Not the commenter, but I would assume forgoing an exit bonus/severance payment that was contingent upon signing a non-disparagement agreement.
Yup exactly. I got my retention bonus and 2 months pay and all that stuff without agreeing to anything, and they offered a little bit more to agree not to disparage them. I'm pretty chatty so decided it wasn't worth it ;)
2000 is a pretty low amount. presumably theyd have to spend way more than that to enforce it, so they would NOT spend it, in which case its free money that you shouldnt have turned down because it was way too small for a gag order
I have absolutely no respect for Tim Cook anymore. I understood that Cook was the operations guy and not a product guy like Jobs. I even have to begrudgingly admit that he has to navigate the political waters in both China and the US doing things I don’t like. But he consistently makes Apple’s products worse in the name of money - advertising on the phone, malicious compliance in the EU, what came out in the recent c…
The current MacBooks and iMacs are the best computers they have every sold.
I agree. But how did like not being able to click on “Buy Book” from the Kindle app until three days ago when the court forced them?
How do you like all of the ads in the App Store and they are thinking about adding more?
How did you like having an 8GB MacBook and the overpriced upgrades until Apple Intelligence forced them to have 16GB minimum?
How did you like being stuck with Lightning ports until the EU forced them?
i love this. A startup I was at during early COVID times got acquired into Hewlett Packard Enterprise, so we all became HPE employees with HPE addresses. There was a similar form there to request "ryancnelson"@hpe, etc... One of my co-workers got cute and asked for "root@hpe.com" .... And boy, there's a lot of cron jobs running at HP.
In the late 90s I worked for a now defunct Australian electronics retailer, who were also a well-known AS/400 shop. Our stock reports etc would come via email from qsecofr@ .com.au. The QSECOFR (Security Officer) user is effectively root on OS/400. I would've thought they would run these jobs as some other user, but apparently not.
Not the commenter, but I would assume forgoing an exit bonus/severance payment that was contingent upon signing a non-disparagement agreement.
Yup exactly. I got my retention bonus and 2 months pay and all that stuff without agreeing to anything, and they offered a little bit more to agree not to disparage them. I'm pretty chatty so decided it wasn't worth it ;)
When NCC Group fired me, they characterized the payment for a nondisparagement agreement as "severance", and didn't offer anything else.†
So now I'm free to tell people that they fired me with zero days' notice and zero severance. That's just the way they roll.
I find it funny that their nondisparagement policy specifically causes disparagement that otherwise couldn't have occurred.
† They also gave me an explicit reassurance that I shouldn't worry about my health benefits, because those would remain good until the end of the month. I didn't find this particularly reassuring, since it was Halloween.
That is one of the most beautifully crafted “I did something dumb” emails — and to a CEO no less. I wish all my emails were so clear, direct, and personable.
: Edit : The OP has history until recently - My message is off base and in the wrong context. Apologies. I feel like I'm in crazy town... Hi - I'm new here. I did something dumb and set up a mail alias so that steve@next.com would go to me. This was a bad idea, I'm sorry. I've changed it to steve@next.com goes to you, not to me. I think that makes more sense. My apologies. Signed, new guy. This was > That is one of t…
Ok well the rest of us got emails at 2am demanding we
Come in and fix some random slide in a presentation. And the world all thought this was “fun and quirky”.
I emailed Steve Jobs right after he came back to Apple and suggested they make a carry-able computer that could project the interface and keyboard input to any glass surface.
I’d do that every time I get a chance! Ex-HPE black label on my resume from a startup I used to work in that they bought. That company is a complete horror show.
It was weird. It makes me sad because the startup I worked at was really gelling despite the HPE interference. Then they just laid everyone off one day (multiple senior leadership changes later) for no apparent reason. All the code is Apache 2 so I guess if I really cared I could just revive it... and as it turns out, I don't care that much. Other stuff to do.
Everyone in my entire team - best of engineering as well as every manager left. Underpaying and over subscribing people has become a hallmark over there - it's just a body shop now. Engineers are just numbers on a sheet, to be exploited, chewed and cast aside when they eventually burnout. Upper management has no vision and everyone's constantly firefighting and struggling to catch up with competitors who had long term vision to invest in engineering teams, tooling and infrastructure to scale up the products and people. They want to do in 2 years what took Google and Amazon a couple of decades. Result post-HPE: poor quality, unscalable, cobbled together, barely functional codebase. Before, the startup I worked for had a well balanced rare combination of high performance, modular and well architected codebase. Later the constant push to ship as fast as possible to catch up with competition, completely destroyed the whole thing - teams, codebase and infrastructure. All because they only know how to react and have no idea how to stay ahead of the curve. Buying startups has become their only means of survival as talent stays away from their brand and the only way to justify value to shareholders is to jump from one rock to another, hoping the new one will rocket them away from the black hole they are spiraling into - all they manage to do is stick to the new rock and pull it with them as fast as they were going into the hole they will eventually vaporize in.