Am I the only one who thinks you should not give a 2 week notice to your current employer when you get an offer, so that in the event your offer gets rescinded, you still have your current job?
I get a ton of push back when I suggest this, but am I being unreasonable when I am trying to look out for my own interests when I know my employer wont? My employer can weather a few bad months, but some people can't lose income for more than one month.
Or are most employees are too scared to piss off some people they might not ever see again anyway?
This would be good advice in a world where rescinded offers are extremely common and employers refused to take people back after their 2 weeks notice.
However, the opposite is true: Rescinded offers are extremely rare. When it does happen at a company of reasonable size, it’s so surprising that it’s a headline like this one. We’re here talking about it because it’s an extraordinary occurrence, not a common thing that happens all the time.
When you over-index on rare risks like rescinded offers, you start to lose sight of what you risk by doing things like quitting jobs without notice. Your professional reputation may end up mattering more than you think some day, and disappearing from a job without notice is the kind of thing that people remember you for.
Refusing to give any notice because you might possibly have a 1-in-10,000 rescinded offer reminds me of my grandmother-in-law who refused to fly on an airplane out of fear of airplane crashes. She definitely avoided death by airplane crash, but in the process she missed out on a lot of vacations and family events.
I know that HN zeitgeist, weirdly, in some strange way likes to be "interchangeable cogs in a machine" (focus on standard easily employable tech stack, avoid learning company-specific stuff, change jobs frequently, be easily replaceable); but in a LOT of companies leaving with no notice puts everybody (coworkers, management, business, client - real human beings) in a crazy bad spot.
Many large companies have a checkbox on whether a leaving employee is rehireable. I've seen enough people leave then come back, that it may not always be as ok as it seems to burn those bridges - not to mention that in some ways industry is surprisingly "small" - people move and bad reputation spreads. If Bob asks Fatima who worked with James, should he hire him - you can bet this'll come up. And if that feels like a low hypothetical risk - it's a lot higher than risk of rescinded offers.
This is totally a response to the employer side. When companies are laying off people en masse with little regard to either performance or years of service rendered, they reveal themselves to regard their workforce as interchangeable cogs. We are living in a market that encapsulates the adage, “your company will let you go without a second thought.”
My understanding of why companies cannot purposely show that they take perf or years of service into account has more to do with labour law than a lack of caring. You cannot take into account perf in a layoff - if you did, you are not allowed to call it a layoff, AFAIK.
That doesn't sound right at all. You would want to lay off the bottom performers, it isn't a lottery. Imagine if a company said 'we need to get rid of 20% of our labor cost' and just ran a random number generator and got rid of the people who's number came up.
No, you want to get rid of just enough of the top performers to significantly lower labor cost while keeping enough that they feel safe. You can shed as many of the bottom performers as you like without worry. Gotta make those top performers do 2x the work for one paycheck.
Companies absolutely take perf and years of service into account for layoffs. It’s not always the same process or formula but those are popular terms in such a formula, along with pay, location, role.
> And that is a reason to turn yourself into indispensable cog, not the best replaceable there is.
For centuries, organizations have been adjusting themselves to ensure that all employees are as easily replaceable as they could possibly be, not to mention outright powerless.
I recommend watching the Netflix documentary "American Factory". If I recall correctly, there's a low-level manager who tried to turn himself indispensable at the expense of the company's workers and he showed a lot of surprise once he himself was fired.
"Indispensable" people leave for greener pastures or get laid off anyways. This happens all the time. A company that has too many indispensable people is a company that has too many single points of failure.
Apparently nobody cares, because both consumers and employees keep flocking to the same soulless behemoths en masse to get their fix and their CVs padded.
Also, employees will dump their employer the second they can. Let’s not pretend this is a one-way street.
> (...) but in a LOT of companies leaving with no notice puts everybody (...) in a crazy bad spot.
Do you think gratuitously firing employees doesn't leave them in a bad spot?
How come that a family needing to pay rent and make ends meet doesn't benefit from the same level of concern you're giving to a manager having to go through the trouble of replacing an employee?
Just because many companies behave poorly does not mean there is not a code of reciprocal obligation between workers and companies. If a company lays someone off and gives them no severance, you would judge that company more harshly than if they had given them severance. Similarly, if a worker leaves with no notice, people judge them poorly. When you break the rules people judge you.
> Just because many companies behave poorly does not mean there is not a code of reciprocal obligation between workers and companies.
What code are you talking about? Either you're referring to worker protection laws or collective bargaining agreements. If you're not referring to either of those, you're just projecting personal expectations that no one meets.
> If a company lays someone off and gives them no severance, you would judge that company more harshly than if they had given them severance.
Your frowns don't pay a man's rent.
> Similarly (...)
There is absolutely no similarity. At all. If a worker gets fired, he loses his livelyhood. If an employee quits, a few employees have a to-do item in their task queue.
You're talking as if companies don't hire people dedicated to hiring and firing.
I mean, it is your problem if you like any of those people and expect them to maybe be part of your career network in the future. I know I'd have a hard time considering referring someone who gave zero notice when quitting. Sure, it's just business, but that's some pretty anti-social behavior. The person who had to stay behind to clean up the mess you left is unlikely to ever want to help you in the future, or take your call if you want to hire them onto your team at some point
You can certainly make it less abrupt in other ways - let people know beforehand or such, but if I showed up on Monday and one of the other senior folks on my team just was gone with no notice and didn't talk with me again, it would be hard to just treat that as normal.
There’s this one cool trick I learned where labor solidarity means telling coworkers ahead of quitting but not managers. Also not everyone needs “their network” to get jobs. This employee karma from fucking management I’m always threatened with has never been real in any industry I worked in.
There's definitely ways you could do it well that don't make a mess - telling your coworkers ahead, or at least the ones who would have to take your workload. Or subtly making sure to knowledge-share before you leave.
I'm saying this from experience of people doing things as mundane as just moving to another team within the company with little to no notice. Yea, it "fucked management", but I also had to spend 3 months dealing with the mess they left behind, and inherited half-working code that they clearly had neglected because they knew they were about to leave.
Labor solidarity isn't just "I screwed capital so it's all a positive". You have to... I dunno, support your fellow laborers. I certainly don't think it's some moral failing to have abandoned a job with no notice, but implying that this is just "fucking management" is missing how much it can really pile stress and bad conditions onto the fellow employees you leave behind.
Maybe it's never bitten you, but I know if any of the folks I've worked with who have disappeared with no notice from my team asked me to work with them, I'd be having a hard time trusting them. Maybe they don't care, and they think I'm some corporate stooge or whatever, but when you're totally fine throwing me into the machinery of capitalism to advantage yourself, what would stop you from doing that again?
People leaving teams sucks, which is all you seem to be describing.
What do you do to management when they hurt you this way (firing/reassigning team members without notice)? How do you fight the corpos? What are some techniques you've come across to cause pain for management that somehow doesn't harm labor? Why aren't your complaints just the voice of management saying that I harmed you (when another way of looking at it as that I liberated myself. Are refugees "throwing their countrymen into the machinery of tyranny"?)?
Ok, your choice. You do know that you risk loosing both if they find out? And in my neck of the woods they will, since full time employment pays into social security and employers receive feed-bavk in the form of their respective contributions.
Nothing I'd recommend, and just for loosing employment, but also for mental health.
All that of course goes for two full time jobs. One full time job and some side jobs are acceptable. And unfortunately for some a necessity to make ends meet.
The mental health thing only matters if you are personally vested in your work and care about what you do.
A lot of the overemployed don't. They are trying to walk a fine line and do the absolute minimal required to remain employed at each job. They also care a lot less about being fired from one job since they a fallback.
Again, personal choices. We all rationalize our own morality :-). You can probably tell how I feel about that level of deception, but as long as you're not in my circle of coworkers or friends, have fun :-).
I think the super-hot job market in tech from 2012ish to 2022ish has really led a lot of people to underrate having a good professional reputation. When you were competing with 10 other companies to try to get a candidate, you couldn't be too fussy about "hey, why do you have a string of short tenures," or "did you get a kinda lukewarm reference from so-and-so."
So now we've got people saying, "Hey, don't worry at all about making your employer mad," in an environment which favors employers over employees. It's shortsighted, unless we return to ultra-hot job market in a year and this is a one-time difficulty.
The mass layoffs this year, almost universally executed on seemingly arbitrary criteria with little regard to performance or seniority, would seem to indicate that employers certainly don’t care about making employees mad. Any pretense of reciprocity has been destroyed this year.
You act like coders are okies. People at Google were frequently getting 2-9 months of severance, with benefits for most of those. Stop pretending like tech employers generally are behaving with "no sense of reciprocity." It's embarrassing and no one in any other field of work is going to buy your sob story.
You say this like you're a big realist, but it's the opposite.
Like, let's say we're in a world in which everybody is just a hard-edged economic realist and no sentiment or loyalty ever gets involved in anywhere. That's the world where you don't want to piss off your employer.
It's the world where employees are super valuable and coddled where all this, "well, I'm just showing them what it feels like to be me" is a viable tactic. That's the world where they care about your reciprocity arguments.
The point of building a good professional reputation is not for the benefit of employers everywhere. It's for you. To the exact extent that you think that employers are faceless soulless monoliths that don't give a shit about you is the extent to which you should stack the deck most in your favor for getting hired. If reference calls are going to be like, "Hey, I think that Bob has a really good heart and a ton of potential," then okay, maybe your minor indiscretions are NBD. To the extent that reference calls are, "I would not hire Bob again," that's when you really want them to say, "I would happily hire Bob again."
You overlook that if you premise “employers are faceless soulless monoliths”, then they would care as little about good behavior as bad. As far as references in tech go, they seem usually an after the fact formality, than anything.
At any rate, all of this is trading in hypotheticals. I don’t actually favor quitting with no notice, but in such an extreme case, I would assume it was done with sufficient justification that one’s colleagues, perhaps even one’s direct manager, would be sympathetic to the quitter.
There never was any pretense to begin with, people just happened to realize that lately. In tech that is.
That being said, your relationship is with your, former and current, co-workers. I am rather good in blowing bridges up if I think someone else put them on fire first. But even then, I took great care of who was on the other side, as much for my own sake as for the sake of my reputation and relationships with others.
Because even if you don't give a single f** about your employer, your co-workers will remember as would you. Especially if all of a sudden the job market is favouring employers again.
It didn't even really happen in FAANG. FAANG employees are still doing extremely well. FAANG companies are still holding onto tons of unproductive headcount which they would prefer to let go were it not for the employee backlash that'd follow. There are lots of people making lots of money who would be cut in any other competitive industry. I know because they're honest about it during their lunch hour. People read these stories about companies going about layoffs in a ham-fisted and counterproductive way, and jump to the conclusion that managements are all mustache-twirling robber barons whose main dream in life is to feed their employees into meat-grinders. The more conservative and reasonable conclusion to draw from the poor layoff execution is that FAANG management teams aren't very competent people managers, and are especially incompetent when it comes to layoffs, since they don't do them often.
Agreed that rescinded offers are not something to worry too much about. And, worst case scenario, you can often go back to your old team if you left on good terms.
It would be nice, though, if you had some certainty of some support, though switching jobs inherently entails some risks. If you're recently hired and there are to be layoffs in the next month, you will absolutely be on the chopping block. I'd love there to be something like unemployment insurance, except effective immediately such that spectacularly bad luck while switching jobs doesn't ruin you (and ideally that imposes some penalty on the hiring employer, who recklessly hired you and put your well-being at risk) and large enough to maintain people's fixed costs. That's more of a <10% risk in a down market (I'd guess... <1% in a good market) than a plane crash risk.
Not exactly true. Has happened with so many companies recently(Google, Amazon, Coinbase etc..,). And it hits most employees hard since they might be someone who just got laid off. This is even harder with people on visas who might be running out of time to find a new job or leave the country. Also, this happens more in a tougher economic climate where the people with rescinded offers are left in a really hard place. A lot of people on visas might have also planned their exits a few months before since visa transfer and everything takes a while. And lot of companies with hiring freezes will 100% refuse to give your job back.
This entirely depends on how common rescinded/delayed offers are. We're seeing a general normalization of the following behaviors at major tech employers.
- Rescinded offers
- Delayed start dates
Unfortunately, people's ability to maintain professional behaviors is entirely dependent on those behaviors working out. When Visas and other critical life factors are on the table, you can't blame someone for being protective.
I think most people operate under the presumption that both parties are acting in good faith. Obviously, there are instances where that isn't true. Choppy economic conditions lead to both sides of the table bending or even breaking norms.
I tend to put stock in giving two weeks of notice as I think it's polite. That being said, I've never had the rug pulled on me, either.
Companies never give anyone 2 weeks notice. They do not deserve it, and no one should give it, unless they have passion about the team and project they are leaving, and even then they should just wrap that up before giving notice.
I'm not sure that's the norm though. FAANG is typically outlier for X Y Z... I would guess that something like 90% of companies don't do severance. Hell, 16 weeks plus 2 weeks per year of tenure is GENEROUS. I'm honestly not sure why they are doing that, unless it isn't voluntary (e.g. some law in CA).
The idea that companies would never give anyone 2 weeks notice is probably closer to reality than the inverse of that assertion.
> Hell, 16 weeks plus 2 weeks per year of tenure is GENEROUS.
You call it generous, Germany calls it the law (depending on tenure, with some other European countries having a similar timeframe), and somehow non-FAANG non-tech companies are also able to stomach it. This is obviously very influenced by a very high demand for stability in Germany, but I also find it crazy how little people in other countries expect from their employers.
I know nothing about Germany, but FWIW several web references suggest that severance pay in Germany is "Standard severance pay in Germany is 50% of one month’s wages for every year of service. This increases to a maximum of 12 months’ salary for employees under 50 years old."
This is significantly less generous than FAANG layoff severances.
I’ve thought about moving to Germany. I know “the grass is always greener” but god damn is it true you guys can have a 4-day workweek, you just get paid 20% less?
Very much depends on the employer still (and there are quite a few political debates ongoing on whether 4 day work weeks should be incentivized, or whether they are the worst thing ever).
Anecdotally, for experienced devs, it is something that is commonly demanded and granted. For entry level positions it's quite common, but more and more people are asking for it quite early in their careers (even outside of tech).
I think that FAANG companies are indeed more somewhat generous than the norm. It's just easier to find the details of severance packages for big companies than mid-sized/small, because they're much more reported on.
However, I think you're going WAY too far in the other direction to suggest that "no severance" or "only two weeks of severance" is closer to true than not. I've seen a lot of mid-sized companies give 30 days of severance.
That's just... Not even remotely true in my neck of the woods.
Everywhere I worked at:
- if individual is not performing, people spend months trying to help them gear up before even considering laying them off
- if large layoffs are happening, there's time and severance. Even the ones we see in the news and perceived as sudden and unfair, the notification may be unexpected, but you're rarely laid off effective tomorrow.
Wrong on the large layoffs point. Plenty of them occurred with no warning this year. And often with little to no justification, not only to the individuals let go but even simply from a business rationale.
They didn't claim their experience was universal. They explicitly qualified their statement. So, you said they were wrong in _their_ experiences, which is calling them a liar and a bad interaction overall. If you'd simply replied that their experience perhaps wasn't indicative of the industry as a whole, _then_ you would have contributed something meaningful to the conversation.
There's one's own experience, and then there's empirical data. Your comment isn't adding any value to this discussion because it's just one in a sea of hundreds of millions.
Hell what about that mortgage company where people found out they were laid off because they couldn't log in to their fucking laptops?
It is kind of funny, from the other side of the pond, that as soon as lay offs start, the loose labour protection laws in the US seem to be less cool. I remeber when people complained that the long notice peruods in Europe as such a pain for start-ups and employees alike. See how the perspective changes when your own paycheck is on the line.
Next time you leave a job, look closer at the COBRA documents for what it would cost to continue the healthcare. Thankfully, you can roll the dice and opt-in retroactively for a month or so.
As some one in the US, I'd rather have the EU safety nets compared to the US unemployment rate.
On the other, other hand, as a European, your kids don't have to go through active shooter training at or fear to be killed there.
One thing people, and it seems this is a problem among the higher paid HN espcially but not exclusively, is tgat money is not everything. And comparing life quality based on how much money someone has is quite frankly pretty sad. And something the truely rich couldn't care less about.
Oh, and I forgot, us poor underpaid Europeans tend not to have student debt in any shape or form. Also something to consider.
Most large companies that do layoffs give over a month of notice+severance. Perhaps they're not required to, but to be given less than a 2 week heads up with no severance is pretty rare.
How large? I don't think Allstate does this and they're Fortune 100. There were layoffs/a reorg back in 2018 in at least Allstate Benefits division but I don't think anyone got severance. I think everyone with more than X years of service was automatically not considered for severance. I know there are many former coworkers who are still there who certainly aren't still there because of their talent. Age is the only factor that comes to mind.
I don’t think rescinded offers are very common, certainly not as a percentage of job changes. While you are entitled to not give notice doing so puts your managers and coworkers in a bit of a lurch. This accumulates ill will that offsets all the work you did to generate good will. As your career advances your best way to find a good job is through your network of past managers and coworkers. Burning through your goodwill as some sort of social protest against the state of tech employment is certainly an option, but it’ll hinder your chances of getting greater roles of higher trust based on your reputation vs cold applying into places that don’t know you.
As a manager I’ve always asked people to go home immediately throughout my orgs, though. I appreciate when people offer notice and I’ll pay them for a period to be available if we need it, but ultimately:
* a dead body stinking up the team doesn’t help
* if you need someone for two weeks to transition work, you aren’t managing your teams well to begin with. Everyone should be important but no one should be indispensable.
I have certainly done that in my career, but it was more because I couldn’t stand to stay there a minute longer. The right answer is to ask if it’s ok. Yes it’s asymmetric and in that sense unfair, but it’s important to realize your manager and your coworkers don’t decide to lay you off without notice. But if you walk away without notice, they’re the ones who feel burned. The layers of management that decide layoff policy don’t even notice when you quit and how you quit.
If you're in a role that is even remotely security sensitive, including having any kind of direct communication with clients, odds are also pretty high that they'll just accept your resignation immediately and not have you work out the two weeks.
It's more or less the same reason they typically don't give notice to people in those roles when they're getting laid off and just surprise them with it out of the blue. There's slightly less risk you'll say or do something harmful when you're the one who chose to leave (and if they have half a brain, they should realize you could already have done whatever you were going to do in the previous two weeks too), but it happens a lot.
> If you're in a role that is even remotely security sensitive, including having any kind of direct communication with clients, odds are also pretty high that they'll just accept your resignation immediately and not have you work out the two weeks.
Not my experience at all, from many high-level roles with access to everything. I've always stayed at least 2-3 weeks for a clean transition.
My point isn't about me, it's to say this is the norm. In well over 20 years of a career, I've also seen a lot of coworkers resign and not even once have any of them been kicked out the same day.
I am coming around to this line if thinking much more lately. Especially if you work at a big company in a fungible role. The power imbalance is such that it costs the company essentially 0% of their assets to abruptly terminate you, but for most people it would start a countdown to financial ruin measured in weeks to months. The only snag is that I would feel remorseful for the former coworkers I would be saddling with undue additional workload.
There’s another risk you’re not accounting for: Reputational damage.
The professional world is smaller than you think. A few years from now you may want a job with someone who works with someone who knows your old boss. They’ll ask for a reference because it’s so easy to find these connections in the era of LinkedIn. When someone leaves a company without notice, that tends to become the thing they’re remembered by. And it’s not a good look.
The risk of a rescinded offer is vanishingly small. Choosing to optimize to avoid that tiny risk in exchange for a near guarantee of damaging your reputation is not a good trade.
I'm not sure that's really an issue in the era of remote work. The word on the street is that it's hard to find a SWE job these days. There's also a lot of talk about RTO (return to office). The two are not necessarily correlated industry-wide, though it may appear that way. If it's really that it's hard to find a SWE job, remote or no, then I wouldn't worry about professional reputation. I'm not sure that you can make an impact/gain real seniority without both impressing and pissing off people.
I think he meant if he leaves, his coworkers would have to take on his tasks. That’s why I like sprint based development - if my boss wants me to do something unplanned, he has to remove something planned first.
Yeah, after almost a decade of “agile” I’ve never seen this to be the case other than when I was super green. Usually, everything’s high priority and it needs to be delivered by day XYZ/ASAP regardless of sprint alignment or milestones.
My boss and I plan tasks at the start of each sprint, and once the tasks are chosen the only way to add a more is to remove something from the sprint. Asking more output from me than what was agreed upon would be similar to me asking my boss for more money. In both cases it’s perfectly reasonable to refuse the request (unless I underperform or am underpaid), and if either side is not satisfied, part ways.
Hey, it's an at-will employment place, that goes both ways.
If your company would like that to be different, they have the option to offer you a contract that stipulates notice periods for either side. (And that means you are guaranteed employment during the notice period, IIRC). They chose not to.
So they are ipso facto OK with you leaving without notice.
The employer version is bringing you into a meeting with HR and telling you you've been let go. Sure, sometimes people get severance, but I've never worked anywhere that does that.
This forum is run by moneyed corporate interests. It's part of a startup incubator. Many here are running or starting their own businesses, so it's in their interest to maintain an imbalance of power.
That may be what we see happening more and more in the future. The recommended "give two weeks notice" will be something we stop recommending to young grads (or any other employee for that matter). As employers push in the direction of distrust, the employees must do what's right for them in reaction to this distrust.
I would go the other way: If an offer is rescinded then 3 months of salary is to be paid.
For going back to your employer I think if you have a good relationship and the position is not filling it should be a nobrainer.
I am in touch with my former coworkers and some managers. Over my work career sometimes i followed them, sometimes they follow me. I may not have loyalty to the company, but i have loyalty to my team.
This! I am putting my job, as in the thing I was hired to do and achieve first (sometimes at the expense on my relationships with other people, as this turned out to be not helpfull, who'd have thought, I try to not do that as much anymore) as long as I am supposed to do said job. I am loyal to my team, as long as long as we do that job together. Both things stop if the job is no longer a thing. But then there is a core group of people I worked with, that forms a team sorts that extends across jobs, companies and even industries.
The moment I realize I cannot be loyal to my team anymore, and there are different eeasons for this, it is time to step back and think about what to do next.
It’s rarely about companies, and often about people. That manager you pissed off by not giving any notice may talk trash about you in backchannel reference checks; or maybe you want to keep the relationship going to leave the door open for future employment opportunities; the industry is small and many people bump into one another more than once in their careers.
> That manager you pissed off by not giving any notice may talk trash about you in backchannel reference checks
This is potentially illegal. Look up "tortious interference".
> or maybe you want to keep the relationship going to leave the door open for future employment opportunities
In my experience, my boss is usually pissed about me leaving anyway, even with 2-week notice. And then they try to backfill my position ASAP anyway.
> the industry is small and many people bump into one another more than once in their careers.
I switched into tech from a very small industry. Tech is huge in contrast to a lot of other industries. And people bumping into each other has a smaller affect than interviewing for better job.
Illegal maybe depending on your jurisdiction but it’s something that happens more often than you think.
I am not here to convince you to give notice, but only stating the reasons people do give a courtesy notice. As always there are people who don’t see the need to observe certain courtesies, but they are the exception not the norm.
I have gone back to a previous employer once. Got separated/divorced shortly after changing jobs so just needed to go back to a place where I already had a support structure built.
At any rate, you're not just burning bridges with companies, you're burning bridges with people. Your team mates are the ones who get royally fucked over when you leave with no noticee and (therefore) no handover. They're also the ones who have the choice to invite you along for the ride when they land roles in cool new companies, or to block you if/when you apply to those companies.
I have worked in tech for 20+ years and have never held it against people who left with no notice. I still provide a positive reference or bring them with to new orgs, as long as they’re competent and decent people. No one owes notice.
I only don’t provide positive references or don’t bring with shitty people, even if you’re exceptional talent.
I've never gone back to a company I've left before, but more than once I've gone back to working for someone I reported to before, at a different company.
The analogy is flawed, because the "old bridges" can move and wind up along your path forward.
But I have worked for a previous manager again. He left the original company too, but set up contracting as an outside consultant to the software we built. He'd hire me to do some of the work as needed. Great gig for him, not bad for me.
That's not that rare of a setup if you're working on large B2B software packages.
People do go back to old employers. I've had old employers reach out trying to hire me back.
The most important point though is that it's people, not companies. Those people will move around to other companies and you want them to try to hire you again.
It's not uncommon to leave a company A go work for company B and a few years later go work for company C hired by a former colleague you met at company A, who perhaps now has some important role there.
That's favourable for both parts. Your former colleague that hires you knows you and your qualities. And it's also good for you because you have some edge in the negotiations because you know you have a strong sponsor.
There is always an upside of being a good colleague with the largest amount of people. That increases the chances you're finding yourself in this favourable networking situation. And it also makes life better for everybody involved when it doesnt
As someone who’s gone out of their way to give three weeks’ notice, I’m not one to test the limits- though I’ve realized extra time given is hardly appreciated. But I’m not about to condemn others for taking risks against an uncaring corporate structure.
Yes, I'm from the US. Despite many of the comments here stating the contrary, I've been working in large tech companies for 30 years, and almost every termination has been an immediate walk out, severance or not. At one of the companies which I won't name, they didn't even let people go to their desks to get their personal items.
[I have no idea] why we had over 200 open roles are on our web site.
I do always find it odd when a not-megacorp company has dozens of open positions for various departments. Surely they can’t actually be hiring for these jobs simultaneously, and it’s just a hiring strategy to attract talent that might otherwise not be aware the company exists?
In my experience at smaller companies, often times you are open to candidates of multiple experience levels or backgrounds filling a role, but if you don't advertise for very specific roles, people are confused and don't apply.
e.g. if your hiring manager says "If we could get someone on our team to cover either some of the devops or some of the backend dev, our one 5-year-tenured person on the team who is doing both could focus on the other." Now you've posted two roles for one opening; devops engineer and server software developer.
> if you don't advertise for very specific roles, people are confused and don't apply.
As a candidate I have the opposite experience with companies that advertise a long list of roles, like Flexport's "200 open roles".
If I see a company with a large number of slightly different roles, for example each specialising in one of the company's numerous obscure products, or some slightly diferent aspect of the process, I have no idea which one(s) to apply for and I end up skipping that company entirely, even if I like the company.
Red Hat is like this. Before the IBM acquisition I was interested in working there but I couldn't figure out what to do with the enormous list of product-specific ad activitiy-specific roles I could theoretically apply for. A recruiter was unable to help; they just wanted to know which ones interested me. Well, about 50 of the roles look interesting and suitable, but... so I didn't apply.
> Well, about 50 of the roles look interesting and suitable, but... so I didn't apply.
While different places do things differently - the role you apply for isn’t necessarily the role you are hired into.
Once upon a time, I was asked to do a tech interview for a candidate. I was told we’d already decided to hire him - the purpose of my interview was just to give management feedback on which of two different roles he’d be better suited for.
> I have no idea which one(s) to apply for and I end up skipping that company entirely, even if I like the company.
If you get overwhelmed by choice and prefer when companies are small enough that you don’t have to make choices like this, working for a big company probably isn’t for you anyway.
If you want a heuristic to overcome this decision paralysis, pick the first one that looks remotely interesting. Apply for it. Applying for something is better than applying for nothing, for obvious reasons.
I suppose, but I've recently had this issue applying to things with a large company. There were at least 20 open positions that fit my skillset, many of which seemed to be literally the same role on different teams. They made me apply to all of them individually, and didn't save any of my info, and some teams required cover letters and other info that other teams didn't.
I gave up after 4 of them. A month later, I've heard nothing back on any of those.
Thanks, I see how that's good advice for someone who wants to proceed with an application and feels stuck.
But personally I have no real problem making choices or decisions, quickly if necessary. I understand the usefulness of making decisions when there's no particular reason to favour one or other.
It is more that the ocean of slight title variations, especially when there are lots of obscure products I've mostly never heard of or obscure departmental processes, make the roles (and the products I'd be working on) seem narrow, tedious and overly corporate. They make the jobs and the company feel offputting for me.
I also want more of my skills and knowledge to be useful and used, so roles that seem like they're designed to only do one thing in a narrow skilll area, perhaps to appeal to people who think they only have one skill area, are offputting. (Note to ad writers: Long lists of tech skills and products does not help with this. Showing variety of things the employee could work on if they want to does.)
Feelings and impressions are part of my heuristic for deciding which companies I find interesting enough to invest my time and energy in.
I don't agree that applying for something is better than nothing. It certainly isn't obviously better.
Some people take the "apply to hundreds of roles" approach to job applications. I'm the opposite (so far; it could happen).
I'm very selective, and apply research and intuition before proceeding with any potential role or equivalent. Impressions from job ads or other materials, including the company's website and reputation, how they present, what they make, who their customers are, and their attitude towards open source, IP and personal side projects, are an important part of that.
That's feedback I'd like to give to any would-be employers and hiring ad writers who are thinking they need to list hundreds of variations of roles to attract candidates, perhaps thinking candidates are combing through for narrow matches. It's going to put off some candidates.
(In the last 20 years I've also found the best jobs have been ones where I didn't end up sending a CV or résumé, but a recruiter hooked me up with a company without one, or by knowing a person who is in a position to hire. Due to that I now see "if interested send your CV/résumé", or an online application form, as a red flag suggesting a worse job, though I wouldn't assume that it is; it's just a signal. But that's another story.)
I believe that people who are accustomed to this size of company, do in fact write out two dozen+ applications, each altered for the role that is listed, with BLOCK LETTER Position Identifier and Very Corporate personnel photo on each and every one. Despite the stupid amount of time it takes to do this, if you do not do this you will get zero jobs. ps- not me
Is there going to be anyone accountable over this? Ryan doesn’t say and most likely the HR/recruiting under his reporting chain will stay unharmed.
It’s amazing how absolutely dry these apologies come out. Everytime a layoff notice comes in there is this usual script. I am yet to see anyone taking meaningful responsibility over it such as CEO paycut or bonus withdrawals.
I think “take responsibility for fucking up the lives of a whole bunch of people, because he didn’t agree with the hiring strategy of the CEO he dumped” is the angle here.
That fine specimen of humanity goes on to say, in the same breath “we are fine, we have money” so clearly they were not pushing bankruptcy, and would have been in a position to help out those they screwed over so brutally.
I’m making it my mission to figure out the combined business interests of their board and c-suite, and make sure that I’ll not use those products if at all possible.
Why would a CEO take a pay cut, his job, approved by the owners, is literally to unload the burden and fire the fat. He would have to lose money if he didnt... a CEO responsibility is first to owners, second to client, third to employees who are resources, like the machines they bought and are compensated monthly for their time.
Some companies have a policy of hiring good people, even if they're not a close march for an open position; and of not hiring weak candidates, even if the hiring manager is desperate. That is, they hire good people when they come available, and never knowingly hire bad people. Hiring for a specific vacancy is silly - good people are adaptable.
So I think that's a great policy, if you have enough money to cover the periods when good staff are cheap and available, and your vacancy list is short. You don't have to fire the dross, because you don't ever hire dross.
Some companies have a policy of hiring good people, even if they're not a close march for an open position; and of not hiring weak candidates, even if the hiring manager is desperate. That is, they hire good people when they come available, and never knowingly hire bad people.
How is this at all different from how literally every hiring manager in the world thinks of themselves? Literally no one is going to wake up in the morning and think "wow, I'm OK with whiffing on a candidate for my team."
It’s different because some firms will choose someone who is just good enough over someone who is super talented if the former has domain knowledge and the latter doesn’t. It’s all about how adaptable you think people are.
If you need a database developer and some junior person who has a couple of indistinguished but relevant jobs on their resume shows up, do you take them over the person who has no database development at all but a decade of lisp with some very high powered firms?
Some firms will choose the latter because they believe highly talented people can adapt. Some don’t.
Plenty of companies will send your application right into the trash heap if your skills/experience aren't a close match (regardless of whether the required skills are trivial to learn)
Welcome to real life where you do not set your own budget. The reality is choosing someone who you feel can do a good enough job to make it worth your time, rather than just doing it yourself.
> How is this at all different from how literally every hiring manager in the world thinks of themselves? Literally no one is going to wake up in the morning and think "wow, I'm OK with whiffing on a candidate for my team."
For some companies the job is "maintain the team at X people, so when we're below that hire the best people we can find in a reasonable time, and when we're above that we close hiring".
I see a lot of this in consulting. A client will say they need skills A, B, and C. We know that X, Y and Z are skills that we see paying dividends in consultants over the long term. But we hire the A, B, C developer because that's specifically what the immediate project demands for rather than what is a good fit for our consulting practice over time. Trying to place those folks after their initial engagement is a lot of work and leads to higher turnover as a result.
Sometimes they get enough of a pool to choose from in a short amount of time, so it doesn't make sense to leave it open for longer. I prefer companies delist it rather than leave it up and simply ignore further applications.
Well, I know of a few big tech companies on the east coast do this so that they can attract higher-level devs and then say after the super-long interview process "sorry, you're actually a mid-level dev" or even try and convince them they are a junior.
It's a way to get around salary disclosure laws, as well.
What makes it easier to sell VCs on your company’s exponential growth story: a website with dozens of openings posted, or a website with none? I think that’s your answer.
The frequency that I've seen companies open positions that don't actually exist to "fill the hiring pipeline" is gross. Recruiters and those that lead them should be ashamed of this, and yet I see it all the time.
The way the job postings are abused around here is a bit of a joke, there’s another company who has been hiring their third employee for over a year now, either they have someone and are lying as their first interaction with people or they can’t hire people or maybe they keep firing employee number 3 before they get any shares.
Who knows which one it is but I wouldn’t want to work with people like this. An easy solution is just let people comment on job listings, it will soon prevent abuse and allow people to get clarification and learn more about the work environment.
This rang a bell, so I went for searching. Said company is Meticulous [0]. Their most recent job post was on 2023-08-27. Their oldest job post that I could find was on 2022-06-07 [2].
It’s a “perk” of Ycombinator investment. From what I understand the exposure is supposed to be the same, probably to help boost early stage companies.
I’ve wanted to comment on job listings many times, but it’s part of the deal of being on HN. This isn’t just here for fun, it’s here to promote Ycombinator and further their goals.
I do wish those posts allowed commenting. Would love to get clarification on the kind of role being offered, and see discussion around the company itself. Without that, they feel like an ad and draw similar amounts of interactions from me by default.
They don’t just feel like an ad, they are an ad. You might not interact with ads (I’m usually similar), but they may still get enough interaction to be worth it to YC.
> But no way around it, we have had a hiring freeze for months I have no ideas why more than 75 people were signed to join.
News reporting (not the protagonist's Tweet) hints at a more plausible explanation than a hiring freeze that was somehow being ignored by everyone involved -- that the person Tweeting is just reneging as part of aggressive moves:
> Two days after returning to run Flexport, founder Ryan Petersen said Friday that his logistics company will rescind 55 offer letters and look to lease out office space across the U.S. as it tries to get its “house in order.”
They also oversubscribed office space and are actively working to get out of signed leases, or to sublease where that’s not possible, according to a friend over there. Morale is a bit low at the moment with the CEO being ousted, office space being given up, offers rescinded, and RIFs in the horizon.
Flexport and Smarking are the two most spammy companies I have seen here on HN. Almost every couple of weeks you see their job opening post on the HN front page. Going on for years now. Just saw one from this very company a couple of weeks back.
“I found out last week that we had 200 open roles and had signed 75 offers. Upon learning this, I fired the CEO. I regret that I now have to be the one to deliver the bad news.”
Presumably so, as down-thread, he states that they were overconfident in their growth. (Most of the time) the CEO knows that if the business can't deliver, it will be their head on the chopping block.
I find it very interesting how he (Ryan Petersen) bragged about Flexport having $1B in cash [2] but now implies that things are tight so they cannot pay any form of severance[1].
Don’t let the SV propaganda fool you. The implicit contract betweeen white collar workers and employers has been gone for quite some time. Employees should always prioritize what is best for them.
It also just occurred to me that _he was on the board signing off on the equity grants_. So it is insane that he says he has no idea how this happened and later backtracks and says they were aligned on a growth plan that didn’t pan out. The rule that company CEO tweets a ton == poorly managed company never ceases to fail.
How does equity grants at flexport work? In all my jobs, there is a number on the offer letter, but the actual sign off happens only at the first board meeting post starting date/
This is true, even somewhat well run management will share the projected plan with the board and get their buy in. The board resolution approving it formally is typically on first board meeting after the employee joins.
It is possible for management with poor relationship with the board and ex-CEO/Founder and issued offer letters without board consent or awareness.
Approval may not be necessary depending on how the options are structured, for example phantom stock plans wouldn't need board approval per se since no actual stock ( or option for it) is issued.
Elon Musk tweets a lot and Tesla has the best electric car batteries in terms of mile range, and the reusuable rockets at SpaceX are managed pretty well
> and the reusuable rockets at SpaceX are managed pretty well
My understanding from talking to multiple people at SpaceX is that Elon isn't really involved there. He shows up and says "do stuff" and they say "yes Elon" and then just do what they were doing anyway.
Besides, it seems like most of his focus is on Twitter these days, which is clearly circling the drain.
Yeah this is quite ridiculous. Even at very high salaries (no one makes these at Flexport, FYI) you're talking about a few million dollars to make this right (2 months severance).
Anecdata: Spouse was let go from Salesforce in the January round of layoffs, after 2 years there. She received 6 months salary, was allowed to keep RSUs that would have vested within 90 days (which amounted to another ~2 months salary), and the company paid for COBRA for her and family for 6 months.
That was very generous, but it's not at all unheard of. There are people who were on her team who got more than 12 months. They had been there quite a bit longer.
I’ve been on the company’s side of a few RIFs lately, it’s not fun for anyone, and clearly worse for the employees. But even for brand new employees we do at least a month’s severance + health care etc. For many, it’s 90+ days. Unless your company is at urgent risk of bankruptcy, just be a normal human and spend the few extra dollars so a bad day is a as good as possible.
Afaik, all employees are entitled to COBRA - in my experience, when it’s mentioned as a severance benefit, the company is paying the employee’s portion of that expense (it’s what all the companies I’ve been involved with have provided) and the remainder of the severance is in addition to that.
That sounds like a decent severance. I’ve only ever been offered COBRA at my own expense which is the full rate of the insurance including the part the company normally chips in.
I had always heard the default to be "a month per year of service," so paying nothing to people who hadn't started is definitely crappy for the people who had probably put in notice elsewhere (who are now, for unemployment insurance purposes, considered to have voluntarily quit their last job), but it doesn't really surprise me.
I never said it was the norm, but I would think it would be a good sign here if they gave two months. I suspect they will give something like two weeks when this shakes out.
75 offers at 200k is 15 million for a year (and I doubt all were that high). This is a drop in the bucket for a company with that much cash. This action also severely damages their reputation: good luck hiring in tbe future, and good luck getting futute investors or business when you've given the impression the ship is sinking.
https://archive.is/RAWQp - "Flexport has $1B in net cash. But we're far from profitable right now and will be laser focused on profitable growth from now on."
There used to be this idea of loyalty between companies and employees, with people staying one company for years, and sometimes their entire lives, and pensions given for retirement, and extreme circumstances needed to be fired. This has been gone for decades, but corporations have held on to the illusion as long as they could to coerce employees to work against their own interests. Most smart people now act as hired guns now and recognize that it's all business and contractual obligations, and only act in their own interest.
This has not been true since the 1980s. Note that even before that, it was a fairy tale because no one can foresee the future, and when things get bad, even loyal employees have to go because there is no money to pay them (if companies kept them, they would run out of money and go bankrupt).
This is still the thing today for many people in trades. I know at least a handful of people who have been at their company for 10+ years, including my father, who works in the trades. Not an unheard of thing - tech is just immature, I think, and they have a lot of immature leadership, unfortunately.
Awful look for this company. Imagine international students /H1B holders who turned down other offers to join Flexport, and now may not have enough time to get another offer before needing to permanently leave in 60 days.
Or, imagine smart, young Americans trying to make a living in a high cost of living area like the Bay Area, having their life FUBAR'd by a selfish exec. Most likely as they just told their previous employer that they're leaving that company.
I assume Dave Clark had a generous exit package. He should waive that compensation, and since these 75 fires are apparently his mistake, that money should be used to compensate them.
I assume Dave Clark is the former CEO. Why should he pay? What if he thought that they needed these roles? What if the new CEO disagrees and they both have valid points? At this point, the new CEO (who is also the founder) has to take responsibility for his decision.
He was recently replaced (ie, strongly encouraged to resign), ostensibly for poor performance of the company. It's all about accountability related to his leadership, including hiring decisions.
Dave Clark either resigned, was pushed out or was fired. It's hard to see how he did not suffer consequences or was not held accountable.
Also, you need to establish that Dave Clark performed poorly and should have known the company could not afford these jobs.
We cannot prove he performed poorly because we do not have enough information. Claiming he performed poorly because he left/was fired does not work because lots of people are unjustly fired. Even if the firing was in some ways justified, it is very possible that this is not a black and white situation. It could be he had a vision, executed on his vision, did a good job delivering it, and then the board and founder decided they did not like it. This does not mean his vision would have failed. It just means the board and founder thought getting rid of Dave Clark and taking a different course would probably lead to a better outcome.
Your basic argument does not work because you assume Dave Clark deserved to get fired and that he somehow knew these 75 offers were bad for the company. You do not prove this.
My guess is Dave Clark did his best, thought he was taking the company in the right direction, and was let go because the board and founder disagreed. I do not think punishing him is justified because it is not clear he did anything wrong.
The tweet says they are not offering compensation but I hope the victims of this are not simply adopting the company's unilateral stance on that. Everyone who was harmed by these rescinded offers (because they quit their other job, moved, sold their house, etc) should at a minimum brandish a promissory estoppel claim and see how much money Flexport coughs up to settle it.
For international students another trick I've seen from companies is moving the starting date by 5 or 6 months. On F1 visa you only get a set amount of unemployment days (90 days if I remember it right) after which you have to leave the country
So those students have to get some job for the time being, work there till it's time to quit and then join "BigCorp". Not many are going to do this since it's too risky, especially now. This is if "BigCorp" is still ready to accept them. I personally know two people who got their joining dates pushed back by 6 months
This is a shitty situation to be in for people who maybe quit their jobs to join, but it's refreshing to see honest and clear communication like this and not a corporate blog post.
Refreshing, like in "somebody else made a mistake, not my fault, I was in the bathroom refreshing myself at the time"?
It is quite funny to see how communication is measured on the same scale used for the action, in this case letting go, even before they started, a sizable number of people. But it is the same for politicians, right?
"See, they are such great orators, a moving speech like I have rarely heard!", we often read or hear.
The problem is that the tweet took 10 minutes, while many, those whose offer was rescinded, must now to work for days, weeks or months to unravel the giant cluster-f that somebody--not the current orator, the one before, even if the current one is the founder and sits on the board--has deployed.
Would be a lot more refreshing if Flexport gave some compensation to those affected. If not, the only real difference from a corporate blog post is in style of communication but not in substance.
He's literally throwing previous guy (no matter what is the opinion about previous guy) under the bus, there is nothing honest about it.
It was (most likely) not the previous CEO who personally decided to hire 75 people, and silently made them offers.
And saying that "we had hiring freeze for months" but in next tweet "I've been CEO only for 18 hours". Isn't that CEO job to decide if hiring/firing needs to be done? Who was in charge of the company then? You, but not in the title?
A friend of mine, ex-IT, is now a Physician Assistant. He was an Alaska native, living outside Seattle. He had been doing a lot of contract work at a large Urgent Care in Alaska, and talked about it with his family.
They talked about making him full-time. Negotiated an offer, relocation package, etc., all good. He set about selling his home, finding his kids new schools, etc. And then about a week before his start date, he got a phone call.
"The clinic has been sold to new owners. They are reviewing finances and rescinded any job offers, including yours. They will allow you 30 days to repay your relocation assistance."
Oh hell no. He lawyered up. He'd sold his home. Wrapped up his, and his family's life. Had an offer and a contract.
He didn't end up repaying his relocation assistance. And his "new" "employer" ended up paying three months salary and the closing costs on his house for the inconvenience.
> What I'm trying to understand is do companies not think these actions will limit their ability to hire in the future?
Running out of money or going out of business also limits your ability to hire in the future.
First responders sometimes apply tourniquets and emergency trauma surgeons sometimes amputate critically injured limbs, even knowing that those have potential or certain downsides for the future of the patient, but aid in survival.
Companies in critical condition or facing threats to their survival may logically do the same thing. If you agree with that, it seems not too far a leap to conclude that taking these same actions while merely under a more moderate threat and wishing to avoid entering a critical condition may also make sense.
This…doesn’t make it better as far as trust in the company goes. Weakness in the business model is one thing. Having a total existential threat to the company that emerges so quickly that it could not be foreseen before sending out a whole whack of signed offer letters — even if real and legitimate — can only mean extremely terrible mismanagement.
What you have to remember is there are no guarantees in the world. No one wants to tell 75 people their job offers were rescinded. The problem is Flexport thinks this is better than the alternatives. Sometimes, you do not have good options. You just have bad and worse.
I think the lesson we can all learn from this is SAVE MONEY, and assume bad things will happen.
In this case, the offers are being rescinded by the CEO who is stepping in to replace the recently dismissed CEO, indicating that the board and new CEO agrees that there was mismanagement previously.
I 100% agree with you and the ability to scale workforce up and down is a key factor in market competitiveness. But offer rescinding is equivalent of a first responder taking off your tourniquet and simply refusing to put another on, leaving you to bleed out. If you can't afford another tourniquet maybe don't take off the one that's holding things together.
IMO hiring be done with a more medium term (6-12 months) mentality based on available runway, and sending out an offer and then rescinding on it usually is a symptom of bad organization where department heads are hiring without CFO buy-in. Maybe just freeze hiring and do layoffs when runway goes below certain level?
But we're not even close to those conditions, are we?
The economy is growing more slowly than in the past, but it's still growing, companies everywhere are issuing stock buybacks and acquiring other companies, regulators are rushing to get out of the way, new tech on the horizon shows incredible promise, consumers are - for the most part - continuing to buy/lease/rent new products regardless of EULAs and subscriptions that are enormously profitable, P/E ratios are stratospheric...it would seem like outlooks have scarcely ever been better for employers.
Focusing on Flexport here, this is a the founder and former CEO taking over again after he clearly announced his disagreement with the outgoing CEO (whom founder installed).
I think it's fine to want to turn the ship around if you think it's going in the wrong direction, or if you think the current course will lead you directly into a storm.
These offered candidates would instead be in danger of layoffs in weeks or months if their offers hadn't been rescinded, so why kick that can down the road? Maybe the new CEO is already planning a round of layoffs for existing employees, so again, why wait?
edit: I missed that Ryan is offering no compensation to the people having their offers rescinded. That is unethical.
Because layoff protections/benefits are often better than people quitting their jobs?
Every single one of these rescinded offers _is_ a layoff , just one that is extremely hostile to the worker.
Frankly, this should be illegal or at least cause for civil restitution. It shows immense hostility by management of flexport and every potential future hire should not give them the time of day indefinitely.
At the very least HN ought to stop running their hiring posts.
Each of those indicators can also be seen as signs of trouble.
Stock buybacks -- indication that investing in business is seen as having lower, maybe even zero or negative, ROI
Acquisitions -- again, natural growth of company less favorable than consolidation. Which could mean that market isn't growing.
Regulators -- I don't know that this claim is well-supported across the board. Would seem to need to be quantified in a very case-by-case basis. There certainly are industries that are examples of the opposite.
New tech on the horizon doesn't generate income today and no one knows for sure exactly which tech to invest in now
Consumers are already cutting spending and about to hit a debt wall later this year; COVID stimulus is pretty much all spent
P/E ratios is a sign, perhaps, that people don't have other places to put there money
Not saying my interpretations are correct, just that there are other sides to your indicators.
They run international shipping logistics so maybe something macro looms large.
Economic disruption in China would be the macro thing. They have real estate issues and large youth unemployment apparently.
More likely they are looking towards an IPO, the market for which is about to reopen if we don’t have any major economic disruptions before instacart and arm list. CNBC squawk box and Cramer talk about flexport a lot so Monday will be interesting if they cover it. It’s already on the general cnbc website.
If I were in Peterson’s shoes I’d get on that show early next week for damage control.
Two out of three of the things listed are akin to the analogy used. RTO isn't (except to the extent that it's being used a shitty way to drive voluntary attrition, but I think those cases are far more rare than merely being accepted as a negative side-effect).
Yeah, I just went through two onsites with Kensho (for two different teams). After the first onsite, I asked them if their compensation range would be competitive with another offer I already received and the recruiter told me "they are very similar." I spent another 6 hours doing the second onsite only to be told that their best offer is 35% lower due to "budget cuts." Needless to say I'll never be interviewing with them again because they've shown they don't respect my (or their interviewer's) time.
I don't understand the motivation behind lying to you in cases like this. Did they honestly expect you to accept their low-ball offer? They most know they're wasting everyone's time.
In the current market, there are a lot of people starting out their search looking to make X, and 1-2 months into the search they realize the only immediately available opportunities are "X - 25%".
In those situations, it's not always a waste of everyone's time. Some candidates (not all, to be clear) start out the job search process with salary expectations that are very unlikely to be easily met compared to 2-3 years ago.
The recruiter in the scenario above was probably hoping the candidate's salary expectations would settle down toward the lower end of the spectrum (which clearly didn't work out for anyone in the specific example above, but it works often enough for it to be a not uncommon practice)
Edit: To be clear, I think it's pretty lame to mislead candidates and I don't advocate for this strategy. But it happens. When I personally interview someone who has salary expectations higher than we're willing to pay, I tell them upfront on the first 30 minute screen call and simply tell them to reach out again if their circumstances change. (They often end up reaching out a month later)
It may look good in recruiter's papers. I.e. it looks like he did his job just right, but the candidate was dissatisfied with the package at the end. What can he do about it?
I am sorry this happened to you. There is not much to say other than I am glad you found out they could not keep their word (and may have been unethical) before you accepted an offer.
>- Forcing employees who were hired as remote employees to relocate for RTO
And that is why when I was recently looking for (contract) work I insisted to have "work from home" out in my contract. Despite looking for wfh from the beginning and multiple verbal and email assurances when it came to sign the contract I got one that said "office based". Of course I said I'm not signing. A week of "but we have a standard contract", "but we can't change it" ensued. Eventually they did change it.
I recommend persevering to anyone else in similar situation (if you have other offers of course).
Employer went remote. After a while they decided we’d stay that way. At contract negotiation time I told them I wanted my contract amended to specify that the role was remote with no expectation of any time in the office. They wouldn’t because who knows what the future holds.
Well, I knew what I wanted my future to hold and it wasn’t compatible with anything but full remote.
Found a remote role with a company that already had its employees spread across like 6 states and three countries. My contract, without asking, said the role was remote with no time in office. Regardless, I wouldn’t see them demanding RTO any time soon—whatever location they picked they’d be losing probably 2/3 of their staff, or paying to open tiny one-person offices all over the place.
In hiring others, so many people I talk to spend a lot of time in the initial call asking about the remote thing. They’ve clearly had the rug pulled out from under them before.
I’ve had a few people now bail partway through the process because they got a great offer from some other company only to come back a week later asking if we can pick back up because it was a bait-and-switch and the final contract specified hybrid or fully in-office.
I just don’t even understand the thought process behind that from the employers… like, do you really think you’ll get to the offer stage and the person will go “Well, I really wanted remote and they lied to my face, but hey one in the hand I guess I’ll start planning a move halfway across the country. shrug”.
Any company that claims they can’t amend a contract is full of shit. That’s literally how business operates - they negotiate and change contracts all day long.
There are caveats, however. Making exceptions for employees can raise alarms in HR compliance. If an employee in a protected class has asked for the same, but perhaps cannot be granted the same terms, it could create liability.
Larger companies really, really don't like having terms vary across their non-executive level employees. And, arguably, for good reason.
This is good advice for contract workers, but is not applicable for the vast majority of "at will" W-2 employees in the US, where terms of employment can be amended ... at will.
It does help you when you have to talk to the unemployment claim adjudicator and the employer tries to claim you quit.
If you can say, "They made a huge change to the terms of my employment. See? Right here, when they hired me, it said 100% remote role," then they're still on the hook for the charge even though you "voluntarily" quit.
(Source: Spent a couple years adjudicating UI claims early in my career.)
I would look at it more like both sides are players. Playas gonna play. The girl plays, the guy plays.
Omar: All in the game
It's not like devs aren't gonna jump ship when the cycle shifts back in the other direction.
Edit:
RTO is a hill I think devs should be prepared to die on. If every dev is not ready to fight for Remote, don't be shocked when it's not even an option as the years go by. Covid gave us a gift, and it's precious. We have to fight to keep it.
> If every dev is not ready to fight for Remote...We have to fight to keep it...Remote or Die.
I had devs quit because we went remote. I have other devs still here but expressing a clear preference for more of an in-office experience.
Not everyone has the same preferences and not every dev wants to work remotely. We shouldn't be surprised when those differences of opinion play out in the remote vs hybrid vs in-office spectrum.
I always hear of this legion of office lovers but when you ask for actual number splits it ends up perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly being that the vast majority of people want 100% remote. All you office people can go work together then, don’t make it miserable for the rest of us
> I always hear of this legion of office lovers but when you ask for actual number splits it ends up perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly being that the vast majority of people want 100% remote. All you office people can go work together then, don’t make it miserable for the rest of us
A comment like this making claims about what happens when you see actual numbers should link to some actual numbers...
Anecdotally, my social circle is increasingly preferring hybrid, which loses one of the most-frequently-touted benefits of remote (make your home wherever you want, even potentially super cheap real estate). IMO remote will likely hang on at bigger, cog-in-assembly-line type information jobs, but some sort of frequent in-person meetups will be hugely valuable for high-ambiguity/collaboration/creative work. For me the difference between "0 days in the office and nobody within a hundred miles" for three years and now "1 day in the office a week" has been huge, productivity-wise.
Note that this is Forbes, who is probably going to be biased towards in office work so the actual numbers from an unbiased source would probably be even more dramatic
> For me the difference between "0 days in the office and nobody within a hundred miles" for three years and now "1 day in the office a week" has been huge, productivity-wise
Why draw such a false dichotomy here? This doesn’t feel like an argument in good faith. The company I work for does onsites twice a year and gives people optionally the budget to meet in person once a quarter beyond that pretty much anywhere they want. I’ve never felt that I needed more than that to do high impact work
It's because they are straight up lying. Like c'mon, you get your OWN PRIVATE BATHROOM when you work from home. The benefits are so obvious, I wonder if the in-office people are legitimate trolls at times.
One reason people like me might prefer working in the office: I don't have a room in my apartment that I can turn into a home office.
(Also, in the home I grew up in, I never had a private bathroom, nor did my parents. What kind of luxurious abode do you live in, and why do you assume that everyone has the same living conditions as you?)
This cardboard box living individual here has such terrible living conditions he longs to breath the air of commercial real estate. Does your bathroom have a stall? No right?
If you rent, your apartment comes with a private bathroom. If you have a roommate, at most one other person shares it with you. That's a pretty private bathroom. You ever been on line to use the bathroom before in the office? Do you think its fun to take a shit with 10 other people in the bathroom with you? lol
Stick a desk in the corner of your apartment and voila, home office.
Decent companies that offer remote will offer to cover the costs of coworking space for people like your use case. The company I work for does. It’s not office as the only alternative
I was happy to go back to the office because working at home is bad for my ability to concentrate, and I also need the personal contact with others. But my particular desk location has not given me noise problems or anything. I also intentionally moved to make my commute a 15-minute walk, because it's better for me to not spend tons of time commuting; I'm aware this isn't a serious option for 99% of people.
I've avoided talking about negative impacts from others' WFH because I don't want to encourage the company to take it away from them.
Also there is a bit of critical mass problem where if you’re something like 50% hybrid or more it suddenly is worse off from a career perspective for WFH people. What I mean by that is that the in office people end up inadvertently getting advantage over people that are remote in meetings, career advancement, etc.
Hybrid is tough to do right to prevent problems like this from happening.
I think the ideal model is 100% remote, cover the costs of a coworking space, do mandatory onsite sat least biannually, give people optionally the resources to meet with each other more often than that, and promote a culture where you meet frequently to collaborate remotely. Like we use Donut app on slack to randomly pair program every week and it works great
Ran a dev team in NZ (which had some brutal lockdowns). I would say it was about 1 in 20 wanted to be at the office. Even to the point of almost twisting our arms on lockdowns to be back in the office. That leaves 19 out of 20 on varying states of happiness being at home. On balance obviously most people prefer to WFH.
The ones that didn't :
- Lonely
- Impossible home environment to work in (noise/kids/distractions/lack of good physical environment)
I reckon it would probably even out in the long term to about 9 out of 10 preferring to WFH.
[edit - should I add I left ~18 months later to start my own SaaS and love WFH, can't imagine ever paying rent on an office again]
The Remote contingent needs to fight harder than the office contingent because the office paradigm has been the dominant paradigm up until now.
In-office work will realistically be seen as a niche when it's all said and done imho. Similar to LAN parties. It's not the way most people want to do things.
Time will tell I guess. But thanks for your anecdote, I hope as time goes on, we begin to see what a niche anecdote it will become.
I’ve just recently encountered a company with a culture that doesn’t interact so well with remote work, and it’s been eye opening. Lots of preference for talking (in person, or call) as soon as a message exchange goes past about two messages, when often what needs to happen is one party needs to go figure out WTF they actually want or are concerned about so they can describe it clearly—the talking doesn’t help, either, just wastes more time. Awful weirdly-restrictive chat room organization, which is shocking considering nearly-leaderless online communities manage to arrange those kinds of things better. Everything important gets posted to one-on-one chats or ephemeral and invisible-to-outsiders small group direct messages. The effect is they’ve accidentally made a bunch of stuff opaque and secret that really, really should not be. It’s poison for collaboration.
I also get the impression some folks here just kinda… aren’t comfortable with written language. Reading or writing it.
It’s so weird to see, but some of the folks who’ve been living this kind of job-life 10+ years, now I get how they think remote can’t possibly be as productive as in-person—but it’s mostly due to dumb mistakes that are also harming collaboration in the office. Most of them have no idea the place is doing things so entirely wrong, or how much better it can be with some simple tweaks.
It is absolutely incredible to me the number of people in professional roles who cannot read and write coherently, even when English is their native language.
I cannot tell you how many meetings I've had where someone told me I "wasn't communicating clearly" and I asked them to read the unclear message back to me so I could understand what would make it clearer for them.
And then I find out they can't read, at least not fluently. They either skip key words altogether or mistake them for other words.
I'm convinced fewer than half of American adults could read a random book out loud, fluidly, without preparation.
Only 12.5% of the population scores in the levels 4 or 5 (they had to group them together because there were so few is my guess). This is a disgrace. There's no reason why every adult should not be able to read proficiently. We are talking about reading, not some obscure skill.
I wonder what these figures would be in Cuba. From what I remember reading, they were much higher because of widespread literacy campaigns.
> Only 12.5% of the population scores in the levels 4 or 5 (they had to group them together because there were so few is my guess)
The reason they did that is called out in endnote 3, "This analysis combines the top two proficiency levels
(Levels 4 and 5), following the OECD’s reporting convention
(OECD 2013), because across all participating countries, no
more than 2 percent of adults reached Level 5."
Most of my experience is in customer-facing roles, and I would argue that reading a customer email chain where they try to describe what is happening, sometimes with pictures, requires level 4 understanding.
You often end up with multiple documents (several emails, pictures, logs). There's often competing information (customers are speculating about what's wrong, but they likely include lots of other information because they don't actually know). And you definitely need background knowledge about the product.
Add in translating that into a bug report for the engineering team? A successful high-level customer support agent needs level 5 reading ability.
But my experience asking questions of my teammates in the company Slack channels tells me very few of them are even actually at level 3.
Okay, so why do you think that will get better in person? Just curious. Why is "lets meet in person" the go to solution? Look, the RTO people are LOUDER. Period.
They will win this fight if the Remote or Die crew doesn't get loud.
I think in-person talking papers over a bunch of dysfunction, in this case, at enormous cost in still-much-worse-than-ideal productivity (plus the overhead of offices). But does let things get done more efficiently than if they tried to take that dysfunction into a heavily-remote environment.
It also, separately, masks it—people working in-person, but hobbled by bad communication patterns, at least look productive.
I’m not claiming this is good, mind you, but that it’s made me understand at least one (I suspect large) segment of the “remote can’t be as good as in-person” side of the argument. If this is how they think “serious business” should or must function, no wonder they’re skeptical of remote work. Meanwhile they’re actually just organizationally bad at communication, in general.
In-office had a long time to evolve (half a century I'd say). Remote work kind of only had the COVID years. It's a baby in an incubator. The RTO stuff is kind of like infanticide. So while I understand your perspective, from a war point of view, we have no choice but to protect this baby. They want to cut this experiment off asap. Every little anecdote, every little corporate RTO plan, every little CEO saying shit, is just chipping away at such an infant life.
Give it the same chance the office bullshit had, which was decades. I kind of have to be militant about this. Thanks for the other side, but this baby gotta be kept alive.
If your team sucks, your team sucks. Doesn't matter if you're in office, or out of office.
I’m on your side. I just think understanding the “enemy” is usually more beneficial than not.
[edit] to explain, I’m using this information to push the organization toward improvements that I can sell without mentioning remote work, but which, if adopted, will surely cause people here to notice a smaller difference between WFH days and in-office days. It may take a while, but this should reduce reluctance to allow long stretches of, or indefinite, remote work.
I don’t think the RTO people are louder, what they are is more powerful. You have a lot of upper management and executives that are RTO people, for whatever reasons that may be. But they hold a lot more power than the ic that like remote.
The LGBTQ community got these people flying rainbow flags. You're telling me the actual IC community can't even get them to respect this platform? Maybe we have some learning to do.
Covid is over, so unless we start fighting better about this, they are absolutely going to chip away at this.
Higher costs of living make relocation and in-office work more restrictive, but that isn't a big concern for remote. Same for the travel burden. It would be very natural to see remote salaries become lower than in-office salaries on convenience, while in-office salaries go up because of that, but that's not really happening.
So while you should choose work for your preferences when you can, you shouldn't let companies gain advantages like under compensating in-office workers. After all, they've already mostly taken away actual offices for individuals.
This fight could be fought on that principle alone.
I recently got ghosted by the management of a multi-national corporation after they made me an offer. Lower level staff trying to bring me in were told by the same people who made the offer that they didn't have the budget. Definitely won't forget that. They are also doing RTO. I don't think this behavior will last. The US economy is overall in very good shape and developers are still money making machines. Right now I'm being contacted by multiple recruiters every day. Other contractors I know are noticing a speedup as well. There are signs of life.
Man, that is tough. (IANAL) Here in Eu(and UK) if you're made an offer and they cancel later after you accepted you would have a good shot at suing them. Especially if you quit your current job or decide not to pursue another offer and you have paperwork to prove it.
However, ability to sue doesn't mean one will. Considering the inconvenience of it all. That's why I simply do not believe a single word until pen is put to paper(or a digital certificate signs the contract) and I act accordingly.
I had a situation before I was made 2 offers. I wanted to accept the second, but I dragged on telling the other guys until I had the contract signed. It feels "wrong" to do this, but I recommend this to everyone. It is in your best interest to do that just in case your preferred company tries to screw you over on some clause in the contract(that's exactly what happened BTW, I could negotiate from a position of power precisely because I had the other offer). Large companies will not blink before screwing you over so why should you afford them the courtesy of politeness a person should get? Large companies are not people. Yes, people work there, but most of these people if you knew them privately would probably give you the same advice.
Lack of market disincentives to carry out abusive behavior.
> - Hoping that future candidates have short memories or they can hire new grads who don't have other options?
Yes. Need for $$ outweighs desire for individual dignity. There's always someone out there willing to take your shitty job, as long as you're willing to wait. And why hurry? Just keep squeezing your current employees in the meantime.
> - Calculating that the job market will stay slack for a long time?
Repeated prisoner's dilemma. There's no reason to start hiring aggressively if nobody else is.
> - The C-suite has short time horizons and thus see these problems as someone else's future problems?
What problem? How does it actually affect their performance or their company's performance?
> existential threats
On the other hand, they won't stop doing something that's perfectly profitable and effective unless there's an existential threat.
I see rescinding offers as a whole separate level because it has a big impact on the logistics of taking that job if you’re already employed somewhere else. If you can’t rely on the offer in hand there’s no way to gracefully wind down your work at the other place. I feel like this will result in employees stopping giving two weeks notice.
This is already covered by promissory estoppel[0]. Anyone affected by this, who can show that they quit an existing job or turned down a different offer, should have access to civil remedies - Flexport would be responsible for making them whole for any damages they suffered as a result of relying on Flexport's promise of employment.
I'm not a lawyer. There may be some caveats for these particular people. But it is a well-recognized remedy for this type of thing[1].
It seems like we need significantly stronger guarantees on contract signing. If company signs this employment offer, and I sign this employment offer, I am hired and getting paid. Anything else constitutes firing me.
It is more surprising there is not a longer history of companies breaking these pinkie promises.
"What I'm trying to understand is do companies not think these actions will limit their ability to hire in the future?
As I see it:
- there is higher supply of talent than demand for talent
- offer enough money next time and see all the doubts disappear (come on, there are companies with a terrible reputation that have been around forever and employ tens or even hundreds of thousands of people)
- companies need to survive now before thinking about tomorrow, especially a company like Flexport, which appears to be quite fragile from a financial standpoint.
The relationship between employees and employers, especially when the latter are big companies, has always been more adversarial than cooperative.
In this context, I don't expect my employer's best, and in return I certainly do not give my best. A lesson I learned after having been let go.
It has worked fine for me since then.
Yeah I'm curious how it shakes out with these kinds of moves. I don't know anything about Flexport, but to me it's just more signs of a broader phenomenon of copious investment money drying up.
It's been "easy" for a long time, and lots of cultural practices built up around hiring and managing staff that look "normal" to people who got into the industry in the last 10 years but more of an aberration for those of us who have been around longer.
We've had a lot of bargaining power as a profession. We still do, but we'll have less. So I think you'll find that, yes, future candidates will have short memories. But more than likely, they won't need them, because a lot of these companies will simply cease to exist.
I agree with you in general, but wanted to point out that layoffs are often related to the companies overall performance and direction. So it's not uncommon for layoffs to have very little correlation with the performance of any individual affected employee.
Furthermore, they are usually top down directives: you need to cut X% of your staff across all groups. The axe needs to swing somewhere. As layoffs have usually been preceded by hiring freezes, managers have to make some calls. Alice is great, but not a unique skill set. Bob is not that good, but he is the only person who can maintain the FooBar system.
What I find surprising is that employees are still reluctant to name and shame such behavior.
Any time any company does any one of the 3 actions you mentioned in your post, it should be an automatic name and shame and a large ding to their reputation.
I don't think it will be sufficient to curb such behavior entirely, but shining light on it is a good first step.
"I hope you will forgive us someday and even consider coming to work here again once we get our house in order"
Lol at that shamelessness in asking. What sort of drugs is this guy on? You seriously screw and fuck someone over once and still expect them to come and help you on a different day? Insane greed right there.
This seems like short term reactive thinking but I'm sure every programmer worth their salt will research "<company x> layoffs/rescind/return to office" before accepting an offer. I recently went through the interview gauntlet and past layoffs and policy changes were a key deciding factor for me.
I could imagine that in a bull market candidates would ask for offer acceptance bonuses before quitting their current jobs as a form of assurance. And this issue is even more severe in countries where 2-3 month notice is the norm.
They are just doing what they need to do. Additional investment dollars are not guaranteed and companies need to get profitable.
When money was easy to find and nobody cared about profits, companies could afford generous operating policies that inspired confidence. Now they can't.
This may impact their ability to hire in the future. On the other hand, they will remain in business.
Without presenting a full argument, just based on your own post, if everyone is starting to do this almost in unison, in cartel-like fashion, then each individual company has no consequences to worry about.
But there is no database keeping score reliably on all the nefarious actions. If a lot of companies already behave this way, then the behavior becomes normalized. None of these companies get ostracized. At worse, they just make a better offer to future candidates to attract them. In the current capitalism, everything has a price, even honor.
I get a ton of push back when I suggest this, but am I being unreasonable when I am trying to look out for my own interests when I know my employer wont? My employer can weather a few bad months, but some people can't lose income for more than one month.
Or are most employees are too scared to piss off some people they might not ever see again anyway?