went unanswered and I had to go looking for them.
I think that's pretty typical, unfortunately.
Anybody who would judge a coworker for leaving without notice shows a pathological lack of empathy. Doing so publicly would be a great way to damage your own reputation.
I assume then that an employer could hold a potential hire accountable for damages if the candidate backs out of the job offer/commitment after agreeing?
If two people sign a paper agreeing that they would both do something on a future date, it's generally a contract, and they don't get to back out of it without paying some form of compensation.
The difficulty of job offers is that you generally can't force the employer to continue hiring a person they don't want, so the most you can get is severance assuming they fire you on the first day at work.
As for whether the employer can sue if the potential hire backs out... my understanding is theoretically yes, but probably the only thing you can claim is the amount they would pay if they resigned without notice. Which generally isn't worth the legal costs and the PR risks.
Don't get me wrong, the employer can then fire the employee within the probation period of two weeks scotch-free (well, after a bunch of paperwork), and the employee can quit within that period as well, and while it might seem the same it's not because that triggers all sorts of gvmt protections for the employee (mainly, unemployment benefits, but YMMV).
... nothing. The recruiter makes disappointed puppy-dog noises but after going through all that trouble to source, vet, interview, and close with you, they're not about to waste that time and effort starting over with someone else.
Seize the time you want. Especially if you're American; nothing in the way American business treats employees will hand you the time you should take.
Also, most big companies give a 60 day notice on layoffs because they are required by law to publicly announce layoffs over a certain size prior to the layoffs.
Antidotally, I had someone leave for a better offer (I that’s life), but gave about a months notice, and transitioned out of her role well. Came back about 4 months later realizing she had made a huge mistake, and we hired her back, because she had left on good terms… if you she had done what you suggested, not a chance.
I know that if you sign a contract, and then incur a cost in executing it, the other party can be liable for damages even if that protection is no explicit in the contract.
At a minimum employees who sold homes, packed up and moved, put down deposits on new rentals should be reimbursed for that cost when the other party fails to follow through with the contract.
Secondly, the lawyer told me that it was only possible to take that route if one had not officially signed an employment contract. The reasoning is that once you’ve signed a contract, you’re technically an employee and your claim would be handled in a different manner. But in many jurisdictions, the wronged person would be treated as having been fired at will and would not have much recourse (as opposed to a promissory estoppel claim)
The other concepts in play were common sense things, like the company had to made you a reasonable offer, you took reasonable actions based on that promise, and the company knew you were taking those actions. And finally, the “penalty” is often only the documented losses you really incurred which can seem tiny in comparison to the situation and intangible losses. I suspect many of these cases are settled before going to court.
IANAL and YMMV
You're right, promissory estoppel applies to arrangements made on the anticipation of a contract or more formal agreement. The courts recognize that it's not unreasonable that people do things on the promise of some future agreement.
As the other comment notes, such a claim must pass a number of tests with regards to the reasonableness of actions, the beliefs of both parties at the time the actions are taken, etc.
This would usually come up during one's due diligence of the company when evaluating a job prospect, but it would be nice to have a list of flagrant violators of norms (i.e. of at least doing right by employees, even if the business is not doing the best).
The externalities of wage theft, surprise costs, and abuse are displaced from the employer and borne by the employee.
Frankly, all of those cheated people should form a class-action lawsuit and sue.
A Flexport team member will reach out to each of you personally asap to explain the move. I hope you will forgive us someday and even consider coming to work here again once we get our house in order. But now would not be a good time to add more people and expenses to the company.
They're not being transparent at all.
This is the founder: "I have no idea how this happened. We've had a hiring freeze for months". (emphasis mine)
Calling this a "transparent explanation" is really stretching it.
I guess it all was a temporary blip, as the incumbents got their act together the new entrants found out the reality, and then the rate hikes made it all worse.
> Amazon's coup against Flexport in the battle for logistics, in 12 months:
1. Dave Clark, 20+ year Amazon vet joins as CEO of Flexport
2. Amazon works out a deal with Shopify to partner on logistics, on the condition that Shopify exits logistics, i.e. sells Deliverr, a notoriously overpriced acquisition and unprofitable division
3. Dave buys Deliverr from Shopify, installs bureaucracyOS at Flexport
4. Dave leaves Flexport, same day Amazon announces its deal with Shopify
> Amazon removes Shopify as a fulfillment competitor and severely hobbles Flexport
I don’t know if Flexport is big enough to be a threat here, but would be some brutal shit if true.
[1] https://twitter.com/kepano/status/1699818506752287055?s=20
I know that sounds like the No True OKR paradox [1], but the truth is that it's not even that complicated. [2]
Write down the outcome you want, and then write down a few measurable milestones on the way. Make the whole thing ruthlessly concise. Make each key result objectively measurable. Go execute. Get together as a team occasionally to debate the whole thing and see if it needs to change.
That's the whole thing. No need to over-complicate it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ht_1VAF6ik, the whole system explained in 2 minutes by the OG himself
The latter is what in-fact happens nearly everywhere, with predictable results that OKRs just end up as bureaucratic waste that distract from valuable work.
When tools become mandates, tools become obstacles. See also: agile.
Our company ditched OKRs and we are running much faster. It turned out that people already knew, at any given point in time and to 95% accuracy, what's the most critical work to focus on. We didn't actually need to spend 3 weeks every quarter hammering out OKRs with dozens and dozens of goal-lists across teams (and then another 2 weeks at the end of the quarter doing OKR progress reviews), when the real thing to do was just to fix the Top N things that are broken, and then keep that short-list of top issues fresh every week.
"But, but... how can you make progress without quantitative quarterly goals?? That's outrageous!" Well, you know how those things that are always broken are now getting fixed? That's how.
In a larger company the problem is connecting "person over here's day to day work in a thousand-person org among other orgs" with "CEO's goals for the year." And now you've got people problems that are harder to solve than "just get together and debate them" because it's near-impossible at that size not to have politics, and some people working in bad-faith because they're prioritizing personal objectives over company ones, etc. No need to over-complicate except for human nature.
The usual problem a startup hits of bringing in a big-company guy is that some of these execs have never seen the tools they like (whether it's OKRs or Agile or "make documents for proposals") outside of the context of the big company bureaucracy and politics and then they don't know how to implement them lightly and they end up bringing all the bloat with them which creates more politics than before.
Much more likely he was just a bad CEO/bad hire. Often vets from mega-corps are terrible hires as C-suite types at startups, bringing all sorts of bureaucratic process and overspending, based on what they know from mega-corps.
What is this world coming to that we think elections are stolen in a mass conspiracy or that large tech companies will somehow install puppet CEOs in a start ups in an effort to fight off a non-existential threat while negotiating a deal with a competitor at the same time (that would be contingent on this first deal happening).
People have too much time on their hands.
Of regime changes in the 21st century over half of them were the result of some kind of coup (aka "conspiracy").
Or consider: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
Or: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed#Industry_r...
We live in a world where weird things happen.
The board could have already had doubts, and when he lost a Shopify contract to Amazon, when arguably Shopify sells itself as the anti-Amazon, that only served to underscore he wasn’t the right person to lead the company.
Huh? FBA is a huge part of Amazon. It's one of the main reasons for Amazon existing without it you could only buy stuff that Amazon themselves stock ...
1, 3, 4 are facts. The only item that is speculative is 2 but it seems obvious that Shopify would have used that lever in negotiating the partnership that was announced this week (buy with Prime + Amazon's logistics network).
In other words, you can draw your own conclusions about whether it was intentional, incompetence, or a series of selfish decisions that had the same emergent result.
I'm trying to think of a better word than "coup". Maybe it's just collateral damage.
In the Nokia scenario, however, Elop published a memo which destroyed Nokia’s declining but still substantial business overnight (that memo alone probably cost Nokia hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in revenue…revenue they simply could not afford to lose), torpedoed the in-house effort Nokia had been working on and had ready to go, and worst of all, when choosing the external platform to depend on instead, chose the one that was not even close to being the market leader, did not allow Nokia anywhere near the same level of control or customization as the market leader, provided Nokia no input on the future of Windows Phone, and as a result predictably made Nokia phones almost exactly the same as rhe no name Chinese phones that were the only other phone makers using Windows Phone.
In Nokia’s case the simplest explanation for all these actions was a conspiracy. There’s no good way to explain Elop’s actions otherwise without doubting his mental acuity.
It might have worked if Ballmer was still in charge. Nadella’s been heavily prioritizing cloud over operating systems platforms, though. It was unclear MS would do that back when Nokia bet on windows phone.
Multiple then Nokia execs have come on the record about how while the decisions Elop made were in hindsight stupid, they at least made sense at the time.
Read "Transforming Nokia", "The Decline and Fall of Nokia", and "Operation Elop" to have a look inside Nokia at the time. Alternatively, talk to PMs and BDs who are ex-Nokia - there are plenty that still roam the Bay Area at top Infra, Cloud, and Security companies.
But yeah, the major forwarders are places like Kuehne + Nagel, DSV, Expeditors, DHL Global Forwarding, DB Schenker, and UPS Supply Chain Solutions.
The most likely explanation is the new CEO's strategy either did not work or the board and founder felt they had a strategy which would work better or have a better chance of working.
Basically, for better or worse, Dave Clark (the old CEO) and Flexport were probably just a poor fit.
everyone else seems to understand, but please explain to me how this set of events hobbles flexport? aside from the price, didn’t flexport just acquire a competitor in this process?
edit: oic, the chain of events is confused, like typical conspiracy theories are. #2 happened unbeknownst to flexport, with flexport thinking it’s all stock acquisition of deliverr comes with shopify as a significant customer.
https://apnews.com/article/shopify-fulfillment-flexport-ocad...
but it turns out shopify won’t be a customer of deliverr anymore.
why would shopify do that to themselves? since after the sale they own 15-18% of flexport, so hurting deliverr, hurting flexport, is self harm.
also, 13% (the purchase price) would represent about 1bn, half of the amount shopify acquired it for just a year ago
They are about to have no income, and no health insurance, in a fucking difficult job market where it can take extremely well qualified people months to find positions.
"I am deeply sorry to those people who were expecting to join our company..." does not begin to address the level of absolute upheaval he's just caused in 75 people's lives.
? This is the hottest job market in living memory. Labor economists have run out of ways to describe it. A damp log can get a six-figure signing bonus.
- low unemployment + high employer demand for new positions + high wage growth = hot job market
- where the market was in 2016-2021
- where the market was in 2022
- where the market is currentlyI've left one of the big FANGs for an opportunity that I thought was better, but did not pan out, when I emailed my old (skip) boss about how to re-interview for my old team, he simply asked "when do you want to start?" (Even get new sign on RSUs)
It's very different right now. Every team is starved for headcount. Job openings don't grow on trees these days — not even in FAANG-land.
Which I do think applies to this case, esp with ones say starting next Monday, their old position is probably not backfilled yet and why not hire someone who already knew the job.
AFAIK, most FANNG companies still have some sort of 6 month to a year hire back no interview policy.
However, hiring is still tough.
He's been on the board during his whole 'leave from the company' (read : very long vacation) and had pull to make sure this doesn't happen. But he made sure that he did nothing. It's just a convenient narrative to pull now that he's 'back' as CEO (although he never really left the company).