Only this time it’s Tesla and she still works there; not only works, but loves her company.
“Until somebody stands up, nothing is going to change,” she said in a recent interview, her first comments about a discrimination lawsuit she filed last year. “I’m an advocate of Tesla. I really do believe they are doing great things. That said, I can’t turn a blind eye if there’s something fundamentally wrong going on.”
Tesla’s response was hilarious, in as much as it parroted almost word-for-word the Valley mantra.
“As with any company with more than 30,000 employees, it is inevitable that there will be a small number of individuals who make claims against the company, but that does not mean those claims have merit”
Whoo hoo. Doesn’t that just give you a warm, fuzzy, confident feeling of trust?
Things were better for women 30-40 years ago. What happened?
When Silicon Valley was emerging, after World War II, software programming was considered rote and unglamorous, somewhat secretarial—and therefore suitable for women. The glittering future, it was thought, lay in hardware. But once software revealed its potential—and profitability—the guys flooded in and coding became a male realm.
Now look a bit further and think about the industries notorious for their bad treatment of women.
Wall Street/financial services. Law. Doctors. University-level teaching. Architecture. Chefs. Construction and journeyman crafts. I can keep going.
What do they have in common?
Follow the money.
White and blue collar = high pay.
Pink collar = low pay.
Money means freedom. Freedom to choose. Freedom to walk — from a job or from a relationship.
The more money you have the more control you have over your world — whether for good or for evil.
So maybe control is the real root cause.
Men (some, not all) need to control women, AKA, mom…
Poor, insecure, little guys.
Trying to change their past by taking revenge on the present and, in doing so, damaging the future.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here.
Tuesday I cited a post by Scott Belsky on Medium talking about how employees are often conned (my word) by founders, especially unicorns, when it comes to the wealth that is supposed to flow from their ISO.
As pithy as the post was, some of the comments were even pithier. I especially like this one from colorfulfool (21st comment)
If profitability were proportional to hypocrisy, there would be no failed startups in the Valley.
Not just true, but succinctly and elegantly stated.
Founders love to talk about the importance of transparency, trust and authenticity.
However, their stock plans and pitfalls thereof exhibit such a high degree of opaqueness and caveat emptor that they kick a hole the size of Texas in the fabric of the founders’ authenticity.
Another prevalent piece of hypocrisy is “change the world.”
Do you really believe that another dating app or being able to evaluate a new restaurant or a better way to buy your groceries will change the world?
While they may impact one’s personal world, they certainly don’t have the impact of something like Mine Kafon.
What is proportional to the Valley’s hypocrisy is its sheer greed.
Actually, when I stop to think about it, the greed probably exceeds even the hypocrisy.
More proof that what What Walmart really excels at is PR and spin.
After years of angry customer complaints about dirty stores, unstocked shelves, uncaring employees and an exodus of customers to the competition Walmart had an epiphany.
What if paying workers more, training them better and offering better opportunities for advancement can actually make a company more profitable, rather than less? “Efficiency wages” is the term that economists — who excel at giving complex names to obvious ideas — use for the notion that employers who pay workers more than the going rate will get more loyal, harder-working, more productive employees in return.
Ford astonished the world in 1914 by offering a $5 per day wage ($110 today), which more than doubled the rate of most of his workers. (…) The move proved extremely profitable; instead of constant turnover of employees, the best mechanics in Detroit flocked to Ford, bringing their human capital and expertise, raising productivity, and lowering training costs.
However, these days, money isn’t everything. People want more challenges, more ways to grow and better career opportunities.
“We realized quickly that wages are only one part of it, that what also matters are the schedules we give people, the hours that they work, the training we give them, the opportunities you provide them,” said Judith McKenna, who became chief operating officer in late 2014, in a recent interview. “What you’ve got to do is not just fix one part, but get all of these things moving together.”
“Quickly?” Considering the years of complaints, falling sales and stock price I’m not sure “quickly” is particularly accurate.
Just think. People who earn more money have more discretionary money to spend.
Rocket science? No, just logic.
But making your company look like a hero for paying people $18K a year definitely is rocket science.
Penny Kim is a marketing professional who relocated from Dallas in July to work for WrkRiot (formerly known as 1for.one and apparently also known as JobSonic) for $135,000 a year plus equity and a $10,000 signing bonus for relocation expenses,
It ended with her dismissal in August after she filed a complaint with the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement over failure to properly pay her
If you wonder whether she’s just another disgruntled employee, she’s not.
Not when the CEO gives everyone faked documentation of wage payment.
“Thursday, August 4th was D-Day … That afternoon in the office, Michael emailed each employee a personalized PDF receipt of a Wells Fargo wire transfer with the message: ‘Here is the receipt. It has been calculated for the taxes on your semi-monthly salary and signing bonus. The money is arriving either today or tomorrow. I am sorry about the delay.'”
But the receipts were fake.
Al Brown, former CTO and one of the founders, confirmed much of her account, even the most outrageous accusation: The CEO she dubbed “Michael,” whose LinkedIn profile identifies him as Isaac Choi, gave employees fake receipts for money wire transfers to convince them the company had paid their back wages when in fact it hadn’t.
Not even a good fake, since the photoshopped receipts said 2014.
Even after that two employees lent the company an additional $65K.
All told, Choi burned through $695,000 (his own initial $400,000, Brown’s $230,000 and the borrowed $65,000) in less than a year.
A comment on Hacker News should serve as a bona fide caveat emptor for everyone in the global startup world, not just in Silicon Valley.
“Welcome to the club. It’s pretty much a rite of passage here to spend some time with a psychopath VC, a completely self absorbed CTO with a rich investor dad that fuels his fantasies, or an idiotic CEO with an ego problem, and to pay the price for it (just time if you’re lucky, time+money if you’re not).”
This isn’t a warning not to join, just a note to do so with your eyes open.
There’s a reason it’s called “due diligence” and it’s as much for employees as it is for founders and investors.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here.
Programmers in Silicon Valley are reeling.
What are they going to do?
No more clandestine recruiter calls from unicorn startups offering million dollar salaries, six figure sign-on bonuses, thousands of stock options and country club style perks.
And those graduating with CS degrees may find fewer startups bidding against each other for their services.
Not to mention layoffs. Layoff a programmer? Are you nuts?
And, as an ex recruiter, all I can say is it’s about time.
Perhaps now candidate focus will return to the mission and the tech, instead of the dollars and bragging rights.
Because, in spite of the all the media coverage, there is a large number of programmers who don’t believe it will affect them — others, sure, but not them.
Of course, it’s hard when you’ve been the golden (mostly) boys and reality rears its ugly head.
But ask anyone in tech who has been around for awhile and they’ll tell you that change is constant and what goes up comes down — and eventually goes back up again.
Do you use or are you familiar with HireAthena? It provides professional services, such as HR, benefits, payroll, FSA and 401k management, accounting, bookkeeping, monthly financials, and taxes, using a subscription model priced according to size and needs, dominantly for startups, non-profits and other small biz.
However, unlike most on-demand providers HireAthena is not using 1099 contract professionals.
In a unique twist in the on-demand labor market, HireAthena offers its professional workforce the best of both worlds: they receive a competitive salary, 401(k), and medical/dental/vision insurance, but they can also work from home. (…) “We’re committed to the idea that employees are loyal if we’re loyal to employees, even if you’re part-time,” said Kristen Koh Goldstein, founder and CEO of HireAthena.
What’s more, HireAthena is specifically targeting professional stay-at-home moms and dads, which gives them a significantly under-utilized source of candidates.
And in case you think that HireAthena’s model only applies to higher-end professional, you have a short memory.
Managed by Q hires its “operators,” as it calls them, as employees, offering full-time and part-time employment with benefits and stock options. The work is flexible, and Managed by Q works with operators’ schedules.
While HireAthena is a spinoff of Backops and Scalus, which have raised $12 million, it hasn’t taken any funding directly and expects to be profitable later this year.
“Our mission wouldn’t be taken seriously unless we were profitable. This is not a charitable organization. We’re employing moms and dads in order to provide a very affordable service to small businesses.”
That was back at the end of February and in tech three weeks can be a lifetime.
The new news is that Talmon Marco founder of Viber six years ago and sold for $900 million two years later, is the guy behind Juno, Uber’s newest competitor — but a competitor that values it’s people.
“What Uber left out in the process of building their company is that they completely and totally forgot about the people who do the work, the drivers. Imagine a company where all the employees hate management; that is not a good place to be.”
And there lies the problem for most of the 1099 crowd.
Unlike most other 1099 businesses, full-time Juno drivers will be employees, not contractors, receive stock quarterly and have the potential to build “as much equity as the founders.” according to Marco.
Remember the robber barons of the late 19th-arly 20th Century?
A robber baron is a wealthy, powerful businessman who employs practices including exerting control over natural resources, influencing high levels of government, paying subsistence wages, squashing competition by acquiring competitors, creating monopolies and raising prices [emphasis mine], and schemes to sell stock at inflated prices to unsuspecting investors.
Even the inflated stock seems familiar when you consider that Uber’s unicorn valuation is based on funds raised, not revenue, and it’s losing hundreds of millions each year.
She is a customer service rep at Yelp, whose pay puts her right down there with Walmart and bank tellers.
“I got paid yesterday ($733.24, bi-weekly) but I have to save as much of that as possible to pay my rent ($1245) for my apartment that’s 40 miles away from work because it was the cheapest place I could find that had access to the train, which costs me $5.65 one way to get to work. That’s $11.30 a day, by the way. I make $8.15 an hour after taxes.” (Minimum wage in San Francisco is $12.25 an hour.)
She was fired two hours after writing an open letter to Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman on Medium.
Yelp, of course, says the letter had nothing to do with her termination.
Stoppleman has a solution.
“The reality of such a high Bay Area cost of living is entry level jobs migrate to where costs of living are lower. Have already announced we are growing EAT24 support in AZ for this reason.”
Stoppleman’s solution seems to be to kick out everyone who doesn’t earn a fat salary — how dare “them” have the temerity to want to enjoy the pleasures and opportunities of life in San Francisco/Silicon Valley.
That said, I’ve never understood why Walmart, banks, Yelp or all those who follow in their footsteps, pay their front-line people—the actual “face of the company”— what can amount to starvation wages in urban areas and then are surprised when those same people lie, cheat, steal or speak out publicly.
Tony Hsieh, of Zappos fame, Costco and Trader Joe’s are a different story.
What it comes down to is that the further away from contact with customers the greater the money, perks and benefits.
The way you treat your employees affects more than your retention rate.
It can have a major impact on your company’s trainsecurity.
Banks are an excellent example. They are notorious for the low pay, haphazard training and opportunities and iffy managers that frontline employees, i.e., tellers, endure.
But it is the pay that is especially erroneous.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median annual income for tellers in 2014 was $25,760, a salary that prosecutors say does not match the high-risk nature of their jobs.
Raising a family and paying bills on $25K a year is beyond difficult, which increases temptation, yet these are the people who have the most access and opportunity to rip off customers.
Rich and elderly bank customers are particularly at risk, prosecutors say, when tellers and other retail-branch employees tap into accounts to wire funds without authorization, make fake debit cards to withdraw money from A.T.M.s and sell off personal information to other criminals. Accounts with high balances and those with direct deposits of government funds, like Social Security payments, are especially coveted.
If you haven’t already guessed, the banks don’t want to spend to fix the problems.
Despite their importance, tellers and many low-level bank employees are not subjected to rigorous background checks. (…) Kevin Streff, managing partner at Secure Banking Solutions, a security consulting firm, said the sluggish controls came, in part, from banks’ outdated view that tellers handled only low-risk transactions. (…) Despite the warnings, progress has been slow. “There is a reluctance to provide real oversight, rigor or even security training because it costs time and money,” Mr. Streff said.
What will banks do?
Reimburse you for money actually taken, but that does nothing if your personal information has been shared or sold.
Based on their actions, as opposed to their words, executive attitude in many banks, insurance companies and others in the financial services industry seems be one of keep costs low, bonuses high and caveat emptor for customers.
That attitude is deeply embedded in their cultural DNA, which means changing it isn’t going to be simple — or quick.
Which means you had better embed caveat emptor in your DNA.
It’s amazing to me, but looking back over nearly a decade of writing I find posts that still impress, with information that is as useful now as when it was written. Golden Oldies is a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time. Read other Golden Oldies here
I’m no happier about the AIG and other bonuses paid to screwed up Wall Street banks, but I’m not sure why any of us are surprised.
“In the largest 25 corporate bankruptcies between 1999 and 2002, while hundreds of billions of dollars of investor wealth and over 100,000 jobs disappeared, the Financial Times found the “barons of bankruptcy” made off with $3.3 billion.”
Giant compensation packages, guaranteed bonuses and platinum parachutes are excused by Boards and executives as necessary to attract the “best and brightest,” but here’s what’s really going on.
The ‘name’ demands outsize compensation/stock options/guaranteed bonus/etc. in order to validate their ‘brand’.
Those responsible for hiring not only meet the demands, but even exceed them in an effort to attain or sustain the company’s reputation as a better home for ‘stars’—the more stars you have the greater the bragging rights— mine’s bigger than yours in high school locker room talk.
Now let’s consider the folly of this attitude.
Those hiring often seek a name brand in the mistaken belief that the brand comes with a warranty that guarantees good results.
But no matter who you hire you’re actually paying for their past performance, which is always influenced by
circumstances—boss and company positioning in its market and industry
environment—culture and colleagues;
and let us not forget that minor factor
the economy.
The hiring mindset is that everything the brand accomplished was done in a total vacuum and dependent only on the brand’s own actions, thereforechanging every single surrounding factor will have no impact on performance.
Put like that it sounds pretty stupid, doesn’t it.
This is one of the prime reasons that so many CEOs bring their ‘own team’ over when they move, as do managers all the way down the food chain—they know they didn’t do it alone.
CEOs aren’t like movie and rock stars whose very names draw consumers into spending money—nobody ever bought a product from GE because Jack Welch was CEO, nor do they carry Jobs’ iPods—so why pay them that way?
Moreover, assuming that performance occurring during an expansion is a valid yardstick for performance in general, let alone a downturn, is sheer idiocy.
You have only to remember the difficulties faced by people whose management skills were honed between 1991 and 2000, the longest expansion in our history. When the recession hit in March of 2001 they had no experience whatsoever of how to drive revenue or manage in a down economy.
That recession and the previous one in 1990 lasted only 8 months each. The longest recession we’ve had was 2 years, January-July 1980 and July 1981-November 1982, and that one had a 12 month break in it. This means there are a very small number of managers with any actual experience managing in anything even close to what’s happening now.
The current recession officially started in December 2007, so it’s already 15 months old and the end isn’t in sight.
What experience makes these folks the ‘best and brightest’ for today’s world?
Just what the hell are companies still guaranteeing oversized compensation and exorbitant exit packages when now is definitely the time to pay for future performance—no guarantees.
The wealth of the richest 62 people grew by more than half a trillion dollars in that last half-decade, while the wealth of the poorest 50 percent of people globally decreased by more than $1 trillion during the same period.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Tuesday I 
