"It stings the person WAY more than the company. ... I encourage everyone to get fired once so they know that feeling. It’s unbelievable and something to definitely learn from."
^THIS. THANK YOU, SIR. In my case, it wasn't the sudden lack of a job that stung, it was the experience of being completely blacklisted by everyone at the company. That was 20 close friends who I never heard from again.
Fair point. Perhaps it seemed that way because I'd been working so much that I'd lost any semblance of a social life outside work. That's a mistake I haven't made again.
Also, not everyone in the company should be painted with the same brush. There was a lot going on, none of which I'm actually at liberty to talk about, unfortunately.
Martin, no intention to hurt your feelings but companies hire people to work, not to enjoy. My first job was utopian. I was the second employee and my primary goal was to build the product. After securing a 2M USD funding in 2005, they thought I have completed my tenure and fired me just 3 days prior to the day my shares vested.
Therefore, I learnt it the hard way and try to be an arse at work speaking in short and to-the-point sentences and keeping my mouth shut and slogging for the 40 hours I am contracted for. What matters to me is the hard cash employers bring on the table and no longer give a flying fuck about stocks, RSUs, et all. I don't even bother to check my email or answer phones unless I am on-call and being paid extra for it.
Indeed. In fact, I figure that those people contributed to the fact he was fired,- directly or otherwise. Never underestimate the prospect of someone else undercutting your reputation to make themselves look better.
If they were "close friends", they're not going to drop you just because you got canned. Good people get fired all the time. It's about as unremarkable as a bad rainstorm. Shit... another one of these.
Most companies are shitty and most people know most companies are shitty and aren't going to ostracize someone just because their employer fired that person.
You are best off if you have an offline form of contact. Don't expect them to let the company know that you're still in contact with them, because that's not a fair expectation (they could be endangering their own reputations) but they'll usually be in contact with you offline.
dude, I would say at least the takeaway from the whole episode was "Personal Life should always have higher priority than work". Your employer can be replaced, your personal life can't.
Every time i read such posts,i become more confident that is harder to be an employee trying to figure out what a boss(or his/her company) needs than to just start your own business and let the market decide.
Yep - having to guess at your boss's needs is like the worst of both worlds. Either have a boss that provides meaningful structure, communication, and leadership or work for yourself.
I think he counting his loss at $100 million is not realistic. I am assuming he calculated this number by the amount of equity he would have vested after Facebook IPO. To cash that amount he probably would have had to keep working till now. And if you are an entrepreneur type its a tall order. He should get rid of this feeling of loss of $100 million which was really nothing more than a promise.
Yeah, I'm guessing he's left handed - I am, and I write my A's and G's just like that. When I'm sloppy, the A's end up looking like E's, and the G's look like really long S's.
Have you read David Foster Wallace's take[1] on this issue? To me[2] it seems like a good case for a form of prescriptivism. I do have to admit that I'm a huge fan of DFW and am surprised anyone was able to write an interesting article about the "linguistic wars", so maybe that colors my opinion somewhat.
This isn't a citation but you might be interested in checking out The Language Log (a language blog, as you may have guessed). That would be a good (and incredibly interesting) place to start to see the countering view to prescriptivism. Personally, they sold me on the idea of "prescriptivist poppycock" years ago, particularly the flavor of it presented in The Elements of Style. I thoroughly loathe that book, mostly for reasons discussed on TLL. The "grammar" in that book haunts my prose to this day.
EDIT: Fixed a typo caused by me pecking out this reply on my iPhone.
I would say it's a sign of allowing emotions to enter the equation, the liability being not to the company, but to the person ascribing liability's plans or personal compensation.
When Noah says, "everyone is replaceable", he really means it.
Yesterday, he fired half of AppSumo, despite the company is profitable and growing.
Here is Noah's m.o. with AppSumo:
1) Attract and hire people by paying them above market salary and promising equity.
2) New employees grow the company by building systems, automating inefficient processes, creating new lines of business, etc.
3) Once systems are built and operating efficiently; fire staff before equity vests.
4) Rinse, repeat, wash.
Entrepreneurs like this give startups a bad name. It's sad to see so many people celebrate him as a startup role model.
The reason he was fired from Facebook because he leaked internal features to the press and blogged about them. Yet he still seems unapologetic "I don’t think what I did was that wrong since the marketing team did not do anything to promote our new features."
Could it be that he got fired from Facebook for the same reason as well? For founders, this seems like an easy way to guard themselves against dilution.
Nobody is perfect. Be it life or work, we all do mistakes. It is easy to disillusion ourselves or justify ourselves, that others were right. In this occasion, it is probably easy for Noah to relate to few things that didn't go well and assume them as reasons for getting fired.
If Mark Zuckerberg used this tactic so that he could have more value for his stocks at the end of the day, then it is quite a disgusting one. I have great respect for Mark. I hope it is not true.
If so many people were fired, then clearly there was a problem with hiring the right people.
> For founders, this seems like an easy way to guard themselves against dilution.
I think the most important property of a good leader is behave like an umbrella. Guard the shit and magnify the happiness. If someone takes the stance of firing employees to justify dilution then, in my not so humble opinion, they dont deserve to lead.
>Nobody is perfect. Be it life or work, we all do mistakes.
And be man enough to own up, learn from the mistake and don't repeat it again.
>If Mark Zuckerberg used this tactic so that he could have more value for his stocks at the end of the day, then it is quite a disgusting one. I have great respect for Mark. I hope it is not true.
"I'm a CEO, bitch". Does that sound familiar? The whole of Facebook works with the preamble of "Mark is always right". That sounds more like a dictator than a founder. And a dictator is only interested in his own interests.
>If so many people were fired, then clearly there was a problem with hiring the right people.
Or, the founder just wanted to get work by paying less. Ideally these people should have been hired as contractors. But the founder decided to create an illusion of a long term commitment to compromise on the Cost to the Company.
Disclaimer: I had worked for Facebook, got fed up with the idiocy and resigned after 3 months.
I seriously doubt this is the reason. Doesn't Noah own like 80-90% of that business, and any one superstar employee is maybe looking at 1% or less in equity.
So you're saying Noah would burn people to pick up rounding-error-level equity? I don't buy it.
There may be other untoward reasons for firing people, but hoarding equity is not one of them. More likely he realized the people he hired don't operate at the level he wanted or he decided he can't afford their above market salary. Salary is a FAR more likely reason, especially because AppSumo is so capital efficient.
The whole point of the original comment was that Noah fires to stop people's equity from vesting. If he did, sure, there's a claim that it's unethical. But since that's unlikely, what do you have left???
That Noah fired some people who may or may not have deserved it. Happens every day. Anyone on HN who builds a company of any size will probably have employees mad at them for doing the same.
Employment is a MARKET. Both parties are "at will"...
If an employee quits without a good reason, is that scummy?
Should the scumminess of it depend on how it "affects" the COMPANY?
People quit every day to earn 10% more across the street, work with better technology, walk away from technical debt, shorten their commute, get away from a dreary office or smelly coworkers. Whatever.
There's no morality in it, good or bad. And employers should feel free to fire people who aren't fitting and/or cannot be kept for whatever reason.
As far as I can tell, that's the AppSumo situation. If you want to call that "scummy" feel free, but I don't see any logic in it.
...and they didn't deserve to get fired a month earlier? Or 3 days later (after vesting)? There is no such thing as a coincidence when money is involved.
In my experience, the deadline of something like that is merely a forcing function to act on a problem that you've let go too long. I have yet to meet an entrepreneur that moves too fast on firings.
That said, I learned early on in my career that you can't make mistakes or have bad optics with people's comp. There's no way to recover from a mistake like that, and people do not give you the benefit of the doubt.
...and "forcing function" is weasel words for "screw them before they vest". If you use the vesting date for any firing decision, that is a moral lapse.
> Yesterday, he fired half of AppSumo, despite the company is profitable and growing.
What's the real story here? Your comment comes off more like a bitter ex-employee than someone who's qualified to judge Noah's moral compass from a blog post and anonymous rumor about AppSumo.
2. Basing a judgement about one's moral compass on a rumor about firing half the company (even if it's true) and blog post is a classic example of a Fundamental attribution error.
1) Was the staff fire or not. That would be pretty easy to check. You instead of saying this is a rumor would have made a better argument by actually checking then coming back and posting "yeah well actually it was exactly 40% that was fired not 50% like he mentioned".
Everything in this subthread is a demonstration of the fall in quality of discourse on Hacker News.
Because Cushman pointed out that a compass tends to have two points, he has received several downvotes. He's got, surprisingly, more than one person suggesting that he should be fired. Where does that even come from? Why is someone being a little pedantic on a web forum cause to tell them they shouldn't have a job?
Especially when he's right: compasses can point both directions. He didn't attack anyone and say they should be fired, he didn't accuse someone of being a "rhetoric astronaut". What's the value in being so hurtful? Most surprising of all is that so many people jumped in. Like they were just waiting to make fun of someone on the internet.
I'd love to see attacks at people stop happening here, because good discussions do still occur. But my remarks are just more reactionary bullshit, I guess. Maybe I should be fired too.
I appreciate the backup, though I'm not really hurt-- getting downvoted for that is pretty amusing.
It does seems like an interesting little pattern on HN, though. I've found I tend to get the most upvotes for expressing the strongest opinions, even "controversial" ones. Maybe it goes against the conventional wisdom, but usually, when I get downvoted, it's not because I've said something unpopular, but because I've said something mildly challenging, but otherwise completely blasé-- like pointing out that there's nothing privileged about the north pole of a dipole magnet. (It's the sort of thing liberal arts grads love to talk about, I'm not surprised it doesn't play well here.)
Normally, of course, there'll be a downvote or two and that's that. On the extreme end, you'll see this strange phenomenon where something is so insultingly boring that it necessitates a whole comment thread complaining about it. I actually find it really fascinating.
> Because Cushman pointed out that a compass tends to have two points, he has received several downvotes.
well, that's because his comment, though superficially relevant, was actually pure noise. there was no compass involved to have two points; the term was being used metaphorically, and everyone (cushman included) knew what it meant.
This comment reminded me of the "architecture astronaut" post by Joel Spolsky[1]:
"Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like "Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music" and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it's interesting because it's peer to peer, completely missing the point that it's interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away."
Yes there might be two points on your compass but the "interesting" point is the one that's drawn to the magnetic pole of the planet. Cushman, you're a rhetoric astronaut.
I agree that cushman seems to be being thick, but there are two magnetic poles on all magnets including the Earth, dangit, not "the magnetic pole of the planet". In fact, the part that points north is the magnetic south pole of the compass.
(Now I suspect the bit about the level of discourse does apply; I was well-aware of magnetic polarity in 1st grade, and polarity itself defines there being two ends...)
I was more concerned with expressing a relevant thought I had than ensuring that the phrase I used to sum up the general concept of a compass was scientifically accurate. Because after all, the very thing this entire thread about is that the properties of magnetism and the nature of compasses are irrelevant to the meaning of the phrase, "moral compass."
Nerds, each of us. I say that affectionately but man I regret answering theorique's question.
It varies, but usually I compress my diaphragm to force air from my lungs past a set of vibrating membranes which produce a base tone, then modulate that tone using the various muscles in my mouth to produce a set of distinct acoustic patterns which my conversational partner can decode. If that's working well I'll also modulate the frequency and volume of the tone itself to encode additional semantic information, but that's not strictly necessary for communication to take place.
Holy shit! Who gives a fuck about compasses. We get it. The guy in question is alleged to be a dick. This noise on HN about people debating types of compasses is like arguing over the arrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic. Next to the hero worship of Kim Dotcom, this is exactly why HN is a pain in the ass sometimes. Yet, I'm still F'ing reading it. Sigh.
The entire story about a startup is about money. I hear people saying stuff like "I add value by creating something wonderful", but I consider that a truckload of horseshit. It is always about money and firing people just before equity vesting bolsters that idea.
This is the precise reason I work as an independent contractor for companies and explicitly make an effort not to get into an employment.
The entire story about a startup is about money.
VC-istan is banking, really, except instead of securities and loans you're dealing in ads.
Honestly, I think finance is better. The money's better, the work is about the same in quality, and if you stick to the quantitative stuff, the people are a lot more ethical in finance.
I worked for a VERY large Internet company in the late '90s, and I can say with complete conviction that the VAST majority of terminations were politically motivated.
Several times I was provided a list of my team members that needed to go, and when I asked "why this guy?" or "why her?", the answer was never performance related. A few times I was able to argue the team member to safety, but most of the time it was already a forgone conclusion.
Each faction would come into and out of favor with upper management as the rounds of layoffs came and went, and the business priorities changed. Enemies of that faction were always targeted, irrespective of the cost to the business of the loss of that talent.
The way I avoided all this WITHOUT choosing a side was to quietly make myself invaluable to the upper management as the key "goto guy" for skunkwerk projects, to always accept technical due-diligence projects on upcoming acquisitions, and keep showing "projects I'm working on in my spare time" to the uppers.
Getting fired is not that big a deal. Employers do everything in their power to make it a big deal. But the truth is, Developers (the good ones) are in such high demand, that it grates employers to no end, we are a liability to be needed so much, so they use psychological tricks to get us to act like begging dogs. To be thankful just to have a job. It's not the case, we have all the cards, if we just open our eyes.
They need you more than you need them. If you are not happy at your job, GTFO, you'll find another in no time and kick yourself for not doing it sooner.
Just needs a bigger ego. Whenevery I get laid off (actually just the once) I assume they are fools to do it, they must have no idea how great I am, I'm going to a better place.
True or false, its the right attitude to take with you. The alternatives - like a year of depression - are awful, and self-inflicted.
Until the business cycle corrects and demand is down. But that is the argument, that the growth of demand for developers (region dependent) will now continually be on the up and up versus a down / up, down / up.
Seemed work was hard to come by (as far as picking any position, leaving any position) by my programmer friends as well as during my Tech Recruiting (no longer) days in '08-'09 (late '09+, power shifted to the talent vs companies).
Relocated many, many persons to Utah (majority, other areas also, uprooting families, etc.) during that period of whom appeared, and stated they would not have relocated if the market was not so depressed for talent in their area (the Valley, Texas, NC, the East Coast, all over).
Getting fired itself is not a big deal because companies rarely give bad references. A bad reference not only makes a defamation suit a slam-dunk, but it puts them at a severe disadvantage in a he-said/she-said termination suit, and those can run into the millions.
Being unemployed in a down market (regardless of the kind of termination) is bad, and short job tenures become damaging after a while. Also, if there isn't a severance package, it can hit you financially. 2-4 months without a salary is a pretty serious cost.
So I'd generally agree with what you are saying-- the probability that getting fired will seriously fuck up your life is low-- but being fired is still best avoided.
OP is an idiot. Not only is he airing his dirty laundry in a way that makes him look extremely bad (saying he was fired because he was "selfish" and "zoned the F out"?) but he left so much on the table (and with his admissions, it's gone forever).
Large companies have deep pockets and don't want information to get out. He couldn't have gotten $100 million out of this, but at the time, he could have definitely had the cliff voided (which would have been enough to get him comfortable)... but now it's far past too late. If nothing else, he could have let the cash and stock go and settled on a glowing reference from Zuck himself-- which would have made his career. There are so many ways he could have turned this to his career benefit.
The money I would have let go. If you're not offered a severance, you're better off negotiating a great reference (including an open offer of introduction) than trying to shake them down for money.
I can see that he's successful, but there are so many ways he could have played this better. Let's compare:
A. A lifelong agreement from one of the most successful people in our generation to give a positive reference and introductions to top investors, in exchange for a small concession (non-disparagement and non-litigation regarding the company and the termination).
B. Emotional catharsis associated with discussing a termination in embarrassing detail.
Not an HR reference. An agreed-upon reference from Mark Zuckerberg himself (he did work with the guy) including introductions to investors. Yes, I think that would be a major asset to anyone. The sort of thing that comes along once every several lifetimes. This idea that Silicon Valley is a what-you-know meritocracy is not well supported.
All he needed to say was, "look man, I'm sorry we got off to a bad start. Let's talk about how we can help each other out in the future."
Mark Zuckerberg has a bad reputation? On what planet do you live? A lot of people dislike him, sure, as a lot of people will dislike any billionaire, but he's the most successful person in our generation... and it's pretty evident to me (and to most) that at least some of that is earned.
^THIS. THANK YOU, SIR. In my case, it wasn't the sudden lack of a job that stung, it was the experience of being completely blacklisted by everyone at the company. That was 20 close friends who I never heard from again.