191–200 of 619 posts
I found the bit about the negotiated salary of particular note. I have never included severance in my negotiations, mostly because i have always left my jobs willingly. Is that something more common than i know of? What is a reasonable target to aim for?
Welcome to the club. It's pretty much a rite of passage here to spend some time with a psychopath VC, a completely self absorbed CTO with a rich investor dad that fuels his fantasies, or an idiotic CEO with an ego problem, and to pay the price for it (just time if you're lucky, time+money if you're not). I've encountered this myself several times (down to the CEO using hire fast fire fast as a mantra), and judging fr…
Outside of the edit window for my comment, but wanted to add: the H1B situation sounds fishy as hell. 8 H1Bs costs a lot of money, which the company does not seem to abound with. It seems like something weird might be going on here - if the founders are willing to forge receipts and lie about the company, it might not be beyond them to hold on to passports or some such for "immigration reasons", which would then expl…
The fake wire transfer receipt is fraud. That's a criminal offense. Have a talk with the local DA. California has a large prison system, with cell space available. I've never heard of a startup going that far.
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This stood out as well. I'd wager that those 9 Chinese employees might be misled about their legal status.
Wouldn't that get caught at the airport? I mean, when someone arrives and says they have an H1B visa, USCIS does check, right? Now, given everything else here I wouldn't be surprised if there was fraud involved in getting the H1B visas issued, but that's separate from the question of whether people who think they have H1B visas actually have H1B visas.
Which also means that if they believed they have a H1B, they could have been misled into staying illegally one way or another (OPT has some reporting requirement, you have to notify your school every 6 months and anytime you change jobs/ locations etc).
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Why? Shouldn't we be encouraging people who out bad actors?
"Name and shame" feels good but there's a huge danger in pillorying people just based on a single person's account. WrkRiot seems to be the company in question and their online presence is so laughable nobody here likely feels bad for making fun of them, especially because of the behaviour the author describes. But the story is not just about a company but also about individuals. Consider WrkRiot's head of marketing,…
If you are a victim of medical malpractice, the district attorney will not find healing for you. If someone wrongfully injures you, a criminal case will not return even an inch of your wholesomeness. If someone cheats or robs you of $50k, the district attorney will not help you pay your bills.
Civil court is the provided forum for issues of individual justice, and there individuals will find themselves paying alone, and in a position of imbalance, only a stupid person would fight for themselves. In the game of civil justice, where one might seek healing or remedy, you must pay for the prerogative to play.
How common is this behavior at startups in Silicon Valley? Can anyone share similar stories or point me at other posts?
As with any geography/industry, there are some people with questionable morals. It's nothing unique to SV or startups.
In most European countries, not paying your employees in the course of delaying bankruptcy on purpose will be a jail term. I was under the impression that California (as opposed to the rest of the US of A) had pretty strict workforce protection laws, too.
Is it a bad sign that all SW engineers were on H1B visas? Why wouldn't they hire any from the US?
For control. A US employee can walk away from the sinking ship any time without too much repercussions, not the case for foreign nationals staying on company sponsored visas
The Qatar school of management.
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Why? Shouldn't we be encouraging people who out bad actors?
Yes, we should out bad actors. But we should also avoid witch hunts. I agree with pluma 100% here. Plausible deniability is important as there are always at least two sides to every story. That said, Penny's account of life at the mystery startup sounds startlingly like that of my experience at Motionloft many years ago. The difference there is that the (ex-)CEO was convicted, and my experience was corroborated by an…