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Zynga to employees: Give back our stock or you'll be fired

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Re: Zynga to employees: Give back our stock or you'll be fired

#241
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be willing to do an anonymous AMA, or write up some of your experiences?

I'll do a quick summary. Episode 1: (this is the one that most directly affected me) I was working on a very interesting but somewhat far-off technology. I did some tech talks about it, and put them on Google Video. Was approached by a guy who said he was a wealthy early-stage technology investor. He showed me a lot of stuff that indicated that this was the case, had a lot of real people vouching for him, etc. He mad…

"Episode 1": That guy has been around every successful industry since the beginning of time. Don't hold it against Tech.

Episode 3-4: Yeah.

Re: Zynga to employees: Give back our stock or you'll be fired

#242
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because California is an "at will" state doesn't mean a company cannot be sued for wrongful termination or constructive dismissal.

Zynga would be effectively firing them for being too expensive. That's probably the most common reason for any layoffs. It sucks, but I can't imagine they have a legal leg to stand on.

Well it really looks more like extortion (the opportunistic timing combined with position of power) than a cost-cutting measure.

Re: Zynga to employees: Give back our stock or you'll be fired

#243
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I am fine with the part that hey we think you are overpaid and we want to renegotiate the option awards that have not been granted, but they are walking a fine line renegotiation the ones that have already been awarded but have not vested. Many companies will award a certain amount of options and those options come with a vesting schedule so for example I get awarded 4 shares that vest in one year. My contract…

Most contracts state that you lose unvested shares upon termination. It doesn't make sense any other way. However the problem with your math (and most others in this thread) is this: lets say Zynga values me at 4 shares, and I get 1 vested per year. However after two years, and a few splits, I have 128 shares. The company hired me to work as a 4 share employee, then it grew like crazy and I became a 128 share employe…

The employee took a risk accepting equity as part of their compensation, especially at a pre-IPO company.

Zynga shouldn't be able to come back, with 20/20 hindsight, and say "turns out we did better than we thought we would so we're taking your stock back".

If they failed they certainly wouldn't be giving employees other compensation to make up for their stock being worthless.

Re: Zynga to employees: Give back our stock or you'll be fired

#244
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very. It's bad. I kind of got out of startups for that reason. I just couldn't take working with sociopaths anymore. I have some stories. Serious f'ing stories. And no, I'm not just "player hating." A lot of it didn't even involve me. I just couldn't take working in proximity to such sleaze. Tech's had this reputation as a place where fortunes can be made. That's going to attract a lot of ambitious and creative peopl…

Here you're allowed to hate the players, and their games...

As it should be. Hip-hop damaged humanity's brain with that one line.

Re: Zynga to employees: Give back our stock or you'll be fired

#245
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be willing to do an anonymous AMA, or write up some of your experiences?

I'll do a quick summary. Episode 1: (this is the one that most directly affected me) I was working on a very interesting but somewhat far-off technology. I did some tech talks about it, and put them on Google Video. Was approached by a guy who said he was a wealthy early-stage technology investor. He showed me a lot of stuff that indicated that this was the case, had a lot of real people vouching for him, etc. He mad…

I worked for a startup during the dot-com boom that seemed to want to be a Yahoo clone. The CEO was incredibly shady and the company was partnered in some way with some huge telemarketing company in Florida.

We offered free webmail, just like Yahoo, and at one point the CEO told a developer to add a credit card field to the sign-up form just to see what would happen. Several users entered valid credit card numbers. I do not believe that anything was done with these numbers, but I cannot imagine why the CEO wanted to test this.

Our main source of revenue seemed to be banner ads offering shady services from the telemarketing company. One of them was a travel club. The users would be drawn in with an offer of free airline tickets. They had to sign up for the travel club to get the tickets and they had to stay at specific hotels and such that were probably marked up to pay for the tickets. The whole idea was to get them to sign up for the travel club which caused a small monthly fee to be charged to their credit card. They knew how much to charge to get most people not to cancel for months (it was around $8-10). The only "benefit" of being in the club was more questionable offers.

At one point they considered starting a gasoline club that promised cheaper gasoline. The idea was that people would again pay a monthly fee for the club but then they would have to submit receipts to receive reimbursement for gasoline purchases. They were counting on people being too lazy to submit receipts.

Re: Zynga to employees: Give back our stock or you'll be fired

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am saying it shouldn't be a legal issue. It is the equivalent of saying 'you need to take a cut in pay or you will be laid off'.

If we're talking about what should be illegal, I find it hard to argue that it shouldn't be. If you hire someone on the promise that they'll get a bonus at 5 years, and purposely fire them at 4 years, 11 months solely to avoid paying them the bonus, that should be illegal. In any reasonable interpretation of the contract, that isn't good-faith upholding of the contract--- you promised them something at certain milest…

I disagree, what you describe is shady, but also pretty unrealistic. Normally there's a vesting schedule with only a 1 year cliff, and then chunks vest yearly. That's essentially pro-rata.

Re: Zynga to employees: Give back our stock or you'll be fired

#247
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IT is not a valid reason to reclaim unvested stock, those are looked at like current compensation when termination is unjust. You cant terminate someone just to unvest them. That being said, I always draw a line through and contract that says that I loose vesting on termination, and change it to all options become instantly vested on termination. IF they want to negotiate as to when the options will be awarded to ens…

They're being terminated because they are not contributing relative to the amount they are being compensated. That seems to be perfectly legal to me (although it will probably hurt them in the long run).

Another point I wanted to make on this was that I also think the Google chef excuse is just that an excuse, I think they will target the big awarded first employees whose value was in getting them off the ground and which they should rightfully be paid for. Their value was then, when the company did not have to money to fairly pay their market price, and they had to use promises of future reward to get them to sign on. By all definitions the developers that got them off the ground are now being overcompensated to their market value, but that was the deal right, we can't afford you because you are a good programer and can get 250k in the market, we want to underpay you now with the promise that if we make it you get to participate in the windfall. So it does not matter if they are not contributing now, it was the contribution while they where being underpaid relative to the market that made them entitled to the windfall. It doe not matter if they where a chef or a developer if they agreed to take reduced compensation as a risk, with the promise of participating in the reward and are being deprived of that then they are in a very grey area.

Re: Zynga to employees: Give back our stock or you'll be fired

#248
post #88
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We do some investigation and find out that this guy's name is on over a dozen defunct LLCs. > we come to find out that he'd been sued multiple times by previous partners Is there a way to find out about this in advance? Some kind of database to check who you deal with prior to starting business with them?

Some of this stuff is public info. The head of our firm should have probably done more checking. But there are limits, of course, and it's a pain and can be expensive. A database of the sort that you suggest is prohibited by libel and slander laws. You'd instantly be sued. While libel and slander laws serve useful purposes, they also serve to prevent people from warning each other about predators. If you say "hey, th…

A database of such information might be sued out of existence, but a meta-search engine wouldn't be. There's nothing libellous about having a really good targeted search engine focusing on say lawsuits.

Re: Zynga to employees: Give back our stock or you'll be fired

#249
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll do a quick summary. Episode 1: (this is the one that most directly affected me) I was working on a very interesting but somewhat far-off technology. I did some tech talks about it, and put them on Google Video. Was approached by a guy who said he was a wealthy early-stage technology investor. He showed me a lot of stuff that indicated that this was the case, had a lot of real people vouching for him, etc. He mad…

I worked for a startup during the dot-com boom that seemed to want to be a Yahoo clone. The CEO was incredibly shady and the company was partnered in some way with some huge telemarketing company in Florida. We offered free webmail, just like Yahoo, and at one point the CEO told a developer to add a credit card field to the sign-up form just to see what would happen. Several users entered valid credit card numbers. I…

I forgot to mention the reason why I left the company about four months after I started. They laid off about half of the developers and told them that they could take their computers as payment instead of their final paycheck if they wanted to. I considered the situation and realized that I might end up not being paid for my time if they were that bad off. I quit the next day and the company went under a couple weeks later.

Re: Zynga to employees: Give back our stock or you'll be fired

#250
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not tech. It's anything that can make money. People have stopped considering others and only do what they can to make money. Not that there aren't still ethical people out there, it's just that the unethical ones make it so hard to see them.

I think this is spot on. I have friends who left the finance industry because they absolutely hated the toxic personalities that it attracts. The ones who went into tech say it isn't much different. Anywhere there is fast money to be made will attract scumbags.

In my experience, finance scumbags and startup scumbags are different breeds. Finance scumbags are greedy but honest. They believe themselves entitled to own $20 million apartments and will do whatever it takes to get them, but they don't pretend to be anything other than what they are. Startup/tech scumbags (because they're more accountable; Zynga's behavior would be unremarkable coming from Goldman) tend to be a bit better at disguising their intentions. They also tend to care more about power, social access and kingmaking, whereas finance scumbags are purely about money. In my opinion, that makes finance scumbags more respectable (or, I should say, less repulsive).

That said, I like technology a lot better. There are always going to be scumbags when there's money, but the difference (IME) is that: (1) there are more normal (non-scumbag) people in tech, probably 85% vs. 70%, (2) the normal people in tech are more interesting and creative, whereas decent people in finance tend to be boring, 9-to-5 types, and (3) technology has a small but sizable number of people who are decent and have entered the upper ranks, whereas there's a glass ceiling that non-scumbags experience in finance (unless they start their own trading firms).

I didn't move from finance to technology with the illusion that I'd never have to deal with another asshat. I moved because in technology, it's much more likely that I can succeed (a) in a creative way, and (b) without becoming a scumbag myself.

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