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They must have learned from your experience. When we were acquired by HPE they did not let us choose and our director of engineering got an email address that

They must have learned from your experience. When we were acquired by HPE they did not let us choose and our director of engineering got an email address that misspelled his name... fixing it involved him being locked out of all systems while the people trying to fix it emailed someone else with a similar name about it. His advice for other team members in the same spot was "if you don't like your email address, do not attempt to fix it." HPE was truly a trip. I paid $2000 to be able to disparage them online and it was worth every penny.

knotimpressed 1y ago
What were the details of paying $2000?
- jkingsman 1y ago
  Not the commenter, but I would assume forgoing an exit bonus/severance payment that was contingent upon signing a non-disparagement agreement.
  - jrockway 1y ago
    Yup exactly. I got my retention bonus and 2 months pay and all that stuff without agreeing to anything, and they offered a little bit more to agree not to disparage them. I'm pretty chatty so decided it wasn't worth it ;)
    - fragmede 1y ago
      Question is, how many zeros would it take to convince you otherwise.
      - jrockway 1y ago
        Some number, absolutely. I don't have that much integrity ;)
      - DonHopkins 1y ago
        As long as the first digit wasn't also a zero.
        fragmede 1y ago
        Unless that was the strike price
    - swyx 1y ago
      2000 is a pretty low amount. presumably theyd have to spend way more than that to enforce it, so they would NOT spend it, in which case its free money that you shouldnt have turned down because it was way too small for a gag order
      - sieabahlpark 1y ago
        [dead]
      - jimmydddd 1y ago
        I friend of mine was an MD advisor to a bio-tech startup. They wanted her to sign off on things that she didn't feel comfortable signing. I guess she wasn't too happy with them as she gave up a $30K severance so she could disparage them. :-)
        teaearlgraycold 1y ago
        Sometimes the knowledge that they’re sweating after you reject the offer is worth quite a lot.
        swyx 1y ago
        and maybe they change their behavior :) the sacrifice does have value.
      - Thorrez 1y ago
        >you shouldnt have turned down because it was way too small for a gag order You're saying that if someone offers me a small amount of money I should accept it, but if someone offers me a large amount of money I should maybe reject it? That sounds backwards to me.
        wavemode 1y ago
        I think the idea is, assuming you have already resolved to disparage the company in that case, rightfully you should not take the money regardless of the amount. but, if it's a tiny amount of money (tiny enough to indicate that the company probably isn't going to bother coming after you in court) then you can maybe consider taking it anyway and accepting the miniscule risk whereas receiving a vast sum of money would carry a much larger risk of legal action
    - thaumasiotes 1y ago
      When NCC Group fired me, they characterized the payment for a nondisparagement agreement as "severance", and didn't offer anything else.† So now I'm free to tell people that they fired me with zero days' notice and zero severance. That's just the way they roll. I find it funny that their nondisparagement policy specifically causes disparagement that otherwise couldn't have occurred. † They also gave me an explicit reassurance that I shouldn't worry about my health benefits, because those would remain good until the end of the month. I didn't find this particularly reassuring, since it was Halloween.
  - rapnie 1y ago
    > bonus/severance bribe?
  - simonask 1y ago
    As a European, it is absolutely WILD to me that this is legal.
    - mytailorisrich 1y ago
      Non-disparagement clauses are generally legal in Europe, too. In addition, defamation laws may apply to what is said/written about a company, so one should be careful in any case.
flutetornado 1y ago
I’d do that every time I get a chance! Ex-HPE black label on my resume from a startup I used to work in that they bought. That company is a complete horror show.
- jrockway 1y ago
  It was weird. It makes me sad because the startup I worked at was really gelling despite the HPE interference. Then they just laid everyone off one day (multiple senior leadership changes later) for no apparent reason. All the code is Apache 2 so I guess if I really cared I could just revive it... and as it turns out, I don't care that much. Other stuff to do.
  - flutetornado 1y ago
    Everyone in my entire team - best of engineering as well as every manager left. Underpaying and over subscribing people has become a hallmark over there - it's just a body shop now. Engineers are just numbers on a sheet, to be exploited, chewed and cast aside when they eventually burnout. Upper management has no vision and everyone's constantly firefighting and struggling to catch up with competitors who had long term vision to invest in engineering teams, tooling and infrastructure to scale up the products and people. They want to do in 2 years what took Google and Amazon a couple of decades. Result post-HPE: poor quality, unscalable, cobbled together, barely functional codebase. Before, the startup I worked for had a well balanced rare combination of high performance, modular and well architected codebase. Later the constant push to ship as fast as possible to catch up with competition, completely destroyed the whole thing - teams, codebase and infrastructure. All because they only know how to react and have no idea how to stay ahead of the curve. Buying startups has become their only means of survival as talent stays away from their brand and the only way to justify value to shareholders is to jump from one rock to another, hoping the new one will rocket them away from the black hole they are spiraling into - all they manage to do is stick to the new rock and pull it with them as fast as they were going into the hole they will eventually vaporize in.
    - franush 1y ago
Lio 1y ago
That’s so Brazilian, in the sense of the film[1] not the country. There’s something of Bob Hoskins’ heating engineer in what you’ve described. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
- whstl 1y ago
  I have a Brazilian (the country) email story. This company had a rule where the mail was first name + last name initial. So, timc@company.com if you're Tim Cook. Naturally they ended up hiring a customer success person called "Ana Lopes". She of course noticed on the first day and complained, but IT dragged their feet until some high-profile customer saw "reply to ANAL" in the automated ZenDesk email and send an angry email to the CEO.
  - cyberpunk 1y ago
    I still raise a glass occasionally to good old William Anker.
litenboll 1y ago
Same story for me at a game studio bought by Microsoft. It was simply not worth the hassle. As an employee I still had to sit through the same customer support as anyone else, talking to some person at an Indian call center with a bad line. After some failed attempts I just gave up and lived with my misspelled address.
- TheNewsIsHere 1y ago
  My spouse is principal architect for a platform made by a large cloud vendor. It takes an Act of Congress, a Papal Conclave who produces white smoke on the first vote, Divine Intervention, and Interdiction by a Vice President, all offered in triplicate upon the altar of subpar IT support organizations, to get a ticket closed -with- a resolution in less than a year. If it’s not something they already have a script for it’s almost certainly impossible as far as IT support is concerned. The company makes billions of dollars a year, employs tens of thousands of people, and they still can’t craft a competent and empowered IT support organization. Even if just for their own developers and technical experts.
  - jrockway 1y ago
    Yeah, this has always bothered me. I don't really know what the issue is. One possibility is that IT is a "cost center" and so by making it cost as little as possible, you are doing a good job of running the company. I look at it more like a "productivity multiplier", where spending money wisely can make other departments more cost efficient beyond the cost you put into IT. I guess they don't teach that in business school, or everyone is already as productive as they can possibly be. Somehow I doubt it, though.
TheNewsIsHere 1y ago
I was once issued %%my full first name and last name%%@company. It was insane to type that, and no one could really work with it. And we had several alias domains. An IT director actually came to me and said “we can shorten that if you’d like”. Sure. I ended up with lastname@company. That created a lot of chaos for a few days because my initial username had already been fully propagated. These were the days before niceties like SCIM, so everything was in-house glue, manual work, or obscure third party solutions.
- djdjnkdjdj 1y ago
  [flagged]

knotimpressed 1y ago

What were the details of paying $2000?

jkingsman 1y ago
Not the commenter, but I would assume forgoing an exit bonus/severance payment that was contingent upon signing a non-disparagement agreement.
- jrockway 1y ago
  Yup exactly. I got my retention bonus and 2 months pay and all that stuff without agreeing to anything, and they offered a little bit more to agree not to disparage them. I'm pretty chatty so decided it wasn't worth it ;)
  - fragmede 1y ago
    Question is, how many zeros would it take to convince you otherwise.
    - jrockway 1y ago
      Some number, absolutely. I don't have that much integrity ;)
    - DonHopkins 1y ago
      As long as the first digit wasn't also a zero.
      - fragmede 1y ago
        Unless that was the strike price
  - swyx 1y ago
    2000 is a pretty low amount. presumably theyd have to spend way more than that to enforce it, so they would NOT spend it, in which case its free money that you shouldnt have turned down because it was way too small for a gag order
    - sieabahlpark 1y ago
      [dead]
    - jimmydddd 1y ago
      I friend of mine was an MD advisor to a bio-tech startup. They wanted her to sign off on things that she didn't feel comfortable signing. I guess she wasn't too happy with them as she gave up a $30K severance so she could disparage them. :-)
      - teaearlgraycold 1y ago
        Sometimes the knowledge that they’re sweating after you reject the offer is worth quite a lot.
        swyx 1y ago
        and maybe they change their behavior :) the sacrifice does have value.
    - Thorrez 1y ago
      >you shouldnt have turned down because it was way too small for a gag order You're saying that if someone offers me a small amount of money I should accept it, but if someone offers me a large amount of money I should maybe reject it? That sounds backwards to me.
      - wavemode 1y ago
        I think the idea is, assuming you have already resolved to disparage the company in that case, rightfully you should not take the money regardless of the amount. but, if it's a tiny amount of money (tiny enough to indicate that the company probably isn't going to bother coming after you in court) then you can maybe consider taking it anyway and accepting the miniscule risk whereas receiving a vast sum of money would carry a much larger risk of legal action
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    When NCC Group fired me, they characterized the payment for a nondisparagement agreement as "severance", and didn't offer anything else.† So now I'm free to tell people that they fired me with zero days' notice and zero severance. That's just the way they roll. I find it funny that their nondisparagement policy specifically causes disparagement that otherwise couldn't have occurred. † They also gave me an explicit reassurance that I shouldn't worry about my health benefits, because those would remain good until the end of the month. I didn't find this particularly reassuring, since it was Halloween.
- rapnie 1y ago
  > bonus/severance bribe?
- simonask 1y ago
  As a European, it is absolutely WILD to me that this is legal.
  - mytailorisrich 1y ago
    Non-disparagement clauses are generally legal in Europe, too. In addition, defamation laws may apply to what is said/written about a company, so one should be careful in any case.

flutetornado 1y ago

I’d do that every time I get a chance! Ex-HPE black label on my resume from a startup I used to work in that they bought. That company is a complete horror show.

jrockway 1y ago
It was weird. It makes me sad because the startup I worked at was really gelling despite the HPE interference. Then they just laid everyone off one day (multiple senior leadership changes later) for no apparent reason. All the code is Apache 2 so I guess if I really cared I could just revive it... and as it turns out, I don't care that much. Other stuff to do.
- flutetornado 1y ago
  Everyone in my entire team - best of engineering as well as every manager left. Underpaying and over subscribing people has become a hallmark over there - it's just a body shop now. Engineers are just numbers on a sheet, to be exploited, chewed and cast aside when they eventually burnout. Upper management has no vision and everyone's constantly firefighting and struggling to catch up with competitors who had long term vision to invest in engineering teams, tooling and infrastructure to scale up the products and people. They want to do in 2 years what took Google and Amazon a couple of decades. Result post-HPE: poor quality, unscalable, cobbled together, barely functional codebase. Before, the startup I worked for had a well balanced rare combination of high performance, modular and well architected codebase. Later the constant push to ship as fast as possible to catch up with competition, completely destroyed the whole thing - teams, codebase and infrastructure. All because they only know how to react and have no idea how to stay ahead of the curve. Buying startups has become their only means of survival as talent stays away from their brand and the only way to justify value to shareholders is to jump from one rock to another, hoping the new one will rocket them away from the black hole they are spiraling into - all they manage to do is stick to the new rock and pull it with them as fast as they were going into the hole they will eventually vaporize in.
  - franush 1y ago

Lio 1y ago

That’s so Brazilian, in the sense of the film[1] not the country. There’s something of Bob Hoskins’ heating engineer in what you’ve described. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)

whstl 1y ago
I have a Brazilian (the country) email story. This company had a rule where the mail was first name + last name initial. So, timc@company.com if you're Tim Cook. Naturally they ended up hiring a customer success person called "Ana Lopes". She of course noticed on the first day and complained, but IT dragged their feet until some high-profile customer saw "reply to ANAL" in the automated ZenDesk email and send an angry email to the CEO.
- cyberpunk 1y ago
  I still raise a glass occasionally to good old William Anker.

litenboll 1y ago

Same story for me at a game studio bought by Microsoft. It was simply not worth the hassle. As an employee I still had to sit through the same customer support as anyone else, talking to some person at an Indian call center with a bad line. After some failed attempts I just gave up and lived with my misspelled address.

TheNewsIsHere 1y ago
My spouse is principal architect for a platform made by a large cloud vendor. It takes an Act of Congress, a Papal Conclave who produces white smoke on the first vote, Divine Intervention, and Interdiction by a Vice President, all offered in triplicate upon the altar of subpar IT support organizations, to get a ticket closed -with- a resolution in less than a year. If it’s not something they already have a script for it’s almost certainly impossible as far as IT support is concerned. The company makes billions of dollars a year, employs tens of thousands of people, and they still can’t craft a competent and empowered IT support organization. Even if just for their own developers and technical experts.
- jrockway 1y ago
  Yeah, this has always bothered me. I don't really know what the issue is. One possibility is that IT is a "cost center" and so by making it cost as little as possible, you are doing a good job of running the company. I look at it more like a "productivity multiplier", where spending money wisely can make other departments more cost efficient beyond the cost you put into IT. I guess they don't teach that in business school, or everyone is already as productive as they can possibly be. Somehow I doubt it, though.

TheNewsIsHere 1y ago

I was once issued %%my full first name and last name%%@company. It was insane to type that, and no one could really work with it. And we had several alias domains. An IT director actually came to me and said “we can shorten that if you’d like”. Sure. I ended up with lastname@company. That created a lot of chaos for a few days because my initial username had already been fully propagated. These were the days before niceties like SCIM, so everything was in-house glue, manual work, or obscure third party solutions.

djdjnkdjdj 1y ago
[flagged]