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Comment by jjmorrison | Hacker News Reader

This is the story of a young founder who is scared and trying her best at an impossible task. And young employees who believed they were allowed to get the job they wanted at the company they wanted.

But that's not how the system works. You need to vote with your feet - you don't like it, leave and let them know you aren't going to put up with it. Without that, we're all just arguing about what's ok and what's not. Don't complain, vote!

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Part of the problem with that approach is that the market won't sink bad companies unless it has information that they are bad.

Plenty of companies play the game of "hire employees, treat them like crap, when they leave hire new employees by misrepresenting what the company is like". The labor market is huge, and you can always find new employees that don't know your previous employees.

So you could argue "If you don't like what the company is doing, don't shop there!" But unless current/former employees speak out, the market (consumers, investors) won't necessarily know "what the company is doing" and won't penalize them.

In this case, employees spoke up, and a whole bunch of people who read the Verge (who are probably in the "luggage buying demographic") decided they didn't like what the company was doing and voiced their concerns stating they would no longer buy the company's product. The board fired the CEO, this apparently satisfied many customers, now they're walking it back and I guess we'll find out how the market feels about it.

But I don't see anything wrong with this approach as long as the reporting is well done (and in this case it was).

I think I disagree with that. The labor pool isn't unlimited and there's laws in place to protect workers. Reading this article as someone that's worked in banking it seems unfair to treat this company a different way that all others. We all still go to banks despite the horrible ways they treat their workers.

Ruling by mob means the treatment is unfair across companies. I think people should argue for laws that are broadly applicable when the market fail. And in this case I think the market (even like glassdoor, reviews, etc) would tank the company's ability to hire it it was not a place people wanted to work.

I have never heard of a company struggling to hire due to reputation. Low wages or lack of qualified workers, sure. Reputation? Never.

I suppose it's not a broadly discussed topic, but it's definitely a thing. HR or recruiting teams would speak best to it. But you can spot this pretty easily. A recent example is Uber. When you do a big lay off followed by accelerated hiring, it's signaling the end of a talent drought. You can't performance manage very aggressively in a period of crisis since it's really hard to hire. So the bar goes down. At some point you clean up, and bring the bar back up. Uber couldn't hire well at all for several years as they went through their culture struggles.

It's definitely less of a problem for lower skilled jobs. And that makes sense since the labour is a lot more replaceable. But it's also why unions are there to prevent abuse.

I won't pretend to claim the system works perfectly. My point is just that there are levers there already that work pretty well. And we should decide as a society how to play or add levers. Managing by mod is really a dictatorship run by the angriest twitter users. If that's who we want running the show - I think that should at least be put to a vote... I'm definitely against it.

Are you saying the workers need to vote with their feet? If so, I disagree. As an employee, I'd always want to try and affect change before leaving. Leaving is the last resort. Complaining is part of trying to affect change, and is one of the "let them know you aren't going to put up with it" step. You seem to be advocating for leaving first.

You're right on that. I'm more reacting to this story where the complaining is not try to change things, but an attempted take down of the company. I disagree with the anger and sense of having been wronged that's portrayed in the original article. You're not a victim if you can leave, that's totally ok to do. I would definitely agree a company is a long series of people affecting changes that hopefully make the whole better.

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