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Zenefits Software Helped Brokers Cheat On Licensing Process

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Re: Zenefits Software Helped Brokers Cheat On Licensing Process

#41

Post by unethical_ban »

uptown wrote: post #34
maxcan wrote: post #25

In this one particular instance, good for them and its a shame that they got caught. I've had to watch quite a few of these "unskippable" videos for various government mandated trainings and there are a complete waste of time so that some bureaucrat can check a box and some company's lawyers can mitigate some liability. They don't educate the captive viewers and they don't protect consumers. Lets see how any customer…

Yes, it should absolutely be up to the individual to decide whether they've met the legal requirements for their job. I hope my surgeons self-certify that they're ready to operate, and the technician that repairs the airline I'm flying on should have the last word on whether he's qualified to start tinkering with the ailerons!

If, after 8 years of med school, your surgeon had to sit through a 2 hour video made 15 years ago about "The importance of surgery" and "where to keep the scalpels", he's probably be a bit frustrated.

Re: Zenefits Software Helped Brokers Cheat On Licensing Process

#42

Post by jacquesm »

jasode wrote: post #3

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…

Sounds to me like the real problem was in the test. If someone can get by without actually absorbing the material then they should be given the pass, if they can't then it's a different story. Of course as soon as the program starts answering test questions or something like that it is a different matter but to spend less time than required and still pass means that either the test is inadequate or the course is needlessly fluffy.

Re: Zenefits Software Helped Brokers Cheat On Licensing Process

#43

Post by exw »

NDizzle wrote: post #35

Can someone give me a good explanation of how the COO wasn't responsible for this kind of stuff? It's mind boggling to me how hard Sacks is throwing Conrad under the bus, despite possibly being just as guilty. I mean, I get it - power plays and all. But aren't they both responsible?

According to the article, Sacks discovered the issue in January, and then forced the company to report it to the California regulator - if you believe that sequence of events, he can't really be held accountable for the action of Conrad.

Let's say you are an engineer, take a new role at a company to work on their database, and then discover that one or your managers has stolen money, do you think you should be held accountable, assuming that you report the issue immediately when you discover it?

Re: Zenefits Software Helped Brokers Cheat On Licensing Process

#44

Post by uiri »

uptown wrote: post #34
maxcan wrote: post #25

In this one particular instance, good for them and its a shame that they got caught. I've had to watch quite a few of these "unskippable" videos for various government mandated trainings and there are a complete waste of time so that some bureaucrat can check a box and some company's lawyers can mitigate some liability. They don't educate the captive viewers and they don't protect consumers. Lets see how any customer…

Yes, it should absolutely be up to the individual to decide whether they've met the legal requirements for their job. I hope my surgeons self-certify that they're ready to operate, and the technician that repairs the airline I'm flying on should have the last word on whether he's qualified to start tinkering with the ailerons!

There is a requirement that someone spend 52 hours in a pre-licensing course. There is a separate requirement that someone pass a broker exam.

If it is possible for someone to do the latter without the former, what purpose does forcing them to do the former serve? Some people will need 100 hours of preparation for the exam and some will need 10. Forcing the latter group to spend an additional 42 hours in prep simply wastes their time.

Re: Zenefits Software Helped Brokers Cheat On Licensing Process

#45

Post by rayiner »

maxcan wrote: post #25

In this one particular instance, good for them and its a shame that they got caught. I've had to watch quite a few of these "unskippable" videos for various government mandated trainings and there are a complete waste of time so that some bureaucrat can check a box and some company's lawyers can mitigate some liability. They don't educate the captive viewers and they don't protect consumers. Lets see how any customer…

The value of training videos is on the back end. Whenever shit goes wrong, peoples' first reaction is to plead ignorance. "Oh I didn't know that, I wasn't told that." These sorts of things eliminate that excuse in a way that leaves a paper trail, making it easier to hold someone accountable if they do fuck up. It's not about making sure they know all of these things that are mostly obvious, it's about ensuring you can fire them, sue them, or defend yourself in a lawsuit if someone sues you, by eliminating their plausible deniability.

Re: Zenefits Software Helped Brokers Cheat On Licensing Process

#46

Post by slavik81 »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #22
tyre wrote: post #16

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.

I started my career working on software where serious bugs could get people killed. You do need experienced mentors, but they certainly could be under thirty.

You don't have to be old to build things safely. You just have to care.

Re: Zenefits Software Helped Brokers Cheat On Licensing Process

#47

Post by timv »

NDizzle wrote: post #35

Can someone give me a good explanation of how the COO wasn't responsible for this kind of stuff? It's mind boggling to me how hard Sacks is throwing Conrad under the bus, despite possibly being just as guilty. I mean, I get it - power plays and all. But aren't they both responsible?

You're questioning the reality, when all of this is about perception.

The board needed to hold someone responsible for this mess in order to satisfy the regulators that they're taking the problem seriously, and things are different now.

Effectively, the message they want to send is that the adults are in charge now.

There was no way Conrad could stay. Even if they could somehow hide any evidence that he knew about the violations (and they probably couldn't), it's very clear from his public statements that he had built the fast and loose culture the had allowed and sustained the problems. He had to go and the message needed to be that the company has no place for him anymore. He's not stepping into a reduced role, he doesn't have a board seat, it's over, he's dead to us.

Sacks has a different record. He wasn't there from the beginning, he hasn't been the public face of the "ready, fire, aim" culture, there's plausible deniability. And he has credentials to justify his position - Yammer, Microsoft, PayPal - he can be painted as a safe pair of hands.

And, since he's been the COO for a year, he can step straight in an take over without needing a handover period from Conrad.

The board need Sacks to stay on and be the new face of Zenefits. And they've decided that the regulator investigations are not going to find damning evidence against him. Maybe because he had no idea. Maybe because he was smart enough not to leave any evidence. Maybe because there's a paper trail of him reporting the issues up the chain in way that makes him look like the good guy.

You're asking the question "How can a COO not know about all this stuff, and not have had some responsibility over it?" and that's a good and fair question - the regulators will ask it too. I take it the board will be able to provide a plausible answer to that question when the regulators come knocking.

But that's not really the #1 question that the board's worried about. They want to know "who has the best chance of saving this company?" And what Sacks provides is:

- Plausible deniability

- Credibility in the market

- Credibility with the regulators

- Knows the business

- Can do the job

- Ready to start now

There's no one else with those credentials, so Sacks needs to take the job.

Once that's decided it's a matter of execution - almost literally. If Sacks is going to save Zenefits then he needs to look innocent, and blame Conrad for everything. That might actually be true, but that's actually not the key question for the board. They just need something that they can sell to the market and regulators.

Re: Zenefits Software Helped Brokers Cheat On Licensing Process

#48

Post by itsjeremy »

tyre wrote: post #27
mixmastamyk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I was 22 when I started and cared very deeply about the consequences of what I was doing. 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)…

This is the essence of why Zenefits is in trouble. One of the mantras Parker would frequently state around the office was something very close to "growth is responsible for all of our problems and also the solution to all our problems".

His view, if I'm recalling correctly, was that hypergrowth makes customer problems more visible due to scale while making the company inherently more valuable. There was absolutely no downside to growing as fast as your imagination could manage - despite an accumulation of red flags, technical debt, and unhappy employees.

As you mentioned in your comment, values absolutely matter. I think Sacks gets this, but a company this deep in with so many employees is a big, unwieldy ship that's hard to turn.

Re: Zenefits Software Helped Brokers Cheat On Licensing Process

#49

Post by x0x0 »

nostrademons wrote: post #20
Analemma_ wrote: post #13

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…

It reminds me a bit of the Ben Horowitz essay "Why I did not go to jail" http://www.bhorowitz.com/why_i_did_not_go_to_jail In general, laws are not something you want to fuck around with as a startup. You can break proprieties , you can do things that will piss certain people off (you're almost guaranteed to piss off your competitors if you're doing anything interesting, for example), and typical business ethics assu…

because I remembered reading it, there's a wee bit more to the story than Ben shares. It took a while to find it since Bloomberg reorganized their site [1] but here you go [2].

tl;dr: what Sharlene really went to jail for was more than shifting grant dates around (some by more than 60 days, which is more than a month last time I checked.) She appears to have changed grant and exercise dates both to increase income and to shift exercise income to long term capital gains, and then mislead auditors about these practices. Specifically, she want to jail for listing a false exercise date on her income tax return.

The point is, according to the reporter, what she went to jail for was more clear-cut than Ben is claiming.

[1] http://go.bloomberg.com/market-now/2014/02/12/dont-worry-ben...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20140309175428/http://go.bloombe...

Re: Zenefits Software Helped Brokers Cheat On Licensing Process

#50

Post by run4yourlives2 »

Let's just forget about the entire ethical argument around breaking an existing policy/legal condition of doing business, as important as that is wrt health insurance.

Who in their right mind thinks taking the time to design, then publish, a way to defeat a relatively straightforward education requirement is in any way a worthwhile thing to do? There is a level of ego there that goes beyond rational decision making: you aren't cheating the system for an advantage; you're cheating just because you can, because it makes you feel better than others. That's some borderline psychopathic behaviour really.

Did Zenefits employees really gain anything from not having to complete the required 52 hours? Was it really that big of an ordeal? Or was this a matter of just being smug about 'not needing' to do some very basic requirement they felt was beneath them? There is an element of hubris there that is unbecoming in and of itself.

These are (very minimal, really) licencing requirements. There is a minimal amount of effort that an employee should be expected to put in to do their job legally. The assumption is that exposure through time to the subject matter will increase knowledge. That may not be true in every situation, but it likely is in a majority; the rule exists. The exposure generated from choosing to "fight this battle" and losing is miles greater than any particular payoff achieved in victory. That alone indicates to me that the person in charge has a poor grasp of weighing risks/rewards, regardless of personal ethics.

Some things just aren't worth fighting because the risks in losing are so disproportional to any net gain from winning. This is a perfect example. A good CEO needs to know how to pick and choose the hills to fight on.

Lesson learned here: Not every component of your business needs to be disrupted. Some things aren't worth disrupting at all, really.

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