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Comment by hn_neverguess | Hacker News Reader

> 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...

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

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

Your shortage is self-created more often than not.

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

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

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

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

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

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is clearly shitty, but at least they are going to offer a 4 month severance just if they agreed to hire you and then rescinded the offer.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> 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.

> 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.

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