5 ms·

> You realize your employer can perfectly legally just fire you and you will not vest any shares at all, right? I'm not so sure that's true. Zynga is headquart

• tptacek 15y ago
  Virtually every state but Montana is at-will (Montana requires "good cause" after probationary periods expire). In no state can you fire someone because of race, sex, national origin, religion, age, or disability.
  • davidcuddeback 15y ago
    Any idea what the justification is for at-will employment? My visceral reaction is that it seems unfair. I like Montana's idea of a probationary period. But I'd like to understand the intellectual justification.
    • MBlume 15y ago
      The intellectual justification is probably something like: Hiring someone always represents a risk. You don't know if the person is going to succeed at the job you hired them for. You don't know if they're going to wind up a positive asset to the company. You need the option of firing them, and the possibility that you might wind up in a legal battle because you did so -- that even if you have an airtight case, you'll have to lawyer up and spend time in a court room -- is scary and could therefore have a chilling effect on hiring in the first place.
      • CaptainZapp 15y ago
        Well, For that we have trial periods (usually three month). After that employees can still be fired, but there's a notification period involved.
    • Androsynth 15y ago
      The justification is that you can fire people who are underperforming. France has had huge problems recently because they have strong 'workers rights'. The problem is that the unemployment rate for young people is huge because there is no movement of labor capital. In general the entire economy gets gummed up from a lack of labor movement. Also, businesses have to subsidize the costs of retaining their worst workers.
      • arethuza 15y ago
        I think what the UK has is a reasonably compromise - workers can be sacked for pretty much any reason within the first year, after that the employer has to go through a staged process. However, if the role no longer exists, rather than the employee underperforming, you can be made redundant at any point.
        • epo 15y ago
          IANAL but I thought the normal probationary period was 3 months, never heard of a year.
          • arethuza 15y ago
            IANAL either :-) "Am I protected against unfair dismissal?" "In most circumstances you must have at least one year's continuous service before you can make a complaint to an employment tribunal." From: http://www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=1797 http://www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=1797
          • joe_fishfish 15y ago
            A normal probationary period is 3 months, yes. But in England at least an employee can be fired for gross misconduct within the first year of employment and will not be legally allowed to challenge it (certain exceptions involving discrimination and health & safety notwithstanding). So an employer can pretty much get rid of anyone in their first year of employment - they just take it through gross misconduct and the employee can't fight it. I think it's different in Scotland, though.
    • ericd 15y ago
      Is it fair to the people running the business that they should have to keep paying money to people that aren't helping out much?
      • davidcuddeback 15y ago
        If the employee us no longer pulling their weight, I would consider that reasonable justification for firing them. (Edited to correct bad autocompletion.)
    • tptacek 15y ago
      The justification for at-will is that without it, hiring anyone is so risky that companies will avoid doing it. I strongly support, for instance, laws making it straightforward for people to sue for discrimination and sexual harassment. But after 15+ years in this industry, it is impossible for me to deny that discrimination and harassment claims are routinely abused by deadweight chaff employees to extract settlements from employers when they're terminated, or, worse, to keep their jobs and continue inflicting themselves on their teams. Discrimination and harassment are two narrowly defined public policy exceptions to the rule of at-will employment, and by themselves they already create a huge amount of pointless† risk. Imagine if instead of narrowly defined exceptions, employees could evaluate every performance, compensation, and staffing decision a company made, and then litigate over them. Welcome to the United States Postal Service. You might as well have this argument with the wind, by the way, because America is not going to move away from the at-will employment doctrine. It is a fundamental difference between the way the US and Europe conduct business, and most people who run companies would rather the world worked more like the US than Europe in this one regard. † but: see above
      • rmc 15y ago
        most people who run companies would rather the world worked more like the US than Europe in this one regard. Yep. And most people who are employees would probably rather the world worked like the EU. at-will versus employee rights is choosing different sides of a power balance (Should we give employees more power? Or give employers more power?). It is clear that most people mostly choose the side that gives them more power.
        • tptacek 15y ago
          What I like about this issue is that it's something where the most "liberal", "employee-friendly" intuitive answer (nb: I'm a "driving to Toledo to canvass" Democrat) is not as simple as it sounds. If you want to work at companies run like the US Postal Service, staffed with lifers, then you want to be in a heavily regulated workforce like France's. If you want to work in a more dynamic environment, where there isn't a structural disincentive to ever change jobs (because once you clear 1 year, you're can more or less lock yourself in) --- and, for that matter, and environment where you yourself could start a company and easily hire people, you want to start a business in the US. You can turn this discussion into a soap opera if you'd like, but Hacker News is ostensibly a discussion among people interested in, trying to found, or working at startups, and I think I can safely assert that at-will employment is a clean simple win for startup founders.
• gm 15y ago
  Yeah, it's pretty hard to prove you were fired for an illegal reason, especially if your employer has a paper trail. My point in all this is that there is no legal claim here. What's at dispute is shares that have not vested. It's kinda like being pissed off that you will not get the free coffee you get at work if you get fired or if the employer chooses to not provide it anymore; or next year's bonus, or whatever else you have not earned yet. I guess the downvotes mean fellow readers do not like what I say, which is ok. As long as what I say is not false I'm ok with it.
  • einhverfr 15y ago
    I don't think the firing would be the issue. It's more of a "we are changing what we promised you. Acknowledge this or leave" that might lead to claims. It doesn't seem that different from reneging on retro pay that an employee might have been promised for example.
    • davidcuddeback 15y ago
      But they're not changing what they promised. Stock option vest as long as you're still employed by the company. If the company fires you, your options stop vesting. The promise is in regards to the stock option vesting, not the length of your employment.
      • danssig 15y ago
        So the question becomes; why are they firing you? Is it to prevent you from keeping your part of the agreement or because you're crap? Stupidly, Zynga has proven that it was not the latter.
        • einhverfr 15y ago
          That is what it boils down to, really. And the thing is that even in an at will state, you still have contract considerations.
  • davidcuddeback 15y ago