"I'm sure these Craigslist Rolex watches are legit." You've just been hired fast. What happens next? If you can't explain to the average person on the street what your company does, your company doesn't do anything. Right. Because "how much money do you spend" and "how much money do you make" are bizarre metrics only employed by venture capitalists. ...and it goes on and on and on. I may go back and read this later but this seems a lot like the whiny rant of the one person stupid enough to take the job after the smart people ran screaming. When the CTO asked me to book it and told me it would be reimbursed later, I was hesitant and skeptical but followed through with blind faith. There’s no way a startup I found on Angel.co is going to screw me over, I thought.
When I asked him if hired employees were given a probationary period (it was standard for several of my past employers), he said “No, because I hire fast and fire fast.” I didn’t know which part of that sentence gave me more pause.
The co-founders wanted to be the next “Credit Karma of LinkedIn” and considered their competition to include Indeed, CareerBuilder, Angel.co, Zip Recruiter, and of course LinkedIn.
When we finally touched the 31 slide pitch deck, the investor stopped us on our team page. He asked, “You have 20 employees? How much have you spent, and what’s the revenue”? That was the first lesson I would learn from those VC investor meetings: your burn rate matters.
I submitted because it's a hilariously awful story of the scamming that goes on in the startup scene. I have a few friends who've shared similar stories (CEOs lying about funding, office leasers not being paid, etc), but this one takes the cake for absurdity. The HN people tracked down the real company behind the story, and the CTO / co-founder at least had seemingly decent history of work. But otherwise red flag 6 and on-wards would make me start researching flights back home. Up to that point, I could see someone who was inexperienced or naive falling prey, thinking that was just the crazy world of startups. "hire fast and fire fast" isn't too far from "move fast and break things" in the list of SV-insane-utterances. Then again, I would have turned the other direction at "* with machine learning / NLP". With any luck, that CEO won't get any more money after a testimonial like this. Or maybe they'll go to jail for fraud. Also, the author wasn't kidding about the spongebob facebook memes....and it goes on and on and on. I may go back and read this later but this seems a lot like the whiny rant of the one person stupid enough to take the job after the smart people ran screaming.
And I shared it for the same reason. It's like the Dan Lyons book but with substantially more facepalm. The platform will be built to scale to 100M's of candidates and 100M's of postings. The system will initially provide unsupervisored matching at which point the candidate (or posting) can start to tailor the results with likes and dislikes at which point we will use supervisored algorithms. So... "machine headhunting." Apparently they're unaware LinkedIn already does that.1 For 1 is an innovative new company building out a robust text analytics platform for actively matching job candidates with job postings. We are using entity extraction, natural language processing and machine learning to provide the matching.
Also, they're doubling down. While it is not our policy to discuss personnel matters, we want to make it clear that this former employee was fired for cause. Signed affidavits from current employees attest to this former employee’s failure to perform her required duties in the workplace. In addition, they attest to her participation in an attempt to undermine or oust certain members of management. This former employee demanded a sum of $50,000 upon her departure. Under no verbal agreement, contract or any other type of covenant was this person entitled to such a sum. After learning that WrkRiot would not pay what it considered extortion money, this former employee began her campaign of slanderous of activity over the Internet. WrkRiot believes this former employee’s writings have led to dangerous situations for many of our employees through the leaking of personal information and through threats being made over social media from others who have taken the former employee’s misinformation as truth. We regret having to spend time and effort on this when there is so much to do in the development of our unique application. However, we want to make it abundantly clear that the slanderous writings of a disgruntled former employee do not represent the truth about WrkRiot, its management or workforce. The racist, sexist and abusive comments our employees have received are inexcusable. Further, we want to make it clear that we will seek any and all legal remedies to end this campaign of slander.WrkRiot is considering legal action against a disgruntled former employee who has launched a slanderous campaign against WrkRiot and some of its employees via social media.
somehow I am reminded of Rogue Brewery. I learned a long time ago to trust my gut about people i meet. It's been incredibly accurate so far.I hire fast and Fire fast
Rogue Brewery is, by a lot "heresay", a bad place to work. Beer's not bad and the marketing is cool but you can get much better beer for the same price.
She might be stupid. And the smart people would have definitely ran. But I don't recall learning anywhere where the appropriate lines are when it comes to negotiating salary, benefits, perks, etc. if it's not either a corporate job or some minimum wage type gig. I'm sure you and all the more experienced folks around here are used to negotiating and are more familiar with their objective skills and value. I'm more on the author's side because I've had a similar experience recently negotiating my own salary, with an SV-type no less. It sucks. He's had countless amounts of practice, and I've done it only several times. I'm still salty at the terms since I feel taken advantage of. But a bird in the hand and all that. Also, there are 20 Chinese engineers on H1B1 visas obtained through the company who hadn't gotten paid in several months. Are they stupid?
This isn't a salary negotiation problem. This is a "you are working for people who pretend they have a company" problem. I did that gig, too. I worked for a biomedical startup that got bought out and destroyed. Then I ended up working for a smaller biomedical startup where I was being paid as an "engineering technician" despite the fact that I was the only person besides the CEO with an engineering degree. And I worked there three months, and it was shit, and the day before Thanksgiving I told the CEO "look - I'm doing legit engineering, I saved you $200k with the warehouse redesign, and I'm making $17 an hour. Either pay me what I"m worth or I'm outtie." They told me that actually, my employment was conditional and they were going to hire me on for another 90 days, but happy trails. And then it was Christmas and then Boeing went on strike and it took me another 4 months to find a gig, but I bloody well found it. I figured they long since crashed and burned but as it turns out, they kept the plates spinning for another 14 years. That was fresh outta college. This chick? 38 years old. Negotiating a 6-figure salary with a $10k bonus and a $40k golden parachute. Which, as she says, she's been unable to find anywhere else. Something something too good to be true.
You're right, I saw fast and loose tactics at the negotiating table and I started to conflate the article with something else. Still... While I'd like to believe that the alarm bells sounding at half the shit this CEO was saying would have precluded me from even considering, if I'm being honest, I'm not entirely sure I would've been immune. Confidence follows competence, so I've still got a long ways to go before I could trust myself to suss out such bullshit.
Dude if someone offers you $135k a year TAKE IT. I don't care if they look like the Hamburgler. You can afford to burn a few weeks figuring out that they're Nigerian scammers. Thing of it is, this is kind of a bad riff on the Dan Lyons book, only more whiny and less entertaining. Far more hit piece, far less think piece.
I loved that book, even if it's a bit scary. One of my friends got a job in sales for a marketing software company in Brooklyn, hawking their products to small and medium-sized companies. Sounds like Hubspot? He described to me their sales room, with their "constant happy hours" and a manager who deals cocaine to the employees, and I realized this all started to sound like Hubspot's Howler Monkey room.
It seems like a culture clash and unrealistic expectations. It's a startup. By their very nature, startups are very risky. Many large companies in Silicon Valley started out on a wing and a prayer. If the startup goes well, things are great, but there are a lot that don't get off the ground. It's more surprising to me that she expected it to be different. If she was looking for a stable job with a stable paycheck, she should have looked for a company that has been around for a while. If everyone who rode the dot com bubble and got adversely affected wrote an article about it, there would be a lot of articles just like this one.