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Tanium is facing employee unrest and an executive exodus

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Re: Tanium is facing employee unrest and an executive exodus

#61

Post by TimJYoung »

jacquesm wrote: post #56
balladeer wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend worked for startup, here in India, that was doing work with drones and water level measurements or something like that. It was and still is a pre-VC startup. He had left a huge European MNC where did cutting edge research but was bored and needed the bleeding edge rush and excitement as he put it. He's awesome in his field and then excellent at coding too (not a CSE grad) he was paid really grand in that MN…

I've had something similar to this happen early in my career, it took two years out of my life and cost me what I thought was a good personal relationship but which turned out to be just predatory in retrospect. Those are expensive lessons, your view of humanity will likely never be quite the same afterwards. The fact that the guy crashed and burned gives me no comfort at all. Even so, I do realize I had a part in th…

Great story, and very well-written. #6 resonated with me quite a bit:

"(6) beware of people that use your love of your work to take advantage of you"

I run into this problem again and again, although I am getting a little better as I get older.

Re: Tanium is facing employee unrest and an executive exodus

#62

Post by jacquesm »

TimJYoung wrote: post #61
jacquesm wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had something similar to this happen early in my career, it took two years out of my life and cost me what I thought was a good personal relationship but which turned out to be just predatory in retrospect. Those are expensive lessons, your view of humanity will likely never be quite the same afterwards. The fact that the guy crashed and burned gives me no comfort at all. Even so, I do realize I had a part in th…

Great story, and very well-written. #6 resonated with me quite a bit: "(6) beware of people that use your love of your work to take advantage of you" I run into this problem again and again, although I am getting a little better as I get older.

This is two decades ago and I still occasionally dream about it. Hard to forget.

Re: Tanium is facing employee unrest and an executive exodus

#63

Post by jonstewart »

tptacek wrote: post #30
brazzledazzle wrote: post #12

I went through a long drawn out sales engagement with them. It seemed like a cool product at its core (basically a sort of meshed set of interconnected nodes that you could do live "natural language" queries against predefined collected data (i.e. "what machines are running ntpd?") but the stuff they were trying to sell on top of it at the time like patch management ranged from half finished to promises for future re…

So... osquery?

It supposedly has some kind of peer-to-peer topology for executing queries and aggregating the responses, so--I believe, I'm not certain--it avoids having a centralized data store that gets DDOS'd from the agents or a linear machine-by-machine connect-and-query model. That allows it to scale to large networks. The company _definitely_ benefited from the a16z lead-gen (and investment). Tanium was the big shiny endpoint tech of 2016, but I'm not convinced they have a good handle on the use cases/domain.

Re: Tanium is facing employee unrest and an executive exodus

#64

Post by mirimir »

posguy wrote: post #19
mvpu wrote: post #17

I'm getting sick of reports like this. Setting up unfair vesting schedules and firing people before their stock vests... somebody should vigorously investigate it and put the CEO in jail. Startups are fucking hard work and a CEO stealing glory is a crime not a culture issue. These guys need fear of God.

Its just another form of indenturing workers, by holding these ballooning stock vesting schedules over their heads in the uneven employer/employee relationship. The employer gets stability from the employee, while being able to fire the employee after a few years just before they vest, saving the company $$$ and maintaining control for the current shareholders.

I've never gotten this stock options thing. I'm a consultant. I do stuff, invoice and get paid. The idea of accepting potential payment in some sort of play money, that I might get if things go well, and that might be worth something at some later date, seems crazy.

Sure, I know that a few founding employees have done very well. But has anyone done very well, recently?

Re: Tanium is facing employee unrest and an executive exodus

#65

Post by rboyd »

late2part wrote: post #37
tptacek wrote: post #11

There are bad reasons to quit a company and good ones, but there are few better ways to make an exit than on the spot when the CEO of your company personally and publicly berates a low-level employee in front of the team.

Correct. If you tolerate, if you blindly allow, if you accept without action - you implicitly endorse. I remember a time 10 years ago when a flight attendant harassed a person behind me unfairly. I regret not standing up for that person. Don't be a bystander - do the right thing!

Easy to say, and I mostly agree, but it can be tough. I've seen a few of these cases of bully management and what you notice is that the team under the manager (and the teams around the manager) all already realize and communicate (sometimes just glances, sometimes quite openly) that the manager is a problem. So making a dramatic exit to make a point sometimes only makes an obvious point.

There are other factors too. Maybe you have a unique skillset and it takes some time to find similar employment, maybe you stay for family reasons, or for a (probably misguided) sense of loyalty to the team. In my last relevant personal experience, it was obviously a hostile work environment fairly early on but I had made an informal commitment to stay on for X amount of time when I joined.

Abusive managers often actually score big wins in short order and garner favor from higher management, but inevitably we see those managers burn out the systems they build and the systems around them. Employees start bouncing out at an accelerating pace and it's a compounding effect usually because an already overtaxed team is now smaller and has to pick up the slack of the departed.

It usually ends badly.

Which of course factors back into the decision not to make a public display of an exit -- karma usually finds a way to sort these things out.

I think it's probably the case that a lot of these managers are completely oblivious to their actions. I had one manager who proudly claimed (to the team) knowledge of sneaky political tactics and posted articles on fb about Machiavelli and corporate tactics for grabbing and wielding power. It's quite an awkward thing to watch and they're usually not fooling anybody.

Re: Tanium is facing employee unrest and an executive exodus

#66

Post by ascendantlogic »

rboyd wrote: post #65
late2part wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. If you tolerate, if you blindly allow, if you accept without action - you implicitly endorse. I remember a time 10 years ago when a flight attendant harassed a person behind me unfairly. I regret not standing up for that person. Don't be a bystander - do the right thing!

Easy to say, and I mostly agree, but it can be tough. I've seen a few of these cases of bully management and what you notice is that the team under the manager (and the teams around the manager) all already realize and communicate (sometimes just glances, sometimes quite openly) that the manager is a problem. So making a dramatic exit to make a point sometimes only makes an obvious point. There are other factors too.…

Walking out instantly is a romantic idea for people who either have fat bank accounts to fall back on or little-to-no responsibility outside of work to worry about. For the rest of us something like that is indeed a reason to immediately seek other employment, but just because you don't walk out instantly doesn't mean you are supporting that behavior.

Re: Tanium is facing employee unrest and an executive exodus

#68

Post by JonFish85 »

pdog wrote: post #2

> One of the most unnerving aspects of life at Tanium is what's known internally as Orion's List . The CEO allegedly kept a close eye on which employees would soon be eligible to take sizable chunks of stock. For those he could stand to do without, Hindawi ordered the workers to be fired before they were able to acquire the shares, according to current and former employees. Employees at startups generally take a belo…

If generally an employee stock option pool is ~5% of the company, then why is it worth spending time optimizing for that by firing people before stock vests? I suppose it'd be possible that management/investors view the employee ownership as getting out of hand, but even if the options pool is 10-15% (which I think would be fairly ridiculously large), it's likely mostly held by early employees who may have already vested.

It just seems like a silly thing to spend time doing, monitoring who will be vesting soon to fire them. Sure, maybe for one or two executives who are vesting integer percents of stock, but beyond that, it's not worth the time, and definitely not worth the backlash.

Re: Tanium is facing employee unrest and an executive exodus

#69

Post by noir_lord »

jacquesm wrote: post #56
balladeer wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend worked for startup, here in India, that was doing work with drones and water level measurements or something like that. It was and still is a pre-VC startup. He had left a huge European MNC where did cutting edge research but was bored and needed the bleeding edge rush and excitement as he put it. He's awesome in his field and then excellent at coding too (not a CSE grad) he was paid really grand in that MN…

I've had something similar to this happen early in my career, it took two years out of my life and cost me what I thought was a good personal relationship but which turned out to be just predatory in retrospect. Those are expensive lessons, your view of humanity will likely never be quite the same afterwards. The fact that the guy crashed and burned gives me no comfort at all. Even so, I do realize I had a part in th…

> I've had something similar to this happen early in my career, it took two years out of my life and cost me what I thought was a good personal relationship but which turned out to be just predatory in retrospect.

That is so damn close to me that it was eerie reading it.

I think quite often programmers who are good but early in their careers don't value themselves enough and the relationship ends up been exploitative.

I worked 80hr weeks for just slightly under 2 years for someone I thought was a both a friend and a boss for it all to go sideways.

The lesson was learnt on the spot and while I'm still gregarious these days I operate by the maxim "trust but verify".

Re: Tanium is facing employee unrest and an executive exodus

#70

Post by jacquesm »

noir_lord wrote: post #69
jacquesm wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had something similar to this happen early in my career, it took two years out of my life and cost me what I thought was a good personal relationship but which turned out to be just predatory in retrospect. Those are expensive lessons, your view of humanity will likely never be quite the same afterwards. The fact that the guy crashed and burned gives me no comfort at all. Even so, I do realize I had a part in th…

> I've had something similar to this happen early in my career, it took two years out of my life and cost me what I thought was a good personal relationship but which turned out to be just predatory in retrospect. That is so damn close to me that it was eerie reading it. I think quite often programmers who are good but early in their careers don't value themselves enough and the relationship ends up been exploitative…

I used to work for nothing if the work was interesting enough. Bad mistake.

> I worked 80hr weeks for just slightly under 2 years for someone I thought was a both a friend and a boss for it all to go sideways.

That is really very familiar.

> The lesson was learnt on the spot and while I'm still gregarious these days I operate by the maxim "trust but verify".

Good for you. And make sure you pass the lesson on to others so they don't have to learn it the hard way.

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