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Comment by hn_neverguess | Hacker News Reader

Sure, if you couldn't care less about your job, then why care about anyone else screwing you over in your job?

But let's see if the inverse is true as well. If you deeply deeply deeply cared about your job (eg: it's your startup and you have exactly 12 months of runway, but it takes 4 months to source, vet, hire and onboard someone), would it matter to you that someone cheated you out of a third of your runway?

The truth is likely somewhere in the middle. That should answer why someone who is likely to reasonable care about their job and would likely experience a serious setback in their work would be really upset about the OP's actions.

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You can blame other people for your failed gambles and slow processes. If it takes 4 months to hire and onboard.. fix that. If you were betting on this person to save the company make sure you offer enough so they can't refuse. Offer them half your company if that's what it takes. It is 100% up to you.. make it happen.. you are cheating yourself and investors by blaming a new hire that never was.

> If it takes 4 months to hire and onboard.. fix that

It takes an average of 58 days to hire an engineer in the US. [0] Add to that another two months to onboard them. [1]

> Offer them half your company if that's what it takes.

Wait - so someone accepts a job, implying that the comp was fair. And then quits a week before a start date without any notice (OP's story). Were you recommending that founders should pre-emptively give away half of the company on top of the original offer just to prevent the possibility of any one random person acting dishonestly?

[0] https://resources.workable.com/tutorial/recruiting-kpis [1] https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-to-onboard-a-sof...

> Wait - so someone accepts a job, implying that the comp was fair.

And if circumstances change, so does that implication.

When Coinbase's circumstances changed, they offered a 4 month severance - even for people who never worked there a single day.

I am not implying that there are no good reasons why someone should bail out after accepting. But you should have a very good reason for doing so. Someone else's offer that's $5k higher is not one of them.

Conversely, your company should also not fire you just because someone else showed up who is willing to do your job for $5k less. There's a certain amount of common decency that can be expected from both sides - if not for ethical reasons, then at least for practical reasons of not destroying your reputation.

> Conversely, your company should also not fire you just because someone else showed up who is willing to do your job for $5k less.

In this light, yeah, that's a reasonable take. Except, frankly? Workers know that this isn't the case generally. "Common decency" isn't. And folks with power have the primary obligation; that would be employers.

I wouldn't bounce from a company over a $5K delta, but I would absolutely expect employers (most of them--I'm quite happy working where I do, where I don't feel that way) to take that low-hanging fruit at my expense the second something gets tight; expecting folks not to take that account is asking them to stick their neck out for the notion of a "professional reputation" that most people don't care about.

Remember this was the person that if they didn't come onboard at that time the startup would die. You do whatever it takes if that's the case.

Now if it is a random person easy to replace giving away 1/2 would be crazy.

58 days is under two months and a startup could hire someone within a week. I've seen someone apply, the owner chat with them a bit, hire them and they were driving across country the next day. Not every founder has those abilities to sell the candidate and have the judgement and believe in themselves to hire on intuition. If you can't do that you might fail where others succeed.

> 58 days is under two months

I engaged with you on a good faith basis that you're genuinely curious about the point I am trying to make. The above comment makes it clear that you're just trolling.

> and a startup could hire someone within a week.

The act of hiring someone _can_ take far less than a week. But it shouldn't. You also shouldn't be driving cross-country for any random startup you just met yesterday. If you haven't yet realized that hiring is not a competition in expediency, I doubt I can change your mind in a single HN comment.

If someone is that essential, it’s not hard to go from “at will” to mutual 90-day notice required. They want to quit, they must give 90 days’ notice. You want to fire them today, you still have to pay them for 90 days (including health insurance and other benefits).

People want things both ways. They want the flexibility of at-will so they can drop someone immediately, but they also want the employee whose work will make them very wealthy to be “committed” and “in it for the long haul.”

In a downturn, would you put your startup at risk to continue making payroll for engineers when, after looking at your runway/product needs, a layoff is clearly the right call? Maybe, but I don't think most founders would (nor should they). It's not reasonable to expect employees to be as invested in the company as a founder when they have comparatively so little ownership.

I also don't think accepting an offer and later declining because you found higher comp elsewhere is dishonest. No salaried employee (where I live at least) signs a contract agreeing to work for any specified period time and I've never promised or been asked to even give my word to stick around for a set period of time.

> I also don't think accepting an offer and later declining because you found higher comp elsewhere is dishonest.

It truly is for one very simple reason - you accept and the hiring manager tells all other candidates that the company is going with someone else. If the person then flakes out, the company is in a difficult spot because the best candidates have several offers and as soon as you're out, they confirm with their next best option.

> I've never promised or been asked to even give my word to stick around for a set period of time.

There are reputable and less reputable companies. What Coinbase is doing is clearly shitty, but at least they are going to offer a 4 month severance just if they agreed to hire you and then rescinded the offer. Again, a shitty thing to do, but even so, you'll notice that they were not contractually required to pay anyone anything for rescinding the offer, and yet they are going to do that. Why? Because reputation matters.

Assuming that you are okay with someone moving on to a new opportunity eventually, how long do expect them to stay before you wouldn't consider them leaving to be damaging to their reputation?

I still think you aren't fully taking into consideration the lack of symmetry of power in the employer-employee relationship and are expecting too much from employees while guaranteeing them so little.

I have no problem hiring qualified engineers in less than a month. The secret is to expand one’s recruitment outside of the Bay Area bubble and cast a wider net for diverse talent.

Whining about talent shortages gets annoying. In every case, I ask if they’re recruiting outside the region, recruiting employees from HBCUs and women’s colleges, considering candidates with non traditional backgrounds, etc and the answer is always “no.”

Your shortage is self-created more often than not.

I doubt that anyone, even someone as extreme as your example, would care enough about it a decade after it happened. More egregious things would have happened in the meantime.

Extending a job offer to someone means you met with them on multiple occasions, remotely and in person. I know I am not going to forget their face in 10 years. Would I feel a bit less wronged about them after 10 years? Of course. Would I lie in a backchannel reference? No.

I doubt your memory and vengeance is nearly as crazy a decade since any event (however wronged by it you may perceive yourself to be) -- let alone something as incredibly benign as someone rescinding an offer.

In short, while you say that now, I highly doubt it actually would be the case were this hypothetical a reality. You'd have to be incredibly thin-skinned and vengeful to carry this much weight to something so minor.

How does a founder with twenty years of experience bear such grudges against a single errant hire that got away? Either this whole hypothetical is talking about an employee number one type situation, or you must have been blessed with having never met anyone underhanded in all of your business dealings.

"Feeling a bit less wronged" is one thing, "making sure that everyone knows how I feel about you" is quite another.

There's also a lot of middle ground: - a friend is looking to take a bet on this guy in his company.

- we're looking for new members for our camp and this guy shows up.

- a female friend meets him on a dating app and tells me about him.

- this guy is being considered for a lateral move within his next company, and the hiring manager is a friend of mine.

- we're on the fence about keeping this guy or letting him go.

- etc, etc.

Sure, but your initial post did not express that sensible middle ground, but rather invoked decade-long grudges using hyperbolic petulance, as if being a founder grants the power to hellban someone from society.

It goes both ways. If anything, I would argue that employees have way more cancel power than founders, and it's far more common for employees to get their founders in trouble than the other way around. No VC will ever do an equity round without doing some research. Not to mention the open letters to founders that have gotten so many fired. Honestly, it's also how it should be - I've seen more founders misbehave than employees. Some founders really think that just because someone gave them a check, they are somehow untouchable.

But regardless if founder or employee, I don't see why we should lie about people misbehaving. If I know someone is a bad apple, I am not going to lie about it - especially if I can prevent someone I care about going through the same ordeal. I also don't know why I should change my mind about someone just because some time has passed. People don't change.

It's frankly pretty appalling that I have to spell this out to you. I suppose you didn't think much of the Me Too movement? While clearly not on the same scale, the fundamental societal mechanics that justify outing perpetrators of sexual harassment are the same ones that justify outing people who break contracts. The society would be a much better place if people knew that karma is real.

It doesn’t matter- Whatever merit there is to your position, your original post was so wrapped up in hyperbole and aggression you completely undercut your own argument, which is why there is such a bevy of responses. I don’t even disagree with some of your points, but the tone-deafness is just completely ridiculous. Let us simply agree to disagree where we do, agree to agree elsewhere, and have peace.

The VC connection is another reason not to pursue scorched earth campaigns.

It’s a double-edged spear. Eventually someone you dislike will have a VC deal pending; if your defamatory comments cost them the deal (or even appear to have had a role), that person will end up owning everything you have and everything you ever will have after a massive court judgment.

And on the flip side, VCs dislike investing in people who are in litigation or who have faced it. You will have to do a lot of explaining about why you were sued, and if there was a judgment against you, it’s hard to imagine your professional judgment not getting questioned.

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