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By tech standards, this is an extremely generous severance. And, in the Bay Area, 3 months would be more than enough time for a young (under 30) person to find

By tech standards, this is an extremely generous severance. And, in the Bay Area, 3 months would be more than enough time for a young (under 30) person to find a job. Unfortunately, it may not be that way in Arizona, but that's not the CEO's fault. I have to give the CEO credit. He's probably had to fight his CFO and board tooth and nail to get that package. I view it the same way that I view Obama's work on health care. Is it perfect? No. But it's better to compromise and get something done than to get nothing accomplished at all. What do you expect Sacks to do, stand up to his board, get fired, and then have everyone get nothing? Most tech companies, when they lay people off, don't offer severance or even announce a layoff. They hide it as a "performance" based layoff or put in a stack-ranking system. Sacks is trying to do the most honorable thing that he can. This is also a way for CEO Sacks to distance himself from the Y Combinator way of doing things. YC would advise him to do the standard sleazy startup thing. He's not doing that.

p4wnc6 10y ago
> By tech standards, this is an extremely generous severance. And, in the Bay Area, 3 months would be more than enough time for a young (under 30) person to find a job. Wrong on both accounts. They say to factor about 1 months of job searching for every $10k of salary you seek, and I have found this to be highly accurate when searching in New York and in Boston -- certainly also true in SF. Keep in mind that most SF start-up jobs are ludicrous start-up bullshit -- yes maybe you can easily hop to these jobs, but they don't actually provide enough compensation to support living there. Being able to hop to these jobs isn't a reasonable backup plan, despite how many deluded folks try this for a while before moving away. > I have to give the CEO credit. He's probably had to fight his CFO and board tooth and nail to get that package. This is not how companies work. The CEO isn't some champion for the people. This was a careful decision with forethought by all parties, planning ahead for how it would be perceived in media, what impact it might have for future recruiting. If you think of the CEO as some kind of chivalrous champion of the common man, you have a very naive understanding of how companies work, and how bureaucracy in general works. > Most tech companies, when they lay people off, don't offer severance or even announce a layoff. In part this happens because of the taboo created to make it "bad" to talk about failure modes, like someone's tenure ending. Most people are too scared to negotiate this because they are afraid it will make them look like they're already thinking about how to leave or something, which is silly. But in general, this is just false. My experience, at least, and the experience of many tech colleagues I've had, contradicts your claim. > This is also a way for CEO Sacks to distance himself from the Y Combinator way of doing things. YC would advise him to do the standard sleazy startup thing. He's not doing that. This is a bizarre comment. While I agree that Y Combinator is sleazy, I think it's clear that Zenefits is awfully sleazy too, and that this severance arrangement is pure sleaze by Zenefits.
- landryraccoon 10y ago
  > They say to factor about 1 months of job searching for every $10k of salary you seek, and I have found this to be highly accurate when searching in New York and in Boston -- certainly also true in SF. What position are you talking about? I have had the opposite experience; in the past decade job hunting in the valley has never taken more than 3 months, and even in the 3 month case it's been because I wanted to slow down the process - the employers wanted to move even faster. > But in general, this is just false. My experience, at least, and the experience of many tech colleagues I've had, contradicts your claim. I have had the opposite experience in the bay area. What positions are you looking at? This doesn't sound like the typical experience for any engineers that I'm aware of. Maybe things are very different on the east coast.
- rco8786 10y ago
  > They say to factor about 1 months of job searching for every $10k of salary you seek This comment in no way applies to tech jobs in SV. It's unfortunate that a lot of these losses will happen in AZ though.
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    That is the most insane rule I have ever heard. Salary is not related to search time, demand is. I know if programmers making 100k find a new job in a week, and factory workers making 30k take 2 years to find a job. I don't have enough data to back up the exact "rule of thumb", but I would eat my shoe if it looked anywhere close to 1 month per 10k of salary.
    - p4wnc6 10y ago
      > I know if programmers making 100k find a new job in a week, and factory workers making 30k take 2 years to find a job. Yes, unrepresentative outliers exist. I don't see your point. This is a frequently cited rule of thumb by professional recruiters and those who work as specialists to help candidates improve their job search and find a job. It's been around for a while and applied to many industries, though certainly some are different. I'm not claiming it always holds, or even that things will always be the way they are now, just that it's a good rule on average for most jobs, and it's definitely a good rule of thumb for software jobs, even in the middle of SV. The reason it takes a long time is that you're assessing goodness of fit. The case when you're just looking to immediately jump ship and you have essentially no standards besides compensation (this happens a lot in SV) is not being considered and is irrelevant in a discussion about severance anyway. You're also speaking from the perspective of someone looking solely in a confined geographic region -- meaning you're not considering the vast amount of job searching that involves considering relocation, in which case just up and leaving your old life behind on a whim after finding a job in one week's time is a ludicrous outlier. What about people with families? You're thinking about this from only a single, narrow perspective that is an outlier in terms of the total volume of jobs. The volume of jobs in SV for which people apply who have low search standards and who are in life positions to just accept possibly relocating or significantly changing their commute on a whim is a tiny fraction of the total volume of jobs, so again I just do not see the relevance of these anecdotes. > Salary is not related to search time, demand is. This is very naive. Salary is loosely a measure of how irreplaceable your labor would be, and is also an expression of demand, both of which affect search time. Salary is definitely causally related to demand, so it's at least a proxy. Again, no one is claiming there is some hard theory to propose an economic law relating search time to salary. It's just a heuristic, most likely because salary is a proxy for demand -- one of the most ubiquitous ones. You seem to just glibly deny this but don't even pause to consider that salary is in part a proxy for demand. The bigger thing is that after you begin earning a salary that you're happy with, you know what you're worth and you know the rough salary range you'll be seeking, and you'll spend some time interviewing at places that can't come near it, but eventually you'll figure out how to target the right places. When you do, then it's not about salary -- it's about work/life balance, flexibility, whether you'll do the kinds of projects you want to do, commute, relocation, whether you like the area you'll move to, how bad are the company politics, etc. This is a massive and difficult combinatorial optimization problem and even conditioning on finding places that offer in your desired salary range, if you take these other life factors at all seriously, it takes a long time to find an acceptable fit. Given that increasing salary is generally related to increasing seniority (thus age, and thus also more complex life situations with spouse and children or family elders in need of care, etc.) and to increasing responsibility (thus politics and subtle factors will greatly affect your experience in the new job, much more than compared with lower salaried workers in general) it's very reasonable to propose that as salary increases, search complexity increases, and so search time to find an acceptable role also increases. Again, outliers exist. Deluded folks who just want to maintain a certain kind of status lifestyle in an urban center may just jump to any job that sustains that lifestyle -- that's a super uncommon way to search for a job in the market overall, even if it's not uncommon in a market like SV. It's just not useful for general heuristics. I mean, an even more obvious outlier example would be getting hired due to a professional connection. You might spend zero time looking for a job and have it just offered to you. But we don't go around making general heuristics based on extreme outlier experiences like that -- and people living in those outlier experiences know that they don't need to use the heuristic.
dang 10y ago
This appears to be the latest sockpuppet by a serial troll who habitually lies about and tries to smear YC, including truly nasty personal attacks and recently even threats of physical violence. It's worth noting how the smears are inserted in passing here and in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11903803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11903803, while pretending to participate in the discussion in good faith. When we ban someone from Hacker News for egregious repeated abuses, we ban their subsequent accounts as well. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11903531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11903531 and marked it off-topic.
- ericfrenkiel 10y ago
  @Dang, commending you for leaving the comment in place - repugnant as it may be. This in stark contrast to the recent censorship at Reddit and /r/news. Not deleting this reflects the maturity of YC and by definition refutes the very accusation laid against it. Kudos

p4wnc6 10y ago

> By tech standards, this is an extremely generous severance. And, in the Bay Area, 3 months would be more than enough time for a young (under 30) person to find a job. Wrong on both accounts. They say to factor about 1 months of job searching for every $10k of salary you seek, and I have found this to be highly accurate when searching in New York and in Boston -- certainly also true in SF. Keep in mind that most SF start-up jobs are ludicrous start-up bullshit -- yes maybe you can easily hop to these jobs, but they don't actually provide enough compensation to support living there. Being able to hop to these jobs isn't a reasonable backup plan, despite how many deluded folks try this for a while before moving away. > I have to give the CEO credit. He's probably had to fight his CFO and board tooth and nail to get that package. This is not how companies work. The CEO isn't some champion for the people. This was a careful decision with forethought by all parties, planning ahead for how it would be perceived in media, what impact it might have for future recruiting. If you think of the CEO as some kind of chivalrous champion of the common man, you have a very naive understanding of how companies work, and how bureaucracy in general works. > Most tech companies, when they lay people off, don't offer severance or even announce a layoff. In part this happens because of the taboo created to make it "bad" to talk about failure modes, like someone's tenure ending. Most people are too scared to negotiate this because they are afraid it will make them look like they're already thinking about how to leave or something, which is silly. But in general, this is just false. My experience, at least, and the experience of many tech colleagues I've had, contradicts your claim. > This is also a way for CEO Sacks to distance himself from the Y Combinator way of doing things. YC would advise him to do the standard sleazy startup thing. He's not doing that. This is a bizarre comment. While I agree that Y Combinator is sleazy, I think it's clear that Zenefits is awfully sleazy too, and that this severance arrangement is pure sleaze by Zenefits.

landryraccoon 10y ago
> They say to factor about 1 months of job searching for every $10k of salary you seek, and I have found this to be highly accurate when searching in New York and in Boston -- certainly also true in SF. What position are you talking about? I have had the opposite experience; in the past decade job hunting in the valley has never taken more than 3 months, and even in the 3 month case it's been because I wanted to slow down the process - the employers wanted to move even faster. > But in general, this is just false. My experience, at least, and the experience of many tech colleagues I've had, contradicts your claim. I have had the opposite experience in the bay area. What positions are you looking at? This doesn't sound like the typical experience for any engineers that I'm aware of. Maybe things are very different on the east coast.
rco8786 10y ago
> They say to factor about 1 months of job searching for every $10k of salary you seek This comment in no way applies to tech jobs in SV. It's unfortunate that a lot of these losses will happen in AZ though.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  That is the most insane rule I have ever heard. Salary is not related to search time, demand is. I know if programmers making 100k find a new job in a week, and factory workers making 30k take 2 years to find a job. I don't have enough data to back up the exact "rule of thumb", but I would eat my shoe if it looked anywhere close to 1 month per 10k of salary.
  - p4wnc6 10y ago
    > I know if programmers making 100k find a new job in a week, and factory workers making 30k take 2 years to find a job. Yes, unrepresentative outliers exist. I don't see your point. This is a frequently cited rule of thumb by professional recruiters and those who work as specialists to help candidates improve their job search and find a job. It's been around for a while and applied to many industries, though certainly some are different. I'm not claiming it always holds, or even that things will always be the way they are now, just that it's a good rule on average for most jobs, and it's definitely a good rule of thumb for software jobs, even in the middle of SV. The reason it takes a long time is that you're assessing goodness of fit. The case when you're just looking to immediately jump ship and you have essentially no standards besides compensation (this happens a lot in SV) is not being considered and is irrelevant in a discussion about severance anyway. You're also speaking from the perspective of someone looking solely in a confined geographic region -- meaning you're not considering the vast amount of job searching that involves considering relocation, in which case just up and leaving your old life behind on a whim after finding a job in one week's time is a ludicrous outlier. What about people with families? You're thinking about this from only a single, narrow perspective that is an outlier in terms of the total volume of jobs. The volume of jobs in SV for which people apply who have low search standards and who are in life positions to just accept possibly relocating or significantly changing their commute on a whim is a tiny fraction of the total volume of jobs, so again I just do not see the relevance of these anecdotes. > Salary is not related to search time, demand is. This is very naive. Salary is loosely a measure of how irreplaceable your labor would be, and is also an expression of demand, both of which affect search time. Salary is definitely causally related to demand, so it's at least a proxy. Again, no one is claiming there is some hard theory to propose an economic law relating search time to salary. It's just a heuristic, most likely because salary is a proxy for demand -- one of the most ubiquitous ones. You seem to just glibly deny this but don't even pause to consider that salary is in part a proxy for demand. The bigger thing is that after you begin earning a salary that you're happy with, you know what you're worth and you know the rough salary range you'll be seeking, and you'll spend some time interviewing at places that can't come near it, but eventually you'll figure out how to target the right places. When you do, then it's not about salary -- it's about work/life balance, flexibility, whether you'll do the kinds of projects you want to do, commute, relocation, whether you like the area you'll move to, how bad are the company politics, etc. This is a massive and difficult combinatorial optimization problem and even conditioning on finding places that offer in your desired salary range, if you take these other life factors at all seriously, it takes a long time to find an acceptable fit. Given that increasing salary is generally related to increasing seniority (thus age, and thus also more complex life situations with spouse and children or family elders in need of care, etc.) and to increasing responsibility (thus politics and subtle factors will greatly affect your experience in the new job, much more than compared with lower salaried workers in general) it's very reasonable to propose that as salary increases, search complexity increases, and so search time to find an acceptable role also increases. Again, outliers exist. Deluded folks who just want to maintain a certain kind of status lifestyle in an urban center may just jump to any job that sustains that lifestyle -- that's a super uncommon way to search for a job in the market overall, even if it's not uncommon in a market like SV. It's just not useful for general heuristics. I mean, an even more obvious outlier example would be getting hired due to a professional connection. You might spend zero time looking for a job and have it just offered to you. But we don't go around making general heuristics based on extreme outlier experiences like that -- and people living in those outlier experiences know that they don't need to use the heuristic.

dang 10y ago

This appears to be the latest sockpuppet by a serial troll who habitually lies about and tries to smear YC, including truly nasty personal attacks and recently even threats of physical violence. It's worth noting how the smears are inserted in passing here and in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11903803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11903803, while pretending to participate in the discussion in good faith. When we ban someone from Hacker News for egregious repeated abuses, we ban their subsequent accounts as well. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11903531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11903531 and marked it off-topic.

ericfrenkiel 10y ago
@Dang, commending you for leaving the comment in place - repugnant as it may be. This in stark contrast to the recent censorship at Reddit and /r/news. Not deleting this reflects the maturity of YC and by definition refutes the very accusation laid against it. Kudos