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I know it’s just an anecdote but as a customer I kind of believe this. I just completed a transaction with them that had to be extended beyond the rate lock wi

I know it’s just an anecdote but as a customer I kind of believe this. I just completed a transaction with them that had to be extended beyond the rate lock window. For about 10 days there was a daily back and forth where they asked me to provide some documentation. I would provide the requested documentation and about 12 hours later I would receive a task of uploading the same required documentation. The document was a 50ish page legal document that required someone to look at it. It’s clear nobody was actually spending any effort on it. Even calling my loan officer wasn’t getting me anywhere. It wasn’t until the deadline approached that they called me and wanted to get it all sorted out and they extended my rate lock. The way management handled this looks horrible but if there’s any truth to these employees essentially stealing wages from their employer then they’re lucky they’re just being fired and not being prosecuted.

Kye 5y ago
Assuming it's true... 900 employees: 1: stealing wages 2: being able to do so 3: doing that rather than their jobs Is a systemic issue. It had to start long before almost a thousand people decided to commit a crime. Assuming it's true. I tend to not trust framing that comes from the top end of a power imbalance. edit: This isn't Twitter. Don't stop at 1 and decide you read enough to go off on someone. Read the entire comment.
- bronco21016 5y ago
  That’s a fair point and the article does mention only 250 of the employees were doing 1:4 hours of work to payable hours. From my experience it’s clear things are broken there. Where the blame lies etc is anyones best guess.
- beckman466 5y ago
  > 1: stealing wages why is Better.com using that language? all that workers can do is sell their labor time, while the property-owners they work for do not (since they earn rents from ownership). in this case, the workers create and develop some intellectual property (software), yet do not own the fruits of their own labor and are instead paid a wage. in other words: workers work on things that are not democratically held in common ownership (even actively made artificially scarce as an intellectual property). my point is: we could argue the workers are rightfully taking back more than what they are paid under our current economic system, since the property-owners take too much to begin with; they steal — to use your word — by not sharing the (intellectual) property, the source of wealth. edit: i've edited to clarify that I am responding to the definition of the word stealing used by Better.com. as Kye/OP pointed out below, this is not Kye's personal definition for the word stealing and it was terminology they copied verbatim from this current context (used by one of the parties involved).
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    If an employee is selling their time to answer customer inquiries and is not, in fact, answering available customer inquiries, what else would you call it?
    - bennyp101 5y ago
      Incompetence? Slacking off? Lazy?
      - thealfreds 5y ago
        Fraud would be another term. But as others have stated this should have been taken care of earlier. To fire them and then give the excuse afterwards meant they allowed the actions to happen.
    - willcipriano 5y ago
      If it happens as frequently as claimed? I'd call it total managerial incompetence. Call metrics are well defined and it is easy to see if someone is doing no work. If the line managers are slacking off like that, what does that say for their management (and so on and so on)?
    - mimon 5y ago
      Breach of contract, or at a stretch maybe fraud if they were actively misleading someone. But definitely not theft.
  - gkop 5y ago
    Thanks for calling this out, moreover that’s not what wage theft means: > Wage theft is the denial of wages or employee benefits rightfully owed to an employee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    related fun fact: wage theft by employers is the largest category of theft in the US by a large measure [1]. [1] https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-forms-theft-workers/ https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...
- bennyp101 5y ago
  Not really stealing though, is it? If the work wasn't there, or they found a way to 'game' the system, then that is on management. I'm sure all of us goof off at some point during the day/week - it just seems that these people were able to do it a LOT. But yea, if you aren't doing the work assigned to you, then you can't expect to keep being paid - but stealing it is not.
  - acdha 5y ago
    It’s theft if they sign a time sheet saying they did work they didn’t. It’s not theft if, say, their management didn’t have enough to work on or created processes with lots of bottlenecks.
- GoToRO 5y ago
  Just fyi, in Romania the wage is a worker’s right, so they can’t ask their money back no matter what.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
Back office (paperwork reviews and processing) was/is done in India, hence the time zone latency. They tried to make up for it with the web app, but mortgage banking relies on too many people processes (title, survey, appraisal, underwriting [even with automated underwriting and “Day One Certainty”] etc) to wring enough efficiencies to scale in a SaaSy sort of way. I was in the middle of a refi with them during this and took my business elsewhere. Maybe their SPAC go public plans are running out of runway in a rising interest rate environment.
- pixelgeek 5y ago
  It is also heavily automated. I used to work for a company that sold a document management package that was integrated with a variety of high speed scanners with OCR and for a time almost all of the new business was with US banks wanting to speed up the processing of mortgage documents. After talking with one of the customers we were all very sure that the US mortgage business was in trouble. Not 'crashing and destroying the economy' bad but on unstable ground.
- werds 5y ago
  where did you go instead? i was halfway through uploading all my stuff to Better
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    https://www.aimloan.com/ https://www.aimloan.com/ (no affiliation)
trasz 5y ago
So essentially the management was so incompetent they failed to notice their employees were underperforming. For how long? And did the responsible - management, and probably also the CEO - get fired?
SkittyDog 5y ago
I concerned that you're jumping to prosecuting employees for the systemic failure of a company to operate well. Without being privvy to the company's internal state, how could you possibly differentiate between management problems and deliberate staff malfeasance? I you have ONE incompetent or crooked employee, then sure, the employee is the problem... But if you have 900 incompetent/crooked employees, I think it's much more likely that you have a management problem. If all those employees were truly so awful, why did Garg wait til the mortgage market started cooling off to fire them? Or could it be that the company has been poorly managed for quite a while, but it's more emotionally convenient to the CEO's ego to blame the workers rather than address his own shortcomings?
- AyyWS 5y ago
  >why did Garg wait til the mortgage market started cooling off to fire them When the tide goes out, you find out who is swimming naked
cprayingmantis 5y ago
I just experienced the same thing! It was so frustrating to see that no one was looking over the documents. Finally I took a day off and sat on the phone with them all day to figure it out. It was a worse process that dealing with an actual mortgage broker.
itisit 5y ago
> The way management handled this looks horrible but if there’s any truth to these employees essentially stealing wages from their employer then they’re lucky they’re just being fired and not being prosecuted. Not excusing laziness/fraud, but it’s an open secret that billable hours from consultancies of all ilks are wildly overstated.
jonathankoren 5y ago
Garg is documented in this article as abusive. This is a fact. Now given that he has a track record of abusive behavior, I wouldn’t believe anything negative he’d say about the layed off employees. The CEO is in charge. He mishandled scaling the company, and so the blame for the failures of the company fall to him. Even if there was massive fraud inside the company, that’s still the CEO’s fault for letting it get so bad. Abusive failures always blame everyone else. If I want to charitable, maybe he thinks by trashing a bunch of people that lost their jobs, will stem the loss of morale by the remaining employees. Either way, it’s gross.
sailingparrot 5y ago
> but if there’s any truth to these employees essentially stealing wages from their employer then they’re lucky they’re just being fired and not being prosecuted. Do you think the company just happened to be extremely unlucky and only hired dishonest employees? If your company is at a stage where your support employees are only working 2 hours a day, and where a customer cannot get support for what they need in less that 10 days, it's an issue with the management and the organisation, unable to provide motivation to their employees, or the condition they need to work effectively, it's not bad luck with hiring. And thinking that just firing those people is going to solve the issue is burying their head in the sand. Maybe the ones that didn't get fired will work a bit harder in the short term, driven by fear, but on the long term it can only get ever more demoralizing.
- jmull 5y ago
  > ...only hired dishonest employees? Apparently this is 9% or 15% of the employees (there's some discrepancy). So not "only". I agree that it's on management if employees are only working 2 hours a day and getting paid 8... but one of the things management can do about it is lay off the excess employees. Either they aren't needed or they need some different people.
  - VRay 5y ago
    9 percent of your workforce isn't going to work 2 hours a day, man. Almost nobody can handle being that much of a lazy, sleazy piece of crap. What probably happened is that the idiot CEO decided to check productivity via some BS metric, then discard all the time his employees had to spend on anything else I've been on the receiving end of that before, it's infuriating.
    - golergka 5y ago
      > Almost nobody can handle being that much of a lazy, sleazy piece of crap. What are you talking about? Entire countries have been doing it for decades before ending up bankrupt.
jwong_ 5y ago
I had some similar issues with purchasing a new house through them. It was obvious no one was actually reading the documentation, or even actually listening when I asked/mentioned things ahead of time that I thought might be issues. The things I pointed out early on did turn out to be more complicated. There was even an issue where I went for a higher rate to get credits, and suddenly that number changed - and no one mentioned (or even seemed to notice). Only when I noticed it, was there anything done about it. It really seems like the US-based loan officers/team does not look at your file at all unless directly pinged by you.
Zambyte 5y ago
What is there to believe? There is a video of it happening in the article
castlecrasher2 5y ago
Yeah, we went through better.com for our refinance because the rate and fees (no loan origination fee!) were the absolute best but I saw a bunch of reviews saying their contact with Better simply ceased and they couldn't get their loan finished. Luckily, we didn't have that issue and our reps were great.
miiiiiike 5y ago
Better killed our deal this Summer. TL;DR: ALWAYS USE A LOCAL LENDER. For some reason they cancelled our inspection without telling us or the sellers. Worse, they told the inspector that the inspection was cancelled because we were changing lenders. The listing agent eventually called the inspectors to find out what was up and the sellers were furious when they heard we were changing lenders. We were accused of all sorts of bad faith tricks to keep the home under contract. Better’s lie set the tone for the rest of the transaction. We missed all of our deadlines, the sellers walked away, and we were stuck. It got so bad that our agent refused to try to resurrect the deal with a new offer. I eventually convinced a local lender to guarantee that she could put a loan together in less than 26 days and made our agent bring a new offer to the listing agent. If he hadn’t, I would have done it myself. The sellers were suspicious so they set a new closing date that was months later than the original. We’d already packed so we had to live in a completely NYC apartment with boxes stacked floor to ceiling for months (I had to pack my desk just to make room for our boxes. Instead of a week or two, I had to work on the floor all summer. My back and neck still hurt), AND my gf missed her first Summer in the Midwest (where Winter is the best 8 months of the year.) Better was awful. This is just one story, there are a few others from the months we had to deal with them. If a mistake is made Better is not structured to recover from it. They just blame their byzantine process and babble about how x, y, and x departments are on it, but, no, you cannot contact anyone in those departments. Always use a local lender. I’m so glad that we’re not going to be sending money to Better for the next 30 years.

Kye 5y ago

Assuming it's true... 900 employees: 1: stealing wages 2: being able to do so 3: doing that rather than their jobs Is a systemic issue. It had to start long before almost a thousand people decided to commit a crime. Assuming it's true. I tend to not trust framing that comes from the top end of a power imbalance. edit: This isn't Twitter. Don't stop at 1 and decide you read enough to go off on someone. Read the entire comment.

bronco21016 5y ago
That’s a fair point and the article does mention only 250 of the employees were doing 1:4 hours of work to payable hours. From my experience it’s clear things are broken there. Where the blame lies etc is anyones best guess.
beckman466 5y ago
> 1: stealing wages why is Better.com using that language? all that workers can do is sell their labor time, while the property-owners they work for do not (since they earn rents from ownership). in this case, the workers create and develop some intellectual property (software), yet do not own the fruits of their own labor and are instead paid a wage. in other words: workers work on things that are not democratically held in common ownership (even actively made artificially scarce as an intellectual property). my point is: we could argue the workers are rightfully taking back more than what they are paid under our current economic system, since the property-owners take too much to begin with; they steal — to use your word — by not sharing the (intellectual) property, the source of wealth. edit: i've edited to clarify that I am responding to the definition of the word stealing used by Better.com. as Kye/OP pointed out below, this is not Kye's personal definition for the word stealing and it was terminology they copied verbatim from this current context (used by one of the parties involved).
- sokoloff 5y ago
  If an employee is selling their time to answer customer inquiries and is not, in fact, answering available customer inquiries, what else would you call it?
  - bennyp101 5y ago
    Incompetence? Slacking off? Lazy?
    - thealfreds 5y ago
      Fraud would be another term. But as others have stated this should have been taken care of earlier. To fire them and then give the excuse afterwards meant they allowed the actions to happen.
  - willcipriano 5y ago
    If it happens as frequently as claimed? I'd call it total managerial incompetence. Call metrics are well defined and it is easy to see if someone is doing no work. If the line managers are slacking off like that, what does that say for their management (and so on and so on)?
  - mimon 5y ago
    Breach of contract, or at a stretch maybe fraud if they were actively misleading someone. But definitely not theft.
- gkop 5y ago
  Thanks for calling this out, moreover that’s not what wage theft means: > Wage theft is the denial of wages or employee benefits rightfully owed to an employee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  related fun fact: wage theft by employers is the largest category of theft in the US by a large measure [1]. [1] https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-forms-theft-workers/ https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...
bennyp101 5y ago
Not really stealing though, is it? If the work wasn't there, or they found a way to 'game' the system, then that is on management. I'm sure all of us goof off at some point during the day/week - it just seems that these people were able to do it a LOT. But yea, if you aren't doing the work assigned to you, then you can't expect to keep being paid - but stealing it is not.
- acdha 5y ago
  It’s theft if they sign a time sheet saying they did work they didn’t. It’s not theft if, say, their management didn’t have enough to work on or created processes with lots of bottlenecks.
GoToRO 5y ago
Just fyi, in Romania the wage is a worker’s right, so they can’t ask their money back no matter what.

toomuchtodo 5y ago

Back office (paperwork reviews and processing) was/is done in India, hence the time zone latency. They tried to make up for it with the web app, but mortgage banking relies on too many people processes (title, survey, appraisal, underwriting [even with automated underwriting and “Day One Certainty”] etc) to wring enough efficiencies to scale in a SaaSy sort of way. I was in the middle of a refi with them during this and took my business elsewhere. Maybe their SPAC go public plans are running out of runway in a rising interest rate environment.

pixelgeek 5y ago
It is also heavily automated. I used to work for a company that sold a document management package that was integrated with a variety of high speed scanners with OCR and for a time almost all of the new business was with US banks wanting to speed up the processing of mortgage documents. After talking with one of the customers we were all very sure that the US mortgage business was in trouble. Not 'crashing and destroying the economy' bad but on unstable ground.
werds 5y ago
where did you go instead? i was halfway through uploading all my stuff to Better
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  https://www.aimloan.com/ https://www.aimloan.com/ (no affiliation)

trasz 5y ago

So essentially the management was so incompetent they failed to notice their employees were underperforming. For how long? And did the responsible - management, and probably also the CEO - get fired?

SkittyDog 5y ago

I concerned that you're jumping to prosecuting employees for the systemic failure of a company to operate well. Without being privvy to the company's internal state, how could you possibly differentiate between management problems and deliberate staff malfeasance? I you have ONE incompetent or crooked employee, then sure, the employee is the problem... But if you have 900 incompetent/crooked employees, I think it's much more likely that you have a management problem. If all those employees were truly so awful, why did Garg wait til the mortgage market started cooling off to fire them? Or could it be that the company has been poorly managed for quite a while, but it's more emotionally convenient to the CEO's ego to blame the workers rather than address his own shortcomings?

AyyWS 5y ago
>why did Garg wait til the mortgage market started cooling off to fire them When the tide goes out, you find out who is swimming naked

cprayingmantis 5y ago

I just experienced the same thing! It was so frustrating to see that no one was looking over the documents. Finally I took a day off and sat on the phone with them all day to figure it out. It was a worse process that dealing with an actual mortgage broker.

itisit 5y ago

> The way management handled this looks horrible but if there’s any truth to these employees essentially stealing wages from their employer then they’re lucky they’re just being fired and not being prosecuted. Not excusing laziness/fraud, but it’s an open secret that billable hours from consultancies of all ilks are wildly overstated.

jonathankoren 5y ago

Garg is documented in this article as abusive. This is a fact. Now given that he has a track record of abusive behavior, I wouldn’t believe anything negative he’d say about the layed off employees. The CEO is in charge. He mishandled scaling the company, and so the blame for the failures of the company fall to him. Even if there was massive fraud inside the company, that’s still the CEO’s fault for letting it get so bad. Abusive failures always blame everyone else. If I want to charitable, maybe he thinks by trashing a bunch of people that lost their jobs, will stem the loss of morale by the remaining employees. Either way, it’s gross.

sailingparrot 5y ago

> but if there’s any truth to these employees essentially stealing wages from their employer then they’re lucky they’re just being fired and not being prosecuted. Do you think the company just happened to be extremely unlucky and only hired dishonest employees? If your company is at a stage where your support employees are only working 2 hours a day, and where a customer cannot get support for what they need in less that 10 days, it's an issue with the management and the organisation, unable to provide motivation to their employees, or the condition they need to work effectively, it's not bad luck with hiring. And thinking that just firing those people is going to solve the issue is burying their head in the sand. Maybe the ones that didn't get fired will work a bit harder in the short term, driven by fear, but on the long term it can only get ever more demoralizing.

jmull 5y ago
> ...only hired dishonest employees? Apparently this is 9% or 15% of the employees (there's some discrepancy). So not "only". I agree that it's on management if employees are only working 2 hours a day and getting paid 8... but one of the things management can do about it is lay off the excess employees. Either they aren't needed or they need some different people.
- VRay 5y ago
  9 percent of your workforce isn't going to work 2 hours a day, man. Almost nobody can handle being that much of a lazy, sleazy piece of crap. What probably happened is that the idiot CEO decided to check productivity via some BS metric, then discard all the time his employees had to spend on anything else I've been on the receiving end of that before, it's infuriating.
  - golergka 5y ago
    > Almost nobody can handle being that much of a lazy, sleazy piece of crap. What are you talking about? Entire countries have been doing it for decades before ending up bankrupt.

jwong_ 5y ago

I had some similar issues with purchasing a new house through them. It was obvious no one was actually reading the documentation, or even actually listening when I asked/mentioned things ahead of time that I thought might be issues. The things I pointed out early on did turn out to be more complicated. There was even an issue where I went for a higher rate to get credits, and suddenly that number changed - and no one mentioned (or even seemed to notice). Only when I noticed it, was there anything done about it. It really seems like the US-based loan officers/team does not look at your file at all unless directly pinged by you.

Zambyte 5y ago

What is there to believe? There is a video of it happening in the article

castlecrasher2 5y ago

Yeah, we went through better.com for our refinance because the rate and fees (no loan origination fee!) were the absolute best but I saw a bunch of reviews saying their contact with Better simply ceased and they couldn't get their loan finished. Luckily, we didn't have that issue and our reps were great.

miiiiiike 5y ago

Better killed our deal this Summer. TL;DR: ALWAYS USE A LOCAL LENDER. For some reason they cancelled our inspection without telling us or the sellers. Worse, they told the inspector that the inspection was cancelled because we were changing lenders. The listing agent eventually called the inspectors to find out what was up and the sellers were furious when they heard we were changing lenders. We were accused of all sorts of bad faith tricks to keep the home under contract. Better’s lie set the tone for the rest of the transaction. We missed all of our deadlines, the sellers walked away, and we were stuck. It got so bad that our agent refused to try to resurrect the deal with a new offer. I eventually convinced a local lender to guarantee that she could put a loan together in less than 26 days and made our agent bring a new offer to the listing agent. If he hadn’t, I would have done it myself. The sellers were suspicious so they set a new closing date that was months later than the original. We’d already packed so we had to live in a completely NYC apartment with boxes stacked floor to ceiling for months (I had to pack my desk just to make room for our boxes. Instead of a week or two, I had to work on the floor all summer. My back and neck still hurt), AND my gf missed her first Summer in the Midwest (where Winter is the best 8 months of the year.) Better was awful. This is just one story, there are a few others from the months we had to deal with them. If a mistake is made Better is not structured to recover from it. They just blame their byzantine process and babble about how x, y, and x departments are on it, but, no, you cannot contact anyone in those departments. Always use a local lender. I’m so glad that we’re not going to be sending money to Better for the next 30 years.