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

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

#191

Post by Nagyman »

rifung wrote: post #150
sliverstorm wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of reasons to stick around that aren't religious zeal.

There certainly are but are there that many reasons that are good enough to make someone stick around instead of taking 3 months pay while not having to work? I imagine most developers could find a job with similar pay in a month or maybe one and a half, so the reasons would have to be strong enough that you'd give up an extra 10% in salary, or even being able to take a 3 month long vacation. On the other hand, if th…

3 months pay is nothing compared to years at a great company with great culture and great people. The work itself might be the same company to company, but the people and the environment depend a lot on internal culture that's not particularly easy to find before taking a job elsewhere. One spends at least 8 hours a day working with others, not just writing rote code. There's very much a human aspect to employment, not simply economic self-interest.

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

#192

Post by danielweber »

rifung wrote: post #150
sliverstorm wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of reasons to stick around that aren't religious zeal.

There certainly are but are there that many reasons that are good enough to make someone stick around instead of taking 3 months pay while not having to work? I imagine most developers could find a job with similar pay in a month or maybe one and a half, so the reasons would have to be strong enough that you'd give up an extra 10% in salary, or even being able to take a 3 month long vacation. On the other hand, if th…

> I imagine most developers could find a job with similar pay in a month or maybe one and a half

Geographic area heavily influences this. Last time, I spent 8 weeks with almost no nibbles (and then suddenly had two companies fighting for me on the 9th week).

I've got mouths to feed. And when you interview for your new job, you are going to be asked why you took the buyout. "LOL 3 months salary" isn't a good answer.

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

#193

Post by danielweber »

hydrogen18 wrote: post #161
logicalmind wrote: post #22

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…

The company I worked at "solved" this problem by offering the same package but with a clausing stating "key employees are not eligible to receive this package". There was some legalese at the end of the document that deciding who was "key" was ultimately up the company and no explanation was required. As one of my co-workers explained it: If you're incompetent you can get a great payout and then go be someone else's…

That sucks. If you ask, you are signaling you want to leave, which you don't want to do unless you really can.

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

#194

Post by teammatters »

exelius wrote: post #37
logicalmind wrote: post #22

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 think the idea with Zappos is that they're supposed to be such a great place to work that you wouldn't want to leave. And in Zappos' case, I get why they offered severance deals. They were embarking on a radical experiment in organizational structure, and not everyone is going to be on board with it. Rather than having a bunch of people at the water cooler talking shit about the changes, you offer them money to lea…

Personally, I don't care too much about company culture in regards to the rat race of working in office(work remotely for a large company). I would take the money and find another gig; preferably a remote job.

On a different note more employers need to offer remote working options. You wake up, rollover and start working without needing to shower right away, drive/get stuck in traffic, pay a lot for gas ... remote working if more and more allow it/offer it is a solution to the traffic on our highways. Yet there goes many construction jobs ... an example of the Internet killing tons of jobs in that field.

Well im off track, but feel passionate about working remotely, not needing to are about office culture/politics and the huge benefits to society if more companies allowed/forced remote working.

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

#195

Post by logfromblammo »

Touche wrote: post #114
sliverstorm wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can find a better job than you have, why haven't you done that already?

No one's giving me 30k to go look for one.

This is highly relevant. Looking for a new job is like another job in itself. You have to do research, have telephone conversations, be "switched on" in your interview persona for hours at a time, jump through flaming hoops, and if possible, also be younger, more energetic, and more beautiful than you really are.

It's a sales job, with you as the product.

I. Hate. Doing it.

So while a lot of people could go out and get a better, higher-paying job, there is a potential barrier and significant activation energy for that reaction. Doing my regular job plus the self-sales job is absolutely exhausting.

When my current job is already almost good enough to keep, I have little incentive to go sift through piles of recruiter spam and speculative postings to find the actual jobs, retype every last detail of my resume into yet another stupid custom candidate tracker web-app, suffer through the bozo filter and the pop quiz of the tech screen, fly or drive wherever, and spend one of my vacation days playing along with some stupidly involved interview process, only to see a curtain of silence descend forever.

For $30k, and an extra 40 hours per week in which to do it, I would certainly put up with the tech hiring circus for a couple of months.

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

#196

Post by rifung »

istvan__ wrote: post #186
rifung wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is 30k-40k really correct? That seems a bit high to me.. If you could make even 30k more a year from switching jobs, and you started at the standard 100k, after 10 years you would be making 400k. I haven't heard of any developers who make 400k. Then again, I suppose you never said this was for developers, so is there another job where this actually applies?

I was following this pattern: test engineer, administrator, junior developer, developer, senior developer, principal developer, architect, principal architect. My last 2 job changes were in the 20 - 40K increase range. 250K is not unheard of. I guess this caps out somewhere, but if the US immigration keeps H1Bs under this control than we are going to soon experiencing 300K wages.

Ah okay I think when you said job change I just assumed it meant going to another company, not having a new position or title. I do wonder how quickly you can change positions though. I imagine once you get to senior it's very difficult keep going higher. At least this was what I heard at Amazon.

Do you know if it's easier to get promoted when switching jobs? I have a hard time believing that since I think you would have had to accomplish something significant on several projects to get to principal, but if you switch companies it's very hard for them to truly the impact of what you did.

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

#197

Post by danielweber »

indymike wrote: post #125
velodrome wrote: post #34

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.

How many people get a three month, paid vacation at any point in their life?

It's not a vacation if you don't have a job to come back to. I'd relax that first week, but then I would need to start job hunting. And this thought that "you can always find a new job" quickly might turn out to stop being true tomorrow, or not be true for your exact specialty or geographic location. (Especially if 210 other employees hit the job market the same time as you.)

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

#198

Post by cthalupa »

dalke wrote: post #178
cthalupa wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't aware of who Jeri Ellsworth was, but a cursory look says that she was fired by Valve. Were her comments before or after she was fired? I'm not sure that if it was after, we can necessarily count on it being objective. I've heard plenty of people make comments that aren't exactly the most accurate after they've been fired.

http://www.develop-online.net/news/valve-s-perfect-hiring-hi... , which is one of the parent posts, gives some of the timing details. Even if it were before, would you "necessarily count on it being objective"? It seems like an impossibly high standard, given how many people make comments that aren't exactly accurate before they've been fired.

> given how many people make comments that aren't exactly accurate before they've been fired

That's certainly fair. I'm not making a comment one way or the other - I don't know her, I don't know the story, and I have no knowledge that leads me to believe one way or the other.

I just naturally am a bit more skeptical of comments made about companies from employees who were fired. People at a company can certainly make untrue comments, and people who were fired can certainly make true ones.

It's just that, in my experience, there's a higher chance of negative bias in someone who was let go from a company.

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

#199

Post by ghaff »

indymike wrote: post #125
velodrome wrote: post #34

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.

How many people get a three month, paid vacation at any point in their life?

Intel still has two month sabbaticals AFAIK but, yeah, it's incredibly rare.

It's not even so much about the vacation being paid but having certainty. I haven't changed jobs a lot but the last time was pretty typical: get an offer and then "when can you start?" I ended up taking a 2-3 week vacation arranged on about 3 weeks notice.

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

#200

Post by iolothebard »

bane wrote: post #126

I'm not sure how to gauge this. I think Holacracy may be one of the dumber pseudo-science management theories that's ever come out. If it works for Zappos I'll eat my hat I guess, but I have a feeling that all we'll hear about it is that "it's working great!" as the ship goes down in flames. Holacracy and other ultra-flat org structures always share two features: - It consolidates power in the people at the top (the…

That review sounds exactly like what I expected. It's more a rah-rah you're with us or against us mentality. Sounds rather cultish even.

It's like places saying they're okay with flex time but you get poor reviews by butts-in-the-seat managers regardless to your actual performance.

This is why I'm simply riding the clock at my current job. It's sucked the life out of me. Change is on its way fortunately.

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