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Comment by jasontan | Hacker News Reader

While this is unfortunate and it sounds like you deserve better (I'd like to hear the other side of the story first), I would discourage against taking this public. This is an issue between you and the founders, and no one else. "Warning" your former Miso coworkers should happen privately -- this post brings them the wrong kind of attention, but they did nothing to deserve it.

Future employers who read this post will think twice about hiring you -- frankly, this is rather unprofessional. Yes, the Miso founders might be in the wrong, but you can still take the high road.

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I dont agree. 99% of this time this type of stuff stays private because the employee is fearful of repercussions and as a result, new employees never get warned about the mess they are walking into. Thats why I upvoted this- It takes balls to air this publicly and thats the only thing you can do to stop shit behavior like this from happening and scare other companys into treating people right.

So long as companys think they can get away with treating you like shit, most of them will. Stuff like this stops that.

I think it's worthwhile taking stuff like this public but threatening beforehand is a big no-no.

You're right. I'm definitely not proud of that.

If your threat is to tell your side of the story I don't see a problem with it. Ivehad customers do that with me and it's usually because their experience with my company sucked.

I've had customers "threaten" me with the same. Some people get really unlucky(had a customer receive two defective products in a row and the third time we were OOS). I've never begrudged a customer for sharing their experience with others as long as its a factual account. In fact with that customer I confirmed his account of events and apologized publicly.

Employees are scared to burn bridges or take it public, because it will affect them when it comes to future job prospects. Unless your new potential employers really know your rep, HR will stay far away from you.

It's also up to the new employees to stay vigilant and find out as much as they can on their new employers – LinkedIn makes it so easy to track down ex employees of companies, just shoot them an email, introduce yourself (even easier with connections) and hopefully they can give on some valuable feedback (and hopefully they're honest!)

Hmm. I disagree. It's a small community built on trust. The cautionary tails I read on HN have changed the way I do business. I don't see anything unprofessional about going public. Think of it as a bug report :-)

If there's a code of silence about this, what levers do employees have? Are lawyers the only recourse? If anything, I think it's admirable to go public; the ecosystem is hurt without honest reporting. And the author pays the cost, of course, because future employers will have a look at this...

I wish companies thought beyond this "unprofessional" thing - is it not unprofessional for them to withhold the money that rightfully belongs to him (assuming the story is factually correct)? Sadly, so many times people don't come forward for fear of losing future opportunities, and bad employers take advantage of it.

Tough call. I have to think would I hire somebody who did something like this - probably on a case by case basis.

In this case, it does seem (from his side of the story) that he was in the right & gave Miso plenty of time/warning.

All that being said, though, I would probably have to do the due diligence were I to know this about a candidate, that by itself is a negative regardless of the merits of the issue.

OTOH, an incident such as this might actually be a positive in a candidate where you are looking for someone who isn't a pushover.

So (IMO) it is hard to characterize it as objectively good or bad to a potential employer, at least this one, other than it is a flag that may need to be checked. It certainly is a good point of departure for getting a candidate to talk about himself.

In general, before going public w/something like this, one always has to consider "Never argue with an idiot because the people watching may not be able to tell the difference".

I'm in two minds about this. If I were hiring someone and came across something like this, I would certainly have questions.

On the one hand, he might do this to me. What if he's lying or twisting the truth in some way, or there's more to the story.

On the other hand, fair play for sticking up for his rights. I'd like that mindset on my team.

I think it would come down to the interview, and how he came across. We once interviewed a guy who came across like an asshole online. We asked him about it in the interview, and he did a poor job of defending himself. I think the same approach would work here.

Well in this case, it looks like the employee was in the right. Just a few minutes ago, the founder (Somrat) admitted his mistake and paid Joshua the full $10k.

Later on when future employers see this, they'll realize that the employee has proper morals, and is a "do-er". I think most employees would suck it up if they lost out on 10k, but this person stuck it out and rode the storm.

Would you hire a passive employee, or a passionate one? Sometimes passion will cause people to do things that may backfire, but at least they gave it a shot. Passive employees wouldn't even bother with the 10k loss.

Agreed. Regardless of how you were wronged, threatening to take something like this public (instead of just doing so, or even better instead of talking to your lawyer first) can come back to bite you, in a number of ways.

However, by taking it public, there's a chance that Miso will try to fix the situation, and he will get the full $10,000 bonus, rather than paying a lawyer.

looks like that's exactly what happened... Somrat just paid the employee $10k.

I agree. It sounds like the OP wants some attention, even if he claims he's doing it for the public service. His ego is bruised, he just wants to recover from it.

Yes. I do want some attention. But really, I think anyone here can see that I have a lot more to lose here than to gain. If this was a matter of pride I'd leave it as a Facebook post for my friends and call it a day. To me, this is the right thing to do, not the smart thing. Unfortunately the two don't necessary come in pairs.

How is this the right thing? I don't imagine that your former coworkers are having a good day today with this kind of publicity. They had nothing to do with this matter, and did nothing to deserve the bad attention.

I understand that it's important to get the word out, but for me, I'd put the people I care about above anything else. All I'm saying is that this could have been handled more professionally.

I see this as doing your former coworkers a favor actually. They might not even know what type of person their boss is behind the scenes. The former coworkers might actually be happy that their boss was called out on shenanigans, to prevent future sleazy behavior.

i think you did the right thing to go public. As an employer i would have no problem with this.

But you shouldn't haven gone into details about their non-existent back-up strategy. This clearly shows their incompetance. This may fear future employers.

future employers who would want to screw him will think twice about hiring him.

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