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Miso pays disputed $10k referral bonus to ex-engineer, apologizes

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Re: Miso pays disputed $10k referral bonus to ex-engineer, apologizes

#61

Post by antoinevg »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #32

Moving forward, we have established the following clear criteria to explain how employees will be eligible for the $10K referral bonus: - The employee must provide a referral for a full-time hire. - The referred employee must work at Miso for 6 full months after hire date (excluding any leaves of absence) - The referring employee must be employed at Miso and not have given notice to depart the company prior to the da…

The point of the third rule is to alert their investors that they're making sure that any people who leave will not be part of the process to hire their replacements.

Re: Miso pays disputed $10k referral bonus to ex-engineer, apologizes

#62

Post by sliverstorm »

nknight wrote: post #53
tantalor wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your point, which is very persuasive, but this case is ambiguous because it could be interpreted in either way. As an agreement between the employer and employee, the agreement might be interpreted to apply only to active employees, and on resignation vanishes. Suppose a company's expense report policy does not clarify whether they will fulfill expenses incurred during employment but filed after resignation. Th…

It's not ambiguous, it's fact-specific, and a court in such a situation would look to questions of fairness and reasonableness under the circumstances. Absent an extended delay that caused meaningful harm to the company, the employee would almost certainly get his reimbursement.

The fact that you mention a court might review such a situation, strongly suggests it is in fact somewhat ambiguous.

Re: Miso pays disputed $10k referral bonus to ex-engineer, apologizes

#63

Post by dkokelley »

veemjeem wrote: post #48
silentscope wrote: post #41

They were both wrong. Any employee who leaves 10k behind didn't care enough about it in the first place. The fact that he forgot is huge. A company that talks about bonuses of that size with no legal contract didn't care enough about it to start with. The developer will pay with his reputation. Any employer who knows what happened will never fully trust him, except after a long working relationship. Miso will pay by…

I think Joshua's rep broke even, or possibly slightly ahead. It shows that he's a passionate employee, and will go out of his way to make things right. In a work setting, he'll probably fix up that copy-pasta code instead of just leaving it there. Passionate employees always win over passive employees. Additionally, his name is so damn generic, it might as well be john lee. There might be 10 serial killers with his n…

I doubt that. What you perceive as passion, I perceived as whiny. Whiny as in how a 4 year old REALLY wants a toy when his parents won't buy it for him. Is a child throwing a tantrum passionate about that toy? Is that a good thing?

Will this potential employee throw a fit when we don't use the libraries he wants? Probably not (like I would assume of most professionals), but this new found infamy would make me as a recruiting company think twice.

I think the situation could and should have been resolved in private. I know there are more clarifying emails, but we don't get to see them. If I were considering hiring this guy, I would be much more comfortable if I could see all of the emails with each side clearly stating their case, and then the developer's calm and rational ultimatum to go to the public. Even then, I would (as a potential employer) be even more comforted if the post itself had a calm and rational voice. (I believe the voice is mixed at best.)

I base my claim that this could have been resolved in private on the fact that Miso resolved everything so quickly. If the case and ultimatum were clearly communicated, Miso would have been prepared for the negative PR by releasing their version of events. Instead, the company payed up not even 12 hours after the story is published. This leads me to believe that communication was poor between the parties.

Re: Miso pays disputed $10k referral bonus to ex-engineer, apologizes

#64

Post by dkokelley »

javajosh wrote: post #55

The world has slowly become spineless, and when someone like Josh Hwu shows a spine and stands up for what's right a rather large fraction of fellow programmers jump on him. Shameful! The CEO of Miso is an unethical egotistical person who doesn't even have the self-awareness to admit to his knee-jerk abuse of power (a mistake that many a young manager has made, myself included). The real story here is that fighting o…

> The CEO of Miso is an unethical egotistical person who doesn't even have the self-awareness to admit to his knee-jerk abuse of power

Unless you have information not available in the original post or reply, you're making that judgement off of a severely limited set of (largely one-sided) data.

Re: Miso pays disputed $10k referral bonus to ex-engineer, apologizes

#65

Post by javajosh »

rogerjin wrote: post #60
javajosh wrote: post #55

The world has slowly become spineless, and when someone like Josh Hwu shows a spine and stands up for what's right a rather large fraction of fellow programmers jump on him. Shameful! The CEO of Miso is an unethical egotistical person who doesn't even have the self-awareness to admit to his knee-jerk abuse of power (a mistake that many a young manager has made, myself included). The real story here is that fighting o…

Agreed. One of the best comments I've seen on HN yet.

Thanks! Felt good to write it.

One concern that I have is that the Miso CEO (and people like him) will take away the wrong lesson, along the lines of "be careful what you say to employees in email". But the real lesson is that you should keep your promises, and if you have a moment of weakness and try to reneg on a promise, don't be proud: admit the mistake and keep the promise. People make mistakes, even twenty-something CEOs of tech startups (shocking, I know).

Re: Miso pays disputed $10k referral bonus to ex-engineer, apologizes

#66

Post by cypherpunks01 »

> The 10k I'll be getting will be going to charity to celebrate the integrity, compassion and passion demonstrated by the community at large. I want to especially thank the Hacker News community...

As an award, Josh should let us decide the charity recipient..via HN poll!

Re: Miso pays disputed $10k referral bonus to ex-engineer, apologizes

#67

Post by javajosh »

dkokelley wrote: post #64
javajosh wrote: post #55

The world has slowly become spineless, and when someone like Josh Hwu shows a spine and stands up for what's right a rather large fraction of fellow programmers jump on him. Shameful! The CEO of Miso is an unethical egotistical person who doesn't even have the self-awareness to admit to his knee-jerk abuse of power (a mistake that many a young manager has made, myself included). The real story here is that fighting o…

> The CEO of Miso is an unethical egotistical person who doesn't even have the self-awareness to admit to his knee-jerk abuse of power Unless you have information not available in the original post or reply, you're making that judgement off of a severely limited set of (largely one-sided) data.

If you read the email stream, the CEO wanted to withhold the referral bonus as a punitive measure for a work-related mistake. His subsequent "apology" in the comments tried to unring that bell, instead blaming an "unclear" referral policy for the "misunderstanding". The first act was unethical, the second was egotistical, and both judgements are based on the CEO's own choice of words, not Josh's.

Re: Miso pays disputed $10k referral bonus to ex-engineer, apologizes

#68

Post by pyre »

antoinevg wrote: post #61
Dylan16807 wrote: post #32

Moving forward, we have established the following clear criteria to explain how employees will be eligible for the $10K referral bonus: - The employee must provide a referral for a full-time hire. - The referred employee must work at Miso for 6 full months after hire date (excluding any leaves of absence) - The referring employee must be employed at Miso and not have given notice to depart the company prior to the da…

The point of the third rule is to alert their investors that they're making sure that any people who leave will not be part of the process to hire their replacements.

That doesn't make any sense. The rule says 'prior to payment' and the payment doesn't happen until after the new hire is there for 6 months. So if I recommend a friend, then leave 5 months later, I don't get the bonus. How does this mean that I am hiring my replacement?

Re: Miso pays disputed $10k referral bonus to ex-engineer, apologizes

#69

Post by chasing »

dlokshin wrote: post #11

I'm not sure that the 10k was worth it for J Wu. Employers Google potential employees, and this blog post will definitely show up. Even though I feel he's in the right this type of public shaming would make me think twice about hiring him. Just doesn't seem like it's worth the hassle even though I don't plan on doing anything terrible to my employees (criminal in this case!) To be clear, I feel that Miso is in the wr…

Josh didn't do anything wrong. Someone tried to screw him out of some money. He wrote about it on his blog. The problem got solved -- rather efficiently, I might add. Sounds like no lawyers got involved and no taxpayer money had to be wasted in court.

It doesn't really reflect on him one way or another. It's an interesting story, but the only part that has anything to do with hiring him would be to ask him what went wrong with that data loss and how he learned to minimize the chances of something like that happening in the future.

Re: Miso pays disputed $10k referral bonus to ex-engineer, apologizes

#70

Post by its_so_on »

javajosh wrote: post #55

The world has slowly become spineless, and when someone like Josh Hwu shows a spine and stands up for what's right a rather large fraction of fellow programmers jump on him. Shameful! The CEO of Miso is an unethical egotistical person who doesn't even have the self-awareness to admit to his knee-jerk abuse of power (a mistake that many a young manager has made, myself included). The real story here is that fighting o…

Let me tell you my perspective, which may be interesting. The company Miso has good points about the reason for the program. In the original exchange the points were brought up.

To me, the points were brought up one email too late. The moment the first response was Josh, let me talk to Tim. After you lost our data and caused our entire company to scramble for 3 days, I am hesitant,

I saw this as. "Let me think of how I can not pay you."

Even though the next email was perfectly cogent, it wasn't the first. (The next email read Spoke with Somrat about this. You're right that the trouble that you caused has nothing to do with a referral bonus. However, we only pay bonuses to employees. The bonuses are discretionary and not contractual. You and Miso never signed a contract that mentions bonuses. As a policy, referral bonuses are meant to help build a stronger team based on existing relationships. Employees bringing on employees that they've worked with in the past builds a stronger team. This bonus is not simply about hiring. For example, we don't pay people outside of Miso when they refer us candidates that we hire. Because you are no longer employed by Miso, you are not eligible for this bonus.).

After the first email bringing up something irrelevant that I passed summary judgment on Miso: if you don't pay, everything else is irrelevant, no matter what you think of it's just excuses, since your first excuse was to just say, "Fuck you, I don't need to string you along anymore. Here's the first thing I could think of. You dropped a one week old database on a product we didn't have backups on." Of COURSE that has nothing to do with a referral, except if you're saying, "you know I pull the strings around here and it's my decision to make. I'm not all that happy with you."

Sorry, Miso, you lost in that sentence. The question is only whether you owe the employee a referral bonus you promised. You don't get to do what you promised if you had a good experience with the the guy or not otherwise.

There's this great founder I always have in mind when I read stuff like this. Boy did that guy have a philosophy! I've always thought of drawing a caricature of him sitting down at a restaurant with his wife and looking at the menu, and his wife saying that they really can't afford these prices. So he says, "It's okay honey order whatever you want. There is no way I'm paying for any of this shit."

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