This is a real disappointment. Had a great job lined up at Coinbase that I was quite excited about, was in the middle of visa processing when this happened (why I had to quit my previous job, can’t have two visas in the US).
This was for a relatively senior position, not a fresh grad. Going to be hard to get a new job considering most of the other places have hiring freezes and I chose Coinbase over other offers (mostly from FAANG), these offers have probably been out for over a month now doubt i can resuscitate them.
On top of that most of the other offers were for SF, and my partner already has a job in NYC on this basis.
Nothing but pain. As much as I appreciate the severance, the damage being done here is immense.
> why I had to quit my previous job, can’t have two visas in the US
Just so others are aware, this is not true. One can have multiple visas issued, but you may only enter the US on one of them. It is very common for people to have 10 year B1/B2 visas and then also get an F1/J1 visa issued later on to be a student which allows you to work on campus. I don't know the OP's situation, but one can also get multiple TN visas issued to work for multiple companies at the same time. This is how nurses from Canada are able to drive across the border and work for different hospitals.
But seriously, in your situation with the visa, you decided to accept an offer from a shady crypto company instead of a FAANG, especially during this huge crypto downturn?
Honestly I can’t understand how anyone can make this kind of choice..
Coinbase is probably the least shady cryptocurrency company there is. And they'll make profits on people both buying and selling cryptocurrencies, so which way it goes day-by-day matters less, unless it all goes to zero of course.
> Coinbase is probably the least shady cryptocurrency company there is.
This is simply not true, from CASH, to Gemini and Kraken (even Binanace) have not had this level of continued 'shadyness.'
Just because they appeal to the lowes common denominator and have a large presence in the US and out doesn't mean they are the least shady by a large extent: I still argue BTC-e was the most honest and upfront exchange which got taken out by the FBI despite operating in an entirely different justification (RU).
With that said, we need to shift to decentralized exchanges: BISQ is where people should be by now.
Correct, Jack Dorsey is one of the biggest proponents of Bitcoin so it's limited to BTC, but yes... that app has Bitcoin purchase and withdraw enabled after some KYC/AML checkpoints. It's been a unicorn within a unicorn [0] and has led to launch of Block, and what will be the production environmentally focused miners with a partnership with Blockstream and Tesla and the battery packs just landed last week [1].
The fees are higher than the aforementioned exchanges, but this is what is being built out, and I have now problem with that at all as an early adopter.
I get at least 2-3 Amazon recruiters a week messaging me on LinkedIn. I wish they just provided a checklist where you could check off companies that you would never work for and it would save these recruiters and me so much time and InMail messages.
I'm not sure what visa you are on, but for H1B you don't need to quit/give up your visa with current company to start processing with new employer. Even after your h1b with new company is approved it isn't necessary to quit your current job or give up that visa. Also, if you're in software, a lot of people here can help. Good luck! Hopefully you'll find something soon.
> Nothing but pain. As much as I appreciate the severance, the damage being done here is immense.
Harsh, but that is what happens when you lie with dogs: you tend to get fleas.
With that said, you're better off not going there and can now use the severance as run way for your next role.
Let this be a lesson, anyone wanting to deal with CONbase this the type of standard they have, and their customer/userbase has been leaving in droves for a reason.
Their IPO was probably the last gasp of that rotting corpse.
Going to use that if I ever have to renege on an offer.
"Although I've accepted your offer, I'll be starting employment elsewhere. And at the end of the day, I think you’ll be proud to have helped dymk navigate this next part of dymk's journey."
This continues to happen over and over again in the industry, and is the reason why I always advise people who get exploding offers from companies to just accept them and then back out later if they need to. Loyalty and respect cannot be a one way street. There's so much propaganda around "burning bridges" that keeps prospective employees in line (and it also extends to stuff like negotiating wages, discussing salaries at work, job hopping and more). Look out for yourself out there, no one else is going to do it. Certainly not the HR department.
Don't have your personal ethics be subject to someone else's ethics, because if you do that, then it means you don't really have ethics.
You aren't accepting to an industry, you are accepting to a hiring manager. And it's just rude to act this way. Exploding offers aren't great, and if you have a problem with them, then simply don't accept them. You miss some opportunities this way but you feel better when you look in the mirror. Regardless, as others have noted, Coinbase has some specific issues that aren't indicative of a broader industry probem. They seem to be handling this as well as can be expected given those problems.
I have a general rule not to lie or deceive people.
But when I play poker, I lie and deceive as well as I possibly can, without remorse or hesitation. That’s because lies and deception are part of the game.
Likewise, when I engage in an employment relationship with a business, I play by those rules.
It is complicated, and to a degree it certainly makes sense to act as though you have a commitment beyond what money paid has bought… but just like all companies do, when enough is at stake, you should recognize that it’s a business relationship and it may not be to your advantage to pretend a higher level of commitment exists between you than really does. It’s a tough call. Burning bridges you don’t have to is not good. Neither is playing the sucker for very long.
Edit: Yikes, I should have presented my poker analogy differently to be more clear!
Lying and deceit is good in poker, but definitely not in business, IMO.
In business the rule is something like this: Pretend that every sentence making claims about the future ends with "... assuming, of course, we either have a signed contract to that effect or nothing significant changes between now and then." That goes for your own statements and the other party's. I think you will do well acting truthfully with those caveats assumed (and avoiding those that don't act truthfully within those caveats).
A reply put it like this, which I like: present your "future-perfect-best self" and expect your employer/potential employer to do the same.
> when I play poker, I lie and deceive as well as I possibly can, without remorse or hesitation
If you make these your rules, you're virtually guaranteeing you'll play with others who think similarly. There is another move at every poker table: get up. Not everyone is playing poker. There are companies and people who interview with integrity. The veteran advantage is in knowing who they are.
Two armies take the field. One brings their swords and their gentlemen's honor. This is how Real Men have always fought, it's Right, and it's the way they'll fight today.
The other brings machine guns.
Maybe there is such a thing as absolute virtue, and maybe the army of swords has found it. Maybe it's worth dying on this literal hill to defend the way of the sword. Maybe they believe insisting that the world "should" work some arbitrary way will make it so.
In any case, by fighting this way they've chosen to lose. By losing they've ensured the values they're supposedly defending won't survive—so what was the point?
If your actual true goal is to preserve the way of the sword, you bring artillery and tanks and wipe the other army off the map; then you go back to your way. Or make alliances in which your swords can serve some purpose, or use diplomacy to keep the war from starting. Just anything that's not the least effective strategy.
If your goal instead is to feel Right, you fight as Real Men do and guarantee the way of the sword is extinguished.
There is no world in which you fight with swords against machine guns while ensuring the continued existence of the way of the sword. (There's an echo of the paradox of tolerance here.) You have to choose between defending it effectively, preserving it as much as possible in the world that actually exists, or doubling down and losing everything on purpose for nothing.
It's tempting to insist there is such a world, but that's just insisting on the way of the sword, again, except about possible worlds.
That's not correct framing. This isn't muskets and cutlasses against drones and cruise missiles. The better analogy is that almost every country abides by the Geneva conventions and adhere to treaties like CTBT. Why do we do that? The US could win almost any conflict within several minutes with strategic nuclear strikes that kill nearly every noncombatant man, woman, and child in the opposing country. This option is obvious, but not acted upon. So why not do that, there has to be a reason that it's an inferior strategy?
Further, you have dehumanize the attacker. They have agency and don't have to attack in the first place. Even then, your analogy fails because you can disengage from the "attacking force" (quit or not accept an offer) without surrendering in the theater of operations of the professional world.
I'm not suggesting it's okay to be an asshole just because you see some other person somewhere being an asshole. If their behavior happens in their bubble and you live in your own, disconnected, then you're free to do whatever you want.
I try to be good. I'd like that from others.
But when your bubbles intersect and you're in the same game, competing directly, other people's ethics absolutely do constrain the ethics you can choose for yourself while remaining effective. I'm not saying you should sacrifice your principles; I'm saying you should mind the difference between sticking to your principles and winning, accept they aren't the same, and not insist they always are or would be "if everyone just." Because everyone won't just.
Your principles may make you better as a person in some way (they really might!) but that doesn't mean they'll make you win. Not admitting this will make you less effective at defending them.
Maybe I'm getting away from the point of the thread, I don't know.
I guess in my analogy the war has come to the army of swords, like it or not. Team Machine Gun could have chosen to be nice. They didn't, so what now? The answer cannot be, "Well, then they're bad." It doesn't matter if they're good or bad: they're here. They don't care what you think. So what do you do?
I think the difference he’s suggesting is that there is more than one battle taking place here. You don’t have to charge the machine gun hill you can go hang out on the hill with a bunch of folks larping with swords and having a good time doing so.
If there really are no sword hills to charge and it’s all machine guns - then I don’t mind going down that way. I can’t imagine that environment is anything but depressing anyways.
That's not the way I took it, but if you're right I wouldn't disagree. Sometimes you can play a different game. Though strategies designed to win will outcompete and replace ones that aren't, so you may not have that option in the long run.
> You have to choose between [...] or doubling down and losing everything on purpose for nothing.
If you choose to double down you might get lucky and win, or some outside-context thing might happen and who knows. There's a range of not-impossible outcomes. The outcome doesn't justify the strategy unless the strategy produced it.
It's not really lying or deceit. It's just companies talk about their future-perfect-best self during the interview and offer - as does the candidate.
The unspoken rule is that things can change dramatically in a few hours and each party should deal with it - which means it's also totally ok to back out of the offer you received and move on.
It is lying. It is deceit. We just dupe people new to the industry about these tactics. It's only the veterans who know that every person and company is completely full of shit.
Startups have "aspirational" speaking where they say they're using revolutionary "AI" and yadda-yadda to do such and such - even if they don't have any of that and there's nothing actually on the roadmap for it. It's a lie. You may want it but you don't.
If I say I have a billion dollars and fly to the moon on weekends - am I lying if I don't actually? In your words - no. I'm being "aspirational".
> So...Coinbase should keep the offer even if it makes bad financial sense?
Yes, absolutely. It’s called integrity. I just bought a house, probably at a loss, at the top of the market, and could have backed out because the economic situation is no longer looking as great. I could have easily used a BS contingency to get out of the contract. However, I made a handshake agreement and asked someone to upend their life for me.
My own code of ethics is to do what I say I will. Maybe it’s not the most game theory thing to do but at least I can sleep at night knowing I was an honest person. There are things in life more important than money.
> There are things in life more important than money.
Not only this, but I think even in purely self-interested financial terms your ethical approach is superior over the long term.
Over time, truth and honesty offer a compounding positive spiral.
You make better decisions because a) the inputs are free of lies and b) you make them carefully knowing you will own the consequences.
Reputationally you garner trust which makes possibilities available to you (collaboration, quid pro quo, and low-friction litigation-fee business relationships) that are not open to unethical people.
> So...Coinbase should keep the offer even if it makes bad financial sense?
How about Coinbase withdraws the offer AND gives the former-future-employee some money to reflect the fact that Coinbase really did want to hire them but now genuinely can't AND that this change has a real and negative impact on the former-future-employee?
Like, a payment on the order of a month or two of living costs (not just "Sorry, and here's $100")
Sure that's expensive, but it's still cheaper than hiring the person for months of time, what with salary, benefits, office and equipment costs, etc.
> This decision is not a reflection on the highly talented people we had extended job offers to. We will apply our generous severance philosophy to offset the financial impact of this decision.
The problem is that a month or two of severance wasn’t a reasonable expectation considering what they were offering.
Look at this from the angle of an insurance company pricing in risk. For example, I might consider a job paying 500k TC for a 1/3 risk that the company goes bust in 2 months. I might also accept an offer for 300k at a company that has a 1/10 risk of going bust in 2 months. And there are a lot of people who would accept working at a company that pays 150k for a 1/100 chance of going bust in the same timeframe.
The thing is, the overall compensation for all of the above scenarios is exactly the same, but the risk is priced differently. Unfortunately some companies are deceptive, and don’t fairly articulate the risk to candidates, which can wildly swing the market value of their compensation. When expectations doesn’t match reality, people feel like they were taken advantage of.
payment on the order of a month or two of living costs
Just one or two months? Banks insist on 6 months of expenses these days when you apply for a mortgage with an offer letter in hand because they know that shit happens all the time.
Here's the kicker: companies have a very good idea of the financial shape they are in. It's just not possible that there was a sudden downturn in fortunes between the offer letter and start date. Except if a round of funding fell through, but an honest man doesn't hire on promises.
The corollary is that these days everyone is a crook.
Maybe the job seeker could offer to work for free for the number of hours they'd be contractually entitled to in severance payments if they were fired their first week on the job. Usually that's zero.
> It's a lie if it's false when you say it - not if it becomes false in the unpredictable future
Isn't this exactly what's happening if you accept an exploding offer and then later rescind your acceptance if you get a better one? The job offer was the best you had at the time, so you accepted it. Somewhat unexpectedly you later receive a better offer, so you have to rescind the first.
I'm not necessarily saying I agree with this practice, but I do agree it's pretty close to what Coinbase is doing with the roles reversed.
It's obviously impossible to say anything universal here, but in my experience, you could restate that statement as "Some companies haven't had to do this sort of thing yet". When the viability of the company is at stake, or orders are coming from the board, no company is going to make a significant sacrifice to stay true to their word if there's no legal consequences for breaking it.
Edit: to be clear, I don't mean things like knowingly lying beforehand, but if circumstances drastically changed, I would 100% expect companies to rescind outstanding offers, so I similarly wouldn't hold it against a candidate for rescinding their acceptance if their circumstances changed significantly. It's reasonable to expect both companies and candidates to act in good faith, but it's unreasonable for them to face significant hardship just to honour an offer if their situation changes.
> Some companies don't do this sort of thing. That others do doesn't justify making this sort of choice with every company.
Replace companies with jobseekers.
Some jobseekers don't do this sort of thing. That others do doesn't justify making this sort of choice with every jobseeker.
I've talked to recruiters who have been rude to me for refusing to "give a number" as in my expected salary/wages. I also do not recommend accepting offers and then backing out. However, I submit that there is no company, even if you founded it yourself, that deserves your loyalty forever.
I mean if a business's fortunes change this quickly it usually means the leadership has no clue. Their job is to be able to accurately forecast all kinds of things at least up to the next few quarters.
This is a great way to put it. Lying is 100% part of the game with employment. It continues even when you're still at the workplace.
Are really people so asinine to believe that hiring managers aren't lying through their teeth the entire time they talk to you? I guess HN is full of people who are naive or have malicious intent.
If anyone here thinks their manager truly cares about them (and you work in SV) - you're naive.
Wow, that is breathtakingly cynical. I’ve hired many people over decades and I’ve never lied to a single one of them. And in the dozen or so tech jobs I’ve had, only one hiring manager (the CEO!) has lied to me. Lastly, I only work places where my manager does give a shit about me. I’ve left a couple gigs because I learned I was wrong about that, but seen it confirmed in plenty of others.
Your advice is not universal. Consider broadening your sample size.
If you can label them breathtakingly cynical, I’d label you breathtakingly naive. And label the grandparent experienced and realistic.
When it comes to being “default alive” there is _zero_ consideration for the human impact. I could not agree more strongly that there’s all sorts of social mores around employee behaving well but virtually zero around executive behavior (you put an exclamation after CEO as if it should be surprising, when the opposite should be).
I’ve read these CEOs brag about “generous severance” that turns out to be 3 weeks.
WSJ reported less than a week ago Coinbase execs netted BILLIONS in PERSONAL profits to execs in the last year. Think any of that money could have been used as a rainy day fund to not fuck over people who resigned from their last job expecting to start at Coinbase?
The amount of apologism for tech execs who act so selfishly over and over again, while the cogs are held to these insanely high standards of behavior, is infuriating.
Call a spade a spade. Brian Armstrong is a selfish piece of trash who dumped hundreds of millions of his company stock for his own profit while reneging on people who took his company’s word for what it was and put their financial health in his hands.
Oh, shit, I’m not apologizing for anyone. I agree with you that plenty of tech execs behave in awful ways. There’s no excuse for that, and I provided none.
I’ve never been a cog. I simply refuse to. I take jobs where I’m valued and treated well, and I leave those I don’t. This is entirely possible if you make it a high-order goal. There’s nothing naive about it; I’ve made a good living this way for 30 years.
> I’ve never been a cog. I simply refuse to. I take jobs where I’m valued and treated well, and I leave those I don’t. This is entirely possible if you make it a high-order goal. There’s nothing naive about it; I’ve made a good living this way for 30 years.
That's an incredibly privileged position. Sometimes, people resort to various tactics, including embellishing and ghosting to get ahead, especially when they feel like they have no other choice.
That doesn't excuse it, but it happens anyway.
What's important to remember is that the power wielded by the company and the employee is not symmetrical, so they have to be treated with a double standard. A company will always be better equipped to lose an employee or handle a rejected offer after a round of interviews than an employee in the reverse position.
Often it is also position that was earned by hard work and delayed gratification. You make it sound like OP is in such position purely due to luck but he obviously made some right choices along the way.
This is the kind of thing that people tell themselves, to act as an anodyne for their own behavior.
In my case, I have always acted with the highest personal standards of Ethics and Integrity. Frequently, the favor has not been returned, and I have had to learn to deal with it.
I will say that my Integrity was directly relevant to my career. I worked for a Japanese corporation, and they knew they could trust me. My employees also knew they could trust me.
It's entirely possible to live in the corporate world, without surrendering your moral backbone.
Totally agree. In the years I've been a hiring manager I've never lied or misrepresented anything about my company or team to potential hires.
To be honest, I don't understand why any competent manager would lie; any high-performing individual you hire is going to bounce as soon as they realize they've been lied to. Always be honest about the current state of your team and you'll get people who want to help you succeed.
Yeah, I don’t get it either. A recruiter I can see, although not condone: they’re motivated differently. But a manager? As a manager your career and livelihood are literally dependent on the people you hire. Why start that off in such a shitty way?
Is it wild to imagine an ethically-run company has salary bands based on levels and makes offers within those bands based on maintaining internal equity?
I don’t naively believe all or most companies do this. But I have been a hiring manager at two that do.
No, I give them a range, and tell them the principles behind it. “My range for this role is $XX - $YY. How much we offer you depends on your skills and experience. If you want to negotiate for the high end of that range, you’ll need to be truly excellent. If you think that range is off for this role, I’m happy to talk about that, too.”
This is easy, honest, transparent, and gets both parties off to a good start. If I do my research well the range is pretty close to the market for what I need. If the candidate wants more they can either argue with me, or say goodbye and find another position.
Is "truly excellent" a measurable quantity and do you tell the candidate exactly what level they need to reach and what knowledge they need to have to get the highest comp? If so would you accept a candidate taking a few months to hone their skills and come back to you at the same stage of the interview?
Do you put in transparently (after all we're talking about being honest and transparent here) in the job description so that candidates know beforehand how they'll be judged?
Do you let the candidate apply again a year later? if they have grown and learned a lot then there's certainly no reason not to hire them this time.
If so then yes, your process is honest and transparent.
I don't typically work in places big enough to have explicit salary bands, and I don't usually run big headcount groups like engineering. So I don't have much experience with bands and guidance around them.
All the rest of it, absolutely yes. I don't hold a grudge if someone fails an interview, unless they're truly an asshole, or dishonest, both of which are exceptionally rare.
This is far too extreme a position and ends up being false as a consequence. Alternatively, you've had a bad pick of managers.
A human relationship with your manager with mutual care is possible.
The thing to understand is this: your manager is not the business.
Unless you're working in a truly tiny company, they operate under their own set of constraints and will have to make decisions they're not really happy about. If that means firing you or low-balling your salary, then sure, you may not care much for that distinction in the hurt of the moment. And maybe they really are out to get you.
But if you treat your manager like an antagonist, don't be surprised if they end up doing the same to you.
More and better candidates than if they’re completely honest about their company? A promotion because they managed to keep wages down for staff? A higher salary or more stock for the same reason?
If you lie about the job and hire someone who doesn’t like the reality they’ll just find another job and now you have to start the hiring process all over. That doesn’t seem like a win to me.
This seems really out of touch. ICs absolutely despise interviewing. Half of my current team has expressed that they want to quit but isn't going to because they are so afraid of interviewing again. Many are coming up on 1-yr tenure and still want to leave but they'll be there for 2+ years because they hate interviewing that much. They're deathly afraid of it.
The rest who want to stay are only there because they're making incredibly high amounts of money thanks to being at the company just before it went public. (They joined 5+ years after the company was founded - hardly part of the original gang)
Legitimately wonder why people find this so so hard to understand.
Has no one ever been a manager? Have you never worked with managers who had to do these things? I've known many managers who admit to having to do all of these things. Some of them are proud that they did it - some are ashamed because they didn't want to but ultimately had to otherwise they would've gotten fired.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether you do it because you enjoy it or because you have to - what matters is that you're doing it and someone is on the receiving end.
Genuinely - how many of you have ever done hiring while searching for a new company yourself? HN is truly full of the self-indulgent and self-righteous to think they're not doing this themselves or that this is wonderful to be around.
> Genuinely - how many of you have ever done hiring while searching for a new company yourself?
There are circumstances where this is ok and others where it isn't. Is it ok to hire for a company that you're retiring from? How about one where you can't continue to advance but you think is a great environment? What if you were at a startup that got acquired by a megacorp and you focus on hiring people who enjoy a big company environment?
IMO, so long as you are transparent about the pros and cons of the position, it's perfectly ethical and reasonable.
> IMO, so long as you are transparent about the pros and cons of the position, it's perfectly ethical and reasonable.
How often are people genuinely leaving companies because they think it's a great environment but it's just not for them? How often? 80%? 50%? 1%? (I'm guessing closer to 1% than 50%)
When hiring, I really strive to figure out what makes my positions special and then find people that are a good fit for what I can offer rather than trying to find some platonic ideal "best" candidate. So for me, other than a toxic situation, I'm very happy pulling people into a role at a company I'm leaving.
But at this point in my career I'm likely much more deliberate than average about making sure a role is giving me what I need as well as more deliberate than most managers about trying to find good all-dimension fits for my positions.
I guess I am in the 1%. My company has a great environment but the pay is much lower than FAANG. So I both am applying elsewhere but can also recommend it.
Any time a company or team needs short-term superficial progress you may see the lying and then the churn mill. Stakeholders or taxpayers are duped over the long-term but someone is clearly making out no worse for the wear.
It’s just business. If walking away from a fresh offer and starting role is burning a bridge, let the burning bridge light your way. The business will not return the loyalty, and one is woefully naive if they believe the business will. Look no further than VCs telling founders to cut deep now. How’s that for reputation? You get the labor market you cultivate.
They cut deep now because they hired too many in the past. Or rather, the business environment has changed compared to the when the hirings were made. Nothing wrong with that. As long as the severance package is generous. Would you rather they get bankrupted and let everyone go in the end?
Continuiing with that logic: if I accept an exploding offer, and my "offers of employment environment" has changed compared to when I accepted company A's offer, I can choose the more recent, and higher offer? I can make the notice period generous
From experience it's not that big of a deal that you walk back accepting an offer. These things happen all the time:
- Immigration / relocation issues
- Partner / significant other (can't find a job, doesn't like the location. etc.) issues
- Health issues
- <Received a better offer but used one of the above reasons> issues
I've had candidates not show up on their first day and email in that regretfully they won't be able to start. Everyone was bummed, but no one wrote down their name in a list and shared it.
I've had people drop out after accepting an offer from me that I still chat with and have relied on for reference calls (they're a manager now). It's really not a big deal, if they got a better offer somewhere else I wouldn't want them to feel like they're stuck with my company, that's not going to be a productive relationship anyway.
Hell, I accepted an offer and still work at BigTech and I still get internal recruiters from the company I work at sending me messages on LinkedIn about “exciting opportunities”. I clearly state on my LinkedIn profile where I work.
For comparison, I would have never ever reached out to you again. And if I met you in the hallway at some other place, I would have made sure that everyone knows how I feel about you.
Most people who worked at one FAANG also eventually work at one more during their careers. So if you screw over one FAANG, you'll have a hard time at 40% of FAANG.
It doesn't stop there. God forbid you live in the Bay Area, and you and I perhaps cross paths at a party, Burning Man, or any other event. And for crying out loud, you better not be connected to me on Linkedin, because people will be reaching out for backchannel references for the rest of your career.
The tricky thing about all this is that you'll never know. People will just magically stop responding, when you felt that things were going great. In my career of 20 years, I've probably been professionally disappointed in something like 4 or 5 people, and I can definitely think of 2 who have resurfaced in my life one way or another.
Tech is a huge space when you're starting out. But as your career accelerates and you end up gaining more visibility, that same space becomes very small very quickly. I would not mess with my reputation, as a matter of principle, but also as a matter of prudence.
> For comparison, I would have never ever reached out to you again. And if I met you in the hallway at some other place, I would have made sure that everyone knows how I feel about you.
Do you have a "burn book" of people who have wronged you or something? How would you even realize it's the same person a decade down the line? Why would you even care?
Even if a lot of managers kept a list of people they would never work with again, it's an enormous industry with O(N^2) person-to-person relationships. It wouldn’t matter.
StillI agree with many others here on: don't back out on a whim, only for a very good reason. Life happens.
Sure, if you couldn't care less about your job, then why care about anyone else screwing you over in your job?
But let's see if the inverse is true as well. If you deeply deeply deeply cared about your job (eg: it's your startup and you have exactly 12 months of runway, but it takes 4 months to source, vet, hire and onboard someone), would it matter to you that someone cheated you out of a third of your runway?
The truth is likely somewhere in the middle. That should answer why someone who is likely to reasonable care about their job and would likely experience a serious setback in their work would be really upset about the OP's actions.
You can blame other people for your failed gambles and slow processes. If it takes 4 months to hire and onboard.. fix that. If you were betting on this person to save the company make sure you offer enough so they can't refuse. Offer them half your company if that's what it takes. It is 100% up to you.. make it happen.. you are cheating yourself and investors by blaming a new hire that never was.
> If it takes 4 months to hire and onboard.. fix that
It takes an average of 58 days to hire an engineer in the US. [0] Add to that another two months to onboard them. [1]
> Offer them half your company if that's what it takes.
Wait - so someone accepts a job, implying that the comp was fair. And then quits a week before a start date without any notice (OP's story). Were you recommending that founders should pre-emptively give away half of the company on top of the original offer just to prevent the possibility of any one random person acting dishonestly?
I have no problem hiring qualified engineers in less than a month. The secret is to expand one’s recruitment outside of the Bay Area bubble and cast a wider net for diverse talent.
Whining about talent shortages gets annoying. In every case, I ask if they’re recruiting outside the region, recruiting employees from HBCUs and women’s colleges, considering candidates with non traditional backgrounds, etc and the answer is always “no.”
Your shortage is self-created more often than not.
In a downturn, would you put your startup at risk to continue making payroll for engineers when, after looking at your runway/product needs, a layoff is clearly the right call? Maybe, but I don't think most founders would (nor should they). It's not reasonable to expect employees to be as invested in the company as a founder when they have comparatively so little ownership.
I also don't think accepting an offer and later declining because you found higher comp elsewhere is dishonest. No salaried employee (where I live at least) signs a contract agreeing to work for any specified period time and I've never promised or been asked to even give my word to stick around for a set period of time.
> I also don't think accepting an offer and later declining because you found higher comp elsewhere is dishonest.
It truly is for one very simple reason - you accept and the hiring manager tells all other candidates that the company is going with someone else. If the person then flakes out, the company is in a difficult spot because the best candidates have several offers and as soon as you're out, they confirm with their next best option.
> I've never promised or been asked to even give my word to stick around for a set period of time.
There are reputable and less reputable companies. What Coinbase is doing is clearly shitty, but at least they are going to offer a 4 month severance just if they agreed to hire you and then rescinded the offer. Again, a shitty thing to do, but even so, you'll notice that they were not contractually required to pay anyone anything for rescinding the offer, and yet they are going to do that. Why? Because reputation matters.
Assuming that you are okay with someone moving on to a new opportunity eventually, how long do expect them to stay before you wouldn't consider them leaving to be damaging to their reputation?
I still think you aren't fully taking into consideration the lack of symmetry of power in the employer-employee relationship and are expecting too much from employees while guaranteeing them so little.
Remember this was the person that if they didn't come onboard at that time the startup would die. You do whatever it takes if that's the case.
Now if it is a random person easy to replace giving away 1/2 would be crazy.
58 days is under two months and a startup could hire someone within a week. I've seen someone apply, the owner chat with them a bit, hire them and they were driving across country the next day. Not every founder has those abilities to sell the candidate and have the judgement and believe in themselves to hire on intuition. If you can't do that you might fail where others succeed.
If someone is that essential, it’s not hard to go from “at will” to mutual 90-day notice required. They want to quit, they must give 90 days’ notice. You want to fire them today, you still have to pay them for 90 days (including health insurance and other benefits).
People want things both ways. They want the flexibility of at-will so they can drop someone immediately, but they also want the employee whose work will make them very wealthy to be “committed” and “in it for the long haul.”
I engaged with you on a good faith basis that you're genuinely curious about the point I am trying to make. The above comment makes it clear that you're just trolling.
> and a startup could hire someone within a week.
The act of hiring someone _can_ take far less than a week. But it shouldn't. You also shouldn't be driving cross-country for any random startup you just met yesterday. If you haven't yet realized that hiring is not a competition in expediency, I doubt I can change your mind in a single HN comment.
When Coinbase's circumstances changed, they offered a 4 month severance - even for people who never worked there a single day.
I am not implying that there are no good reasons why someone should bail out after accepting. But you should have a very good reason for doing so. Someone else's offer that's $5k higher is not one of them.
Conversely, your company should also not fire you just because someone else showed up who is willing to do your job for $5k less. There's a certain amount of common decency that can be expected from both sides - if not for ethical reasons, then at least for practical reasons of not destroying your reputation.
> Conversely, your company should also not fire you just because someone else showed up who is willing to do your job for $5k less.
In this light, yeah, that's a reasonable take. Except, frankly? Workers know that this isn't the case generally. "Common decency" isn't. And folks with power have the primary obligation; that would be employers.
I wouldn't bounce from a company over a $5K delta, but I would absolutely expect employers (most of them--I'm quite happy working where I do, where I don't feel that way) to take that low-hanging fruit at my expense the second something gets tight; expecting folks not to take that account is asking them to stick their neck out for the notion of a "professional reputation" that most people don't care about.
I doubt that anyone, even someone as extreme as your example, would care enough about it a decade after it happened. More egregious things would have happened in the meantime.
Extending a job offer to someone means you met with them on multiple occasions, remotely and in person. I know I am not going to forget their face in 10 years. Would I feel a bit less wronged about them after 10 years? Of course. Would I lie in a backchannel reference? No.
How does a founder with twenty years of experience bear such grudges against a single errant hire that got away? Either this whole hypothetical is talking about an employee number one type situation, or you must have been blessed with having never met anyone underhanded in all of your business dealings.
"Feeling a bit less wronged" is one thing, "making sure that everyone knows how I feel about you" is quite another.
Sure, but your initial post did not express that sensible middle ground, but rather invoked decade-long grudges using hyperbolic petulance, as if being a founder grants the power to hellban someone from society.
It goes both ways. If anything, I would argue that employees have way more cancel power than founders, and it's far more common for employees to get their founders in trouble than the other way around. No VC will ever do an equity round without doing some research. Not to mention the open letters to founders that have gotten so many fired. Honestly, it's also how it should be - I've seen more founders misbehave than employees. Some founders really think that just because someone gave them a check, they are somehow untouchable.
But regardless if founder or employee, I don't see why we should lie about people misbehaving. If I know someone is a bad apple, I am not going to lie about it - especially if I can prevent someone I care about going through the same ordeal. I also don't know why I should change my mind about someone just because some time has passed. People don't change.
It's frankly pretty appalling that I have to spell this out to you. I suppose you didn't think much of the Me Too movement? While clearly not on the same scale, the fundamental societal mechanics that justify outing perpetrators of sexual harassment are the same ones that justify outing people who break contracts. The society would be a much better place if people knew that karma is real.
The VC connection is another reason not to pursue scorched earth campaigns.
It’s a double-edged spear. Eventually someone you dislike will have a VC deal pending; if your defamatory comments cost them the deal (or even appear to have had a role), that person will end up owning everything you have and everything you ever will have after a massive court judgment.
And on the flip side, VCs dislike investing in people who are in litigation or who have faced it. You will have to do a lot of explaining about why you were sued, and if there was a judgment against you, it’s hard to imagine your professional judgment not getting questioned.
It doesn’t matter- Whatever merit there is to your position, your original post was so wrapped up in hyperbole and aggression you completely undercut your own argument, which is why there is such a bevy of responses. I don’t even disagree with some of your points, but the tone-deafness is just completely ridiculous. Let us simply agree to disagree where we do, agree to agree elsewhere, and have peace.
I doubt your memory and vengeance is nearly as crazy a decade since any event (however wronged by it you may perceive yourself to be) -- let alone something as incredibly benign as someone rescinding an offer.
In short, while you say that now, I highly doubt it actually would be the case were this hypothetical a reality. You'd have to be incredibly thin-skinned and vengeful to carry this much weight to something so minor.
I recommend NOT attempting malicious demolition of the careers of others; it’s not only unethical but it also can land one in a massive heap of legal trouble.
Attorneys love actions like those active career sabotage “revenge” tactics you’re describing, and sooner or later, someone employing them will learn the hard way.
If they’re lucky and get smarter, they’ll end up just having to write a public letter of apology they share with the world (including those they defamed the former employee to). It will have a negative impact on their own career and probably sink their chances of ever raising money again.
If they’re less lucky or unwilling to address an attorney’s letter, they’ll end up having to pay a fat seven figure settlement, attorney’s fees, and a letter of apology. VCs will be most unimpressed.
And in some cases, if they’re willing enough to go to court, they’ll be facing having their communications subpoenaed, their professional network subpoenaed and deposed about the comments, and will end up with a seven or eight figure judgment including punitive damages. VCs won’t even reply to their communications, and anyone deposed will associate the angry would-be saboteur with legal trouble.
Your statement sounds much like the old “if you get caught doing $x at school it will go on your permanent record”. BigTech is so vast that unless you do something egregious it’s hard not to get hired back at the same one, let alone a competitor.
For every you that wouldn’t hire the parent posters, there are hundreds of managers that will.
No part of the hiring loop at major tech companies for ICs that I am aware of involves checking references. We definitely don’t do that as part of the loop. Our entire hiring process is based on how well you do in the interview.
Elsewhere in this thread I pointed out that you would want to future proof your actions for the rest of your career. I wouldn't bet on the visibility of my actions being the same today as it will be in 20 years from now.
I’m 48 and I’ve been in the industry since I was 22. I’ve worked in companies with 10 people all the way to second largest employer in the country. In 20 years if I’m still having to work, I need to rethink my life choices.
That being said, especially with the acceleration of remote work (I live on the opposite coast) Opportunities are vast.
As someone with more than 20 years experience.. I always feared what you mentioned but your post made me question that fear.
Small companies may hold it against you and you may never have a chance to work their again but what are the odds they have a matching role and would you ever apply again.
The industry keeps getting bigger. I have never run into anyone I ever worked with in any other company.
I don't think it really matters.
The chances of seeing someone at a party or burning man or a ghost reference (they want your opinion on someone you never worked with?) is literally 0.
If you told everyone/everywhere it would make people question you.. why doesn't this great candidate (you wanted to hire them) decide to back out. What is wrong with this manager/team.. bonus is if you are successful impacting their career they can personally sue and take everything you own.
For most social media I go under a different name and never invite people I work with. For something like linkedin over the years the number of connections reaches thousands and any mutual connection will be connected to 2nd, 3rd headhunters. Trying to find the back channel person would be like whack a mole.
If I work with 100-300 people over a 5 years period the number of new companies would be in the 10,000+ range. The growth has been crazy.
Those reference checks target companies on your resume not positions you didn't accept.
This is happening more often because of long hiring cycles where candidates invest so much time in multiple rounds that offers and deadlines often do not align. I use to be able to target one company and find out quickly (one interview, maybe a test) if there was an offer. It literally takes 4-8 rounds where any one round can knock you out.
Having said that I've never pulled my acceptance. Once time I quit after the first day.. One small room that was so crowded it wasn't going to work (the interview happened elsewhere). The first few months are a trial for both parties.
I hope you're stance assumes you know why the candidate reversed. If you don't know for a fact that it was a cynical or frivolous ploy, then it can't have much bearing on their reputation. Perhaps they accepted the offer, closed their search, and something came up. Perhaps a bad thing, such as cancer or rehab or mental care, or a neutral thing like their military spouse was transferred.
> For comparison, I would have never ever reached out to you again. And if I met you in the hallway at some other place, I would have made sure that everyone knows how I feel about you.
Well, see, I don't even need to work with you to know I wouldn't enjoy it :). Spiteful much? And guess what, I bet the tech industry is big enough that it will never happen, so cheers.
I could respond with something equally snarky, but that would detract from the point I am trying to make. I would recommend you reread my message and try not to take it personally but instead ask yourself if there's a chance that the tech industry is not as big as you make it out to be. I'll give you two things to think about:
1. Most people never gain any amount of visibility in their lives, and that's fine. But why prevent that from at least being a possibility? What if it turns out that you have something interesting to say and there's a ton of people who want to hear it (eg: you become a VC or an expert in something). Not being able to benefit from having a personal brand should the opportunity present itself would be a hell of a bummer. You'll notice that I am being very careful with my own identity when giving unpopular feedback.
2. Sure, in 2022 it would be hard for a startup in Iowa to learn that you screwed someone over in Florida. But do you really want to bet that the same will be true in 2042? In the last 20 years, we went from no social graph at all to a social graph in every slice of our lives. What are the odds that in the next 20 years we won't see continued progress towards transparency and accountability?
Reputations have never mattered more, and will only do more so in the future.
Your argument hinges upon the fact that one company or person's opinion would hold enough sway to actually ruin your entire reputation.
Even if this individual or this company was exceptionally vocal about your betrayal, do you really think it would "prevent having visibility into your life as a possibility?"
The arguments for this are all over the spectrum, but I think _Most_ people fall into a moderate stance of, if you accept and offer and something substantial and unexpected changes your situation (an incredible competing offer, an unexpected opportunity, health or spousal related issues) then you should do what's best for you and not let loyalty to a business and a people that you don't even have an established relationship with yet have a negative impact on you.
As evidence by the Post here - Companies will make the same decisions when exceptional circumstances arrive.
I would also argue that anti-corporation/anti-business sentiment in the USA has never been more prevalent with r/antiwork in the spotlight, ridiculous inflation, a new outburst of unionization (e.g. starbucks) and CEO's under fire (Elon/Bezos) that a reputation for making tough decisions for yourself and not exhibiting loyalty where its not deserved might gain you more fame. Especially if some "SV Startup CEO" corroborated your story for you.
Not sure why it was necessary to put SV startup CEO into quotation marks. Also funny that you think that somehow Bezos and Elon are struggling. And lastly, screwing people over will not get you fame but infamy (regardless of how high the inflation is or what you read on r/antiwork).
> Reputations have never mattered more, and will only do more so in the future
I guarantee there's at least one person per FAANG who never wants to work with me again. Probably a dozen others in different companies.
... And yet, here I am making seven figures and receiving a request or two per day to interview with various tech companies. If one won't hire me, 3 dozen others will. I have a pool of 100+ colleagues who would be happy to provide a glowing reference.
I do not think it matters nearly as much as you think, unless you live in a smaller city and limit yourself to only working locally.
Orthogonal to this entire debate on employee conduct, what you call "transparency and accountability" is synonymous with social surveillance and the erosion of privacy. Instead of a state-mandated social credit system, you're describing societal norms giving way to an ad hoc total information awareness as pushed by social media websites and search engines, public record indexing companies and grassroots doxxers. Let us pray in twenty years more countries will enshrine the right to be forgotten.
Ask yourself honestly, in this situation (dropping out of an accepted offer), what outcome would you have wanted? The person in question resigning themselves to working with you and being miserable so that they didn't go back on their word? I don't see the positive in having a disengaged employee who's only with your company out of obligation.
> God forbid you live in the Bay Area, and you and I perhaps cross paths at a party, Burning Man, or any other event
What, you’ll be so personally slighted that this person made a business decision that you’ll ensure to disrupt everyone else’s time at burning man/a party/ any other event?
I like how you minimize the ethical implications by calling it a business decision. I do agree that screwing over a family member is different than screwing over a colleague, but let's also agree that both are bad.
And what appears to be a "business decision" could be a serious setback for the person on the other side of this transaction. Granted, as a startup founder, I am more exposed than someone at FAANG, but don't fool yourself - either way, someone wasted a lot of time and money on giving you a shot, and more importantly, they declined all other candidates. It really is such a selfish thing to do, and while sometimes you have no choice (health, etc), I didn't get the feeling from the OP that he felt particularly bad about it.
So to get back to your original question - no, I wouldn't give you a pass because you showed your dirty side in a business context. And if I thought you were dishonest, I would assume that your dishonesty extends across all facets of your life, and I would think I'd be doing my friends a favor by letting them know.
> And what appears to be a "business decision" could be a serious setback for the person on the other side of this transaction. Granted, as a startup founder, I am more exposed than someone at FAANG, but don't fool yourself - either way, someone wasted a lot of time and money on giving you a shot, and more importantly, they declined all other candidates.
Yeah, sucks, that's life, if that triggers you emotionally you have no business running a startup.
I hate to be blunt. But as a startup founder, you probably don’t matter to many of the posters on HN. Most startup founders pay below what we could get at a public company and all you could offer is “equity” that would be statistically worthless.
No need to apologize - what you're sharing is the accepted truism. And yes, it makes it hard to compete for the same talent that's also considering FAANG. I will be even more blunt - yes, you're likely to retire sooner if you took a FAANG job.
But there are three caveats:
1. That last statement is only true because most of the people who start or join a startup don't see a material increase in the value of their equity. But a little known secret in the startup world is that you only have to be right once. It doesn't matter one tiny bit if your previous 5 startups failed, if the 6th one ends up finding the product market fit. My batting average is pretty poor, and even so I am way ahead of anyone I grew up with. You only have to be right once.
2. People think of startup success as this all or nothing thing, where you're either super poor or super rich. In reality, if you give it your best and do a decent job, even if you end up failing you'll be getting calls from people who you would have never met in any other way. For example, I failed with a startup about 10 years ago and ended up at Square only because of that exact same failure. There's no way in hell it would have happened any other way.
3. Most startups are run by first-time founders, and most first-time founders are still early in their learning process. A direct consequence of that is that they are cheap. But every once in a while you come across someone who's had one or two big exits, and I guarantee you that they are thinking differently about comp. In PG's words, Apple could have given Steve Jobs 95% of their equity to lure him back, and it still would have been a great deal for them. Experienced startup founders know that, and they have levers that FAANG doesn't. There are two senior people in my current startup that I poached directly out of FAANG.
1. "You only have to be right once"... out of how many times? 1/6? 1/10? Much worse? This caveat is nothing but an ad for lottery tickets.
2. Sure, startups are a fine place to hone your talents, show your worth, and network. Same as any other type of workplace. Who's to say you wouldn't have met someone else at a big company who could've gotten you into Square?
3. For every serial entrepreneur who truly has a knack for it and truly learned along the way, there are those who are persisting in error. You're combining your first and second caveats here, describing the possibility of networking one's way into working for a quality experienced founder who will be your lottery ticket.
Nothing wrong with startups, but this is just another set of hoary old truisms more optimistic than the previous one.
Let's do the math. YC has had 378 exits out of 4314 investments [0], so roughly 9% so far. Most investments have been made recently enough that those companies are still baking, so let's double that number to 18%.
The only other number of you need is how likely you are to get into YC. Their overall acceptance rate is 1.75% per application[1], so if you apply three times with the same startup, you get to 5.25%. That figure includes literally everyone and their grandmother, so let's assume you're deciding between a startup and FAANG. Well, FAANG's acceptance in late stages of interviews is around 15% [2], so your YC acceptance chances are around 33%.
Combine 33% and 18%, and you get 6% per lifecycle of a startup. If you try that with four startups, you're at 24%.
Is 24% a good deal? Well, it depends on the upside and the opportunity cost. Let's assume it took you 16 years to build 4 failed startups. In that time period, you could have earned around $5m at FAANG ($300k/year). Of course, things could have also gone wrong (bad manager, your screwed up, layoffs), so let's peg that chance at 80%, which gives the opportunity cost of $4m.
The average YC exit is $24m (not taking into account the whales, which ballooned the overall YC portfolio to over $300B) - the $24m seems like a pretty conservative take [3]. That yields almost $6m upside, not including dilution. Hard to guess what the average dilution is, but I bet you it's higher than 33%, which would have been the breakeven point. Darn it, startups suck! :)
We might be posting on YC's site, but there are a whole lotta startups beyond YC funded ones. For all of this work, this math relies upon an incomplete data set.
But you have to include dilution. You’re speaking as a founder - not an employee.
If I join any of the BigTech companies (FAANG - Netflix + Microsoft), as a mid level developer, I’m guaranteed to get a $1 million+ four year offer and I don’t have to wait on an exit and pray for a successful exit. I can sell my RSUs at every vesting event. The average startup takes 7 years to exit. I would have also been hypothetically missing out on one of the greatest bull markers and seen my earlier grants more than double over the last five years.
I left out Netflix because even before the stock tanked, it should have never been grouped with the 1 trillion+ BigTech companies.
For context, I am speaking from the viewpoint of a 48 year old guy who first fell into BigTech two years ago by doing a slight pivot from software development at unremarkable companies into cloud consulting.
So for me personally, I don’t have time to risk on startups when I can be certain that my RSUs will be worth something when they vest and I can sell them and diversify. Even if they are down 25% year to date.
On the other hand, I mentored an intern last year, who got a return offer of $150K and can live anywhere in the US - right now he is staying at home rent free. This already puts him in the top 10% of income earners in the US.
In three years, he can be making $250k- $275K. Three years after that, he can be making close to $400K-$500K. But he will need to switch from an IC if he doesn’t want to switch from consulting.
Because of the time value of money, it makes much more sense to make as much money as possible while he is younger and avoid startups like the plague unless they can offer as much in cash as he is getting in cash+RSUs.
You are looking at things from the founders side. I am looking at things from the employee’s end. It’s your company. You should be passionate it about. From our end it’s a job.
As far as finding “product market fit”, how often has a company found product market fit, and a larger more profitable company came in, put a department on duplicating the effort and crushed the upstart?
We saw it in the 90s with Microsoft and we see it today with Facebook. Even Netflix isn’t immune. It’s being outcompeted by Warner Bros and Disney.
Everyone likes to point to Apple and Amazon. But they are the exception not the rule.
Always funny when employers realize that "at will" works both ways.
You can easily let someone go any day of the week? Well, I can also leave any day of the week. If you don't want this sort of liability you can hire me with a contract.
I get your point, but if, after extending an offer (and having it accepted) you suddenly found out the role has been "made redundant", would go out of your way to get your executive compensation reduced so that the new hire could stay and you wouldn't have to "burn bridges" with the person?
I'm not taking sides here, but am curious to see your argument.
I've been a startup founder for the last 20 years, and the short answer is yes. I did exactly that same thing in 2020 to help onboard someone in February who we otherwise wouldn't have been able to keep. Our board asked for a hiring freeze, and I pushed through a candidate by cutting my salary by 50% (I would have done it anyway out of principle, but that's a different story). I know a lot of other startup CEOs who lowered their salaries to help extend their runways.
That's rational. If a startup CEO is motivated by salary rather than equity, that's terrible for everyone involved, from the investors on down to the early employees.
> For comparison, I would have never ever reached out to you again. And if I met you in the hallway at some other place, I would have made sure that everyone knows how I feel about you.
If you were to do that it says more about you than the person in question and would not look positively on you.
I don’t really want to engage but this is really bugging me. Now, I haven’t been to burning man, but I’ve been to plenty of bush doofs, and if I bumped into someone who’d ghosted me for a job I’d be like; man, what happened? you really missed out. How ‘bout a hug?
There are better ways to deal with adversity in the world than to go on the attack and threaten people’s livelihoods. Even if their decision impacted you adversely, it doesn’t give you the right to fuck someone over in retaliation.
I hear this a lot but the job market indicates the opposite. Given sufficient skill and availability everyone is hireable. In your world Jacob Applebaum is giving back rubs to Damore under a bridge somewhere pulling on two ends of a food stamp.
> Jacob Applebaum is giving back rubs to Demore under a bridge somewhere
It's Damore. And he's working, as far as I know.
As for "bad reputations": at Google, and I assume at most modern companies, if an applicant came in who worked somewhere you worked at the same time, you got an automated email asking you to rate that person. I don't think I'd even call that a "backchannel."
How much influence did that have? Don't know.
I always knew when the bonuses had gone out at Oracle, because I'd get a flood of reference questions for people trying to leave Oracle.
Do you think that the majority of people that had their reputations tarnished and lost their jobs were re-hired later in another place of equal or higher stature?
IOW, do you really think that Damore is the exception to the rule?
I think that the bar for "had their reputations tarnished" is far higher than "rescinding an accepted offer" which is the topic of this thread.
I additionally think that trying to compare someone rescinding an offer with Damore and co is irrelevant when the actions are nowhere near equal, and therefore the reactions would also not be anywhere near the same.
The point that was being discussed was whether or not "bad reputations are hard to repair". GP argued that this is not the case and did use an example of someone who got a bad reputation and (to my understanding) has not managed to establish himself in a prestigious position as the one he had.
According to his Linkedin he's working at an undisclosed startup. Who knows what his compensation is like, but it's not as if going from Google to an early-stage startup is particularly uncommon.
It’s difficult to get a bad reputation in most fields.
Stepping out of an offer isn’t something that most people will bother telling anyone about. The bar seems to sit somewhere around setting a server room on fire.
i got told by a vp at a faang i would never work in the industry again and within 3 years the same faang had hired me back at a higher level. people need talent more than they can afford to hold grudges
It is not obedience, not even close. It is highly empowering to act with the high ethical standards no matter what, because it's always in your control. That doesn't mean being acquiescent or being naive. I don't tolerated being mistreated or lied to, but I don't reply in kind: I just leave, I don't come back, and I don't forget.
My read of the root comment is "don't get tricked into thinking the company / manager cares about you and that you owe them something". No point in being naive and personally committing to a relationship that the other side is not committed to in the same way. It's not a question of ethics, it's a question of properly assessing the commitment that's being made
>It's not a question of ethics, it's a question of properly assessing the commitment that's being made
I've been on both ends of this, as an employee a few years ago and now an employer. I'm not sure if assuming the worst in all employers and putting in the bare minimum/acting unethically to avoid being "taken advantage of" is the optimal way to act.
It pushes away the good companies that will reward loyalty and drive, and attracts unethical companies who have an adversarial relationship with their employees.
Same goes for relationships - if you assume that the person you're going to marry is simply going to take your house and kids and build your relationship about minimising feeling stupid if/when it happens, you're not going to have a good time.
I don’t assume any intention from a company neither good nor bad just like I wouldn’t assume that a wasp meant to do me harm if I were highly allergic to it. A business is just an entity I work for to support my addiction to food and shelter.
I assume they hired me because I could help make them money. If one day that assumption isn’t met and they need to lay me off (been there done that), I call my wife, I call my network to tell them I’m in the market. There are no hard feelings.
Don’t be an asshole. If your employer is half-decent don’t just leave without 2 weeks notice and no replacement, don’t “put in minimum required effort” which is actually below minimum required, don’t sabotage the company, and don’t be strict when your employer has a true emergency situation (which is actually an emergency and not every weekend) and relies on you.*
But also don’t trust your employer. Require important stuff in writing and contracts, don’t expect your employer to give anything extra for hard work / overtime (unless it’s in contract), don’t rely on “promised” benefits or rely on your employer to do anything they don’t have to.
And also, if you get another offer which pays 200% after accepting, or one which requires you to quit immediately, you might want to break loyalty. IMO this should go both ways: the company and employer should expect the other party to “betray” them if there’s a huge bonus like that. In fact all of this goes both ways and company/employer should have a decent, “loyal” relationship to an extent, but never put too much trust into each other.
* the other exception is toxic workplaces where your boss is being an asshole to you. Although in that case you should be trying to leave ASAP
Don't be a chump. Employment-at-will means being an asshole is both parties' negotiated default. It says so in your offer letter unless you're at the very highest levels. Now, I have personally extended the courtesy of a multi-month notice to a manager with whom there was genuine mutual respect. But generally speaking, if a company mistreats me the only reason I'll give any notice is because I think it will directly benefit me. For example, maybe it will help to get a better separation agreement.
Is that mercenary? Yes. Do I like it? No, not really. But in the USA where I live it's virtually universal policy with private employers.
It's a good lesson. We spend most of our lives forming real bonds with humans. Corporations are not humans and interactions with them should not be treated as such.
edit: Since I can't delete my comment now, I just want to apologize that I read your message too quickly and missed the 50% salary difference part. Come on, there's ethical and then there is crazy, of course you leave and take the other offer if it's 50%, that's common sense and any hiring manager should understand it. But that's not really commonplace and you can handle it in a professionally ethical way.
If a relationship is bound by ethical principles on one side and a cold economic calculus on the other, it seems pretty clear which will be taken advantage of most often.
I don't see anything particularly wrong with either way, I guess. If they have to rescind offers to be a profitable business, so be it. Sometimes I will have to renege in exchange for working fewer years.
Listen, man. I am a hiring manager. People have reneged on accepted offers. It doesn't affect me personally at all. It's a bit annoying, but the real damage to real human beings is close to zero. OTOH, a company rescinding an offer to someone who accepted and probably quit their other job can be devastating. It happened to fried of mine very recently and their life is very stressful right now. You are definitely arguing on the wrong side of this.
Don't have your personal ethics be subject to someone else's ethics, because if you do that, then it means you don't really have ethics.
In general I agree with this, but the situation described usually happens when offers have expiry windows. I'm sorry, but a job offer is a major life step for me, and when a hiring manager frames it like a TV infomercial with a countdown timer, he's dealing on a lower moral plane. After all the time we both invested in this process, I don't deserve a slick sales maneuver. It's like how I would not stab anyone either, but when you raise a block of wood overhead and menace at me, it's self defense. I have my long term career arc to preserve, including opportunity costs: unsolicited hostile negotiating tactics thrown at me will meet a defense.
> You miss some opportunities this way but you feel better when you look in the mirror. Regardless, as others have noted, Coinbase has some specific issues that aren't indicative of a broader industry probem. They seem to be handling this as well as can be expected given those problems.
I have a hard time reading this as anything other than "it's OK for companies to rescind agreements but not OK for employees to". Consistency requires that it's either acceptable for both employer and employee to do that, or unacceptable for both. (Personally, I lean toward the latter.)
> You aren't accepting to an industry, you are accepting to a hiring manager.
No, you are accepting to work for a business that is legally bound to prioritize the interests of the shareholders over those of any employee. They will always, always be "rude" to you if that's best for the people whose money they're spending to employ you.
> legally bound to prioritize the interests of the shareholders over those of any employee
I 100% agree with you on your broader point. That said, this is incorrect. There are no laws that stipulate a business must put shareholders above anything else. There _are_ laws that say employees get first dibs on accrued pay in the event of a bankruptcy, among other things that businesses must do on behalf of employees.
You’re not, though. You’re accepting to the company. The hiring manager may well quit or you may be reorg’ed at a moment’s notice to a new manager. I’ve been a hiring manager and I would be bummed if someone accepted and then took another offer, but this is their livelihood and their life we’re talking about. You do not owe nor are you owed fealty to the hiring manager or a company that may very well kick you to the curb at any time.
Of course the obvious followup question is: how long do you have to stay at the job before it becomes ethical to leave (for normal reasons like finding another more desirable job)?
In jurisdictions with at-will employment (like California), most full-time jobs explicitly have no guarantees or commitments from either side about how long an employment offer will last. If your ethics are instead based on supposed implicit norms (like "it's rude to change your mind on a job offer" or "it's rude to leave your job before the recruiter/hiring manager gets their bonus" or whatever), then I think it's entirely reasonable to examine 1) whether those supposed norms actually even exist, 2) what the source of those norms are, and 3) whether those norms systematically favor one party over another.
Is this a joke? Companies have no qualms about rescinding offers for people who may have already quit their current job or who need a job for Visa purposes.
>Coinbase has some specific issues that aren't indicative of a broader industry probem
I have seen examples of this from several FAANG companies.
> Don't have your personal ethics be subject to someone else's ethics, because if you do that, then it means you don't really have ethics.
Corporations are not people. They don't have ethics. The most they can have is an ethical culture or guidelines - which still doesn't preclude them from doing anything.
The power imbalance is just too great. Don't be an as**, but don't be naive, either.
Everyone on HN should own a copy of Max Stirner's "The Ego and It's Own".
Ethics is a scam by the powerful to control everyone else.
I don't love my kid because of ethics, I love my kid because I love my kid. I'm not kind to my annoying neighbor because "it's the right thing", I'm kind to my neighbor because, despite his being annoying, I appreciate his friendship.
Ethics that you're advocating for exist so people running companies an take advantage of you, full stop. If it's more important for you to feel smugly superior, good for you, but I don't buy into it. I'd rather minimize how exploited I am.
You don't have to buy into someone else's definition of "ethics" in order to life a full, happy life, which involves loving your community and being kind to your neighbor. The rejection of mainstream ethics doesn't mean you have to be a monster, it just mean you're going to stop being manipulated for the benefit of someone far more powerful then you who never even paused for a moment to consider ethics.
edit: obviously I'm being a bit hyperbolic here. Spinoza and de Beauvoir both establish fairly exquisite ethical systems. But by en large "pop" ethics is a scam that is asymmetrically followed to the advantage of people in power. Quick example: Music companies want you to consider ethics when pirating music, but absolutely never bring up ethics when it comes to decisions around artists that could potentially increase profits.
I'm not talking about pop ethics, I'm talking about good old "golden rule" boring stuff. There is a tragedy of commons aspect to acting in this way, and I knowingly treat others like I would treat myself even doubting I'll get the benefit of reciprocity. You could say that I derive utility from it, and it's selfish? I could also shrug and say that I can't disprove that and what is the difference, at that point.
I simply put myself in the shoes of the other person and ask, how would my decision make them feel? I may be even more selfish, in some interpretations, because I think that behaving this way impacts others, and pretty soon you have a culture of respect and empathy, which I think is good for everyone including myself. So I am acting towards my own benefit.
I haven't read Stirner or Spinoza much, but it seems like common sense to behave ethically in the way that I've described. And maybe you have a point with Stirner regarding your later music piracy point, because I don't pirate music, and I don't do it for any reason other than I feel my integrity is worth more than any song. I don't care at all for the major labels' thoughts, I do it for "selfish" reasons and maybe it's egoism. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ethics encompasses a broad set of values, claiming the whole school of thought is a scam because you don't agree with a particular framework is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
If your personal ethics are to give respect to those who respect you, it is not out of line with personal ethics to treat corporations and HR departments like the lying sociopaths that they are.
And why would you hobble yourself into a disadvantage and even potentially take a multiyear hit to your life because you have some vague notion of objective ethics? That's just letting them take advantage of you. They bet on engineers thinking the game is not rigged.
Yeah, I had job offers rescinded on me. Funny enough these companies still have the audacity to have recruiters message me about new roles. Personally, I also stopped using these companies as a customer.
> Yeah, I had job offers rescinded on me. Funny enough these companies still have the audacity to have recruiters message me about new roles. Personally, I also stopped using these companies as a customer.
Rescinded offers are an extremely rare occurrence. If I had not one, but two offers rescinded I'd start wondering if maybe employers were discovering something they didn't like during routine background checks: Unflattering social media posts, something on your record, and so on.
Maybe it's purely coincidence, but if this becomes a pattern I'd start looking more closely for potential issues in your public profile or public records.
2020 and now 2022 are bloodbaths for anyone who was a new grad from 2019 until now. Not only have I been rescinded, but several friends and my girlfriend have been rescinded (we went from employed to jobless in a snap). My anecdata is that nobody in my circle of friends would bat an eye accepting an offer and rescinding for something better. When I worked at a startup, we had people rescind on a regular basis.
If Amazon gives me an exploding offer, I shed no tears for Bezos by rescinding. You might perceive this as rare depending on where in your career you are, but going through this has fundamentally changed my perspective on job hunting.
There is a power imbalance. If I rescind, a normal company will survive. When I was rescinded on, I had to completely change my life plan, apply for unemployment (unsuccessfully), and re-interview while studying for finals. In a twist of irony, I ended up rejoining the company that rescinded my offer a year later (it's a good gig, what can I say) and it spread that some interns had their offers rescinded that year -- bloodboiling. Companies will literally not care, and I will not either.
Or they're applying at small companies with unprofessional leadership. I've seen that fairly often while mentoring second-tier university students. Little fly-by-night cottage industry companies sometimes try to hire out of narcissism but don't have the cash.
It does appear Coinbase is paying severance to folks who hadn't started yet- so that is a plus. I have no idea if it is really "generous" as they claim in their blog post, though.
You're right about who is to say. It depends on how much Crypto grows and how important engineering is to a Crypto brokerage, e.g., Vanguard's UI sucks but their rates are great and that's why I have my money there.
The key is offsetting financial hardship, as they said. I think it will set back the job search months for some people, perhaps longer depending on what happens with the economy. I think severence based a month or two's living expenses would be reasonable though.
Geez, are you supposed to not give your current employer even two weeks notice, but not tell them you're leaving until your first day at a new job, to avoid getting screwed?
> Geez, are you supposed to not give your current employer even two weeks notice, but not tell them you're leaving until your first day at a new job, to avoid getting screwed?
No, don't do this in a professional developer job.
These rescinded offer stories are rare. That's why they make headlines. It's a newsworthy event, not a common occurrence.
Don't compromise your reputation and burn bridges on the way out the door just to compensate for the remote possibility of being subject to an outlier event like this.
Leaving on a good note and maintaining positive references is far more valuable than hedging against perceived downside risk of having an offer rescinded.
This happened to plenty of people I knew personally during the covid layoffs and I see no reason it won't happen again (in fact we're discussing a pretty well known company doing it right now in these very comments).
> Don't compromise your reputation
Your reputation with who? I've never considered working for a previous employer in my entire career and never, ever known hiring managers at one company to have influence over another.
I used to feel very safe when leaving a role but it's unfortunately just not the way things are these days. Same goes for "ghosting". I used to think it was repulsive for candidates to ghost a potential employer during an interview, however I've been on the receiving end of companies ghosting a shocking number of times.
I wish we lived in the world you are describing, but we don't.
Might be true in FAANG/consulting but in the tier below FAANG reputation with a company is so useless it’s not worth considering. That even assumes it’s possible to be rehired or considered for employment by the same bosses, and that they didn’t just write you off forever for having the audacity to every be disloyal to them.
If you’re in an area with few employers, don’t want to move, _and_ don’t want to work, then maybe don’t give notice, otherwise you’re just leaving value on the table for people who only like you when you leave value on the table
It depends. I don't think bad of any of my coworker who went on PTO and gave their notice on the Friday before coming back. What I remember of them is how great they were. This little snag at the end is just people being human, having had enough and not wanting to get screwed by a company's HR department. I'd recommend them anytime and they never suffered from it either, many even being hired by startups created by their ex-leaders.
No, no. You wait until you start at the new job and then you give two weeks. This works the best since the last two weeks at a job you don't really do to much and the first week a new job is just onboarding.
Plus you get the added bonus of an additional two weeks pay.
Young people might not even realize, but back in the olden times of non-"unlimited vacation" employers were required to payout your unused vacation time when you left (usually leaving you with a fair bit of extra cash).
Unlimited vacation means that you no longer get this even though you probably take the same amount of leave, so you have to figure out a way to make up for this yourself.
It's more than just a crazy idea. I joined a high-risk small startup coming from a very stable job with a new baby to take care of. Being unemployed at the time was absolutely not an option. The new company seemed amazing and like a great opportunity, but they didn't even have health insurance for remote employees (this was awhile back), so I was very worried that something would fall through at the last moment.
I've heard stories of people working two remote jobs to double their income, but based on my experience of just two weeks overlap the stress induced from secretly having two jobs indefinitely seems to outweigh the financial benefit.
> I've heard stories of people working two remote jobs to double their income, but based on my experience of just two weeks overlap the stress induced from secretly having two jobs indefinitely seems to outweigh the financial benefit.
Same here. I read about this happening, but can't imagine wanting to deal with that kind of stress and anxiety personally.
On top of all this, you also lose unemployment benefits if you quit your job and the new one has rescinded their offer. As far as the states are concerned, you voluntarily quit your previous job, and never started a new one
That is a problem with how the governments treat layoffs vs quitting. In attempting to make companies and individuals responsible for more unemployment benefits, they made a number of large cracks for people to fall through.
It a problem with corporations too. They’re not bound by the laws of physics to leave you high and dry. Anyway, the point of the GP question was if it was necessary to give notice after you started your new job.
Given that companies are almost always choosing to leave people high and dry, the rational response is to not let yourself get into that situation by not giving your employer advanced notice
Employers have PIPs as a way to give themselves optionality in deciding to fire someone or not. Seems a bit unfair that employees don’t have much way today of saying, “hey, I might peace out any day now, and don’t take it personally if I do, but I expect that things should still be cool between us if I end up sticking around.”
Much like many employees take PIP as a "well fuck that" and plan their departure (indeed, when it's discussed here that's the common advice), I can't see companies not taking an employee's "maybe I'll leave" notice in the same way.
To be fair. Not all HR departments are like that. I’ve been through big layoffs during the last recessions and we let people go the day they joined and gave them 3 month severance packages, cobra access and unemployment insurance.
Coinbase HR are just being jackasses and deserve to be blacklisted. This behavior should not be tolerated to prevent employees from giving 0 day notice when they quit and screwing over the rest of us. I know they are going in my hiring notebook for do not hire.
They shouldn’t have rescinded offers and just let people people go the day they join. The damage is already done and there are comments on here about giving no notice.
With big companies and if you are not household name, I believe it should be easier than people think. Change your email and phone number in CV next time you are applying and nobody will remember your past with the company.
I am hiring manager in mid-size company and if you used different email to login into workday, to work for somebody who is not sitting next to me, no chance your previous behaviour could disqualify you in any way.
Came here to quote the same line, but follow it with "yeah, fuck these guys". Its not fair to paint the whole industry with bad sentiment, but anyone who recinds accepted offers either has no decency or no ability to forecast their most basic needs.
Teams, yes. But the greater companies? By default, you should assume that any modern corporation cannot be trusted to do anything but act in its own perceived short term best interest. Some may not, some may do better, but you should never assume that they will.
> you should assume that any modern corporation cannot be trusted to do anything but act in its own perceived short term best interest
Trust, but verify. You shouldn't set yourself up to get massively screwed if a corporate pinky swear falls through. But if you act like an asshole in ever interaction, you're going to select for people who find that the norm.
Trust but verify only applies to people not pseudo legal entities that have at most a few hundred years of legal history that will likely change again in the next 1,000 years.
People acting behalf on these entities don’t deserve your unearned trust.
> People acting behalf on these entities don’t deserve your unearned trust
I never said that. I just don't want to be permanently surrounded by assholes. Presuming the other side is an asshole is a good way to end up in that situation.
The only time the HR department has been a great help for me was in a layoff situation. I was part of a general 20% cut a few years ago, and the layoffs were staggered over six tranches spread over four months. Why the spread? To avoid reporting requirements that would trigger with that many people leaving at once.
I was slotted for the last release. At the end of the summer. Just before my kids would return to college / high school. The first release was in May. I could spend the whole summer thinking about what to do next, and beach days with my kids.
So I told management, I am out of here in May. They said 'no, and if you leave, you lose your vacation pay and severance'.
So I called HR, explained my thinking, and told them to get me out of there in May. Management was not happy, but HR took full responsibility for the moved date. And I got to spend a glorious late spring and early summer lazing about before reentering the work force.
Indeed. I switched jobs recently and wanted to provide notice but had to do so without a signed offer. I was thankfully confident enough that I'd be OK even if things fell through to go ahead with it, but in different circumstances I might not have been able to do it.
In many cases, it's OK to negotiate your start date a couple of weeks out from the offer agreement. I've gotten almost a month in both of my last offers.
Yes, and the point of this article is that Coinbase is rescinding employment for people who have accepted offers but haven't started yet. These people have already given notice at their current jobs and now won't have a new one to start. They are Screwed.
In California does a rescinded offer after quitting another job qualify someone for unemployment benefits? It's a small amount compared to tech salaries, but is helpful when between jobs.
> I always advise people who get exploding offers from companies to just accept them and then back out later if they need to
This is not a sustainable long-term strategy for most people. You know what is? Walking away from the offer immediately when it has an overly-aggressive expiration date and letting them know the reason.
Absolutely. I got two exploding offers in my career and I declined them on the spot. Both companies later returned with better offers and longer timelines. There's really no reason to let a company push you around. Just walk away.
There was a major hue and cry by founders, esp in Bangalore about how ungrateful the prospective employees were, when they ghosted the founders after accepting offers. These founders never really tried to understand the simple market dynamics and that they would do something similar to employees, should the market go down.
The playing God shit by founders has to end and this move by Coinbase gives a huge boost to employees to hedge their offers. I won't be surprised if employees accept 2 offers, join one and after a a couple of days say no to the other or ghost them.
+1 to this
It's at will employment so a signed offer doesn't really mean anything anyway. Practically speaking, people renege on offers all the time and nobody holds it against them.
Note that there are companies that forbid employees from being on the payroll for another company at the same time. So if a person accepted two offers simultaneously, and both companies found out, this person could end up with zero jobs.
Also, I wonder if this mainly a problem when there is a long gap between accepting the offer and the job start date. I would think a better strategy is to try to start getting paid as soon an offer is extended, by starting sooner.
Is expoding offers worse than being fired on the first day at your job? If not then why does it bring so much hate? At least more hate than just firing people. Honest question
Well, the problem as I see it is, I just gave my 2 weeks notice when I accepted your offer. I might have even given it earlier and pushed the start date a week forward so I could get a nice gap week to decompress between jobs.
Now, at this new company I've been excited to work for, I receive an email telling me that I in fact do not have a job next week and I am actually unemployed.
My options range from extremely bad (begging for old job back) to mildly embarrassing (attempting to re-accept a previously declined counter offer).
Still, why does it always have to be when they're doing something they shouldn't do?
...
Then I realized that they really have to do something, and I don't know exactly what the alternative is. If they gave them any compensation they would be admitting harming people and that could be a legal issue.
Edit: Oh, they are doing that, but are vague about it:
> We will apply our generous severance philosophy to offset the financial impact of this decision.
That's a pretty nice minimal way of saying it, and they probably will have a minimal approach of doing it as well, both to reduce the cost and risks.
While I have seen several people accept two offers and then no-show to one in the first day, it’s not the safest thing to do. At the end of the day, the employee controls the capital and most of employment law. That lets any negative sentiment carry a lot of weight. Make sure there’s a clear and understood story; don’t ghost.
Employers have in fact lobbied hard for laws that make this possible in the first place. They want all the benefits of at will employment, so there's no reason why they shouldn't also be on the receiving end of it.
It just means that there's an initial probationary period where the employment is at-will, and beyond that point the employer must have a reasonable cause to terminate the employee. I'm not at all familiar with Montana labor laws in practice, but I find it very difficult to believe that it makes much of a difference.
I worked with a guy who stayed with a company through “thick and thin.” Then when it was a good move for the company, they laid him off. He asked HR if they could help him find a new position within the company and their response was “HR is not in the business of helping people find employment.”
TLDR: HR definitely does not care about you. It’s all about making sure the company doesn’t get in trouble while they do their best to exploit you.
"In response to the current market conditions and ongoing business prioritization efforts, we will extend our hiring pause for both new and backfill roles for the foreseeable future and rescind a number of accepted offers."
LIFO is common in broad layoffs, that are responding to overall business velocity and not more specific need determination, and the people that haven't started yet are very much the LI.
Coinbase isn't new to the four year crypto cycle set by bitcoin halvings, they shouldn't have hired the people in the first place in the bear year. Rescinding job offers is a really bad look.
I don't see what the Bitcoin halvening has anything to do with this. The halvenings have been known from the very beginning and are thus priced in. The downturn we're seeing now is caused by market volatility, the exact opposite of a guaranteed halvening that we already knew was coming a decade ago.
N=3 is an absurd sample size to base hiring or investment decisions on, especially considering that each halving will have a smaller effect than the previous.
An aside, I like how crypto borrows terminology from real financial instruments. Like "cycles" when the industry as we know it has existed for maybe 10 years. I've even heard "fundamentals" thrown around. There's no earnings or assets! How are there fundamentals?? Aside over.
> For BTC, fundamentals are absolute scarcity combined with buy-in/popularity
This is literally the opposite of the meaning of fundamentals. Absolute scarcity is meaningless; in classical economics, everything is scarce. And popularity are animal spirits.
Well, words can have different meanings in different contexts. This IS what fundamentals means in the world of crypto.
You don't decide on the value of a scarce asset, the owners of the asset do. If you personally believe the nominal value of a scarce asset like BTC is meaningless and thus zero, short it.
> words can have different meanings in different contexts
I agree. It's just convenient that fundamentals, by this definition, always equals the market price. At which point one asks why there are two words other than for misdirection.
For businesses it's important to understand earnings and assets because those put a floor on the price of the business: they set a price level at which you are very likely to see demand for taking over the business. At the end of the day, though, when you study fundamentals you are making guesses at supply and demand.
The price of a Bitcoin depends on how many people are trying to use it for remittances and how easily those people can acquire Bitcoin and how long recipients hold before selling. Demand also depends on the macro environment and it's historic correlation with other markets. Supply depends on the issuance rate and energy prices (higher prices will force miners to sell more to pay for their operations). Many other factors are at play; by predicting them you can make guesses as to future supply and demand and future bitcoin prices.
How is there scarcity in Bitcoin when 1, 1000, or 10⁷ Satoshi can all serve the purpose of sending one dollar overseas? I have never understood how supply and demand can work for currencies.
Random BTC fluctuations probably don't make too much of a difference, but as of their Q4 '21 report 86% of their trading volume is actually from outside Bitcoin. Those have all taken a massive hit in recent months, and I can't expect that is good news for Coinbase.
think it’s more like a barbell. last time Uber did a mass layoff it included a lot of more senior managers who had been there awhile. they are far more expensive than the entry level new hire who is actually doing the work…
So if you accept an offer at CB, give notice to your current employer, have CB rescind the offer, and now find yourself unemployed? Is that what's happened here?
This happened to a friend of mine(not with CB, not even in tech - a sales job) - he sued them and ended up getting a severance package for a job he never worked at. I'm not sure if it was just a settlement or an actual judgement against them though.
Based on a couple of LinkedIn posts I saw, that's exactly what happened. I wish they hadn't reneged offers for start dates that were inside of 2-3 weeks.
Rescinding job offers is about the worst move a company can make for their talent reputation. A major bank I worked with rescinded job offers to college graduates during one recession and it took us a decade to remake our reputation. From that point on we would sooner let current employees go to make room for offered jobs (realistically layoffs were already happen if things got that bad). That the tech industry seems to be thinking this is an acceptable way to treat people, but the organizations that follow this trend will be realized for the meat grinder culture they must be. No one that respects their talent treats people who have quit jobs and turned down other offers to work for them in this way.
To be fair, Coinbase has never made a secret of the fact that they have a meatgrinder culture. "Unremarkable performance gets a generous severance package", in their CEO's words.
I don't care what the business case is, how can you have had such a short planning horizon that you were making offers and then rescinding them before folks start?
Let them start, they will see writing on wall and can start looking for a new place with an active job.
That's why I never recommend delaying the starting date too much. I've seen people accepting offers and giving crazy starting dates (like 3 or 4 months). Too much can happen in between.
This is why every time I've left a job, my last day at my previous job was Friday and the first day at my next job was Monday. There's something deeply stressful to me about being unemployed. I'd much rather take a stress-free paid vacation on holiday leave than just be unemployed and have things potentially up in the air.
But we'd get the HR managers complaining if employees accepted offers and then ghosted, so we should complain about employers doing this.
Crazy they can't even afford to give folks a 6 month slot in a "gardening" type position. Be upfront. Hey, we're hurting, we can keep you for 6 months or so, no expectation on work output, but growth trajectory is going to be limited and a RIF is possible so may not be a bad idea to look for next spot.
I didn't know that. I started a new job three months ago in the US, and I had to negotiate because they wanted me to start in 2 weeks and I wanted a month. They told me three weeks was a hard limit.
At least in the US, they can say that, and maybe they will throw you in the "do not hire back", but you could give 0 days notices legally. "Right to work" goes both ways.
A rescinded offer is basically equivalent to getting laid off immediately. Honestly I’d rather get a rescinded offer than a layoff 3 months into the job.
Wow. They must really be in trouble. Rescinding accepted offers is a super shitty thing to do and I'm sure they know that. I bet layoffs are next.
I'd make a snarky comment about "how's that no politics in the workplace policy working out for you," but real talk, I'm sure it has nothing to do with this, so it'd be a cheap dunk. The underlying problems with crypto are so multitudinous that they easily dwarf any such practice.
Coinbase as a business, at least one that is traded publicly, never made sense during off cycles for crypto at their current scale. It makes sense in that it'll still be a business, and can certainly still make money, but it's extremely seasonal. Coinbase during a crypto bear market might be "worth" 10-100x less than what it might be worth in a bull market.
As such, I imagine they'll have these wild swings every 4-6 years. I think many people don't realize just how incredibly stagnate and boring crypto is when it's not consuming every part of everyone's online identity. The bad news is that for companies like Coinbase they essentially have to drastically downsize every few years. The good news is that with proper planning, they can really make the profits from a bull market last.
As far as the Coinbase marketplace, it may have “seasons” but the margins from fees will probably shrink over time regardless. A recent episode from Crypto Critics’ Corner ( https://anchor.fm/cryptocriticscorner/episodes/Cryptocurrenc... ) covered some of the headwinds facing Coinbase. Coinbase (at least the CEO) claims this is not a problem so it will be interesting.
I do wonder how SoftBank investing $680M into SoRare at the height of the NFT boom is going to work out. If SoRareStats is correct, they did 170Eth of auction volume in 24 hours. If they have the same fees as OpenSea, that’s roughly $8,000 in daily revenue.
Yep. OpenSea, too, raised funding at 13B valuation right at the peak of the NFT mania
I don’t understand how VCs work. I was deep in the NFT world at that time and outside of the influencers on Twitter, every single trader I know was just in it to dump NFTs on someone else. And everyone knew that it wasn’t sustainable at all.
How can VCs look at something like this, abandon all common sense and buy in right at the top of a mania phase?
Yeah I've thought about this a lot too. My only guess is that these VCs never really felt the pain from the previous cycle collapses.
I made and subsequently lost a very large sum of money from 2015 to 2018. This happened because I bought into the ICO craze and after seeing 1000x gains I saw almost all of it evaporate. So to me, NFTs reeked of the same odor.
I was smart enough this cycle to stick with projects that made sense to me. NFTs didn't make sense, and even though I saw people making money on them, I knew the risk was too high. I think another learning point for me was letting go of romanticizing crypto as a technology and embracing it for what it truly is, which is gambling.
I don't think crypto is the future of anything other than online gambling and speculation. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's the reality.
VCs seem stuck in that romantic phase coupled with a lack of technical understanding. I think after they get burned this cycle they'll be less likely to invest in the next. They'll have the experience to know.
In hindsight, that May 2021 was a good thing. Taught me how much these coins can collapse. I did much better at securing profits in the second half of this run
Coinbase doesn't need to care about the value of crypto, it makes money on fees when people buy or sell against USD. All it should care about is the traded volumes, and they don't necessarily have to be a lot lower in a bear market.
We’re not even in a proper bear market and its already collapsing
Just see dex trading volume metrics or OpenSea volume data on Dune.com - a much better indicator of the state of the crypto markets since you can’t hide on chain data
> Coinbase doesn't need to care about the value of crypto, it makes money on fees when people buy or sell against USD
Coinbase ran a gambling business like an exchange business. That's their mistake. The guys who knew they were running unregulated slot machines are doing fine.
Volume barely exists during a bear market. Attention is the currency by which crypto lives and dies. Even negative attention is attention. A bear market is the lack of attention. It has nothing to do with the macro price of any coin.
The problem is, there are a number of other exchanges out there, and they are going to need to get competitive on fees. They aren't the only game in town now and other exchanges are advertising heavily.
Don't see why that should be the case. Unless there are massive swings in the number of trades, setting a flat rate for transactions should insulate them from the actual prices of crypto assets.
> Unless there are massive swings in the number of trades,
Precisely. Holders HODL during bear markets. Traders go bankrupt. New money stays on the sidelines. Everyone else forgets about crypto for a few years.
We're past a decade already. I think gambling is pretty popular. So I expect it to only increase in popularity until it inevitability gets regulated into the dirt.
I expect that it will continue to be the preferred mechanism for paying criminals. It genuinely improves on the experience for both criminal and victim vs alternatives like wire transfers and cash. There is a decently large market for paying criminals (illegally but also legally, eg ransomware), so some base level can be expected to continue.
Law enforcement and private surveillance companies are currently investing a ton of effort into using public blockchains (which is most of them) to unmask participants in crypto transactions. At the same time, they're putting more pressure on Coinbase and friends to do aggressive KYC, and Congress keeps considering bills that would effectively outlaw anonymous crypto purchases. It's not going to be the safest way to collect ransoms for long, if it even is today.
I'm surprised they even announced it publicly, it can do nothing but make them look like a terrible place to go apply for work if they do things like yank offers. Although I guess since they aren't hiring for anything in the near future it doesn't matter but I bet this perception will persist well beyond when they start hiring again.
I wonder if this announcement was pressure from management and the board to make some public announcement for shareholders that Coinbase is doing something, anything, to cut costs and weather the crypto and tech downturn.
And for sure, if you work as a recruiter for Coinbase and still have a job... time to start tapping your network for other opportunities.
> We acknowledge and take responsibility for the experience of those impacted.
No; apart from a bit of severance pay, the responsibility is on your former hires to restart their job hunts or plead for their previous roles. "Taking responsibility" is not a declaration but an action.
Actually at any rate, given that they still win on either side of the trade and have complied with many regulations; survived any bull or bear market just like they have survived 2013, 2018, 2020 and so on.
Until all cryptocurrencies are totally wiped out, banned and stopped completely 100%, then Coinbase is finished. Realistically and especially at this rate, I'm afraid that is simply not going to happen.
I have a good friend who has just graduated from college and is affected by this. It's extremely stressful for her and a very rude entry into the professional workforce, it's already rough enough for her. I'm not sure yet if they will/have rescinded her offer or not.
It's very disappointing to see a company treat employees like this. There are ways to plan better, especially at huge corps like this.
If you're in a position making decisions like this in your organization, please remember that decisions like this affect real people and have a serious impact on their wellbeing in numerous ways.
"There are ways to plan better, especially at huge corps like this."
Not really true for crypto. The crypto crash of the last 2 months was extreme and sudden, not an ordinary "bear market". It puts the company as a whole into an existential mode. And not just this company, most of tech companies.
Also, Coinbase was getting into all kinds of side projects, like an NFT marketplace. Due to market conditions, NFTs all of a sudden are dead. People pull out their liquidity and trading stops.
Say they had offers for 10 NFT experts. Now they need none. What are they to do, hire them anyway?
I do feel for your friend. Tell her what my dad always tells me: don't worry, they didn't take away your hands or brain. You'll be fine.
It's not like all the offers that were rescinded were made before the crash. This is not exucable with the market crash, it's simply poor form and bad planning. They simply should've not made those offers.
Her offer was rescinded and she's devastated about it. She received her offer in the past couple of weeks, well after the stock lost a lot of its value and they announced a hiring "slow down":
The upside is that Coinbase is very clearly trending towards substantial layoffs if the market doesn’t recover, and if she did join now, she’d have been straight back out the door in the first layoff. Therefore, while this is painful for her now, it’ll hopefully be for the greater good long term: being at a company, like Coinbase, during a downturn, is an awful experience that would be more harmful to her longterm career than this situation. Hopefully she’s able to find another opportunity with a company that isn’t facing economic crisis, and a few months from now, she’ll be thankful to have dodged a Coinbase shaped bullet.
"I'm not sure yet if they will/have rescinded her offer or not."
In the meanwhile, the timeline got clarified? Anyway, I agree with you if the offer was made when the downturn was already obvious.
It's a shitty situation, and it will be followed by much more of it, cross industry. The music stopped playing. Don't waste time wondering why it stopped, find a chair.
Yes; when I first read the post I didn't know yet if her offer was rescinded. By the time of the second comment I called her and found out that it was indeed rescinded.
You know what is rude?... to have lived in a world where everyone knew everyone so much that people were afraid to be laid off a company, because the world would know it. 30 years ago - the world of IT.
It is really difficult for me to see how XXXXX going into pieces fails your global career.
The crypto bubble is popping. There are a huge number of dead coins and NFTs, with more to come. Bitcoin and ETH are useful enough to stay around, but most of the off-brand ones are doomed.
List of dead coins.[1]
NFTs stall, rather than crashing. High asking price, low offering price, few sales.
Peak NFT volume was in late 2021.
Everything that depended on growth rather than profits is tanking. Even Softbank is in trouble.
I don’t see how this is any worse than the “ICO” craze a few years ago. Probably 99% of those scams are now dead. Rumors about crypto’s death are always greatly exaggerated
For the 900th time, the crypto bubble is 'popping' or it has already 'popped'. The speculators and bag-holders are getting flushed and wiped out once again just like in 2017. This is before regulations are coming and it is happening again.
Meme-coins and other useless ERC-20 tokens will collapse and become abandoned where as the utility in many other cryptocurrencies (coins not tokens) will continue to survive.
Until then it has to go down before another drive higher which will probably happen after another Bitcoin halving, most likely in a couple of years time.
Would have expected another run after the next halving but we’re in uncharted territory honestly. Bitcoin and crypto only came about in the post 2008 era of easy money. If that spigot dries up, its not certain they will keep going up every halving like they used to.
On the other hand, after the current central bank shenanigans, trust in centralized institutions is even lower and non-centralized currencies become more attractive.
There's no shortage of easy money, there's shortage of confidence. Every single crisis the already wealthy become even more wealthy. Right now they're consolidating and derisking, wait a few years and the chips are on the table again.
Besides the wealthy, there's the army of believers putting in small money.
I got an email from Coinbase recruiter asking for an interview like 3 weeks ago about how they are in "hyper growth" stage. I said no because I was not confident that Coinbase will ride out the current market effects without layoffs. From "hyper growth" hyperbole to rescinding offers in 3 weeks. Damn, that is rough.
Yeah they hit me up about a month ago. I've been a crypto-skeptic for a while so I chose to not step up to that slot machine. The pay was usually really good, and the work is interesting, but I can't sleep at night knowing that I'm helping scam people.
> I think CB is on a very slippery slope. There are plenty of opportunities out there. Why working at CB?
For now, but give it six months I would tell you that they'd take a job at Coinbase for the same reason anyone today works anywhere: for the pay cheque.
We've had an entire generation of tech workers that forget that there are market downturns and in these downturns you end up with thousands of laid off people competing for the same job - often a job that you would have considered "under" you 6 months ago. I'm talking someone with 5 years more experience than you willing to take your job, and they'll do it for less money to boot.
It's in times like that where people will accept a job at Coinbase, because Coinbase will be around. And they'll be around because back in the early stages of the downturn they took the painfully necessary step of reducing payrolls.
> We will apply our generous severance philosophy to offset the financial impact of this decision.
It's funny, just last week I was talking about my friend who got a job offer and then lost it and got severance back in 2000. Some asked me, "how do I get that to happen to me!"
I said "try to get a job offer and then pray for failure". Apparently the answer was, "try to get a job at Coinbase".
While Coinbase's value is not dependent on a given price of a given crypto currency they are quite dependent on people using and trading some crypto currency.
> So the Bitcoin faithful have tried to not only convert people, but also convince them to martyr themselves, financially-speaking, for the crypto cause. It goes something like this. Hey, do you want to hear about the future? It's a digital currency called Bitcoin that lets you spend or move your money online without paying any fees. Sounds great. How does it do that? Well, Bitcoin saves you money by making transactions irreversible. So ... if I get scammed, I got scammed? There's nothing I can do about it? Yes. Okay, but is it at least easy to use? The thing is, I don't actually use it. I just hoard it. I'm waiting for some greater fools to push up the price by using theirs. Oh. Yeah. So you should buy some Bitcoins and use yours.
Then starting in 2017 but really gathering steam in 2018 came stablecoins.
And, of course, 2020 was the real start and 2021 the peak of NFTs.
Both stablecoins and NFTs are in ruins now. Note how quick NFT was compared to stablecoins -- and USDT still holds but that won't last either.
Unless a new shilling vehicle can be found, bitcoin is next.
It's weird to pull things tighter so soon after pausing hiring two weeks ago. Why not take all these measures (no new positions, now backfills, rescind offers) 2 weeks ago? Did they figure out that what they were doing was not drastic enough in that time? The whole thing screams of incompetence.
What Brock is omitting is that the last hired are very likely to be the first to go in the near future. Anyone who joined Coinbase within the last 24 months should be interviewing.
Which is practically everyone. Coinbase has been on a ridiculous hiring spree. Last I looked there were very few long time Coinbae left at the company.
Can't really say I dodged a bullet because I'm not employed either way but I was about to get an offer from them a month ago when I decided it just didn't seem like a place I wanted to work at. Not regretting the decision at all
The advice in these types of economic times from VCs etc. is to get to default-alive, e.g. a viable shot at cash flow positive before the money you have in the bank is gone.
While that view is understandable, can folks think of companies who did 20% type layoffs at the eve of bad times, e.g. 2001 or 2008, and then became market leaders, expanding as the market recovered?
I know Coinbase is not a typical startup given their IPO but they are a startup in other senses.
Most of the largest tech players today (including Microsoft and Google) did rounds of layoffs in 2008. Of course in those cases it was more trimming some fat rather than a do or die situation. But there are plenty of companies that have survived existential crises of this nature and come back stronger.
I should have worded that better - was trying to think of startups (or companies with startup characteristics (like the high losses and increasing costs coinbase had last q)) coming back after a very large reset.
Coinbase is an extremely profitable company. I don't think any VC advice applies to them. I think their valuation just got way out of hand, and with the crypto bear market just getting started I imagine they'll downsize like this during every cycle to come.
They burned almost a billion dollars in operating cash flow last quarter, and nearly all of their profitability in the past flowed from retail, which has shifted down dramatically. Not quite as simple as extremely profitable.
Profitable, yes. Sustainable, probably not. They are scrambling to open up lines of stable revenue that they can rely on once crypto mania starts dying down (and that is already happening to some degree).
Back in 2000 I left a long term position because I was unhappy at work (there was a lot of turmoil) and filled out a few applications, In response I got two promising offers. The one I was leaning towards put the offer 'on hold'. Not rescinded completely, but no explanation, just 'on hold'.
I couldn't take the risk, and accepted the other offer, which was best in hind sight.
The 'on hold' was because the company had been bought one day before my start date, and the deal had to close first, because I would be hired into the new company. If they had told me that, I might have waited, but they could not, because it would have been insider info on the purchase.
Rescinding an offer is brutal. I don't think hiring organizations make that decision lightly, and they certainly shouldn't.
If I had turned down my other offer, and the delayed one had fallen through, that would have been career altering. It would have completely changed the arc of my life, likely not for the better.
Can someone explain me something about USA employment law?
Can you rescind offers and suffer 0 consequences?
I can easily imagine a situation, where manager A wants to get rid of employee E. So manager A, asks a friend in company B, to make an offer for 10M dollars. Then employee E leaves, offer gets rescinded by company B.
Employee E left on their own from company A, so "problem solved". Obviously some other employee, this time from company B gets another miracle offer, just to quit and be rescinded.
I imagine that this is somehow banned, or everyone would be doing this?
Yes, that would be sue-able over and if you could prove the pact you would probably win (promissory estoppel). But in the ordinary sense you can typically just rescind whatever you want and as long as it is not for a protect reason, you are good.
For the extremely high end of salaries (your theoretical "10M" offer), you would do well to negotiate explicit terms of severance pay, or a signing bonus or other incentive, in your offer before signing it. Your employer will be bound by the terms of a signed job contract or other legal document. You should at the bare minimum not quit an active position on a verbal offer, wait until the full legal paperwork has been fully negotiated and signed. But there are almost no "default" protections applied at the state or federal level. Also job contract terms are often highly in favor the employer and non-negotiable language at most entry level / minimum wage jobs, leading to the vast majority of Americans working with a very low level of employee legal protection.
There isn't a federal law that covers stuff like this. We really only have employment discrimination laws at a federal level (i.e. you can't fire someone for being a certain race, religion, etc.). So it's up to each state and local area to define employment laws and it varies a ton. In some states they have 'at will' employment laws that effectively say you can be fired for any reason and with or without any notice. I imagine rescinding offers fall under this and are perfectly legal in some areas.
If the offer is in writing (always get offers in writing), then the employee has some recourse. I imagine this is why CB is offering 2 months severance to affected people, or so I read elsewhere in this thread.
The situation you propose is more than just rescinding an offer. It's colluding with another company to make an offer in bad faith with the intent of rescinding it, in order to entice an employee to quit.
"hiring freeze/pause" can tend to be something very subjective.
This is especially the case for many of these companies who may have essentially "overhired" and are correcting for that, rather than pausing hiring because the general economic conditions have affected their revenue outlook.
Rescinding accepted job offers, and not a single word along the lines of "apology" or "sorry" in the statement? That's a bit bold, in my view. Am I missing something?
That's generous? I've been through two RIFs and countless hiring freezes some with rescinding offers in big name companies, startups and "unicorns" and it was always at least that or more.
Last year they went from a normal 4 year grant to an yearly grant of a fix dollar value in order to protect employees from a down turn. Now they ended up doing layoffs, tells you how big a BS this grant structure is.
Stripe, lyft and uber do the same. At Stripe( at least) VPs and up get the standard 4 year fixed number of stock grants which basically creates a class system.
I was literally looking at their jobs page today and was going to apply... rescinding offers is a bad move. They've damaged their reputation with this. I wouldn't hand in a 30 day notice for a company known for doing this.
Adding them to my list of places who rescind offers, on there with Stripe, Splunk, and Twilio. The Venn diagram of that list completely overlaps with a list of places I won't work.
From what I am reading: The moral of this story's comments seems to be accept (multiple offers) early, backout (of the not-as-good offers) late and don't put in my last-day's notice in until as late as possible, since we are playing a capitalistic game. Of course there are exceptions but if we are talking about the majority of stereotypical organizations then...:shrug:.
I still believe having a good relationship with your previous employers isn't the worst thing - I have at least a few that have said that if I'm ever in need of a job that they'd be glad to bring me back in. In unstable economic times that kind of relationship puts me at ease. Quitting without notice, which is what you're suggesting, is a great way to screw up that relationship.
Of course, if you're working somewhere that you'd never want to go back to under any circumstances, all bets are off.
This reminds me of something one of my previous employers did. They had hired a ton of new engineers straight out of college and gave them a couple weeks to relocate to the city, get apartments, etc. After about 2 weeks of their training, executives decided it was time for some layoffs. The main targets? Those new employees. Company severance policy was only based on tenure, so these people probably got $20 and were unemployed, with a brand new lease, in a city they didn't know (and frankly, one that isn't at the top of most peoples' lists to live in).
Notice periods are still a thing. And in many places outside of the US they aren't just a thing you do out of courtesy (sometimes much longer than 2 weeks too). And even notice periods didn't exist, what's stopping the company from laying off new hires anyway?
Notice periods are called extended breaks outside the USA. I've done them before and I put my feet up at my desk and let time pass. If you are a friend and worthwhile colleague then I will happily help you and my immediate team. I'm not there to screw up my teammates.
That stuff is just to scare you. In 25+ years, I've never NOT moonlighted. I did get a "talking to" by a VP once, earlier in my career, about having too many "outside business activities." His concerns were promptly ignored.
This was for a relatively senior position, not a fresh grad. Going to be hard to get a new job considering most of the other places have hiring freezes and I chose Coinbase over other offers (mostly from FAANG), these offers have probably been out for over a month now doubt i can resuscitate them.
On top of that most of the other offers were for SF, and my partner already has a job in NYC on this basis.
Nothing but pain. As much as I appreciate the severance, the damage being done here is immense.