271–280 of 339 posts
The same author has been reporting diligently on Pollen, and has said he will do a write-up on the collapse there. I will be very interested to read that.
Wow, that sounds so poorly handled. Not figuring out a way to tell everyone affected at (nearly) the same time is probably the worst sin. Best layoff I ever went through was when my boss came to our team and said, "look, don't tell anyone, but we have a layoff coming in a few days. I have to let one of the three of you go. Do you want me to decide or do you want to decide amongst yourselves?". She knew we were good f…
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I like the book Crucial Conversations, which tells us to avoid the "fool's choice" and be 100% honest and 100% respectful at the same time. The fool's choice is when a fool thinks something like "I can either tell the truth and be fired, or keep my mouth shut". The book teaches that with some thought you can find a way to tell the truth without being fired, etc. This is advice for an individual, but not an entire org…
What if you don't have a solution to the complaint?
also, the complaint can be perfectly valid and important without having any solutions for it. many times employees don't have the knowledge needed to know what are the possible solutions.
but individually their solution is to go where their needs are met (as much as possible of course)
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Stripe had a few “official” principles that I really liked along these lines: “We haven’t won yet”, “macro-optimism but micro-pessimism”. They’re no longer official principles though, and I’m not 100% sure how much they were actually acted upon while they were (at least during my tenure).
I like the book Crucial Conversations, which tells us to avoid the "fool's choice" and be 100% honest and 100% respectful at the same time. The fool's choice is when a fool thinks something like "I can either tell the truth and be fired, or keep my mouth shut". The book teaches that with some thought you can find a way to tell the truth without being fired, etc. This is advice for an individual, but not an entire org…
But more realistically, most modern tech companies are going to want to not fire people for telling the truth or more generally speaking their minds, and individuals can often have a bigger impact than they would imagine. It doesn’t really make sense for a reasonably well run company to ignore such things from employees they clearly think are valuable.
That said, there are still exceptions, e.g. labour activism in the US is probably a good way to get fired (with a nice big severance), and if you work at Boeing and write some email like ‘this plane is designed by clowns and I won’t let my family fly in it’ (or perhaps even just reasonable concerns) that is also bad (because that email will show up in court if there’s an accident and you can’t say ‘we want to have a workplace where all engineers can raise concerns about the safety of our planes’ – better to just not do it over email, which is a bit of a silly incentive)
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She was a great leader. She recognized that our team was cohesive and could make a better decision than she could. She was one of the best managers I ever had.
she is supposed to be part of the team and have the same knowledge and thus be able to make an equally or more informed decision
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Story time. I was looking to buy a 911 in the past. Found one at a dealership. The car was 3 years old, just off lease, in good condition, and with no accidents shown in Carfax. I searched the VIN number in the state’s DMV car registration database. Well well. The car had an expired tag and had high thousands of dollars of unpaid taxes, fees and penalties against it. The owner had never bothered to pay any taxes and…
> I would have to pay all those when doing the car transfer at DMV. ...why are these are on the car and not on the person?
I talked to another car dealer and asked him about it. He said this kind of car was usually sold to people in another states, where their DMV won't enforce California's taxes and fines.
The lesson here is be sure to check for a clear title on the car, including DMV fees and fines, before making a purchase.
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Never said debt is intrinsically harmful. I do however think consumption debt, for goods such as clothes or the next iphone, is harmful. They're not investments, like an education or a car. It's a tax on people who don't have money in the bank to buy such things up front. Usually such loan "services" are marketed in a way that hides the effective cost of the loan to the customer. Especially problematic for young peop…
I would challenge that notion too. I rather travel the world, eat great food, take tennis lessons, dance into the night when I'm in 20's and 30's where I get the most enjoyment rather than in my 60s where my body is not in good physical shape to do any of those things. The fact that I travelled the world in my 20s may also enhance my own future productivity. I would even further claim that not enough people go into d…
You can't loan for consumption in your 20-30s, planning to pay it back in your 40s and 50s. Klarna does not even offer loans beyond 36 months, and month 1 to 36 you have 20% interest rate! If you skip a payment there are steep fees.
Klarna is for short term loans. Like, half a month.
Klarna is definitely not offering their service to poor people in developing nations. Even if they did, how would a 20% interest loan for an Iphone help anyone escape poverty?
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Are we sure that that's true? As a private company klarna can choose any metric they so desire as revenue...
What? Isn’t revenue kind of … revenue? What else can it be?
As a private tech company I would assume that they are using the broadest possible definition of revenue.
I still currently work at Klarna. The article is a very good write up of what happened. I'm going to talk about what the current internal situation is and how people are feeling based on what I'm seeing. Since the layoffs there has been a noticeable shift in atmosphere. Previously quite a few people would regularly come to the offices, now not so much. Some still do come but significantly less. Performance has gone f…
One of my ex-colleagues simply quit one day - no emails, no notice...nothing. Another one of my ex-colleagues told me he was doing two jobs, but only working 8 hours in total per day, if that. Then COVID layoffs happened. In the first case, the company simply turned off the logins - it was their way of laying people off (one laid off guy had been with the company for 15 years, another one had health issues and needed…
In a lot of countries this is illegal, you need to prove a cause for firing anyone. One of the reasons klarnas firings in Sweden have been controversial and complicated is that they specifically tried to sidestep that by "firing people" by getting them to resign and accept a deal. They would not be able to just outright fire people without negotiating the terms, and those terms are usually based on a LIFO queue.
> One of my ex-colleagues simply quit one day - no emails, no notice...nothing.
Some people don't want to leave with fanfare, but notice is basically required in sweden (again, using sweden as a comparison since the thread is about klarna).
> Another one of my ex-colleagues told me he was doing two jobs, but only working 8 hours in total per day, if that.
If they were dishonest about that then that does not look great IMO. If they weren't and both companies were fine with it then it seems OK.
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I like the book Crucial Conversations, which tells us to avoid the "fool's choice" and be 100% honest and 100% respectful at the same time. The fool's choice is when a fool thinks something like "I can either tell the truth and be fired, or keep my mouth shut". The book teaches that with some thought you can find a way to tell the truth without being fired, etc. This is advice for an individual, but not an entire org…
What if you don't have a solution to the complaint?
You can still do something like offer to help or proposing a meeting as the "solution", or at least the start of a solution.