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This bit at the end: > and learned an enormous amount about what it means to build and run a people-first company Seems at odds with this bit at the beginning

• loloquwowndueo 3y ago
  The “people first” company was Auth0. The company that sent the email and terminated access instantly was Okta. Fairly clear to me.
  • AndrewPGameDev 3y ago
    How can a company be "people first" when they sell out to a larger company who isn't "people first"?
    • joshcanhelp 3y ago
      This is a good question. A lot of people, all over the world, put a lot of work into something and getting acquired turns stock options worth $0 into options worth a lot more than that. It’s just my $0.02 but, knowing the founders and who they are, I’m fairly sure this was more about giving back to the folks that made it happen than it was a purely business decision. Also, Auth0 was investor-backed so there was likely a lot of pressure to sell at the price being offered. I don’t know how all that works exactly but I can imagine that this kind of decision is made by more people than just the founders.
      • whoisthemachine 3y ago
        Ethics are tricky!
    • plagiarist 3y ago
      At billions of dollars in acquisition you'd think any employee wouldn't have financial stability as a top concern like mentioned a few times here.
    • scott_w 3y ago
      Just off the top of my head: - They didn’t know the purchasing company wasn’t “people first” - The founders burnt out and needed an exit - The purchasing company was “people first” at the time of purchase I’m not placing a judgement on Okta here, by the way, because I know nothing about them. Just answering your question.
    • eurg 3y ago
      For a company I once worked, it was because the VCs held more than 50% of the company, and the founders - ultimately - didn't have a say.
    • akira2501 3y ago
      The management was people first. The owners were VC. So maybe the original owners didn't care enough to interfere with the working management policy. The new owners do. So.. "incidentally people first just until we can exit."
• morgante 3y ago
  It has nothing to do with being "people-first" or not. Leaving terminated employees with access to sensitive systems is poor security practice.
  • progbits 3y ago
    You trusted them with that access yesterday, and they are not being fired for cause (eg. stealing company secrets), so why don't you trust them today? This sort of thing only really happens in US companies (see lots of other comments in this thread on this), and maybe that should be a clue this isn't "security practice".
    • morgante 3y ago
      Fired employees are much more likely to do something malicious, either by sabotaging systems or stealing proprietary data. The incentives are totally different.
    • rad_gruchalski 3y ago
      > so why don't you trust them today Because they heard about being laid off this morning and who knows what goes through the mind of a laid off person.
      • sokoloff 3y ago
        Exactly this. The company just subjected the individual to an enormous amount of stress that didn't exist yesterday coupled with the fact that the long-term payoff to them of "don't act like a jackass at work" has just changed a lot.
        • rad_gruchalski 3y ago
          Yes. That’s the unfortunate part of being laid off. So to protect the individual from himself and the company from the individual it might be actually better to just lock people out. Funnily, nobody has such empathy towards a company when the employee lays the company off. Then everyone is like „suck it up company, suck it up boss”.
• CalRobert 3y ago
  Auth0 was a much better place to work than Okta.
  • briffle 3y ago
    as a potential client, they were also night and day different. I had great sales conversations with Auth0, and they had so many easy to follow examples, tutorials, etc. Very helpful engineers on the call, who asked questions about our environments, etc. A sales call with Okta just left me feeling dirty. It felt a lot like my sales calls when I was an Oracle customer. All about how many products they could push on us, no good technical explanations, and of course, huge pressure to 'sign this contract before the end of the month to get this great price'. I wanted to go with Auth0, but then they got aquired, and we just said hell no.
    • CalRobert 3y ago
      Auth0 wasn't perfect (I would've like fewer pages), but it was pretty damn good. I learned a lot there and had one of the best managers of my career there. I also was the only employee in my country for several years and still felt very included. It was telling that I was able to chat with Eugenio myself even as a lowly IC. Okta's main claim to fame seemed to be a great sales team, though your explanation sounds like that wasn't great either.
• johnnyAghands 3y ago
  > and learned an enormous amount about what it means to build and run a people-first company He's talking about Auth0. > And then it happened, I got the email. Slack didn't work. My laptop restarted and came back with accounts missing. It really, actually happened. And even though the writing seemed to be on the wall, I was still caught a bit off guard. Talking about how that culture no longer existed -- it's fully Okta now. The Auth0 culture essentially erroded until it finally just no longer existed. This of course happened at a different pace across differnt organizations. Unfortunately, I'd say ours was probably one of the earliest to get hit. --- As an aside, I was part of same team (also laid off), and had an especially unique viewpoint. I joined Auth0 in 2020 -- months before the acquisition. I joined because of the culture and the amazing people I get to work with and learn from. I had a lot of fun and we built some amazing things. After about 18 months I decided to join a local startup, itching to get back to a much smaller arena, building something from the ground up. Applying all the great things I've learned in my career thus far. Long story short, as most starups go, especially during COVID, it didn't pan out. I kept in touch with my old colleagues, now my friends, who approached me with a potential new opportunity. They did warn me things were different now, but I was excited to get to work with great people again. Coming back it was starkly different. Gone was the magic that was once there. A lot of familiar faces were still around, but so too were a lot gone now. I can feel the beating of the Okta drums more loudly now.. there just felt a lot of separation between leadership and us dreamers at the bottom. I felt like I was just back at a corporate company now, more worried about writing OKRs and how they made my boss/division look good verses actually making our customers lives better. There was a constant dread in the air.. verses excitement. It's strange, but in some ways its almost like a feeling of mourning. That meme about not knowing when you're in the good old days is very true. Goodbye Auth0 <3
• robertlagrant 3y ago
  > know that every right that you ever had was earned through a union This really isn't true. Lots of these perks are because there was loads of money sloshing around, and a competitive hiring environment drove the culture to be as attractive as possible for employees.
  • stevage 3y ago
    Perks and rights are extremely different. Companies can't take rights away.
    • robertlagrant 3y ago
      Well, laws create rights, not unions, as far as I understand things.
      • stevage 3y ago
        Not sure if you're just being obtuse, but: Workers' rights that are written into law are often there because unions lobbied for them.