I just hope this emphasizes that individuals should never feel guilty or shameful if they need to back out of a job agreement that they made.
I've heard stories of folks that accepted job offers, only to have circumstances unexpectedly change shortly thereafter, or to have a better offer come along. And I've seen these people have a lot of stress and guilt about wanting to rescind their acceptance.
Just remember, it's just business. I guarantee Meta (and all other companies) are just treating it as business, and you should do the same. I'm not at all saying be rude, and it's important not to burn bridges, but remember that when push comes to shove a company will never show you loyalty beyond what makes economic sense and what is legally necessary, and you should do the same.
> When push comes to shove a company will never show you loyalty beyond what makes economic sense and what is legally necessary
I disagree. Privately owned & profitable companies have plenty of leeway to practice loyalty to their employees beyond what is economical and legal. Even in the unprofitable tech startup world, if it was all about the money, you'd see people getting laid off right before their vesting cliffs, but that doesn't happen, which is to some degree an expression of good will.
The fact that people routinely fail to see obvious deleterious repercussions of their actions doesn't mean that they fail to see all obvious deleterious repercussions of their actions. If you routinely lay people off before their vesting cliffs, you'd have to pay them more up-front (also you would probably get into legal trouble). Penny-pinchers are very keen on not paying people more up-front (including paying more lawyers). The fact that people routinely miss implications that seem just as obvious that this one does not oblige them not to notice this one.
Being a good ethical person/organization who rewards loyalty and doesn't treat people like shit is astonishingly profitable. You just can't teach that shit in 2 years tho, so instead they just teach optimization problems
It's probably better for the company, cash-flow wise, to lay employees off after their vesting cliff. Some of them might exercise their options, using the severance you just paid them, reducing your total expenses. You can always increase the option pool in the next round (if there is one.)
These days*, the equity component of most** offers takes the form of RSUs, not options, i.e. when the equity vests, you just get stock (public or private).
*, ** For some definition of "these days" and "most", based on first-hand factual knowledge of the FAANGs (except Netflix with their special approach to comp), various "unicorns", and a long list of US-based companies modeling themselves on and/or aspiring to be the next FAANGs and unicorns.
It's also technically illegal and although extremely difficult to prove doing it as a policy probably doesn't make strict economic sense when you factor it litigation and reputational risk.
If people were routinely laid off right before vesting cliffs, employees would just start devaluing any equity behind such a cliff.
In general, how is an employee or prospective employee supposed to tell which companies are going to be loyal ahead of time? Private companies can choose to be loyal out of a sense of good will, just like employees can, but unless both parties have some credible reason to trust the other, it's just self-defeating to do so because then you're just volunteering to end up on the rough end of a cooperate/defect outcome.
> if it was all about the money, you'd see people getting laid off right before their vesting cliffs
Except it sorta does. You can’t casually lay people off but companies absolutely optimize around payouts.
Amazon, for example, famously had an average tenure of less than two years for outgoing employees, with a vesting schedule that heavily increased after 24 mo.
Conversely, Google famous link doesn’t like to cull underperforming employees. They have a front-weighted vesting schedule so underperforming employees get an effective pay cut.
I've been laid off ~1 month before a vesting cliff before. Along with a few other early employees.
Looking back (this was 10ish years ago when I was still a n00b), they had definitely given me too much equity based on my experience. If you don't grow as fast as the business grows, you will get booted. Even if you're a cofounder (one of the cofounders "left" about a year later too). Business is business, especially in America.
it would quickly ruin the point of offering them if it became widely perceived the company could not be trusted to follow through, so I guess it is self limiting in the end.
This is a dangerous idea to put in the head of impressionable young tech workers during a difficult economic time.
First of all, it's ridiculous to equate Meta with all companies. The mistake to watch out for is treating a company as a human being, and expecting the relationship to have similar social dynamics to that between natural persons. Companies are not humans, and the bigger they get the more apparent the truth becomes. However, in negotiating a job offer, you will also be dealing with humans, and your reputation very much matters on what those humans think as a result of your actions. Ghosting Meta (or any other mega corp) is not a big deal, they will forget you in 30 seconds. On the other hand, if you do this to a smaller company, especially one that is very resource constrained, they may be putting a lot of eggs in your basket, and backing out last minute could materially hurt them in a way that they won't soon forget. This could very much matter down the line, because even if the company goes out of business, the leaders there will likely still be around and may pop up on hiring committees/reference checks you least expect.
The question is this: if you have excepted a job offer, and you get another job offer you prefer, is it unethical to back out of the original job offer?
The answer is no. But clearly you have to contact the original employer, explain the situation, and apologize. Again, no one, not one person, is suggesting ghosting.
That's fair criticism, my choice of verb in that sentence was poor. The reason I used it was to emphasize that with Meta they honestly be very unlikely to be offended. That said though, one should always behave professionally regardless of who the counterparty is.
Or if you are in a smaller market - people talk and word spreads faster there. This may not matter to those who are not in it for the long run but if you are, be careful.
Thank you for this. I was in this exact position once, where a better offer came along just after I had accepted. Honestly, if the original company had matched (or gotten very close to) the better offer I would have still gone there since it wouldn't have required moving. But it was so much higher that I knew it was basically not going to happen. I felt guilty about that for a while. But going to the company I did turned out great for me, and if I was in that position again I'd do the same thing.
The unfortunate thing is that companies have a lot more power, the relationship isn't symmetrical. An individual withdrawing from from a job offer has to worry about being blacklisted by the company and often even other companies in the industry (I know this to be the case w/ some positions in banking, admittedly not familiar w/ practices in big tech). I'm not saying people should feel bad about walking away from an employment agreement, nor do companies deserve loyalty, but definitely emphasizing your point to avoid burning bridges because a lot of industries are a lot smaller on the inside than they look.
I've been involved hiring a fair amount and I'm pretty sure there's no blacklist, at least in the tech world. In fact, I once worked at a place where someone started at the company, worked a couple of weeks, then left because their preferred job offer came through. A couple of months later this person came back and said the other job wasn't working out and was hired again.
Despite the messaging constantly broadcast by HR departments, it really is just business, unless the organization is horribly dysfunctional. There are vindictive individuals out there, but you don't want to work for those people anyway.
> about being blacklisted by the company and often even other companies in the industry
I've asked many recruiters and HR professionals this exact question but all of them said there is no such thing as blacklisting. Its not worth their time and effort to maintain an industry wide blacklist of candidates which Sounds borderline illegal.
Generally, it's so difficult to hire technical talent, that it would be very difficult to maintain a blacklist anyway. Basically, some companies would just break the blacklist, because there's a good source of talent, that some companies have decided to overlook for petty reasons.
The world is too busy and too chaotic to really care that you decided not to join a company or that a company decided to withdraw an offer. Life goes on.
There might not be intercompany blacklists, but there are definitely intracompany blacklists.
But it also depends on the size of the industry. Smaller industries where everyone knows each other, people will talk about a candidate pulling out, and stop extending that person offers.
All those companies are made up of individuals who must make those exact same decisions for themselves.
As for blacklists, if you're a douchebag you'd better be real good at something, because people never forget that, and in no time you have a rep. Anyone who has been around for a while has names on their DO NOT HIRE list, and if those resumes run across their desk it's instant reject.
> but remember that when push comes to shove a company will never show you loyalty beyond what makes economic sense and what is legally necessary, and you should do the same.
I don't know if I agree with you. I've had big successful companies give me way more than I believe I deserved. I've had small companies screw me over (or at least tried to). I don't know if a hard-and-fast rule like that works for everyone nor every situation. My suggestion is to treat a company only as well as it treats you -- which is probably a good thing to do in life in general. Relationships should be reciprocal. For many of us who've worked for a while, I am sure there has been instances where companies or managers have gone out of their way to take care of us. Even at the company that tried to screw me over, my manager cared for me beyond what his job entails. For new offers though, since there is no history with the company, no one should feel obligated to accept an offer if there is a better one that comes along or if the potential employee have any misgivings about the company.
Respectfully, it sounds like you didn't know your worth and should have held out for more. Large companies have seriously big bags of cash to give to their people. Money's only worth as much as you can eat though, you can't take it with you.
I don’t think company size is often indicative of compensation. Rather, determine if you will be a cost center or a profit center.
A small company where you will be a profit center can give you significantly more money than a large company where you will be a cost center. Even if you’ll be doing essentially the same work at both companies.
I totally lucked into it. I was basically a new college grad and joined just before the IPO was announced. The equity was awarded to me was pretty small compared to some of the equity earlier employees received. So the company gave me a second much bigger grant just before the IPO. I contributed little to what got the company to the IPO. Maybe a charitable way to see it would be that the company saw potential in me. And like you said, they have huge bags of money to give away anyways because of the IPO so maybe it didn't matter as much to them. I just felt super lucky and undeserving. I did end up staying a long time at the company though and I did end up doing well and contributing post IPO. But I did appreciate someone taking a chance on me initially.
As a hiring manager I don’t hold it against someone for making a decision they think is right. I always see the candidate’s decision as also the right one for me. I do think it can reflect badly on someone if it’s handled poorly/unprofessionally but this is rare in my experience.
Right, if either the employer or employee at the end of the day don't think it's a good fit after having given/received an offer it's still less painful to reciend it than to hire the person and then fire them some months afterwards (or vice versa for the employee).
I don’t know, at some point, you are responsible for who you work for and the kind of person you want to be.
I’m not surprised to see large soulless corporations acting like large soulless corporations but my preferred solution to this problem is not to become cynical but to go work with people who have some values.
I wouldn’t feel bad about doing it to Meta, but Meta isn’t every company and every company isn’t Meta. You shouldn’t “punish” every company for the misbehavior of one giant one.
Though I would still say it’s probably usually fine to back out of an offer. Just take the normal care you otherwise would and be kind about it. Don’t just ghost them or be a dick.
If you are backing out of an offer, that is a pretty unfriendly thing to do. Not immoral, just unfriendly. Doing it to Google or Meta is fine because they very clearly aren't your friend. Do it to a startup and they will likely hold a grudge. Do it to your friend's business, and they will understand, but might be a little upset for a little while.
> Quotation marks can also highlight that a word is being used somehow peculiarly – a writer may wish to indicate irony, inaccuracy, or scepticism, for example; used this way, they’re called scare quotes.
A lot of people use them merely to offset metaphors... though this usage is often discouraged (much to my chagrin, as I do it often ;P) because your audience can usually be expected to figure it out themselves and it is almost infantilizing to offset them constantly (though, in my experience a lot of people don't know idioms or usage and so it can be helpful).
In this case, I believe the idea is that if you tell a bunch of people that public companies like Meta don't give a shit about you, and that you should never feel bad about going back on something you agreed to, it effectively "punishes" other more reasonable--maybe even privately-held--companies... but it isn't actually a punishment (of course) so you use quotation marks to add distance.
(That said, I don't personally think you should ever have to feel bad about suddenly disappearing or deciding you don't want to do the thing you thought you could do: working should be consensual, and it is almost never the case that someone is absolutely screwed if you don't take the job; and in the cases where they would be you probably know and it is almost certainly an extremely short-term problem that you can negotiate how to handle. I am just responding not to the idea but to defend the usage of quotation marks.)
There isn’t really a word for what I meant, but punish is pretty close. “Actor A does something wrong, so it’s ok to punish actor B” is how I characterize the parent poster’s statement.
I think it's a lot more nuanced. If you're joining LargeTechCo as one of thousands of entry level new hires, then reneg on an offer accept, I don't think that's a big deal.
But let's say it's a startup that put considerable effort into hiring you, and turned down other candidates, and you reneg just because you got a slightly better offer? You'll probably burn a few bridges.
I wouldn't call it loyalty. To me the only thing that counts is if someone is going to get in trouble if i don't show up. Any sufficiently large company wont feel pain of any kind, its just business as usual. Worse case: Someone has to fill a form.
Meta is hardly the only the first tech company to rescind offers.
Yes, it's poor form and rightfully burns a bridge, but it's not a contract. Let's not expect people to treat employers any better than employers treat people.
This view is really popular, but totally wrong if you take the view of a business (or a capitalist ideologue). In that frame of reference, a contract is something that might cost money to break, not a high and mighty promise.
A corporation is like a computer program. It has a purpose (making loads of money), and a methodology to follow to do so. If a computer program wiped your harddrive, fried your CPU, and burnt your house down, you wouldn't swear a vendetta against the software, you'd hold the person who wrote it to account. Likewise, corporations are automatons. If a corporation does evil, it's because its leadership is evil.
As automatons, corporations cannot have morals, because they simply follow their programming. You, a flesh and blood human, should feel no obligation to a corporation for any actions they take, for the same reason you don't write letters to a bollard thanking it for stopping a car that might have hit you.
It's interesting that so many people vociferously deny that corporations are people, yet just as many seem to habitually ascribe motives and moral character to them, and hate or love them as if they are, in fact, people. Maybe this is a disjoint set, but I doubt it.
When I say corporations aren’t people, I mean that in a literal sense, with implications such as “corporations shouldn’t be given human rights” (I’m sure there are some rights which do make sense for both humans and corporations, but it’s not 1:1)
When I say corporations have motives, that is shorthand for “the human leadership of this company has motives which control their decision making and cause them to make decisions which point the corporation in a certain direction”
Ok, but that same shorthand can, and arguably should be, applied to whatever situation caused you to say "corporations shouldn't be given human rights".
I know the argument. It's propaganda, a theory by Milton Friedman taken to an extreme, starting (IIRC) in the 1980s. Just look into it a little, think about it a little. It's paper thin.
I hope the is emphasizes that just because your spouse is nice to you 9/10 times, because of that 1/10 times they argue with you you should give up all loyalty and good will towards them. After that one argument, all trust is lost.
/s
I hope your realise life is more complicated. Yes meta may do this sometimes, but as an employer I’ve been fucked over plenty of times by flakey people. So what. You should judge each and every person and company for they are and their situation.
As a hiring manager who has had multiple people back out or leave early in their tenure, for personal reasons, I try hard to never take it personally and just try to support them in their decision. People gotta do what's right for them. It might be inconvenient for me or I might think they're not making the best choice, but such is life.
Most companies won't do that by default, but when push comes to shove, they care about the bottom line much more than the person. Plus they have almost all of the leverage.
I agree with the GP because the power imbalance is too big. They're also not saying people should screw companies over all the time. Just to not feel guilty if/when it makes sense to take a better offer.
The Treasury yield curve has been inverted -- that is, long-term bond rates are lower than short-term -- for the last few months, which has traditionally (n=8) been a reliable indicator of an upcoming recession. The market mechanism leading to this signal isn't well-understood, but is certainly related to inflation expectations. The good news here is that the market expects that long-run inflation will be brought under control (otherwise, the 10-year t-bill rate would be much higher to compensate for expected inflation losses), but monetary policy to do so will impact economic growth.
The countervailing element here is that the economy is slowing down from a very fast clip: unemployment is historically low, job losses are pretty subsector-specific and tech employees are quickly finding new jobs elsewhere in the economy, the financial sector is healthy, and consumers aren't seeing the kind of destruction of wealth we saw back in '08. As a result, I'm still cautiously optimistic -- for whatever my opinion's worth -- that the Fed can manage a soft landing, though the ambiguous nature of current economic signals means that monetary over- or under-shooting is quite possible, leading to either a hard recessionary landing or continued inflation (noting that cost-push inflation due to factors such as COVID and the Russian war in Ukraine are not really manageable through monetary mechanisms, so hang-on inflation is likely to continue to eat away at economic performance).
> which has traditionally (n=8) been a reliable indicator of an upcoming recession.
No, yield curve inversions have preceded each of the last 8 recessions (9 if you count 20-year to 3-month inversion), they've also occurred multiple times in that period without recessions before the inversion resolved, so they are not a reliable indicator of recessions (their absence is, by that history, a reliable indicator of not-recession, though).
Yeah, I think it depends on whether you consider it a prediction if the recession occurs during the inversion (Harvey's thesis, IIRC, considers it a prediction if a recession occurs within 1-4 quarters after the inversion, regardless of whether the inversion is maintained into the recession itself. Plus, I think his approach was less predictive prior to the 1976+ time period, though that might have been a data noise artifact.)
If you accept Harvey's definition, then the major misses were the minor 10-2 inversion in the summer of 1998 (which prompted a quick round of Fed cuts that may have avoided a mild recession); the persistent inversion of 2000, which correctly predicted an economic slowdown but not a recession (in the US, anyway); the February 2006 inversion, which was in response to Fed attempts to cool down the housing market, which bit us a few years later; and the summer 2019 inversion, which I think was a true miss, though COVID pretty much upended any "normal" economic cycle, so it's possible that absent pandemic-era stimulus we might have had a mild recession. (Src: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=YAvs and https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=YAvv)
As you say, it's an imperfect metric by any light, even though I buy into the less-strict traditional prediction model, so take it a bit more seriously when the lights start flashing. Regardless, for what my opinion's worth (which ain't much), I think this is looking more like '98 at best and '01 at worst, at least as long as the Fed doesn't overshoot and slam us into the tarmac.
Hasn't that happened multiple times over the last ~5 years? Or are there different definitions of long vs short term bonds that are more accurate (eg you can compare 30 yr vs 1 month, or you can compare 10 year vs 1 year)
Tech industry risk appetite is inverse to the prime rate. With rates at near zero, there's going to be lots of growth because, hey free money. As that prime rate increases you need a lot better justifications to borrow money for new endeavors. The tech market gets a lot tighter in that case.
Inversion means that bondholders value short terms more than long terms. That happens when the future is uncertain. If you think rates will go up substantially in a couple of months it's better to buy the short term bond and then later roll to the long term bond then to buy and hold a long term bond which will increase in yield as the prime increases. (Increasing yield is bad for bond holders).
They don’t know the future, but they are leading indicators, so their current state often has important correlations to broad economic health in the future.
The first dominos are falling. The others will soon follow. When Big Tech makes up a sizable marketcap of the markets, and most folks are passively invested these days, it will hit everyone.
It’s hard to guess. Big Tech has been riding high for a very long time in an environment saturated with cheap money. Still despite multiple crisis the rest of the economy is not doing so bad and reshoring has put manufacturing back into the limelight. We might see something more akin to a rebalance rather than a full on crash.
Looking at QQQs growth on a longer term chart is nothing short of staggering. I do feel a price correction is due. We saw it with Tesla and so too do I think we'll see it with QQQ.
Economic data just out showed that wage growth is slowing. For normal folks that sounds bad, for economists it means inflation is finally being tamed.
What good is making more money if your money becomes worth less? The hard part is selling people on why stopping the status quo is actually a good thing.
The crazy prices of cars and homes was a great example of mania that was unsustainable.
No one thinks their bluffing, the market WANTS this, it depresses wages bringing costs down. Corporate profits are responsible for at least half of inflation, and wage growth is a good chunk of the other half. Profits are good reasons to raise prices, but wages isn't, and the market wants to put workers back in their place. They WANT a short recession.
Core CPI ex-shelter was negative the previous two months. The way BLS measures shelter is notoriously laggy. High-frequency metrics of shelter inflation (e.g. Zillow data)[1] is falling off a cliff.
The upshot is that while CPI is probably over-measuring inflation today, and we're basically back to baseline, earlier in the year we were probably running closer to 11-12% inflation with the real housing numbers.
There's money to be made day trading the volatility but I haven't the time, nor the experience, to predict each movement with reasonable certainty. I know the medium-term is down, and the long-term is up. If your outlook is long then you stay the course.
Going from dramatic doomsaying about "falling dominoes" to tepid observations that are almost impossible to not have come true, is really quite the downgrade.
There will be pain because there's always pain to come with the mind bogglingly good times? I mean I and so so so many others in tech have done well enough in the last 5 years or so to weather quite a bit to understate the tech market leading up to this. Sure there's going to be unlucky folks who enter the market at the tail end of the current round of musical chairs, but even the doomsayer admits the long-term is up so...
The only people I feel bad for are those who missed out because they were too busy thumbing their noses down at the crowd.
Did dominoes not fall in 2008? 2000? There is always a trigger action. The mania that has been pervasive for the past few years has not been good. A boom cycle of 14 years is too long to not be painful when it turns to bust.
Speaking of musical chairs it feels like people want the bank to keep playing as the ship goes down. Will we recover from it? Almost certainly we will, but the pain inflicted on many during that time will not be fun. We have an new generation in the workforce that has really only known prosperity for as far back as their conscious memories stretch.
If money was my profession then you'd best believe I'd be capitalizing on this. Look at Citadel's profits from last year, despite being initially caught off guard, and losing a fair amount, at the hands of folks from Wall Street Bets.
I do wholeheartedly believe this downturn will be worse than 2008 and 2000, perhaps on the levels we saw during the 1970s and 1980s, or slightly worse. I don't believe people see this as even remotely possible and that, I believe, is dangerous.
> There will be pain because there's always pain to come with the mind bogglingly good times?
There was never anything interesting about being able to call out a 2008 or a 2000 because every single year in between them someone was always saying this was going to be the year of "tulip mania come roost".
People would see dips in 2010 and point to them as obvious proof that 2008 was just the tip of the iceberg, and they had about as much to go on as you would if you weren't able to pull up a graph of the years that follow today.
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What makes it interesting (read: worth saying out loud) is if you can put your money where your mouth was and actually bet something, then win on that bet.
But saying stuff like "Pain inflicted during that time will not be fun"... well duh? You're telling me that a correction after the market rallies 400% in a decade that included a world-shifting global pandemic is going to be painful?
I don't know, I guess I just get rubbed the wrong way by broad gesturing with nothing being put down on it when it comes after a period that has literally been defined by the same.
The last decade has been so much of it in fact, that at this point even another "1970s or slightly worse" wouldn't cover the losses we've been promised.
I believe you're saying such because I don't have the "creds" to claim it. The people with creds feel the same way. If Morgan Stanley feels a bigger downturn is looming then they more than likely are putting their money where their mouth is.
I don't disagree with this nominally, but "the market can remain irrational longer then you remain solvent" has been proven ongoingly true. Ultimately you're trying to time the market and you are paying for the privilege of doing so.
I bought a bunch of call options for GoPro, because they're switching to a subscription model and being very aggressive about it (you get a year for free when you buy the latest gopro AND a discount on the gopro, it's insane). Yet, the options just crashed like crazy over time. Irrational market.
I think they're growing on the cloud + software side though, and they also have their gopro max (360 camera) offering that I don't think is really matched by the competition right now. The next step for them is really to offer some video editing tools online.
Let's go economic recession 2023, it'll be just like 2008 all over again!!! I hope the US Govt bails out Google and Facebook with billions of tax payer dollars this time while we all the voters realize there's no way to stop the bipartisan transfer of wealth to insecure financial ventures
You're skipping the part where Google grew because they were opening new channels for growth - YouTube was only a few years old and growing, in 2008 Android had just been released and DoubleClick had just been bought. Now their growth depends on extracting more from their advertisers, it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.
They've increased headcount significantly since 2019 so I imagine layoffs would be in the picture. Agree they'd still be large businesses with growth prospects.
To be clear, I mean that Alphabet revenue was about the same in both 2019 and 2020, so it's only growth since Q3 2020 that matters.
Any idea what the new headcount is doing? I can think of very little change in their services over the last handful of years, but apparently they have doubled in size in the last five! At best I could point at waymo, but they've gained 2k compared to 70k. And they already gutted stadia but that was never very big.
My impression is that a lot of it goes to GCP. Maybe YouTube getting a push in whatever initiative prompts them to overpay for NFL Sunday Ticket. I'd love to see a leaked doc from some mega cap tech outlining headcount per segment. I don't get it either.
While 120,000 people may have been recently laid off at high profile tech companies, that's only 0.07% of the jobs market. (and many of them are highly employable and have new jobs)
Indeed, but how is that number calculated? The output of an algorithm is only as good as the data you choose to incorporate into it. I think the picture is painted rosier than it is, but also I think we have ample room to fall still.
If you think it's wrong, there are other measures of household economic activity that can be used in conjunction. For instance, if people lose their jobs, they're going to spend less money, which hasn't happened yet (at least through Nov '22): https://www.bea.gov/news/2022/personal-income-and-outlays-no...
I think roles in LON are considered probationary for the first 6 months... so technically I suppose they are not considered equivalent to FTE roles in the States. You normally go through a probation review in which they will decide to terminate, extend probation, or convert to full time employee.
This question was also raised when layoffs were first announced as it was noted there is difficulty doing layoffs in certain European countries and particularly challenging if you're actively on-boarding people at the same tie. Not sure how much this applies to the UK.
England’s employment rights are much less beneficial to employees now than they once were: nowadays, in your first 2 years, you have no meaningful protection beyond what’s contracted, it’s not until 2 years that you have employment protection rights that prevent dismissal without cause — an employer must go through the redundancy process to dismiss an employee with more than 2 years service without cause.
If you’re at a company less than 2 years, your employment can be ended whenever, so probation doesn’t serve any meaningful legal purpose, it’s just an arbitrary structure a company can use to review employees and delay granting additional benefits. While you’re on probation, you’re still a true full time employee.
(Employment tribunals adjudicate whether dismissal is fair, and dismissal for protected characteristics is never fair, regardless of length of service - e.g: you can’t fire someone because of their religion)
Thanks for the that insight. When I was working with folks in the LON office they were often stressed about the probationary period and relieved once it was over. It sounds like they were potentially misinformed about the process.
Many people do find probation stressful because of the perception that they’re being scrutinised: although there’s no difference in the legal rights at 5 months vs. 7 months service, an employee on probation may perceive probation as being a process that is being used to find a reason to fire them. I’ve only heard of one person “failing probation” through my career and they would have been terminated whether the company used probation or not.
Personally, I would never implement probation in my company because it is a stressful process for employees that provides zero value to employers (unless they want to stress out their employees).
Available sick leave is usually shorter, too. Normally 5 days, converted to 10-15 after probation. Usually annual leave is fully made available from the start, though.
I think what I was alluding to was that I'm not sure if they did any cuts in the LON office during their first layoff announcements due to potential labor laws as it relates to incoming folks.
With these rescinds, perhaps they are gearing up to do actual layoffs.
This was happening late last year when the big layoff was announced.
Here is my advice to anyone, particularly in this market: when you accept an offer, don't quit. Do not quit until you've started at the new company. Before you start they can just rescind the offer. After you start they need to fire you.
Remember you can just quit with no notice from your old employer. Is it ideal? No. But a lot of employers will have you doing nothing the last 2 weeks anyway. It'll just be handing off stuff and twiddling your thumbs.
But most importantly, the company won't hesitate to rescind an offer or fire you for reasons that have nothing to do with you, even when doing so puts you in an extremely precarious situation (eg you may lose your work visa and have to leave the country).
The company isn't your friend. it's a business and you have a business relationship. You're just terminating it, just like they can and do.
Fuck all that. Quit the moment you feel it is negatively impacting your life. You don't owe employers shit if they violate the spirit of your contract, the only signal you can send to make it clear that you find that despicable is to quit. Everything else is toxic careerist bullshit.
We aren't on this planet for long. You are entitled to a small rebellion once in awhile, particularly if it is merited.
Agreed. Only follow this advice if you have the means to survive and no dependents. I am merely rejecting the pervasive generalized fear of quitting we all have instilled in us, that keeps many of us in toxic and/or detrimental work environments. We are so focused on not burning bridges even if we do quit, the company will not even know their behavior has effected you negatively.
Or try out having 2 jobs for a week before deciding if you want to put in a 2 week notice at your old job, quit the new job, or continue working at both.
this is explicitly happening in London so it is complicated. Contractual (and statute) notice period are enforceable by both sides and, in principle, your employer can successfully sue you for the difference between your salary and the cost of hiring a temporary replacement for the notice period.
Wow. I am so sorry to all those new grads affected. I was one of those new grads in 2018, I cannot even imagine the horror of having that offer rescinded back then.
Is that surprising or new? I think they laid off people who've been in the company for only a few days or weeks. I'm wondering if this announces even more lay offs.
I see some people rejoicing about Meta possibly declining, but unfortunately, this is a general trend and is bad for everybody in the field. I'm personally very worried about this recession.
No -- they laid off a broad swath across the board -- I know folks with 10 years experience who were laid off, although it did seem the layoffs were tilted toward more recent hires.
Naming and shaming, Insomnia Cookies in Philadelphia, PA didn't want to pay more than $100k for me full-time, which was already a non-starter, but they baited-and-switched an ostensibly full time job with benefits into a 90 day contract-to-hire arrangement.
Promissory estoppel[0] exists, but is kind of hard to get any money out of it, and depends on the circumstances and state you live in. Note that, in general, if you renege on a job offer after accepting, all that happens is the company blacklists you.
They probably won't even blacklist you, if they wanted to hire you then (and you come up with a good reason for walking away) they'll want to hire you later for the same reasons. Be kind to your recruiters, have a good justification, and nothing should come of it.
> If facebook makes you an offer and then pulls back can you sue?
Generally, an offer that has not yet been accepted does not create a contract, so probably not.
If it has been accepted, maybe, though in an at-will employment jurisdiction, probably not for the loss of employment, but maybe for reliance damages in some cases.
Genuine question - if I sign an offer with a company, and then renege on it before the start date (e.g., because I got another offer that i like better), do I owe money to the company for some form of money lost?
Not trying to defend Meta, they are gonna be just fine without me arguing in their favor on HN, but isn't this just the other side of the "you can quit any time you want without a warning" coin? Yes, rude and shitty to do, but I feel like it goes both ways, and it is kind of difficult to defend one without defending the other.
> You put a bid om a home and then try walk away usually means you get sued.
You might forfeit your earnest money, depending how the offer is written. But there are ways around that, and that's part of why some people advise having an attorney help write your offer. An attorney will include escape clauses that a realtor might not. Of course if there are too many escape clauses, your offer might get rejected, so it's a balancing act.
People back out of home deals all the time. For example, if the seller counter-offers your bid price, or asks for any other change in the offer, you can just drop the whole thing.
You can potentially get sued for backing of buying once you have a signed contract. It's rare because the seller will usually just take the earnest money and then sell to someone else, but if the housing market really plunges after you signed the contract, then they might want to go through the trouble of suing.
Obviously, before you actually have a signed contract or if you have a contingency in your contract, you can back out without a problem.
> You put a bid om[sic] a home and then try walk away usually means you get sued.
Usually the other way around. You can’t make someone buy but you can make someone sell. The buyer may lose their downpayment if they walk, but the seller can be sued to achieve “specific performance”, forcing them to sell if they get cold feet.
I mean, that's not nothing though. Then downpayment on my house was 10%, and that is not a small amount of money to forfeit for a capital asset like that given a house is usually an "everything you have" investment these days.
I did say “may.” Usually what happens is the buyer sues and files lis pendens on the property. The seller then no longer has a clean title, and must complete the litigation in order to sell their property to someone else (months pass in this process). The seller usually wants to sell their house more than fight to keep the money of a recalcitrant buyer, and thus returns the downpayment to the buyer in full.
I think the meant the earnest money, not the down payment. The earnest money is lot less- I did like $3000 on a $700k purchase. The down payment is between you and your financing, the earnest money is what you put on the table for the offer to the seller.
Even then, you can generally get the earnest money back if appraisal or inspection fails.
They usually state in the offer how and under what conditions they’re paid, and when they can be clawed back. Usually it’s a short period after your start date, but you still have to be working and have to continue working there for X days/months.
> This is the first time I'm aware that Meta is taking back signed, FTE offers.
I did a quick search on twitter and linkedin and found multiple posts about offers being rescinded from various types of jobs over the last year and even earlier. So much catastrophizing from these voices online. If you keep talking about everything leading up to a recession, you're gonna have a recession.
everyone seems to be avoiding the elephant in the room:
not everyone is meant to be working at these FAANG companies making obscene amounts of money working 3 hours a week.
plenty of jobs to go around at non-sexy companies that pay decent and have decent benefits not trumped up benefits like free food etc, that other workers don't experience.
once we start looking at software engineering as another "blue" collar office job then things will normalize.
Five years from now, Facebook will be trying to hire a new grad and Google will just steal them away with a lower offer by pointing to this incident. Facebook will have to throw even more money at new hires to get them to stay.
I've heard stories of folks that accepted job offers, only to have circumstances unexpectedly change shortly thereafter, or to have a better offer come along. And I've seen these people have a lot of stress and guilt about wanting to rescind their acceptance.
Just remember, it's just business. I guarantee Meta (and all other companies) are just treating it as business, and you should do the same. I'm not at all saying be rude, and it's important not to burn bridges, but remember that when push comes to shove a company will never show you loyalty beyond what makes economic sense and what is legally necessary, and you should do the same.