Flock Offers Employees Buyouts as Customers Flee | Hacker News Reader

Flock Offers Employees Buyouts as Customers Flee

wired.com

98 pointsent10145 comments

Flock seeks to shed whistleblowers via financially-motivated self selection

> And we just want people to be safe.

We’d all be safer if we were in jail (sorry to give the clown ideas)

Been to America the other week on IT conference honestly felt like I was in prison since the moment I landed my boots on your soil

A disturbing amount of people so not recognize the fact. An even higher percentage willingly supports their own disenfranchisement.

It's amazing what easy access to meat, processed food and Walmart does to your brain.

It's the phones and the propaganda being streamed through them 24/7. And if your reaction is, "the rest of the Western world has that too," well, they're really not all that far behind us.

I know that this is old, but allowing an entertainment network to look, smell like, and carry the moniker of 'news' has done incalculable damage to the world.

AI is now the digital Walmart. It's basically proposing to do exactly what mom & pop found out, except everywhere on the internet.

What made you feel that way?

For me (not OP) a clear example I can give from a collage of my past three visits: arrive at JFK, get in the immigration queue, heavily armed agents walking around, some ICE agents looking tough surrounding the area, someone is directing the queue like we are cattle.

Get to the immigration officer, answer questions, get a cold stare a few times looking at me and my passport, unpleasantly asked why do I have two passports (I'm a dual citizen), told I don't look Swedish (of course, I'm naturalised), get told to wait, they leave to get someone else to check something, two immigration officers start shuffling my passport, wait while no one talks to me or acknowledge I'm there, passport stamped and I get told to "move".

Get my bags, and out of the terminal, on the walk through the terminal there's another 15-20 officers with rifles strutting around, get out of the terminal and there are two massive armoured cars from NYPD parked up front, more cops looking a bit tough.

It's an overwhelming presence of "security" everywhere, signs plastered with messages about how illegal stuff will be punished (littering, leaving your bags unattended, smoking, every message seems to say something about "under penalty of the law").

I think if you live with that all the time it's easy to filter out the noise but there's an eery feeling of oppression all around, like a boot is just waiting the right moment to stomp on you.

Maybe Sweden is different from every other country I’ve visited in Europe…but having traveled quite extensively in the EU, most countries I’ve been to don’t feel much different than the US.

Very immigration officer I’ve ever interacted with has been chilly, it’s not some uniquely American thing.

Pretty much every rail station I went through in Europe had extremely (to my eyes) heavily armed guards standing around. I was also asked to present my passport on several occasions. At one Italian station, it happed twice within a few minutes. I’ve been on multiple trains where some flavor of police comes on, checks people’s papers, and then grab some guy and escort him off at the next stop.

I don't mind the stern-looking armed security or immigration officers, it just feels different in the USA. Being chilly is different than being told to "move", I have never experienced such attitude getting into Schengen, at most it's a mostly quiet stern encounter.

It's very hard to express in text the feeling of oppression, it's not about just armed security, it's the attitude of those, it's the attitude of the people representing the State, it feels much more adversarial in the USA than anywhere I've been in Europe.

Also, it's not about being asked to present a passport but presenting a legitimate passport and being met with "you don't look Swedish".

Perhaps you are just too accustomed to the feeling of the USA, as an outsider it does feel different, and way more oppressive.

Where are you from? It's weird to me that you on the one hand defend the US, but on the other DID notice all these armed guards everywhere you went in Europe. If you don't feel it's different, then I don't think you should have noticed it so much? Or if you do notice it everywhere, why would you equate the US and Europe without raising a critical stance against these kinds of policies on either side of the atlantic?

I think you can get a sense of what kind of person they are by this kind of comments [0][1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49697884

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49441324

A person that likes normal non woke stuff and does not like feces on the street?

Seems normal to me.

> Why the fuck are we so soft on these gutter trash in this country.

If you think it's normal to call people "gutter trash" I guess you're too far gone in some bullshit and should do some soul-searching to come back to your humanity.

Anything that touches on US geopolitical/immigration policy is bound to bring out the russian troll army.

It must be nerve wracking to live in your shoes day to day. This is, probably due to flying through an airport like JFK. I'm also not sure what you mean by heavily armed agents. Most MPs at airports just have pistols on them.

Interesting you should say that, friend of mine transited through the US recently (overnight stay before a connecting flight) after having not been there for some years and described the experience as "very unnerving". Since she was messaging from inside the US she didn't want to say any more, but I'm expecting a more detailed report once she lands at the other end.

> And we just want people to be safe.

Heh. Real-world occurrence of Silicon Valley "We just want to make the world a better place" (also $billions, mainly that actually)

> “Because you go on to X or you go on to Reddit and you go, why are people so mad at us when we've been doing the same thing for nine years?” Langley said. “And why are they so mad at us for things we don't do? And we just want people to be safe.”

I can't believe this is being said with a straight face. "We've been dumping chemicals in this river for a decade, why are people getting so mad about it now (when they are finally finding out more about it)?". Completely absurd.

Couple that with "we just want people to be safe", sorry but ignoring the abuses of the system (which they tacitly allow due to lack of safeguards) is not acceptable.

Why are they doing this when they're hiring:

https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/flock-safety

Over the last months I've gotten very familiar with the tech job market. Those job postings are ghost jobs. Companies usually keep a few generic jobs online continuously like "Fullstack developer" to fish for top candidates, but there is no actual position that needs to be filled.

Or because required by law for some reasons including visa holders (assuming that’s still a thing in the US these days - fortunate not to have to know)?

Yes its disgusting that companies rather hire cheap foreigners over qualified natives.

https://archive.is/9FuDK

My city right outside Austin scrapped it. Its even split between red and blue voters and support for abandoning flock was overwhelmingly in favor of abandoning. Makes me feel good to see others banding together for positive change in today’s political climate in the USA….even if the motivation comes from self interest (too used to “get your government hands off of my medicaid/care” deluded thinking).

It's weird to see that any towns even remotely close to Austin would support Flock at all in the first place.

I wonder if something similar will happen to Palantir et al.

It would be nice to think this will significantly hamper Flock and its goals and methods in any way, but it will probably just have the effect of selecting for the employees who are either true believers, or are desperate enough that they'll keep their heads down and get good work done just to keep their jobs.

Sporadic vandalism, a handful of canceled contracts, some employee morale problems, all of this falls far short of the organized campaign of resistance that would be needed to roll back Flock at this point. Flock really should be the last nail in the coffin of Edward Snowden's libertarian take that mass surveillance can be fought only with individual action and technology rather than political movements.

"Founded in 2017, Flock raised money at a valuation of more than $8 billion in a funding round that closed in April."

https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-secures-major-...

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety/jobs

https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/13/y-combinators-police-surve...

https://techfundingnews.com/275m-at-7-5-valuation-y-combinat...

https://www.ycdb.co/company/flock-safety

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/y-combinator_flock-safety-has...

https://www.inc.com/lisa-bonos/how-flock-became-the-most-con...

Oh nooooooo! /s

I cannot believe how tone deaf this quote is. Mind boggling. Veep, torture nexus-level parody.

I find this story to be heartwarming. I hope the employees flee to companies with missions and products more worthy of their talents.

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