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ADP Sues Zenefits for Defamation

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Re: ADP Sues Zenefits for Defamation

#113
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the applicant "slammed" Zenefits by saying that having their name on his resume would be less valuable than others when applying FOR A NEW JOB (my emphasis). If an employee applied to work for my business and one of their "concerns" was how our company would appear on their resume (in contrast to another), I would similarly discard their application.

Fine, then don't hire him. The mistake wasn't the hiring decision, clearly it was getting into an argument with a prospective employee in a public internet posting. That shows a serious lack of judgement and poor leadership. And moreover this isn't a photo sharing business he's running, when you're asking people to trust you with their income and their medical coverage you are going to be held to a higher standard.

What if the argument took place privately? Is the mistake the venue, the participation or the action/argument itself? The applicant invited a public debate - should the CEO just avoid the debate and let it play out?

Re: ADP Sues Zenefits for Defamation

#114
post #106

Two articles on this were at the top of the front page. Since we don't need two, we buried https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9693370 as a dupe. That's not entirely fair, since the other link contains Zenefits' response, but anyone who wants to can go read it. Since we have to pick one it seems best to keep the third-party article.

Thank you for the transparency of your decision. It's always welcome from the community.

Re: ADP Sues Zenefits for Defamation

#115
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine, then don't hire him. The mistake wasn't the hiring decision, clearly it was getting into an argument with a prospective employee in a public internet posting. That shows a serious lack of judgement and poor leadership. And moreover this isn't a photo sharing business he's running, when you're asking people to trust you with their income and their medical coverage you are going to be held to a higher standard.

What if the argument took place privately? Is the mistake the venue, the participation or the action/argument itself? The applicant invited a public debate - should the CEO just avoid the debate and let it play out?

> should the CEO just avoid the debate and let it play out?

Yes. Getting into acrimonious debate with a prospective junior hire about their future career prospects is almost the definition of a misplaced sense of priority.

Re: ADP Sues Zenefits for Defamation

#116
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I continue to be amazed by the horribleness of benefits web front-ends. I recently did a simple task in our Hewitt system, and it required five pop-up windows. It's just so, so terrible. ADP EZ-Labour - not so EZ, but plenty of labour. There are 20 work days in a month. There are 20 rows in the timesheet form. Every one of them has 8 drop-down boxes, and every one of them needs to be filled with your work status, pro…

Are you using it for time tracking? Would you be able to use a dedicated time-tracking tool like Toggl [0]? I'm not connected Toggl, just a happy user. It seems to have good reporting and project-granularity for timesheets, better than any I've used before. 0: https://toggl.com/ I'm sure there are several other great time tracking ones, too. Is there a particular reason you must use ADP's timecard tracking?

I don't think that anyone would voluntarily use EZ-labour themselves. EZ-labour is the sort of software that you choose for OTHER people to use. In other words, Enterprise-Grade Software.

Our accounting department uses EZ-labour to keep track of our work on different projects and for registering time-off and vacation. Realistically most of us only work on one project, but accounting wants the time cards filled out anyways.

EZ-Labour is unfit for personal time-tracking. For one thing, the UI is clumsy and repetitive. If I work on one thing consistently for a week, I have 5*8 slowly updating combo box fields to enter at the end of the week.

For another thing, the work categories are defined by the accounting department, not by the users. The categories aren't useful for me - they're useful for accounting.

Also, you can't always fix errors. There's at least one bug in EZ-labour where accidentally entering hours on a weekend can't be removed.

EZ-Labour's front end could probably be improved a LOT, quite easily. But it's Enterprise-Grade Software - no one who made it is using it, no one who is buying it is using it, no one who uses it has an opportunity to fix it, and there's clearly no user-feedback being incorporated into the design. It's bad software being shovelled out by a big, dumb, blind company. That's really what characterized Enterprise-Grade Software - it's produced by a silo-ed organization and there's no opportunity for feedback and iteration, so it never gets past it's shitty v0.1 state.

Re: ADP Sues Zenefits for Defamation

#117

The health insurance and benefits industry needs innovation, badly, but as one person said on this thread, don't bite the hand that feeds you. The Hub and Spoke model that Parker often refers to will not work if you are too aggressive with trying to force (your version) of change on these companies you have no choice to work with in some capacity. Disruption is one thing, destruction is another. There's a lot of focu…

The WSJ reported this morning that many startups (and distrubingly, many HN-backed startups) are using fuzzy math when it comes to reporting financials. Generally, they're using non-GAAP measures that they "feel" better reflects their "growth" and "income potential" rather than actual financial measures that everyone else uses.

I wouldn't be surprised if the "10,000+" businesses included prospective businesses, companies that tested Zenefits out without committing to it, and former customers.

Re: ADP Sues Zenefits for Defamation

#118

We're a very small company (10 FTEs), but we have been anything but impressed with Zenefits as a customer. We only use them for medical and dental insurance, but in reality, they provide very little, if any value. The Zenefits software is really nothing special, and in fact, the onboarding UI is pretty poor. Now that we have our insurance, Zenefits adds zero value to us. We deal directly with United and Zenefits coll…

> Zenefits doesn't have any intrinsic rights to ADP's system. Zenefits doesn't want or need intrinsic rights to the ADP system. They do need (and deserve) the same level of access as a human working for a client using ADP. They might provide little to no value or be a worthless company but NONE OF THAT MATTERS. The client paid for ADP access and has every right to use whatever means they deem necessary to input or ou…

The system in question was clearly built to meet the scale of human users, not synchronization with third-party automation systems. That, to me, is the issue here - not the question of access, but of purpose.

ADP is clearly responding to a capacity issue but Zenefits is attempting to frame it as a competitive one.

Re: ADP Sues Zenefits for Defamation

#119
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the argument took place privately? Is the mistake the venue, the participation or the action/argument itself? The applicant invited a public debate - should the CEO just avoid the debate and let it play out?

> should the CEO just avoid the debate and let it play out? Yes. Getting into acrimonious debate with a prospective junior hire about their future career prospects is almost the definition of a misplaced sense of priority.

I am leaning to agreeing with you, however (in the spirit of debate) there are many examples of successful CEO's who meddle in seemingly unimportant matters due to their personal obsession/work ethic etc.

It's a not a good sign when your CEO argues with a "junior hire", however if he's successful at growing the company and creating value, it will be painted as part of his winning formula.

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