21–30 of 167 posts
Another source[1] had more info about " The Macro ": Many of our California sales representatives received access to a software tool called a “Macro” that may have allowed them to complete mandatory online pre-licensing education courses offered by a third-party test preparation provider in less than the legally required 52 total hours. The Macro functioned to keep a person logged into the course and prevented the pe…
I used to work at Gusto (ZenPayroll back in my day) and dealing with Zenefits was always a pain for this reason. They were the consummate hackers, using screen scraping and automation to do whatever the hell they wanted. One nightmare example was when a bug in their "automated" system rewrote bank account information for tons of employees to just be the last 4 digits of their account number. Such a mess. Even if this…
This is one of the dark sides to having an entire engineering team in the 25-30 age range. They can sling http just fine, but sometimes don't fully grasp the consequences of their work.
Another source[1] had more info about " The Macro ": Many of our California sales representatives received access to a software tool called a “Macro” that may have allowed them to complete mandatory online pre-licensing education courses offered by a third-party test preparation provider in less than the legally required 52 total hours. The Macro functioned to keep a person logged into the course and prevented the pe…
Another source[1] had more info about " The Macro ": Many of our California sales representatives received access to a software tool called a “Macro” that may have allowed them to complete mandatory online pre-licensing education courses offered by a third-party test preparation provider in less than the legally required 52 total hours. The Macro functioned to keep a person logged into the course and prevented the pe…
i read somewhere that it may have been iMacro - the chrome plugin http://imacros.net/browser/cr/welcome
Lets see how any customers were actually harmed by this.
I used to work at Gusto (ZenPayroll back in my day) and dealing with Zenefits was always a pain for this reason. They were the consummate hackers, using screen scraping and automation to do whatever the hell they wanted. One nightmare example was when a bug in their "automated" system rewrote bank account information for tons of employees to just be the last 4 digits of their account number. Such a mess. Even if this…
I get that moving fast and breaking things works for some products, but I wish more companies had the same attitude as you.
I used to work at Gusto (ZenPayroll back in my day) and dealing with Zenefits was always a pain for this reason. They were the consummate hackers, using screen scraping and automation to do whatever the hell they wanted. One nightmare example was when a bug in their "automated" system rewrote bank account information for tons of employees to just be the last 4 digits of their account number. Such a mess. Even if this…
> uncovering some frightening immaturity pervasive in Valley companies. This is one of the dark sides to having an entire engineering team in the 25-30 age range. They can sling http just fine, but sometimes don't fully grasp the consequences of their work.
It's more about heavily interviewing for alignment with your mission. If people care deeply about the problem you're solving — not just the technical problem, the people problem — then you're far less likely to have these issues.
I interviewed dozens if not hundreds of people at ZP and there were two red flags for engineers:
1) They only care about the technical problems. In this case, they're likely to make decisions more aligned with "that's interesting" than "that helps our customers"
2) Once we raised our Series A, we had a lot of applicants wanting to join a rocket ship. I literally heard that in an interview with a Facebook engineer who found us by "googling startups with 9 figure valuations." If you care about growth at all costs, you're going to cut corners and fuck over your customer.
Mission matters. Values matter. Interview for them.
I used to work at Gusto (ZenPayroll back in my day) and dealing with Zenefits was always a pain for this reason. They were the consummate hackers, using screen scraping and automation to do whatever the hell they wanted. One nightmare example was when a bug in their "automated" system rewrote bank account information for tons of employees to just be the last 4 digits of their account number. Such a mess. Even if this…
> uncovering some frightening immaturity pervasive in Valley companies. This is one of the dark sides to having an entire engineering team in the 25-30 age range. They can sling http just fine, but sometimes don't fully grasp the consequences of their work.
https://twitter.com/williamalden/status/697898496314077185
>
I used to work at Gusto (ZenPayroll back in my day) and dealing with Zenefits was always a pain for this reason. They were the consummate hackers, using screen scraping and automation to do whatever the hell they wanted. One nightmare example was when a bug in their "automated" system rewrote bank account information for tons of employees to just be the last 4 digits of their account number. Such a mess. Even if this…
(This doesn't excuse bad testing or bad code, but it's not like the insurance industry has well-documented public APIs for Zenefits to use)
I guess this is a useful lesson to any would-be founders who want to make a business out of breaking the law: make sure you don't break laws higher than those on the municipal level. The difference between Uber and Zenefits/Theranos is that cities have limited resources and angry citizens can convince them to back down (and if you lose, hey, just ignore that city and try somewhere else), whereas state and Federal age…
Aren't a substantial share of Uber's legal issues state-level employer vs. contractor issues (which also potentially have federal counterparts)? So I'm not sure they are a good example of a company restricting its testing of legal boundaries to the municipal level.
I think the difference between potential (and likely) costs and consequences is far more complicated that simply the level of government involved.