How Not to Hire | Hacker News Reader

How Not to Hire

blog.karma.wiki

25 pointsvladaionescu19 comments

I was enjoying reading this post until I realized I was reading a post designed to name and shame a particular individual who probably has no way to respond equally.

I don't know who the folks behind Karma are nor am I calling them a liar but this whole article makes me really uncomfortable.

One of the things reddit (at least some subreddits) gets right is the "no witch hunting rule". The most important facet of it is no personal information about any individuals should be posted.

Agreed, they could have written the entire piece without naming the person. As well it could have had the same outcome, we hired poorly, we learned X and Y, and they would have looked better. Now they might end up black listed, who wants to work for a company that will publicly stab you if things go poorly?

Writing the article that way would defeat its apparent purpose; to name and shame. They even bought a domain name of the guys full name and pointed it at this blog. I assume they're probably promoting on social media (why else buy the domain name if not to promote it).

I get why they would go to such lengths; they're angry and want to get revenge. Too bad no one reminded them of that old saying about the best revenge is moving on and living a good life.

AFAICT the entire purpose of their startup is to monetize online revenge, naming and shaming, etc.

What's really interesting to me is that their service, Karma, appears to be a service for naming people and reviewing them personally.

If someone is feeling sorry for this developer, and wants to right a wrong they have a chance of hiring him (I don't know if some of the blurring on the post was intentional, but it was certainly ineffective), his contacts are there.

What goes around comes around.

It seems to be in very poor conduct for an employer to discuss, by name, the performance of an employee. In the U.S. the employee would likely have grounds for a lawsuit. Regardless of location, this does come down to a he-said, she-said type argument and private conversations such as these are not appropriate to share with the public. IMHO.

The service they were paying him to build, Karma, is a service for discussing private individuals by name publicly.

Fascinating coincidence, no?

The real story: two months into the project, Karma founders Dayne Rathbone and Clyde Rathbone realize that they are not happy with their contractor, Artem Andreenko. DR & CR threaten AA that unless he gives them a full refund, they would publish a name-and-shame article about him. AA disagrees, Karma founders follow through on their threat and publish the piece.

From the article:

We discuss how much money we should ask Artem to refund us. We consider all the time and energy he’s cost us in addition to the cash, and decide to request all our money back.

A search on GoDaddy informs me that www.artemandreenko.com is available. I buy it and begin writing this blog.

The following day Clyde and I had our last chat with Artem. We were interested to see his reaction to a draft of this blog, and to give Artem the opportunity to decide how the story ends.

You say "karma", I say "shake-down".

P.S. Negative review blackmail has been around for a long time: https://www.google.com/search?q=negative+review+blackmail. Your startup is not doing anything new.

P.P.S. Biggest lesson of all? When you use GoDaddy, Bad Things are bound to happen.

We should be mindful not to vilify Artem. [...] We wish [him] well.

This is clearly a lie. On the face of it, the intent of the post is to ensure no-one employs Artem again, under that name.

However, it's about what you could expect from people trying to create a site that reviews people; that puts into the public and searchable record as many experiences as they can about named individuals - whether positive or negative, but we all know we're more motivated to post the negative. Monetizing bullying, IMO.

Unpleasant founders, unpleasant startup, unpleasant developer. Unpleasant all round.

It sounds like brothers Clyde and Dayne are ineffective managers who neglected to supervise Artem (i.e. provide guidance on what he should be working on, then reviewing it to make sure it meets expectations). This blog post, replete with pictures of Artem from his various social media profiles, strikes me as incredibly immature and unbecoming of a professional company.

While Artem seems to be an ass, the other important conclusion that can be drawn from this article is that Dayne and Clyde sunk $10k for 600 lines of simple Go code. It took them months to realize that they're being cheated. Now... would you sink $10M of funding into a company managed by such people?

Who Not to Seek Employment From: The Likely Right but Certainly Rash Founders at Karma

"name and shame" without giving the other side a chance to respond seems a little unfair, and from the tone of the article, one has to wonder if this is the model for how the site will work. I don't know that something like this will be very useful or productive. This experience is called out on their homepage, tagging the Artem as "Deceitful". If it ever takes off, I predict a lot of messy private disputes ending up out in public and not really to anyone's benefit.

Also, I think they fell into a trap that a lot of startups fall into (and some pre-startup ideas I've had have certainly fallen into this trap) - overthinking technology choices. I think choosing Go and Cassandra was a mistake - not because there is anything wrong with those technologies, but because there are so many other choices that would have been easier to hire for (their post mentions how hard it was to find someone).

If you are a founder that is going to be writing code and actually building the software that runs your business, I could see making somewhat uncommon technology decisions, but it seems unnecessary for non-technical founders to paint themselves into a corner by choosing technologies that are hard to hire for.

I am guessing they outsourced the creation of their logo with similar success: http://bit.ly/1HoypyB

Funny

When (my company) hired a remote team, that remote team would stop working as soon as payment was late (by 1 day, not our fault, unfortunately)

This article shows a lot of inexperience in managing people and dealing with cases such as this.

Also the red flags and warnings have been big, since the beginning.

This person should have been dropped 1 or 2 weeks into the story. 6 weeks without showing any work product?

Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me (but we need an equivalent phrase for continuous events)

those emails aren't properly sanitised, you can read the 'censored' bits that have just a very small blur.

unless you meant to share those email addresses with the world?

First mistake I noticed was requiring that the person already have experience in relatively new and uncommon software tools.

It sounds like he could be taking on multiple projects simultaneously, and after the first week either outsourcing the work to someone else or just spending very little time on it.

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