Live data from Hacker News

210 Zappos employees – 14% of the staff – take buyouts after CEO ultimatum

businessinsider.com

131–140 of 327 posts

Re: 210 Zappos employees – 14% of the staff – take buyouts after CEO ultimatum

#131
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percentage would quit? The ones that could land another job by the quit date. They would essentially get a 3-month "bonus" for doing nothing. I would say this is only possible if the these people were looking to jump ship anyway.

What percentage of any competent IT team can't have a competitive offer in writing by the end of the day? Even if your anticipated time between jobs is 1-2 months, you can still confidently quit by the deadline and end up with six weeks paid vacation and a six weeks bonus.

You still have to schedule interviews, take vacation to interview because it takes all day, etc. You should probably interview at many places to get a better offer, and because you can get rejected for pretty silly reasons. You might want to review your whiteboard coding too. It can take a few weeks / months.

Re: 210 Zappos employees – 14% of the staff – take buyouts after CEO ultimatum

#132
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very similar in holocracy: the people who are natural leaders will fill the management needs of the organization; it's just more chaotic, less predictable, and not as good. The lack of structure brings out the worst in human behavior. In my experience, it is a horrible system in which to exist. It's highly ignorant of psychology and behavior theory almost intentionally, and it creates far more drama and politics…

Are you speaking from experience? It seems that if you completely do away with job titles, the politics would go away right?

Politics isn't tied to job titles. There still are people with different amounts of influence that try to influence others for their own goals. FWIW, Jeri Ellsworth (who was hired to do hardware stuff, didn't do well there and was fired in the end) described office politics at Valve "like back in high school". Not saying that it can't work, but it also is not without its flaws.

Re: 210 Zappos employees – 14% of the staff – take buyouts after CEO ultimatum

#133

I work at a company that was in bad shape during the financial crisis. A temporary CEO was put in charge. Ultimately, a number of companies were merged to create one company that could survive. In the end, one of the CEO's of the merged companies became the CEO of the final company. His first act as CEO was to offer everyone in the company a tenure-based package to leave the company. I don't know the full numbers, bu…

I once started a gig at a broadcasting company that had just bought a respected multimedia/internet company running several major high traffic websites. The broadcaster didn't like the employment contracts with all the "cushy" benefits, so they offered the staff a buyout. The entire technical staff took the buyout, most of the easily replaceable editorial, project management and graphics people stayed put.

Re: 210 Zappos employees – 14% of the staff – take buyouts after CEO ultimatum

#134
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very similar in holocracy: the people who are natural leaders will fill the management needs of the organization; it's just more chaotic, less predictable, and not as good. The lack of structure brings out the worst in human behavior. In my experience, it is a horrible system in which to exist. It's highly ignorant of psychology and behavior theory almost intentionally, and it creates far more drama and politics…

Are you speaking from experience? It seems that if you completely do away with job titles, the politics would go away right?

Sorry, but that's not how large groups of humans self-organize. Many idealists have tried, but power vacuums don't stay for long, nor are they efficient.

Re: 210 Zappos employees – 14% of the staff – take buyouts after CEO ultimatum

#135

Are warehouse workers considered to be 'Zappos employees'? Will they also be managing themselves?

Those are the kind of things I wonder about when I hear about zappos or valve or other companies that claim to be without managers. Is the person who cleans the restrooms getting to be part of this (although in the modern world the companies probably pay another company to do their janitorial work)

That's exactly how it supposedly works at Ricardo Semler's companies. Everyone participates in self-organization.

Re: 210 Zappos employees – 14% of the staff – take buyouts after CEO ultimatum

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are articles on how Valve has "hidden management" cliques though [1]. I'm not sure if this was ever addressed by Valve itself. [1] http://www.develop-online.net/news/valve-s-perfect-hiring-hi...

It's very similar in holocracy: the people who are natural leaders will fill the management needs of the organization; it's just more chaotic, less predictable, and not as good. The lack of structure brings out the worst in human behavior. In my experience, it is a horrible system in which to exist. It's highly ignorant of psychology and behavior theory almost intentionally, and it creates far more drama and politics…

Yeah. It's essentially creating a power vacuum.

People don't work without structure, ad hoc structures develop. The conjecture is that this is a good thing, that these ad hoc structures are more natural, and you will have natural leaders take lead where appropriate and this will be more effective.

But the issue is structure deals with quirks in human behavior. It deals with the emotional side of it, it deals with the cliquish, tribal nature of our default social behavior. You can put a highly productive, less social person into a position, give him a set of tasks to do, evaluate him fairly and see him produce. In doing this, you need an objective manager, you need a fair structure, and it works.

Without those things, the less social, highly productive person is easily sidelined. The person who takes leadership isn't given that position, they don't lead because they have been shown that they can motivate people to do great things, because nobody gives them that position. The people who get into leadership positions are those people who can convince other people to work with them on a personal level instead of on an organizational level. The really smart, less social person doesn't even get brought in to participate, and little power struggles happen between factions of people who want to be the person who directs the project, despite the fact that none of the people looking to do it might even be very good at doing it at all.

The real problem with traditional management structures is that it often breaks down to this sort of system to start with. Where the people building the systems aren't very good at it, and where they invite their buddies to be management because management pays the best, and they want to help their buddies out. It's because you have poor systems, and because you have the wrong people managing.

The issue with this is that rather than potentially falling short and missing the mark, they start with the worst of it.

Re: 210 Zappos employees – 14% of the staff – take buyouts after CEO ultimatum

#137
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was unclear what his intentions were. To determine loyalty to the company, possibly. Corporate loyalty has been dead for many, many years.

Corporate loyalty died when companies stopped paying pensions, or severely reducing pensions. Our parents always worried about pensions and corporate loyalty. In our generation, and especially technology, we make a lot more money, and can generally make even more by switching jobs. Therefor, corporate loyalty, in the current tech industry, is virtually dead. The one case that it isn't is perhaps companies like google…

Could not agree more, the only downside is that some companies see you as a job hopper, but you can just explain to them that losing 30K-40K/year (aka staying in your job) is not an option

Re: 210 Zappos employees – 14% of the staff – take buyouts after CEO ultimatum

#138
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very similar in holocracy: the people who are natural leaders will fill the management needs of the organization; it's just more chaotic, less predictable, and not as good. The lack of structure brings out the worst in human behavior. In my experience, it is a horrible system in which to exist. It's highly ignorant of psychology and behavior theory almost intentionally, and it creates far more drama and politics…

Are you speaking from experience? It seems that if you completely do away with job titles, the politics would go away right?

Yes, I am speaking from experience directly with a holocratic organization.

Re: 210 Zappos employees – 14% of the staff – take buyouts after CEO ultimatum

#140

This sounds a lot like the flat structure they have at Valve, except at Valve they have had that since Day 1 and everyone is used to it. I can't imagine the headaches and the absolute confusion that would result from trying to take a traditional management tree and flatten it. It seems like by its very nature the kinds of people you hired when you had tiered management might not be able to easily transition to a flat…

There are articles on how Valve has "hidden management" cliques though [1]. I'm not sure if this was ever addressed by Valve itself. [1] http://www.develop-online.net/news/valve-s-perfect-hiring-hi...

Now that is a one-sided article if I've ever read one. Not to say that her position wasn't frustrating- I imagine that it was incredibly frustrating- but yeah OK she gets fired from Valve and then immediately goes on to do exactly what she was doing at Valve with the same engineers at a spin-off company that has Gabe's blessing producing stuff for Valve. How is that a loss?

It sounds way more like Valve wanted to do something that was a radical departure from anything they'd ever done before (hardware), the intrinsic structure of Valve meant that it was difficult if not impossible to set hardware up to succeed (peer-evaluated hiring, bonus tied to value of work), and then Valve realized it wasn't working and decided to make a clean break instead of drag it out. So then Valve immediately says "OK guys we couldn't make this work within Valve but we will back you up 100% if you want to go make this work external to Valve."

Post reply on HN