Ask HN: What to do about a fake cofounder/employee?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9933237

by lined9292 • 11 years ago

4 7 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

We hired an independent contractor a few months back and fired him. In his contract it clearly stipulates he wasn't an employee, owner, etc. He has no equity interest in the company. He is now claiming on Linkedin he was a cofounder. I fear that this might be a negative signal to future investors by associating us with him.

Thinking about talking to a lawyer on this. Before I do was wondering if anyone had suggestions/similar stories? Any way I can get Linkedin to remove his 'title'?

I am realizing anyone can claim anything on Linkedin.

jurymatic• 11 years ago

Yeah I've had fake "employees" as well. When I read up on it, it seemed the general consensus was that you could ask LinkedIn to remove them but they didn't particularly care. Over time, you'll likely end up playing whack-a-mole with fake profiles.

andersthue• 11 years ago

As with competition the less mind space you are using on him the better.

I am pretty sure a future investor has seen this before and will understand that he is a fake.

tokenadult• 11 years ago

I have written to LinkedIn before about a claimed "employee" (a person who has never been in my state, ever) and LinkedIn appears to have removed the fake information. Some fakers just try to see what they can get away with.

JSeymourATL• 11 years ago

This may be a simple case of resume embellishment.

Before you lawyer-up; know that even a simple cease & desist letter written by an attorney can run $500. And the helpful attorney, would gladly pursue further legal action for an additional modest fee.

You can of course, write your own demand letter. But I suggest you phone this guy first. He needs to hear the tone of your voice.

Keep the conversation buttoned-up and professional. As an opener, seek to understand-- ask him what's the deal with the Founders title on Linkedin? Let him know your position and request he remove it today. No need to threaten him, threats are often counter-productive.

In most cases, the call should be enough. And you saved $500.

liquidcool• 11 years ago

I have many false employees on LinkedIn, but I can't completely divorce myself from blame after naming my company "Made Up Name." :-)

And I also recommend a phone call. I understand it will be uncomfortable for you after firing him, but be polite and if he doesn't comply, try LinkedIn, and then finally the legal route.

jfrisby• 11 years ago

I had a coworker recently whose behavior became problematic, leading me to discover a similar situation.

For example: I introduced a style / complexity checking tool into various repos, including his. When I ran it, it flagged a couple methods as too complex. We got into an argument over whether this was a fair assessment or not. The end result was that I left things where they were and moved on to something else until I could coordinate with the CTO on how to achieve my objectives in this context. (My role involves security...)

It's worth noting that at that point the tool was optional and out-of-band. It wasn't failing CI, it wasn't required as part of any other workflow, etc. At that point it existed solely for my own use and he could have ignored it for the time being.

At the end of the very next day, he brags to me about how he's "fixed" the complexity issues in the code. Based on my previous interactions with him, I decided to check this out. His "fix" was to put meta-comments in that disabled the relevant rules for the code violating them. Except he put the meta-comment to disable each rule several statements earlier than needed, and didn't include any meta-comments to re-enable the rules after the relevant code. And he had changed the config file comments I had made, reflecting that the exceptions from the company standard configuration were done to accommodate his needs (I felt it was important to have that context present for future maintenance efforts).

His bragging to me about "fixing" the complexity issues (and yes, he used the word "fix") struck me as being either deeply dishonest, or representative of a truly breathtaking lack of understanding.

Between this and several other incidents (most of them I merely observed, some I was entangled in), I decided to dig into his background a bit.

I found a few things that I could chalk up to simply not understanding the very domain-specific meaning of some general-sounding terms in particular contexts. For example: On his FounderDating profile he listed himself as having been a "mentor" to TogetherSoft / Borland. That just seemed... beyond implausible to me. So I read deeper and it seems his role at TogetherSoft (acquired by Borland turing his tenure) involved mentoring coworkers.

Ok, I'll chalk that up to an innocent mistake.

Then I get to the startup he co-founded. Except... wait. The dates here don't fit with those on his resume? Hrm. Start-date was some 6 months after the company was founded.

I tracked down the main founder's email and sent him a brief inquiry, with a fairly vague wording, asking about the time discrepancy, and asking if perhaps this was some unusual situation and that he was in fact a founder. I got an initial response asking for clarification, to which I responded. No response to that. So the founder didn't even want to say "yeah, he was a (co-)founder."

At my employer, he had taken a truly beautiful codebase written by ThoughtBot and absolutely wrecked it in the space of 2 months: He refused to gain any significant understanding of Ruby, Rails, or Angular. He ripped out Angular in favor of his own templating library. He reinvented ActiveRecord associations, incorrectly because he didn't like that the column name had to have `_id` at the end. And all the while he would rail in front of the entire company during demos about how "stupid" various tools were. "HighCharts is such a broken library -- you can't even remove a series from a chart once you've added it!" / "Wait, that seems ridiculous. Are you sure?" / "Yeah, I scoured the docs and found nothing. Googled it and found loads of other people having the same issue. I'm gonna have to blow away the whole chart and recreate it whenever there's a change!" / "... I just found the method right here while you were talking about it, and here's a jsFiddle showing that it works as expected."

I also found out he'd introduced his templating library without clarifying that it was created by him (he just announced it as a good tool he'd "found"), and had done so at at least one other company.

Given the damage done, here and apparently elsewhere, I'm seriously inclined to blog about it publicly -- name him, so that any potential employers who google him will have access to some very relevant information.

Perhaps you could write a blog post that makes a point of outlining who the founding team is? A "founders" page doesn't help because one expects that a departed cofounder would be scrubbed from it, but a blog post may raise alarm flags for more people. You wouldn't even have to name him explicitly -- just not include him, or mention him indirectly ("we hired a contractor to do X").

alphanumeric0• 11 years ago

Putting a clause in the contract stipulating that he isn't an employee doesn't mean anything, at least in the state of New York [1].

I should know, my previous employer got me to sign such a contract, but the state determined I was indeed an employee after I was unjustly fired, and now I can legally collect unemployment.

1. https://labor.ny.gov/ui/claimantinfo/ui%20and%20independent%...

Ask HN: What to do about a fake cofounder/employee?

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