Firing People

https://zachholman.com/talk/firing-people

by jmduke • 10 years ago

322 98 10 years ago

yuhong• 10 years ago

I have been thinking about Yishan-style CEOs for a while now, and I would like to fix the problems with firing this way.

palakchokshi3• 10 years ago

I think the author is taking firing too personally. His rant about "Fire fast" seems to indicate that people who fire employees are somehow devoid of empathy for the person. Fire fast does not mean you fire at the first instance that someone didn't agree with your opinion or some trivial reason like that. Fire fast means if you notice a general trend with the person that is harmful to the company or the team then stop giving the person chances and fire them. I think the sentiment is expressed very well by the culture doc by Netflix. [1]

It's not personal!! Don't take it personally! Unless of course it was personal.

[1]http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/23-Were_a...

jmduke• 10 years ago

One of the big positions of this article is that despite employers' insistence that "firing isn't personal", employees will take firing personally and it negatively impacts them and can negatively impact the company's culture. Saying "no it doesn't, don't take it personally" isn't really a counterargument.

palakchokshi3• 10 years ago

It doesn't affect the company's culture if the employee chooses to take the firing personally. In the end if there is a valid reason for firing someone then from a company's perspective it doesn't matter to the company how it affects the employee fired.

Additionally this article just talks from the author's viewpoint so we really don't know exactly why he was fired. If you read the post it would seem like the CEO told him he can take a sabbatical and his manager told him don't come back. There is a huge disconnect somewhere that we are not being told about. If the author's behavior prior to leaving for sabbatical was toxic to the team the company shouldn't be responsible for taking care of his feelings and emotional state on being fired.

I'm not saying being fired doesn't suck as an employee but expecting the company to take care of you as you are being fired or afterwards is kind of naive and a little self-centric in my opinion.

GFK_of_xmaspast3• 10 years ago

Isn't Zach Holman the guy about whom was written "He ... even admitted to plotting with Theresa Preston-Werner to get women at the company fired."

catfest2• 10 years ago

Exactly - why doesn't he talk about the real reason behind being fired? I just don't understand.

ryanSrich2• 10 years ago

Where was this quote pulled from? Can't find it via Google search.

etjossem2• 10 years ago

In an interview of Julie Ann Horvath by a Valleywag reporter: "@Holman is my ex-partner. He was complicit in the actions of both Tom and Theresa Preston-Werner and even admitted to plotting with Theresa Preston-Werner to get women at the company fired. He should be let go from GitHub and I regret being kind to him in previous interviews." [1]

[1] http://valleywag.gawker.com/ims-and-email-support-allegation...

13of402• 10 years ago

Fire fast

It's been my experience that people who are on the path to getting fired turn hostile either to their direct management or to the company, and keeping them around after that is a net-negative for the team. Once you've decided to fire someone, you should do it as fast as you legally can.

MrAlmostWrong• 10 years ago

More than once I had been confusingly introduced as a founder or CEO of the company. That, in part, was how I ultimately was able to sneak into the Andreessen Horowitz corporate apartments and stayed there rent-free for sixteen months. I currently have twelve monogrammed a16z robes in my collection, and possibly was involved in mistakenly giving the greenlight to a Zenefits employee who came by asking if they could get an additional key to the stairwell for a… meeting.

This seems unethical.

fmela• 10 years ago

I think the bit about the Zenefits employee is a reference to the "no more sex in the stairwell" memo sent by their former CEO.

Elepsis• 10 years ago

It's also pretty clearly a joke, per the Zenefits reference.

jasode• 10 years ago

What the shit does that even mean, fire fast? Should I fire people four minutes after I hire them? That’ll show ‘em!

My suggestion is to remove all sentences like the above from the essay. The "four minutes" sounds juvenile or coy (or combination of both).

Are there reasonable adults out there who have no idea what the "fast" in "fire fast" actually means? If not, don't insult your audience with a caricature. Demonstrate that you have some perspective so readers can focus on the stronger parts of your commentary.

The essay is almost 10,000 words long and stumbling across that sentence doesn't entice me to commit the time and read the rest of it.

archemike_• 10 years ago

Well I'll take a reasonable attempt. Have done a firing like this in the real world as well.

Fire fast when a few things happen, such as when energy belief and overall personality inertia has lowered of an employee where their fire has diminished for one reason or another then you should get them fired and replaced as soon as possible to not allow that to affect others on the team. This can be for a number of reasons and the signs will be clear and instead of saying "oh gee he'll turn around" just fire fast stoicly and move on. The fire fast is a very unemotional philosophy where as a leader you view the team as a chain and weakest links must be cut out and a new one placed.

Fire fast is not at all indicative of what the term entails and you can't really deduce anything from that as the right deduction is what you said, fire right after hiring! But what I think the rational interpretation is; is to fire as soon as there are negative connotations being exhibited by a team member and instead of wondering if it'll change execute an order to fix it asap. I would also say fast can mean set guidelines and expecations and transparent ways to reinstill vigor into an individual. I think fire fast has an unquantified blowback where someone who could be good( even "10X" ) is fired prematurely and they could have been someone worth multiples of their salary in output for a company but were fired for internal reasons (Your policies and docs suck).

cannibalbob• 10 years ago

Yea I can't stand Zach Holman's writing because its written in 14-year-old style and doesn't leave me any wiser.

dpritchett• 10 years ago

I for one enjoyed these human touches in what was overall a very calm and reasonable essay.

baldfat• 10 years ago

"I have fired people. It is brutal. I have been fired. It's worse. So managers, please: Never solicit sympathy for the pain of firing people."

I left a college I worked at because of this they fired 12 people in the morning and called a all hands meeting at 3PM and said they were feeling horrible and please pray for them. A) It was a complete surprise to anyone that didn't know the actual numbers for incoming freshmen like I did. B) They acted like they were the ones who were equal harmed by the firings.

So you fired 12 people "fast" and you then ask for sympathy? That was September and I got the new job in May.

e40• 10 years ago

More people than we care to admit, in our culture, have a huge empathy gap. It's really quite troubling. Just look at the political landscape. Quite scary.

joslin013• 10 years ago

I hadn’t been involved with the company at all for two months through my sabbatical, and I hadn’t even talked to my manager in four months, ever since she had decided that 1:1s weren’t really valuable between her and me.
I’m still not fully certain why I got the axe ... My best guess is that it’s Tall Poppy Syndrome

Probably some signs here... I wouldn't say he was fired "fast" by any stretch of the imagination.

I will explain what firing fast means to me. I get a lot of work done through foreign devs I find on Upwork. I have to manage them closely, but overall, as they become acclimated and trained, they become pretty self-reliant in about 2-3 months.

However, I have also invested plenty of time into bad apples hoping to train their dev skills, teach them about our product, and all sorts of things only to get random "hey I'm going away for couple weeks tomorrow" kind of messages or a waning commitment to the project and quality of work.

Admittedly, I used to feel bad about firing people. I didn't care if they were "just" some Upwork guys, I try to get everyone involved in my team and feel like they're part of something. These days, I'm experienced enough to see the warning signs and rather than mull over "should I do it?" I just fire them and get onto hiring the next. I've never seen anyone turn around after warning signs, and I've gone through enough "oh come on they're human too, let me try to just understand their situation" moments to know it's a flawed manner of thinking. This is why you "fire fast" and "hire slowly".

Business is business. It sucks to get fired, but it's worse for your business to run on rusty cogs that can break at any moment.

laxatives• 10 years ago

What are some of the warning signs? What do you considerable tolerable/intolerable?

joslin013• 10 years ago

Well you should keep in mind I hire on Upwork, so not everything carries over to real-life. In real-life, these kinds of issues should be recognized during the hiring process. Since most Upwork devs are BS-artists, it's not worth my time to do some lame Skype interview. Instead I just throw them in the gauntlet and see what they can do.

Some further background: I don't talk to my devs with my vocal chords -- ever. It's a waste of my time and the communication is better documented in Slack (Zach actually has a good post on this). They join Slack, I assign them Pivotal stories, and they make pull requests that I review. Their onboarding is just me telling them a little about the project and their first task. I don't explain our grand purpose or any of that stuff because 4 times outta 5, they don't make the cut.

Warning signs:

* They struggle profusely with setting up the project or it takes a long time. If I have to hold your hand installing our necessary dependencies, chances are you're an inexperienced dev and/or have weak problem solving skills.

* They have very little to say besides "ok". The good ones always start asking a bunch of questions as they attempt to genuinely understand what's going on. The poor ones feign expertise.

* It takes them a long time to deliver their first unit of work and/or it's very low quality and barely meets minimum requirements.

* Their work diary shows few hours logged. I ask everyone you're willing to do 30-40 hours a week? They all say yes. About 10% actually take the hours I'm willing to give to them.

* They have a poor attitude

* They need to be constantly prodded for status updates and to work more

Good signs:

* They ask questions

* They have a positive attitude and seem appreciative of the opportunity

* They dive right into work

* They work a lot

* They hit me up randomly with status updates

People reading this are like "well ya," but what makes life interesting is the gray area. It's never this black & white and I have to just monitor them. In fact, I prefer to somewhat leave them alone to see how they really work. Anyone will log on and start coding under fear of being fired, but there's only few that take the reigns into their own hands.

Over the course of almost 2 years, I have 2 core guys who have done wonders for me each at $15/hr. They both are very happy with the opportunity and I've made them into very competent devs who I would put up against a college grad (or higher) any day of the week. I have a third who has all the right good signs, but is somewhat rough skill-wise. I don't mind because my core guy was rough in the beginning and he started reading a Scala book to get better. In general, my team is always about 4-5 since I code myself and can only do so much.

Honestly, it all comes down to attitude. I can train an earnest, hard-worker into an amazing dev but it's impossible for me to inspire someone who just doesn't care. I'm sure all this stuff carries over into the real world, but it's a lot more rapid fire in the Upwork game.

curun1r• 10 years ago

Probably some signs here... I wouldn't say he was fired "fast" by any stretch of the imagination.

He didn't mention it, but there was political/PR situation that happened at Github shortly before that and it's entirely conceivable that his firing was Github distancing itself from him for that reason. It was his former partner that was the center of the very public allegations of sexism at the company and she had some none-too-flattering things to say, again publicly, about his role in the matter.

As a manager, it wouldn't even cross my mind to fire someone that was underperforming when they had previously been such a strong contributor without at least first trying to figure out why the performance suffered. Where I have been involved in such abrupt terminations, it's always been because of something unrelated to performance (sexual harassment, abusing the corporate card, etc). The fact that he was never given an explanation from the company only makes this explanation seem more likely.

gingerrr• 10 years ago

I'm not sure the lack of an explanation from the company really means anything here. Most companies, especially the more risk-averse, will not tell you why you were let go unless there are clearly-documented performance milestones that were missed (i.e. not meeting your PIP goals). It's a potential liability, up to and including a lawsuit for wrongful termination, to justify a firing in any recordable way unless they've been exceptionally judicious in documenting cause.

madeofpalk• 10 years ago

He didn't mention it, but there was political/PR situation that happened at Github shortly before that and it's entirely conceivable that his firing was Github distancing itself from him for that reason. It was his former partner that was the center of the very public allegations of sexism at the company and she had some none-too-flattering things to say, again publicly, about his role in the matter.

I always assumed this was the case, and was surprised (well, not surprised, just disappointed I guess) to not hear this side of the story. It was very peculiar timing.

Mithaldu4• 10 years ago

As a bit of perspective: I'm from germany and worker protection laws here are really strong.

It is common in many companies for there to be a two-way 6 month firing/quitting limititation, meaning: At the point the worker turns in their quitting notification, they can make an agreement with the company to be let go earlier, or the company can insist on them staying the full term. Similarly when letting a worker go, the company has to let them know 6 months before that, though the worker can agree to leave earlier.

Of course faster firings are possible as well, with "immediately" usually reserved for "breaking a law". Additionally workers can be let go early for performance reasons, but only after three separate, paper-trailed notifications of such issues. Additionally, those are unlikely to be trivial, since a worker can sue their company for the remaining wage, if fired unfairly, and if successful the company will have to pay all legal bills of both sides.

This means that both sides here tend to make a lot of effort to avoid firings. The company because it's just easier to help an employee improve, and the worker because they'll see it coming.

I've been in the situation myself where a company expected certain things of me, that just didn't fit my nature and health. We tried to improve things informally for a while and i kept failing. Then we had a serious talk and agreed that things wouldn't work like that, and now i contract for them, with both sides being very happy.

An important contrast between that, and the american system, is that i knew at every single point exactly how far away i was from being fired. Due to the wording of my contract, i was at all times, right up to the end, exactly 3 months away from being fired, at least. My livelihood was never in danger, and i was given plenty motivation to help both myself and my company, instead of being put into an adversarial situation.

13of402• 10 years ago

the company can insist on them staying the full term

What happens if they quit showing up for work?

parenthephobia3• 10 years ago

In the UK, at least, they risk forfeiting the wages they'd have earned in the remainder of their employment.

Mithaldu4• 10 years ago

I honestly do not know, and find it hard to research on what actually happens in that case. I presume the employer would be able to successfully sue for damages of some kind, which would be dangerous for the worker if at fault, due to the duty to pay legal fees.

It is rather rare a case.

geococcyxc• 10 years ago

I'm pretty certain they could sue for damages in that case, though I have never heard of this happening. I have heard of people playing the "I'm ill-card" in such cases, though.

dominotw2• 10 years ago

It is common in many companies for there to be a two-way 6 month firing/quitting limititation

Does it mean that workers also have to give a 6 month advance notice before quitting?

dejv• 10 years ago

yes

parenthephobia3• 10 years ago

Brit here. Our laws are weaker, but broadly similar in spirit.

There are some reasons, called, "automatically unfair" reasons, for which you cannot fire a person: e.g. being pregnant, being a member of a union (or refusing to be), refusing to work on Sundays, and general sorts of sexual/religious/racial discrimination. Outside of that, you can dismiss somebody for any reason or no reason within the first 2 years of employment.

After that, you can dismiss a person generally only due to their incompetence, negligence, legal incapacity[1], or because you don't have any work for him to do. You are required to be fair and reasonable, a standard which is generally interpreted in the employee's interests.

One element of the article that seemed particularly off was that he claims he still doesn't know why he was fired. In the UK, you have a legal right to know the company's reason for firing you, and you can sue them if you think they lied about it.

[1] e.g. if a court order prevents the school janitor being within a mile of a school, you can fire him due to being unable to do his job.

Zikes• 10 years ago

One element of the article that seemed particularly off was that he claims he still doesn't know why he was fired.

He very likely knows, as he was in some way involved in this drama: http://readwrite.com/2014/03/15/github-julia-ann-horvath-har...

What his actual role was, however, is likely unprovable or not worth trying to prove. As informative as his blog post otherwise is, going into the "reasons" would likely re-open a can of worms everyone is happy to have closed.

Edit: I'm not saying he did anything untoward. I just find it highly unlikely that it's a coincidence that he's one of the names named by Julie after her departure and shortly afterwards he's fired under "mysterious circumstances" despite being one of the most productive and senior developers in the company. He just got caught up in that drama somehow, and as he says himself in the blog post "HR is not your friend".

mstade2• 10 years ago

One element of the article that seemed particularly off was that he claims he still doesn't know why he was fired. In the UK, you have a legal right to know the company's reason for firing you, and you can sue them if you think they lied about it.

I'm not sure this is factually correct, but if it is it'd be in direct conflict with what lawyers told me when I was forced out of one job in the UK. Essentially, I was powerless to do anything, since I hadn't been with the company for two years just like you say. When I was told I was being forced out, I immediately got in touch with two lawyers specializing in employment law, and independently of one another they said the exact same thing: prior to two years at the company they can do whatever they want, giving reason or not.

I was indeed given a reason, however I'm absolutely positive that it's not the truth. The company did right by me in the end anyway in terms of severance, so there are no hard feelings, but the truth would've been better. At least I imagine it would have been. Oh well.

ryanSrich2• 10 years ago

At the rate people change jobs in the Bay I don't think 6/6 would work. I know a handful of people that have had 7 jobs in 5 years.

Mithaldu4• 10 years ago

Shorter arrangements can be made. Last two times i arranged 3/3. Also it is important to consider whether the lack of such protection causes such high change rates.

baus• 10 years ago

Maybe one reason the author is depressed and seems a bit aimless is that when you put the kind of energy into a company, which I'm sure he did at GitHub, then the relationship grows beyond something simple like employee/employer and closer to family.

When the relationship falls apart, for whatever reason, it is like getting a divorce. I spent most of my career at one company, and when I decided to leave, dealing with that separation was a lot harder than I thought it would be.

catfest2• 10 years ago

Look, I'm all for Zach writing about his experience, but I never see him mention the whole incident with Julie Ann Horvath which is what I understand to be the reason he was fired.

Is there a reason he can't talk about what happened there?

virtuexru2• 10 years ago

Can you expand on this at all?

unfunco• 10 years ago

Zach mentions his being fired as one of the top stories on Hacker News; Julie Ann Horvath is probably somewhere on that list too.

http://www.inc.com/abigail-tracy/github-julie-ann-horvath-hr...

mathattack3• 10 years ago

This? [0]

It seems like there is some namedropping here [1] too though I don't see anything explicitly tying them together. It may be hard to definitively know since it's an HR issue and generally separation agreements require both sides to keep quiet. (Non-disparagement clauses)

Per the article:

I’m still not fully certain why I got the axe; it was never made explicit to me. I asked other managers and those on the highest level of leadership, and everyone seemed be as confused as I was.

My best guess is that it’s Tall Poppy Syndrome, a phrase I was unfamiliar with until an Aussie told me about it. (Everything worthwhile in life I’ve learned from an Australian, basically.) The tallest poppy gets cut first.

[0] http://readwrite.com/2014/03/15/github-julia-ann-horvath-har...

[1] http://www.dailydot.com/business/julie-ann-horvath-names-git...

holman4• 10 years ago

It didn't have anything to do with my departure, nor is it my story to tell.

GFK_of_xmaspast3• 10 years ago

Hey is it true that "[Holman] ... even admitted to plotting with Theresa Preston-Werner to get women at the company fired."?

tyre• 10 years ago

A great overview on everything that happened, with the exception of the reasoning behind "Fire fast."

It isn't about churning and burning through people. This isn't about "move fast and break people." As a CEO that has had to fire employees, there is literally nothing more difficult. I'm not asking for sympathy, just communicating that nothing is more important in terms of a company's health and success than the people. I agree that managers don't deserve sympathy. They asked for or accepted the responsibility to manage people and now it's time to put up or shut up.

Firing quickly is partly about the company, but it is also respectful to the employee. If you know it isn't going to work out, don't waste their time. How many people do you know how have been in romantic relationships that dragged out for too long? Where they knew it wouldn't work out but kept the hope alive?

Everyone loses. It sucks. People are both immensely rewarding and Really Fucking Hard.

The reason people say Fire Fast is that new managers (in my experience and that of close mentors to me) almost never fire too quickly. Very often, they either make excuses for the employee or are afraid that firing is their fault. A lot of times it is.

Look, if you hire someone for a role and have to fire them, that is your fault. 100%. And it is gut-wrenching to think you built someone up, got them to quit another job, had them tell their friends and family how excited they were, then forcing them to go back and say "oh yeah, I got fired and now you think I'm a failure."

But if you are the manager and you know it isn't going to work, you owe it to the employee, to yourself, and (especially) to everyone at the company to not drag things out.

## On Zach

Github is changing and he didn't fit in with its future. They took a tone of investment and needed to be a different company. Whether that is the right or wrong strategy isn't the point (and I have no idea.) They needed people who were on board with that and believed (probably correctly) that he wouldn't be. It's not an easy decision, and everyone involved knows it could have gone down better, but it also could have been much worse.

cldellow• 10 years ago

Firing quickly is partly about the company, but it is also respectful to the employee.

This a thousand times. Under Microsoft's brutal stack rank system, I chatted with a peer who saw me as a good source of career advice. This fellow was not performing very well in his current team. His management had given up on him and IMO his peers didn't see him as a leader. Whether it was his skills or his environment that led to this situation, the environment was definitely no longer there for him to improve or gain responsibility.

His read of the situation was totally different. He was seeking increased responsibility in the team and had a promotion goal he was targeting. This was lunacy. His past 3 annual reviews had been the lowest score possible. If his manager was following policy, he would have been fired a long time ago, not kept on as a sacrificial lamb for the stack rank gods.

There's a lot of gray area, obviously, but I shared your feeling that "fire fast" was misrepresented here.

gyardley• 10 years ago

This was a fine read, and somewhat brave, because posting something like this just invites a bunch of people to play the 'let me judge this person and decide whether their firing was legitimate / their reaction to it was appropriate' game, as if it was remotely any of their business.

The only part I disagreed with was the section on being truthful in internal corporate communications. When it comes to firings, being discreet beats being truthful. The only thing the vast majority of people at the company need to know is that the fired person is no longer a coworker. Those who truly need to know more than that probably already do - and if not, they can quietly be told verbally.

Impenetrable corporate BS like "we had a very honest and productive conversation with Zach this morning and decided it was best to part ways" makes me think "oh good, the company is inclined to keep its mouth shut, and I don't need to worry quite as much about defending my reputation." If I'm not Zach but Zach's coworker, I think "whatever happened there (and if I really want to know I can ask around), it's nice that the company's not shit-talking him in public."

On the other hand, an honest internal email like "Greg was fired because he had a fundamental disagreement with our engineering team about the interaction between engineering and product management, and this lingering conflict led to him phoning it in" (to use, like Zack, a complete hypothetical) makes me think "great, I wonder who this is going to be forwarded to, and if the company will be just as mouthy later on to outsiders."

You might disagree, but I'd take the corporate BS version every time.

parenthephobia3• 10 years ago

The only part I disagreed with was the section on being truthful in internal corporate communications. When it comes to firings, being discreet beats being truthful.

Yes, but honesty doesn't mean telling everyone everything. You can be honest and say nothing.

Honesty means not making up a narrative in which you had a nice chat and they left voluntarily. Just tell people "Zach no longer works for GitHub". It's honest, only presents the needed facts, and as a bonus doesn't make people who know that Zach got fired wonder what else management lie about in their internal emails.

rpgmaker• 10 years ago

I completely agree with you, if the company it's going to say anything at all internally I'd rather it be some feel-good BS than an "honest" explanation of what transpired. It's very likely that their version of events would differ from yours and make you look bad (they're firing you, after all).

malyk• 10 years ago

The problem with this is that /someone/ knows why. And they'll mention half the story to someone else. Then that person will mention mostly the same half story and interject 10% more. And then the person who heard that will completely mangle the whole thing. It's a game of telephone. Eventually the rumor mill is super excited and has the completely wrong story which ends up getting people all worked up about their place in the organization. The only thing to do then is for the company to "come clean"...but then half the people think they are just covering things up.

It's a tough balancing act, but you have to give your employees something or they'll just go and make everything up themselves. It's really hard to put that genie back in the bottle.

JoeAltmaier• 10 years ago

In my experience, remaining employees talk for about a day, then forget the fired person ever existed. And life goes on.

planetjones• 10 years ago

The two most striking points to me were a company where the employer can call the employee an asshole in front of HR. And a company where one employee hugs other employees, including those who just fired him. It sounds like a very difficult place to set or maintain boundaries.

fapjacks• 10 years ago

To be honest, it feels like Github is a big social experiment (or game) masquerading as a company. I feel like going to work there would be to implicitly agree to be part of those experiments, and that -- exactly as you mention -- it would be hard to discover the rules of the game and even harder to continually abide by them while maintaining any sort of sense of individuality. I interview for fun in my spare time, and every once in a while I am invited to interview at a company that breeds a Borg-like hivemind which seems to consume all traces of individuality for whatever reason (usually I think this boils down to a volatile management environment). Google is one of those companies. Whisper (the "anonymous" social network) is another. And Github feels like it would easily reign supreme in that respect. I would not feel comfortable being myself in that environment for fear of breaking these unknowable boundaries, and it would affect my work.

harryh3• 10 years ago

Denial is a hell of a drug.

maherbeg• 10 years ago

This is an excellent multi-faceted view of getting fired.

Don’t talk to HR.

This is so true in the firing case. But do remember, as a regular employee, HR can be extremely helpful. When I took a Leave of Absence for a health issue, HR was so incredibly helpful and empathetic to help me get back on my feet and return with a smooth transition on both ends.

On the other side, having mentored a lot of people at my previous job who were on PiPs/cusp of getting fired...they are definitely not your friend and their first order of business is to protect the company.

Get everything in writing, emails etc should be printed out.

joshmanders• 10 years ago

Great article Zach, really resonated with me. I too was fired from a company I helped build. I was employee number 4, and the only non-cofounder to have equity. You're damn right on the phrase "If you don't own the company, the company owns you"

xiaoma• 10 years ago

"I was informed 28 hours before my 90 day window closed that the agreement I had thought I had didn’t exist; it was then that I realized I had 28 hours to either come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars that I didn’t have to save half of my stock, or I could sign the agreement as-is and avoid losing half of my already-diminished stake. I opted to sign."

This egregiously unethical and it's saddening to hear Github's leadership keep sinking lower. What a way to treat literally the #1 contributor to github/github, who gave half a decade of his life to the company.

Takeaway: don't join a startup as one of the first ten employees if you value your financial future. Zach is living proof that even if you're a top performer, you fully vest and the company becomes a unicorn, you still might be broke afterwards.

scalesolved• 10 years ago

Yup I was shocked by this, really disappointing behaviour from Github.

askyourmother• 10 years ago

I have learnt over the years from personal experience, and watching the outcomes of others, never, ever, accept a deal with an employer where they structure pay or rewards for future payout. Always, always get the payoff or bonus upfront.

They may want to discuss potential claw back contractual clauses, but again, once you starting your own, they will back down.

The biggest eye opener is that you never really "know" an employer till things go wrong and communication goes legal.

sheepmullet3• 10 years ago

Takeaway: don't join a startup as one of the first ten employees if you value your financial future.

It is the dirty little startup secret. Top performers who care about the company/vision/product frequently get shafted.

The problem is they typically have significant leadership roles and have a lot of emotional investment but they haven't negotiated leadership style exit packages or any official power.

For example I was a top performer at company X ~10 years ago and I really cared about the product and our customers. So when new senior management started pushing a complete re-write of our systems into another language stack I pushed back.

I argued it would cost $8-$10 million and give us minimal benefit. It wasn't helping our product or our customers. I argued we should upgrade one part of our system and measure the benefits etc.

And then... I was let go for poor performance (way to really stick it to me!). They still haven't finished the rewrite but are still around and doing "ok" in the market.

If I was a bit wiser and more mature I would have simply said "Great lets re-write it" and used it as an opportunity to learn the new language and ecosystem and then jump ship.

Now this happens in large corporations as well as startups... But the really toxic part about startups is they go out of their way to hire and advertise to top performers who buy into the product vision etc and then they shaft them.

lololomg• 10 years ago

Great, let's rewrite it. We'll start with this piece here and get immediate benefit without having to complete the entire rewrite first, and then we'll decide which piece to do next!

imgabe• 10 years ago

If an employer has decided to fire you, then you’ve not only failed at your job, you’ve failed as a human being.

Damn, that's a downright toxic attitude. I've never been fired, but nobody should consider their job a measure of their worth as a human being.

harryh3• 10 years ago

Why not? My job isn't my only worth as a human being, but it's certainly a pretty big portion of it. I spend approximately 25% of my time working. If I'm not accomplishing something meaningful in those hours, then something is definitely wrong.

kasey_junk• 10 years ago

Because firing decisions get made all the time absent details about the human behind it. I was there when a team that was better at their job than another one at every measure was let go because of their lease terms.

hooloovoo_zoo• 10 years ago

Can someone please summarize this? I can't get past his rambling style.

jonnathanson2• 10 years ago

Zach was fired from GitHub last year, after which he published a few tweets and a blog post that got a great deal of attention here. Now he is revisiting the situation, both to mine lessons from it and to make peace with it.

There is some room for agreement or disagreement with Zach's characterization of the circumstances, as indicated by many of the comments on this thread. Regardless, I think it's a worthwhile and interesting read.

mikestew3• 10 years ago

That, in part, was how I ultimately was able to sneak into the Andreessen Horowitz corporate apartments and stayed there rent-free for sixteen months. I currently have twelve monogrammed a16z robes in my collection

At which point what little sympathy I might had for the author vanished, unless I missed the part that explains why this isn't just outright thievery. And then to publicly admit that if it's not nailed down, you'll steal it. Yeah, "tall poppy syndrome", that must be it. You were just too good for this world.

Besides, do I want to take advice from someone with such large blinders on? Yes, HR joins video conferences because they want to personally thank you for your outstanding work. Be careful at train crossings, Zach, because if you didn't see this metapohorical train coming with it's lights and horn ablazin', you might not see a real one.

holman4• 10 years ago

I'm really not even sure a16z has corporate apartments. It's just poking a little fun in the middle of a dreary subject. I don't even own a single robe, much less twelve, although I'd be into it.

mikestew3• 10 years ago

Fair enough. I don't really get the joke, but that's on me for not reading the article word-for-word.

skrebbel• 10 years ago

Besides, do I want to take advice from someone with such large blinders on? Yes, HR joins video conferences because they want to personally thank you for your outstanding work.

Wow, you really hate people who share things on the internet, right?

Anyway, I've worked 3 years at a company where HR joining a meeting usually meant something like "hey we have this great training/project/coach role that we think you'd like to dive in to. would you?". That, or I had large blinders on and they actually planned to fire me each time but instead sent me on a 3-day CouchDB training abroad. Oops!

mikestew3• 10 years ago

Wow, you really hate people who share things on the internet, right?

Just because you wrote it on the internet doesn't mean it's beyond reproach. What's your point?

Anyway, I've worked 3 years at a company where HR joining a meeting

I wasn't talking about just the HR freight train bearing down on him. I'm willing to bet that you knew this, but just didn't like my comment so you needed a point to argue with. Have at it, won't bother me a bit.

kafkaesq• 10 years ago

I was in Colorado at the time, but agreed to meet up and have a video chat about things. When I jumped on the call, I noticed that — surprise! — someone from HR was on the call as well.

It's always an onerous sign when HR "joins you" for a call or an in-person meeting.

But when the person inviting you doesn't tell you in advance that they'd like to have their pal from HR join in? That's a pretty solid indication that not only is the chat not going the be particularly fun. They've pretty much reached a certain "disconnect" stage with you already, and are already in the mindset of going over your head -- and beyond caring how disconcerting this may be for you, or how you might react.

As a prerequisite to excreting you out of their system more formally and definitively, shortly thereafter.

wambotron• 10 years ago

I'm in a situation now where I was one of the first five (#5, to be precise) employees at a startup. I told them what I needed to get as a salary, and I didn't cut it down for the sake of hoping to cash out later. I got less stock than I could've, but that money (if it ever exists), is more of a bonus to me than anything.

I can't afford to go out on a limb for a startup or to hope for some big pay day. I'm a single earner in a family of five and I can't just make my kids stop eating and growing because I want to get some stock options.

I would suggest anyone thinking of working at a startup keeps their regular salary in mind as what you need/want, and think of stock as a bonus later that probably will NOT ever come.

Stock is a nice carrot to dangle if you're a stingy employer (or one who refuses to pay folks' worth), but it shouldn't be considered as part of your compensation if you're a lowly employee like myself.

mathattack3• 10 years ago

Very well written. Stock options don't pay for the groceries. My landlord doesn't take a potential bonus as a reason for not paying rent.

You need to be able to find a way to make ends meet with just base salary.

mstade2• 10 years ago

100% this. I've been offered (and given) stock options at a couple of places now but never compromised on compensation. Stock options for a non-traded entity are worthless, regardless of what arbitrary finger-in-air valuation some investors have given you. On the off chance you do get to vest, and actually make some money, you're still very likely to not make up the loss during the years you took a compensatory hit, and would've been better off compensation wise with a more stable (in every sense) but possibly more dull company.

fideloper• 10 years ago

This is getting prematurely buried

twoquestions• 10 years ago

If an employer has decided to fire you, then you’ve not only failed at your job, you’ve failed as a human being.

That was me, being a hateful little shitbird. Reading that is like seeing myself in a photo of a lynching, gleefully pointing at the victim.

There's no excuse for posting like that, and I am ashamed for hurting you and kicking you when you were down.

I hope the next time I'm tempted to post like that, someone serves me up a knuckle sandwich before I hit the 'add comment' button.

I'm sorry.

holman4• 10 years ago

All is forgiven. :) Thanks.

GFK_of_xmaspast3• 10 years ago

There's a big difference between 'losing a job' and 'getting strung up neck-wise from an oak tree'.

brazzledazzle• 10 years ago

Good on you for owning up and apologizing. I went looking for the original comment and I found this. I expected to be angry but now I'm happy.

EugeneOZ• 10 years ago

When every company in web dev is yelling "we are firing" on each corner, I don't understand such extreme feelings about being fired. Couple of weeks and you are hired again, calm down.

joesmo• 10 years ago

"Even though I helped move a company’s valuation almost two billion dollars, I haven’t made a dime from the company outside of making a pretty below-to-average salary. That’s after six years."

Pretty much sums up most startup experiences in the area.

dawhizkid• 10 years ago

Why didn't he sign an 83b when he joined? That's a must when you join an early stage startup!

phonon• 10 years ago

Because he got ISO style options, and not restricted stock (which is what an 83b affects). Those options have an exercise price (that he could not afford).

holman4• 10 years ago

I was not permitted to.

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