Eight hundred employees resign after WhiteHat Jr asks them to work from office

https://inc42.com/buzz/exclusive-over-800-whitehat-jr-employees-resign-as-edtech-giant-asks-to-report-to-office/

388 128 4 years ago

ipnon• 4 years ago

You will never see an "Office Space" type movie for remote workers.

krasin• 4 years ago

I would not be so sure. Companies go great lengths to control remote workers and protect their information, so it's probably only a matter of time when working from VR will be required at least from some of them. And then it's Office Space v2.

0des• 4 years ago

You going to burn down your living room?

1123581321• 4 years ago

I’ve been performing gangland style murders of my own printers for decades.

acheron• 4 years ago

Damn it feels good to be a gangsta

mattkevan• 4 years ago

Ha, I showed that scene just yesterday to my Epson that announced it wasn’t going to print anymore.

Hopefully it took the hint and is thinking very hard about the consequences of its refusal to work properly.

MiddleEndian• 4 years ago

When I was but a young student, I smashed my printer with a sledgehammer and recorded it. This was before I had seen Office Space, I was just tired of its shit.

conradfr• 4 years ago

I guess there was the Mythic Quest Quarantine episode.

egberts1• 4 years ago

but of course, how else are they going to do a layoff on an extremely short notice without all the legalese and laws of layoff.

bin_bash• 4 years ago

WhiteHat Jr is a coding school in India

drieddust• 4 years ago

Watch their AD on YouTube and you will know. They are selling dreams to unsuspecting parents. As per then kid can learn scratch and become an engineer at Google it fly a rocket to the moon.

matt_heimer• 4 years ago

They hired remote workers regardless of location and decided to give everyone a month to starting working from an office?

geocrasher• 4 years ago

     “This was a well-planned and managed layoff that WhiteHat Jr did,” a former employee remarked.

Indeed. Vicious, but well played.

unethical_ban• 4 years ago

Yep. One month to relocate cities? This isn't merely "drive 15 minutes to the office".

nanidin• 4 years ago

Yep, time to reconsider the resignations as constructive dismissal via the legal system.

hedora• 4 years ago

Note that, if they lay you off, you're entitled to unemployment, etc. It's probably better to refuse to resign and also refuse to move. That way, you get whatever severance benefits you are due.

If you are at the company, or just resigned because of this unreasonable policy change, I highly suggest you use your local bar association's referral service (or some other means) to schedule an inexpensive consult with a labor attorney.

Afforess• 4 years ago

It's an old tactic, IBM used to do it all the time: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/ibm-tells-its...

searchableguy6• 4 years ago

This is likely a general layoff. Edtech bubble in India has bursted. Many edtech are going through huge layoffs.

gkoberger• 4 years ago

I think this title/article is a bit misleading.

1/ The company was hemorrhaging money and wanted resignations (if I'm understanding "INR CR" correctly, they lost $218,102,508 USD last year??)

2/ This was India, so the stock image feels a bit misleading

3/ It happened two months ago, not recently

4/ It wasn't just coming back to the office; it was relocating people to offices who hadn't worked there before

5/ They even forced people who worked near an office go to OTHER offices in other cities

Here's the original source, which is much better (and includes details on revenue and expenses): https://inc42.com/buzz/exclusive-over-800-whitehat-jr-employ...

This isn't a case of workers preferring WFH over the office; it's a sneaky layoff.

searchableguy6• 4 years ago

The company was hemorrhaging money and wanted resignations

Unrelated, it's amazing how edtech startups have been beaten by traditional coaching institutions. Not only those institutions are profitable but they are beating growth numbers consistently.

prewett• 4 years ago

I've never understood why tech people think computers are going to improve education. Education is a human activity, you cannot replace a human with a computer. At best a computer is going to be like a book v2, plus multiple choice problem sets / test. Learning from a book is hardly going to be more effective than a teacher who can adjust on the fly to the students.

dv_dt2• 4 years ago

If a company is hemorrhaging money, why not eliminate some office leases and keep more people remote? Maybe that comes later after the self-layoff selection?

searchableguy6• 4 years ago

Remote work at scale doesn't work well in India due to general distrust.

rossdavidh2• 4 years ago

Depends on whether or not office leases or salaries are the bigger expense.

vishnugupta2• 4 years ago

Schools are reopening this week in India. These online coaching classes saw big growth last two years but now I expect a massive subscriber churn.

rossdavidh2• 4 years ago

This seems like a massively important bit of context which was missing from the article, thanks for telling us this! The article is clickbaity, given that I learned more context from your HN comment than their whole page of text.

ushakov• 4 years ago

what is the reason for churn?

vishnugupta2• 4 years ago

Online classes from schools in India didn’t engage kids beyond 2-3 hrs. That left a big time void which were filled by these online coaching classes.

But now with physical schools starting kids will be busy for a good 6-7 hrs after which (and home work, playtime) they will hardly have time for online coaching classes. Parents would soon realize this, if not already, and discontinue subscriptions.

shreyshnaccount• 4 years ago

Schools have been open for months, atleast in the Delhi region

unmole2• 4 years ago

Schools have been open for months in many states. And more importantly, most schools have summer vacation now.

ldjkfkdsjnv• 4 years ago

I think in the future, forced working from the office will be considered barbaric, and a direct form of control over the employees life. Similar to feudalism, peasants, or other patterns of worker owner relationships, forced office work for a middling wage simply isn't worth it.

tyrfing• 4 years ago

The next step is obviously employer-provided XR systems that allow control regardless of your physical location. Just think of the potential for analytics based on things like gaze metrics!

29athrowaway• 4 years ago

It is already barbaric today.

A waste of time and resources. Fuel, road infrastructure, vehicles, parking space. All for what? so that people can waste their productivity in an open plan office, which is objectively the most distracting type of office plan ever devised, even worse than its predecessor, cubicles.

And when it's flu season, prepare to bring the flu home and make your entire family sick, because seeing people face to face from a close distance, including their nostrils and mouth from where pathogens come out, is a fantastic idea during a flu season. In fact, it is such a great idea, that we should do an all-hands meeting and bring all employees into the same space, all next to each other, so that we can maximize the odds of the flu spreading from person to person.

It is also great for companies, because helping people succeed based on superficial traits like their appearance or voice parameters instead of their productivity is definitively in the best interest of a company. That definitively helps companies succeed considering the customer doesn't care about how your employees look.

Imnimo• 4 years ago

I know this has nothing to do with the story, but I cannot get over how close this company name is to Weenie Hut Junior.

deadalus• 4 years ago

Came across this article about Whitehat Jr, its hilarious : https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/who-wolf-gupta-story-b...

They created a fictional character 'WOLF GUPTA' to promote their brand.

kburman• 4 years ago

Creating a fictional character is not a bad thing but what they did is the claim that it is a real story with a success story that he got a job offer from Google and package in crores(INR) all being a kid. Ran this ad nationwide on all media and mislead many parents who already have FOMO.

When asked about this kid wolf Gupta they sent a full legal team to threaten anyone who raises questions mass reporting bad reviews as a task from their employees.

And when it got out of hand they acknowledged that it was all a lie and continued misleadig parents like nothing bad in it.

s09dfhks• 4 years ago

Reminds me of the fictional highschool prodigy musician "Ling Ling" that the "Ling Ling 40hrs" subreddit created

simonh• 4 years ago

Was anyone ever threatened with legal action for saying Ling Ling was a fictional character?

ClumsyPilot3• 4 years ago

If I pulled that kind of shit in my job, I'd be fired or in jail. Surely this is fraud?

ghoomketu• 4 years ago

For some background history whitehat jr has been accused of running misleading ads and shady marketing and also sueuing individuals for millions of dollars to keep their mouth shut.

To get more context please google "pradeep poonia whitehat" and you will get all the gory details, whatsapp chats, etc.

breitling• 4 years ago

Haven't heard from Pradeep in a while. Do you know how all those cases progressed?

amitheonlyone• 4 years ago

Last news I saw was that Whitehat Jr withdrew their case

mbostleman• 4 years ago

Ah the ever elusive causation shell game.

samstave2• 4 years ago

Uhm.... if you call yourself "whitehat jr"... I auto dont trust you.

CoastalCoder• 4 years ago

My brain keeps parsing that as a mashup of "Whitecastle" and "Carls, Jr."

PragmaticPulp• 4 years ago

Yes, there's far more to this story. This isn't your typical story of employees going remote for COVID and then being asked to return. There's a lot more wrapped up in this, including failure to adjust salaries and employees who can't relocate on short notice:

One of the employees who resigned told the website that a month’s time was not enough for relocation. “Some have kids, some have aged and sick parents, while others have other responsibilities. It is not right to call back employees in such a short period of time,” the former WhiteHat Jr employee said.
Another employee said salaries also factored in the decision to not return to the office. At the time of hiring, employees were told about their job location – WhiteHat Jr has offices in Gurugram, Mumbai and Bengaluru. However, after working from home for two years, employees believed that their salaries should be revised to reflect the cost of living in expensive cities.

This looks like more of an engineered layoff from a company that is already in a death spiral:

“This was a well-planned and managed layoff that WhiteHat Jr did,” a former employee remarked.

zerop• 4 years ago

White hat is actually grey.

mc4ndr3• 4 years ago

If education can work online, why not the makers of online education? Sounds like a company that doesn't believe in their own product.

happy-go-lucky• 4 years ago

Seems like a classic example of fly-by-night companies barely staying afloat on the highly dubious claims they make about their products or services. They don't value their customers. They say they do, but they just want their money.

sonicggg• 4 years ago

Can someone enlighten me? Why would they resign instead forcing the employer to fire them? Like by not going to work or just doing a shitty job.

If you quit, you're giving up on severance or unemployment insurance benefits.

searchableguy6• 4 years ago

I can't speak for the company in question but corporate culture can be very toxic here. They might have stopped remiting salary or threatened some other action if they do not resign themselves.

saagarjha3• 4 years ago

What action can they threaten that's worse than just firing the employees?

SmartestUnknown• 4 years ago

God! I hope both WhiteHat Jr. and their parent company Byju's crash and burn. They are crap companies which make poor and gullible parents enroll their kids in one of their programs for extortionate amount of money. If the parents cannot afford to pay all at once, they give a "loan" to the parents and collect a part of it each month even if the kids aren't satisfied with the education that is being provided. Note that none of the kids in India use these apps as the only way to study. They attend regular schools and use these apps as an additional source. Byju's employs 1000s of people whose only job is to go visit as many houses as they can and trick the parents into subscribing for their services by falsely claiming that the only way their kids can succeed is when their education is supplemented by these apps. Many innocent people who want to do all they can to make their kids' lives better fall into the trap and then keep paying the "loan" amount back which could be a substantial part of their monthly income.

Meta and Disney invested a lot of money into these companies and they use it to bully anyone who tries to bring these issues up by shutting down their YouTube channels and filing defamation law suits [1,2]. The entire online education industry is unregulated and resort to shitty antics to extort money. I don't understand why these companies need to exist when we have other free and amazing resources online like Khan Academy which teach all topics to all ages of people.

[1] https://thepost.co.in/news/633/whitehat-jr-lawsuit-pradeep-p...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/india/search?q=pradeep+poonia&restr...

rmbyrro2• 4 years ago

Unfortunately, that's the reality of many industries and countless organizations.

I too wish this didn't exist. But I'm learning to replace wishful thinking with something better.

In this case, I think reality is providing a valuable learning opportunity to those parents: that they should verify everything before taking as truth, and only believe as an anticipation of goodwill only during the period necessary for verification (to avoid ending up pessimistic or cynic, for instance).

While there are still people that didn't learn and apply these lessons well, there will always be Byju's out there...

ClumsyPilot3• 4 years ago

'I think reality is providing a valuable learning'

What they need to be provided is a good layer, and a clampdown on corporate fraud.

nr2x• 4 years ago

Yuck.

kamaal• 4 years ago

> I don't understand why these companies need to exist when we have other free and amazing resources online like Khan Academy which teach all topics to all ages of people.

Cram school culture, FOMO and dreams of children making it big.

These apps are just a part of the larger culture where IIT cram school tuitions are supposed to begin at age 11. Every one in India likes to diss on Engineering education, but it continues to remain the most predictable way of making an upper middle class living.

Parent obviously spend good money on education for this reason.

geodel• 4 years ago

Agree with everything you said. These asshats should crash and burn in just world.

SrslyJosh• 4 years ago

As the Covid situation has improved

LOL, sure.

nikolay• 4 years ago

I have not worked at an office in the past 10 years. Can't believe some people prefer to work in the old way. Okay, I get it's convenient to spend most of the day pretending that you work - coming at 9AM and going into the kitchen to make coffee and breakfast, than getting a 2-hour lunch, having a proof on your calendar that you worked for 1 hour, when the meeting ended after 20 minutes, and people stayed there talking about anythign but work. Even if people are distracted during WFH, the waste is still much less and there are less excuses compared to WFO.

analog31• 4 years ago

Well, working in a lab is one reason. I develop technology for scientific measurement equipment. I did OK during the lockdown by moving one of my experiments to a spare room in my basement, but whether that can work or not depends a lot on what facilities are needed for a specific project.

Sure I spend some time goofing off like you describe, but my work is neither measured nor paid by the hour.

davidgerard• 4 years ago

cheap reblog of https://inc42.com/buzz/exclusive-over-800-whitehat-jr-employ...

dubswithus• 4 years ago

Is this going to impact operations?

Eight hundred employees resign after WhiteHat Jr asks them to work from office

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