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"voluntarily" is doing a lot of work there. I don't disagree with the facts here, but I do with this particular qualifier which implies a level of willingness t

"voluntarily" is doing a lot of work there. I don't disagree with the facts here, but I do with this particular qualifier which implies a level of willingness to sign away rights was something that she (or anyone in that position) wanted. She was likely very strongly pressured to sign it with various threats and consequences if she didn't. So she did sign it, but lets not pretend her choices at that moment were many and/or equal when faced with the law team of a trillion dollar company.

__turbobrew__ 1y ago
I don’t really feel bad for the author. Most of these separation agreements - especially at higher levels - are generous golden parachutes with the stipulation that you don’t do damaging things like working for a competitor (while on garden leave) or disparage the company. I am not aware of their separation agreement being published, but you have to be a special type of stupid to work for Facebook as an exec, get a $500k advance on a book you wrote about Meta, and then go bankrupt. From the limited information I have I can see why Facebook fired her.
- hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
  You don’t need to feel bad for the author. You need to feel afraid for the ability for a corporation to so easily get you to surrender your own fundamental rights. It’s not a coincidence you rarely hear stories like this in Scandinavian or even broader European countries because they have basic safety nets that mean you don’t need to sign away your rights in order to just live peacefully.
  - __turbobrew__ 1y ago
    Facebook execs need safety nets now? I am all for safety nets, and I actually live in a country with stronger safety nets than the USA, but I still don’t feel sorry for the author who basically has had every card to be extremely wealthy and squandered it. Also realize that it isn’t private companies job to fix the broken social system in the USA, usually separation agreements for high paid employees offer severance well above and beyond the legal requirements (I have seen 3 months to a year including accelerated vesting in some cases), and a condition of accepting those benefits above and beyond the laws is you don’t disparage your employer. If you don’t accept the agreement you get the bare minimum according to the laws but you are then not bound to the disparage clauses.
    - queenkjuul 1y ago
      There is no legally required severance in the US, the "bare minimum" is nothing.
      - __turbobrew__ 1y ago
        Ok, so the fact that the USA has no laws for severance is the problem, not the fact that companies who pay severance above and beyond what is required of them comes with strings attached. If severance was legally mandated people could tell the company to pound sand when they push an exit contract on you. It blew my USA colleagues when I told them I can take over a year of legally mandated parental leave and there is nothing the company can do about it.
  - huflungdung 1y ago
    [dead]
  - cmiles74 1y ago
    They are using the same kind of exit NDA used to coerce OpenAI employees who left that organization. We should all be afraid for ourselves as these organizations turn into black boxes where the only people who could speak out feel they cannot. This thing where you stop working for a company but they can still penalize you financially if they don’t like your annual “post-employee performance” evaluations is Kafka-esque. https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-whistleblowers-ask-sec-investigate-restrictive-non-disclosure-agreements-2024-07-13/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-whistleblowers-ask... Just to clarify, OpenAI did change their agreement (to some degree) after the SEC put pressure on them. In Facebook’s case the SEC has been notably silent despite the calls from US senators (AFAICT).
jordanb 1y ago
The book talks about the conditions when she was fired. She was suffering from life threatening medical problems from complications from a pregnancy. Not hard to see these terms as coerced given the medical and financial problems she was facing at the time.
- crazygringo 1y ago
  Can you elaborate on the financial problems she was facing? She seems to have been a highly paid Facebook exec who would have had great health insurance. And if her employment was in the US she could keep that insurance through COBRA for between 18 and 36 months. Life threatening medical problems are obviously horrific and she has my full sympathies. But I'm having a tough time drawing a from that to "coercion" for someone who was a director at Facebook.
  - giancarlostoro 1y ago
    COBRA means you pay the full cost of the insurance. So suddenly instead of paying $150 you are now seeing a $500 or more bill, especially if your employer is a major company that pays for all sorts of benefits. COBRA is a joke when you consider you just lost all source of income.
    - loeg 1y ago
      Again, something that could be a hardship for a junior employee, but she was a director.
    - lokar 1y ago
      And you pay 102% of what the plan costs, and Meta has a truly deluxe plan, the COBRA fee is enormous
    - crazygringo 1y ago
      The point is, you're not suddenly facing ruinous bankrupting medical expenses. You're continuing your health insurance. You're paying for your insurance, not your medical care. She was an executive at Facebook. If she hasn't saved enough for COBRA then I don't even know what to say.
crazygringo 1y ago
> She was likely very strongly pressured to sign it with various threats and consequences if she didn't. Like what? If it's something you sign when you leave, it generally comes down to whether you want some level of severance payments/accelerated vesting or not, even when you're fired (when you're at the executive level). Basically, the company says: if you agree not to sue us or disparage us, here's a bunch of money. There are no threats. The consequence is, if you don't sign, you don't get the extra money. It's completely and entirely voluntary. She was a highly paid executive who chose to get even more money in exchange for keeping her mouth shut. Now I think it's great she wrote the book, I love transparency. But nobody can be surprised Facebook is taking legal action when she presumably took their money under an agreement not to disparage. Nobody made her take the extra money.
- amrocha 1y ago
  Remember this next time you have cancer and get fired, and then have the option to “voluntarily” sign something to keep receiving money until hopefully you’re well enough to look for a new job.
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    She had world-class health insurance. You build up savings. You collect unemployment. Your spouse continues working. These are all things to help you. She wasn't homeless, on the street, alone, without skills or education, where she had no choice. Let's keep things in perspective here. So yes, it is absolutely voluntarily to sign something like that. Otherwise, what does taking responsibility for your actions even mean?
    - godelski 1y ago
      > She wasn't homeless I think where most people disagree with you is that this is not the bar. I think you'll find that most people agree with you in some sense but have a drastically different bar. If you can't recognize this then there's no productive conversation to be had
jwsteigerwalt 1y ago
In all likelihood the “voluntary” part was an exchange for accelerated stock vesting or similar. Could have walked away without that financial gain, signed the non-disparagement agreement to walk with the stock vested.
- zukzuk 1y ago
  Further up in this thread someone remarked that she did not receive any equity as part of her original compensation.
  - thayne 1y ago
    From the article it sounds like it was a condition of a severance package.
- KaiserPro 1y ago
  > was an exchange for accelerated stock vesting or similar. Meta doesn't do that. Especially if you are yeeted. You'll get 6 months wage at best.
  - smsm42 1y ago
    6 months of senior executive wages is nothing to sneeze at.
- jwsteigerwalt 1y ago
  Or severance in the form of X months or weeks of salary and benefits.
mbostleman 1y ago
What’s likely is that she was offered more generous compensation in return for things this. This is pretty standard stuff. What “threats and consequences” are you suggesting?
- cmiles74 1y ago
  Any documentation on this would be great!
lttlrck 1y ago
All true but she still signed the document, and later acted against the agreement with the very same trillion dollar company.
- lokar 1y ago
  Agreements like that should be considered unenforceable
  - jsnell 1y ago
    But then Facebook would have had no incentive to offer the agreement to her. And she must have been very happy with what she got in the deal, given she gave up the option of talking about all the apparently horrible misdeeds she witnessed while they were still fresh, rather than a decade later.
    - godelski 1y ago
      Plenty of companies have nonenforcable clauses in their contracts. Either by momentum or stupidity. That's despite the inclusion of such conditions can often void a contract in its entirety. Is there an incentive to have unenforceable clauses? Yes, of course. The same way one might be incentivized to say they will harm you if you do not do what they want even if they have no intention of harming you. It's called "a bluff". Play some poker, you'll see how effective this strategy really is.
  - Kranar 1y ago
    Then she would get no money either.
    - lokar 1y ago
      I don't think that's true in most situations. I think most companies would still pay a severance out of a general effort to smooth things over, and some sense of social loyalties. And some aspects of the agreement would be fine. No spilling actual business relevant secrets, nothing that would count as libel or slander, etc.
chaosharmonic 1y ago
It's doing even more work when you're aware that, at one point, the NLRB had banned non-disparagement clauses in severances and employment agreements outright, stating that even offering these terms amounted to coercive behavior that prevented people from discussing their working conditions. [1] [1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-labor-board-limits-gag-clauses-severance-agreements-2023-02-22/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-labor-board-limits-gag-clau...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- fsckboy 1y ago
  it has a lot of work to do yes, but is still slacking off at its job when she signs it voluntarily, takes the consideration, then violates it and pays no consideration in return.
smsm42 1y ago
How it's not voluntary? She didn't face prison if she didn't sign, she faced having less money. She chose more money. What other threat coukd facebook apply beyond not paying severance?

__turbobrew__ 1y ago

I don’t really feel bad for the author. Most of these separation agreements - especially at higher levels - are generous golden parachutes with the stipulation that you don’t do damaging things like working for a competitor (while on garden leave) or disparage the company. I am not aware of their separation agreement being published, but you have to be a special type of stupid to work for Facebook as an exec, get a $500k advance on a book you wrote about Meta, and then go bankrupt. From the limited information I have I can see why Facebook fired her.

hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
You don’t need to feel bad for the author. You need to feel afraid for the ability for a corporation to so easily get you to surrender your own fundamental rights. It’s not a coincidence you rarely hear stories like this in Scandinavian or even broader European countries because they have basic safety nets that mean you don’t need to sign away your rights in order to just live peacefully.
- __turbobrew__ 1y ago
  Facebook execs need safety nets now? I am all for safety nets, and I actually live in a country with stronger safety nets than the USA, but I still don’t feel sorry for the author who basically has had every card to be extremely wealthy and squandered it. Also realize that it isn’t private companies job to fix the broken social system in the USA, usually separation agreements for high paid employees offer severance well above and beyond the legal requirements (I have seen 3 months to a year including accelerated vesting in some cases), and a condition of accepting those benefits above and beyond the laws is you don’t disparage your employer. If you don’t accept the agreement you get the bare minimum according to the laws but you are then not bound to the disparage clauses.
  - queenkjuul 1y ago
    There is no legally required severance in the US, the "bare minimum" is nothing.
    - __turbobrew__ 1y ago
      Ok, so the fact that the USA has no laws for severance is the problem, not the fact that companies who pay severance above and beyond what is required of them comes with strings attached. If severance was legally mandated people could tell the company to pound sand when they push an exit contract on you. It blew my USA colleagues when I told them I can take over a year of legally mandated parental leave and there is nothing the company can do about it.
- huflungdung 1y ago
  [dead]
- cmiles74 1y ago
  They are using the same kind of exit NDA used to coerce OpenAI employees who left that organization. We should all be afraid for ourselves as these organizations turn into black boxes where the only people who could speak out feel they cannot. This thing where you stop working for a company but they can still penalize you financially if they don’t like your annual “post-employee performance” evaluations is Kafka-esque. https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-whistleblowers-ask-sec-investigate-restrictive-non-disclosure-agreements-2024-07-13/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-whistleblowers-ask... Just to clarify, OpenAI did change their agreement (to some degree) after the SEC put pressure on them. In Facebook’s case the SEC has been notably silent despite the calls from US senators (AFAICT).

jordanb 1y ago

The book talks about the conditions when she was fired. She was suffering from life threatening medical problems from complications from a pregnancy. Not hard to see these terms as coerced given the medical and financial problems she was facing at the time.

crazygringo 1y ago
Can you elaborate on the financial problems she was facing? She seems to have been a highly paid Facebook exec who would have had great health insurance. And if her employment was in the US she could keep that insurance through COBRA for between 18 and 36 months. Life threatening medical problems are obviously horrific and she has my full sympathies. But I'm having a tough time drawing a from that to "coercion" for someone who was a director at Facebook.
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  COBRA means you pay the full cost of the insurance. So suddenly instead of paying $150 you are now seeing a $500 or more bill, especially if your employer is a major company that pays for all sorts of benefits. COBRA is a joke when you consider you just lost all source of income.
  - loeg 1y ago
    Again, something that could be a hardship for a junior employee, but she was a director.
  - lokar 1y ago
    And you pay 102% of what the plan costs, and Meta has a truly deluxe plan, the COBRA fee is enormous
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    The point is, you're not suddenly facing ruinous bankrupting medical expenses. You're continuing your health insurance. You're paying for your insurance, not your medical care. She was an executive at Facebook. If she hasn't saved enough for COBRA then I don't even know what to say.

crazygringo 1y ago

> She was likely very strongly pressured to sign it with various threats and consequences if she didn't. Like what? If it's something you sign when you leave, it generally comes down to whether you want some level of severance payments/accelerated vesting or not, even when you're fired (when you're at the executive level). Basically, the company says: if you agree not to sue us or disparage us, here's a bunch of money. There are no threats. The consequence is, if you don't sign, you don't get the extra money. It's completely and entirely voluntary. She was a highly paid executive who chose to get even more money in exchange for keeping her mouth shut. Now I think it's great she wrote the book, I love transparency. But nobody can be surprised Facebook is taking legal action when she presumably took their money under an agreement not to disparage. Nobody made her take the extra money.

amrocha 1y ago
Remember this next time you have cancer and get fired, and then have the option to “voluntarily” sign something to keep receiving money until hopefully you’re well enough to look for a new job.
- crazygringo 1y ago
  She had world-class health insurance. You build up savings. You collect unemployment. Your spouse continues working. These are all things to help you. She wasn't homeless, on the street, alone, without skills or education, where she had no choice. Let's keep things in perspective here. So yes, it is absolutely voluntarily to sign something like that. Otherwise, what does taking responsibility for your actions even mean?
  - godelski 1y ago
    > She wasn't homeless I think where most people disagree with you is that this is not the bar. I think you'll find that most people agree with you in some sense but have a drastically different bar. If you can't recognize this then there's no productive conversation to be had

jwsteigerwalt 1y ago

In all likelihood the “voluntary” part was an exchange for accelerated stock vesting or similar. Could have walked away without that financial gain, signed the non-disparagement agreement to walk with the stock vested.

zukzuk 1y ago
Further up in this thread someone remarked that she did not receive any equity as part of her original compensation.
- thayne 1y ago
  From the article it sounds like it was a condition of a severance package.
KaiserPro 1y ago
> was an exchange for accelerated stock vesting or similar. Meta doesn't do that. Especially if you are yeeted. You'll get 6 months wage at best.
- smsm42 1y ago
  6 months of senior executive wages is nothing to sneeze at.
jwsteigerwalt 1y ago
Or severance in the form of X months or weeks of salary and benefits.

mbostleman 1y ago

What’s likely is that she was offered more generous compensation in return for things this. This is pretty standard stuff. What “threats and consequences” are you suggesting?

cmiles74 1y ago
Any documentation on this would be great!

lttlrck 1y ago

All true but she still signed the document, and later acted against the agreement with the very same trillion dollar company.

lokar 1y ago
Agreements like that should be considered unenforceable
- jsnell 1y ago
  But then Facebook would have had no incentive to offer the agreement to her. And she must have been very happy with what she got in the deal, given she gave up the option of talking about all the apparently horrible misdeeds she witnessed while they were still fresh, rather than a decade later.
  - godelski 1y ago
    Plenty of companies have nonenforcable clauses in their contracts. Either by momentum or stupidity. That's despite the inclusion of such conditions can often void a contract in its entirety. Is there an incentive to have unenforceable clauses? Yes, of course. The same way one might be incentivized to say they will harm you if you do not do what they want even if they have no intention of harming you. It's called "a bluff". Play some poker, you'll see how effective this strategy really is.
- Kranar 1y ago
  Then she would get no money either.
  - lokar 1y ago
    I don't think that's true in most situations. I think most companies would still pay a severance out of a general effort to smooth things over, and some sense of social loyalties. And some aspects of the agreement would be fine. No spilling actual business relevant secrets, nothing that would count as libel or slander, etc.

chaosharmonic 1y ago

It's doing even more work when you're aware that, at one point, the NLRB had banned non-disparagement clauses in severances and employment agreements outright, stating that even offering these terms amounted to coercive behavior that prevented people from discussing their working conditions. [1] [1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-labor-board-limits-gag-clauses-severance-agreements-2023-02-22/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-labor-board-limits-gag-clau...

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
fsckboy 1y ago
it has a lot of work to do yes, but is still slacking off at its job when she signs it voluntarily, takes the consideration, then violates it and pays no consideration in return.

smsm42 1y ago

How it's not voluntary? She didn't face prison if she didn't sign, she faced having less money. She chose more money. What other threat coukd facebook apply beyond not paying severance?