I mean, yeah, sometimes there are pretty widespread deceptive or immoral practices, but I wouldn’t consider them being widespread that great of an excuse to do them anyways (I think it’s somewhat of an excuse, but not a huge one, and it does matter to me whether employees are informed that their severance is conditional on signing a non-disparagement clause when they leave, and whether anyone has ever complained about these, and as such you had the opportunity to reflect on your practices here).
I feel like the setup of a combined non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreement should have obviously raised huge flags for you, independently of its precedent in Silicon Valley.
I think a non-disparagement clause can make sense in some circumstances, but I find really very little excuse to combine that with a non-disclosure clause. This is directly asking the other person to engage in a deceptive relationship with anyone who wants to have an accurate model of what it’s like to work for you. They are basically forced to lie when asked about their takes on the organization, since answering with “I cannot answer that” is now no longer an option due to revealing the non-disparagement agreement. And because of the disparagement clause they are only allowed to answer positively. This just seems like a crazy combination to me.
I think this combination is really not a reasonable thing to ask off of people in a community like ours, where people put huge amounts of effort into sharing information on the impact of different organizations, and where people freely share information about past employers, their flaws, their advantages, and where people (like me) have invested years of their life into building out talent pipelines and trying to cooperate on helping people find the most impactful places for them to work.
Like, I don’t know what you mean by over-indexing. De-facto I recommended that people work for Wave, on the basis of information that you filtered for me, and most importantly, you contractually paid people off to keep that filtering hidden from me. How am I supposed to react with anything but betrayal? Like, yeah, it sounds to me like you paid at least tens (and maybe hundreds) of thousands of dollars explicitly so that I and other people like me would walk away with this kind of skewed impression. What does it mean to over-index on this?
I don’t generally engage in high-trust relationships with random companies in Silicon Valley, so the costs for me there are much lower. I also generally don’t recommend that people work there in the same way that I did for Wave, and didn’t spend years of my life helping build a community that feeds into companies like Wave.
They are basically forced to lie when asked about their takes on the organization, since answering with “I cannot answer that” is now no longer an option due to revealing the non-disparagement agreement. And because of the disparagement clause they are only allowed to answer positively. This just seems like a crazy combination to me.
I agree this is very awkward.
If people asked about my time at Wave I would just not talk about it; I wouldn’t selectively say positive things.
If most firms have these clauses, one firm doesn’t, and most people don’t understand this, it seems possible that most people would end up with a less accurate impression of their relative merits than if all firms had been subject to equivalent evidence filtering effects.
In particular, it seems like this might matter for Wave if most of their hiring is from non-EA/LW people who are comparing them against random other normal companies.
So I agree that I wish fewer organizations would ask for non-disparagement clauses, especially for employees that are leaving. I don’t yet agree that this is the ‘obvious standard’ / non-disparagement is haram instead of makruh.
A related thing that’s coming to mind is that I have mediated a handful of disputes under conditions of secrecy. I currently don’t view this as a betrayal of you (that I’ve accepted information that I cannot share with you) but do you view it as me betraying you somehow?
A related thing that’s coming to mind is that I have mediated a handful of disputes under conditions of secrecy. I currently don’t view this as a betrayal of you (that I’ve accepted information that I cannot share with you) but do you view it as me betraying you somehow?
I think if, during those disputes, you committed to only say positive things about either party (in pretty broad generality, as non-disparagement clauses tend to do), and that you promised to keep that commitment of yours secret, and if because of that I ended up with a mistaken impression on reasonably high-stakes decisions, then yeah, I would feel betrayed by that.
I think accepting confidentiality is totally fine. It’s costly, but I don’t see a way around it in many circumstances. The NDA situation feels quite different to me, where it’s really a quite direct commitment to providing filtered evidence, combined with a promise to keep that filtering secret, which seems very different from normal confidentiality to me.
I can understand the sentiment here, but contracts are generally voluntary agreements. It feels like at least some part of your feelings should be directed at the other party in these agreements. Probably not in anywhere close to equal measure, given the power dynamics between the signing parties, and your own relationship with and trust level in each.
But my guess is that most of the people you sent to Wave were capable of understanding what they were signing and thinking through the implications of what they were agreeing to, even if they didn’t actually have the conscientiousness / wisdom / quick-thinking to do so. (Except, apparently, Elizabeth. Bravo, @Elizabeth!)
Some signers may have really needed the severance money, which makes things trickier, but not unsolvable. For the future, you might want to announce to your friends now that, if they forgo signing a severance agreement in order to share information with you, you’ll reimburse them (though please think through the particulars and how this could be exploited or go wrong, first).
Also, another thing you might be missing:
though my sense is this only happened because Jeff did something slightly risky under his NDA, by leaking some relevant information (there are not that many places Jeff worked, so him saying he knew about one organization, and having to check for permission, was leaking some decent number of bits, possibly enough to risk a suit if Lincoln wanted to),
If I were @jefftk, I would probably have been more worried about the risk of violating a contract I had knowingly and willingly agreed to than about getting sued! That’s a risk to honor and reputation, and a serious deontological line to cross for a lot of people[1], even if the contract is unfair in some ways, or a betrayal of a thirdparty’s trust.
(To be clear, I agree with Jeff’s own assessment that he didn’t really take much of a risk of any kind here. I’m not actually questioning his honor; just using it as an example to illustrate the point. Though I do predict Jeff’s initial concern was more about damaging a relationship through a breach of trust, than of getting sued per se.)
But my guess is that most of the people you sent to Wave were capable of understanding what they were signing and thinking through the implications of what they were agreeing to, even if they didn’t actually have the conscientiousness / wisdom / quick-thinking to do so. (Except, apparently, Elizabeth. Bravo, @Elizabeth!)
I appreciate the kudos here, but feel like I should give more context.
I think some of what led to me to renegotiate was a stubborn streak and righteousness about truth. I mostly hear when those traits annoy people, so it’s really nice to have them recognized in a good light here. But that righteous streak was greatly enabled by the fact that my mom is a lawyer who modeled reading legal documents before signing (even when its embarrassing your kids who just want to join their friends at the rockclimbing birthday party), and that I could afford to forgo severance. Obviously I really wanted the money, and I couldn’t afford to take this kind of stand every week. But I believe there were people who couldn’t even afford to add a few extra days, and so almost had to cave
To the extent people in that second group were unvirtuous, I think the lack of virtue occurred when they didn’t create enough financial slack to even have the time to negotiate. By the time they were laid off without a cushion it was too late. And that’s not available to everyone- Wave paid well, but emergencies happen, any one of them could have a really good reason their emergency fund was empty.
So the main thing I want to pitch here is that “getting yourself into a position where virtue is cheap” is an underrated strategy.
Rereading my emails, it looks like I noticed the provision and pushed back on it, and was told I needed to follow up with a different person. I can’t find any record of having done that, and don’t remember any of this well. Looking at timestamps, though, my guess at what happened is that I was intending to follow up but ran out of time and needed to accept the offer as-is.
(We did have enough of a financial cushion that we could have waived severance without risk to our family, but it was also enough money that I didn’t want to risk it.)
I forget how long they gave us at first (my deadline got extended). I do think that companies should give people long deadlines for this, and short deadlines are maybe the most antisocial part of this? People are predictably stressed out and have a lot to deal with (because they’ve been laid off or fired), and now they have to read complicated paperwork, find a lawyer, and negotiate with a company? That’s a lot.
Non-disparagement and non-disclosure feel complicated to me and I can see how strong blanket statements became the norm, but using tight deadlines to pressure people on significant legal and financial decisions seems quite bad.
For the future, you might want to announce to your friends now that, if they forgo signing a severance agreement in order to share information with you, you’ll reimburse them
Well, either the information is worth that much or more (to someone), in which case the true value of the option Wave is offering is ~0, or it’s not, in which case the package deal is worth some non-zero amount that might still be significantly less than the headline value of the unencumbered financial benefits.
By successfully executing these agreements, Wave and their terminated employees managed to capture some value for themselves, at the cost of imposing negative externalities on parties not directly involved (Oli, other prospective Wave employees, would-be startup employees more generally).
And I’m saying (a) we should probably assign some blame to all parties involved in creating this externality and (b) Oli himself might be in a position to do something unilaterally to disincentivize others from creating or benefiting from it in the future.
Even a limited monetary offer might be a way to add force / credibility / publicity to the approach that Ben and Oli appear to already be taking, of making it well-known that they consider making these kinds of offers to be harmful and norm-violating. So it seemed worth throwing out there as a suggestion, even if it unrealistic or unworkable at scale.
Well, either the information is worth that much or more (to someone), in which case the true value of the option Wave is offering is ~0, or it’s not, in which case the package deal is worth some non-zero amount that might still be significantly less than the headline value of the unencumbered financial benefits.
What do you think the altruistic value in 2017 (ex-ante) was of negotiating releasing one laid off Wave employee from a non-disparagement+non-disclosure? (When the alternative is that they stay quiet about their time at Wave, not say selectively positive things.)
Pretty low! I know nothing about the specifics, but I personally would probably not have predicted that the information gained from such a release would be worth much to anyone. One reason is that I predict (retrodict?) that if there were a lot of value in this information, at least one of the laid-off employees would have declined the severance agreement or negotiated for better terms.
Also, in my model, a lot of the value isn’t exactly altruistic. In a lot of possible worlds, most of the value would accrue in the form of a better working life for well-off people who in principle have the resources and selfish interest to pay for such benefits, even if there’s no mechanism for them to actually do so. The counterfactual EA who learns that e.g. Lincoln Quirk is a terrible boss (but everything else about Wave is otherwise as it appears), instead goes off to work in some equally high-paying and high-impact role, but is personally happier during their working hours.
I really appreciate this as a push towards holding people/companies to a higher moral standard, and as an expectation that you think about such questions yourself rather than falling back to “well everyone else is doing it”.
I mean, yeah, sometimes there are pretty widespread deceptive or immoral practices, but I wouldn’t consider them being widespread that great of an excuse to do them anyways (I think it’s somewhat of an excuse, but not a huge one, and it does matter to me whether employees are informed that their severance is conditional on signing a non-disparagement clause when they leave, and whether anyone has ever complained about these, and as such you had the opportunity to reflect on your practices here).
I feel like the setup of a combined non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreement should have obviously raised huge flags for you, independently of its precedent in Silicon Valley.
I think a non-disparagement clause can make sense in some circumstances, but I find really very little excuse to combine that with a non-disclosure clause. This is directly asking the other person to engage in a deceptive relationship with anyone who wants to have an accurate model of what it’s like to work for you. They are basically forced to lie when asked about their takes on the organization, since answering with “I cannot answer that” is now no longer an option due to revealing the non-disparagement agreement. And because of the disparagement clause they are only allowed to answer positively. This just seems like a crazy combination to me.
I think this combination is really not a reasonable thing to ask off of people in a community like ours, where people put huge amounts of effort into sharing information on the impact of different organizations, and where people freely share information about past employers, their flaws, their advantages, and where people (like me) have invested years of their life into building out talent pipelines and trying to cooperate on helping people find the most impactful places for them to work.
Like, I don’t know what you mean by over-indexing. De-facto I recommended that people work for Wave, on the basis of information that you filtered for me, and most importantly, you contractually paid people off to keep that filtering hidden from me. How am I supposed to react with anything but betrayal? Like, yeah, it sounds to me like you paid at least tens (and maybe hundreds) of thousands of dollars explicitly so that I and other people like me would walk away with this kind of skewed impression. What does it mean to over-index on this?
I don’t generally engage in high-trust relationships with random companies in Silicon Valley, so the costs for me there are much lower. I also generally don’t recommend that people work there in the same way that I did for Wave, and didn’t spend years of my life helping build a community that feeds into companies like Wave.
I agree this is very awkward.
If people asked about my time at Wave I would just not talk about it; I wouldn’t selectively say positive things.
If most firms have these clauses, one firm doesn’t, and most people don’t understand this, it seems possible that most people would end up with a less accurate impression of their relative merits than if all firms had been subject to equivalent evidence filtering effects.
In particular, it seems like this might matter for Wave if most of their hiring is from non-EA/LW people who are comparing them against random other normal companies.
So I agree that I wish fewer organizations would ask for non-disparagement clauses, especially for employees that are leaving. I don’t yet agree that this is the ‘obvious standard’ / non-disparagement is haram instead of makruh.
A related thing that’s coming to mind is that I have mediated a handful of disputes under conditions of secrecy. I currently don’t view this as a betrayal of you (that I’ve accepted information that I cannot share with you) but do you view it as me betraying you somehow?
I think if, during those disputes, you committed to only say positive things about either party (in pretty broad generality, as non-disparagement clauses tend to do), and that you promised to keep that commitment of yours secret, and if because of that I ended up with a mistaken impression on reasonably high-stakes decisions, then yeah, I would feel betrayed by that.
I think accepting confidentiality is totally fine. It’s costly, but I don’t see a way around it in many circumstances. The NDA situation feels quite different to me, where it’s really a quite direct commitment to providing filtered evidence, combined with a promise to keep that filtering secret, which seems very different from normal confidentiality to me.
I can understand the sentiment here, but contracts are generally voluntary agreements. It feels like at least some part of your feelings should be directed at the other party in these agreements. Probably not in anywhere close to equal measure, given the power dynamics between the signing parties, and your own relationship with and trust level in each.
But my guess is that most of the people you sent to Wave were capable of understanding what they were signing and thinking through the implications of what they were agreeing to, even if they didn’t actually have the conscientiousness / wisdom / quick-thinking to do so. (Except, apparently, Elizabeth. Bravo, @Elizabeth!)
Some signers may have really needed the severance money, which makes things trickier, but not unsolvable. For the future, you might want to announce to your friends now that, if they forgo signing a severance agreement in order to share information with you, you’ll reimburse them (though please think through the particulars and how this could be exploited or go wrong, first).
Also, another thing you might be missing:
If I were @jefftk, I would probably have been more worried about the risk of violating a contract I had knowingly and willingly agreed to than about getting sued! That’s a risk to honor and reputation, and a serious deontological line to cross for a lot of people[1], even if the contract is unfair in some ways, or a betrayal of a thirdparty’s trust.
(To be clear, I agree with Jeff’s own assessment that he didn’t really take much of a risk of any kind here. I’m not actually questioning his honor; just using it as an example to illustrate the point. Though I do predict Jeff’s initial concern was more about damaging a relationship through a breach of trust, than of getting sued per se.)
In some parts of the multiverse, breaching a contract can get you sent to Abaddon...
I appreciate the kudos here, but feel like I should give more context.
I think some of what led to me to renegotiate was a stubborn streak and righteousness about truth. I mostly hear when those traits annoy people, so it’s really nice to have them recognized in a good light here. But that righteous streak was greatly enabled by the fact that my mom is a lawyer who modeled reading legal documents before signing (even when its embarrassing your kids who just want to join their friends at the rockclimbing birthday party), and that I could afford to forgo severance. Obviously I really wanted the money, and I couldn’t afford to take this kind of stand every week. But I believe there were people who couldn’t even afford to add a few extra days, and so almost had to cave
To the extent people in that second group were unvirtuous, I think the lack of virtue occurred when they didn’t create enough financial slack to even have the time to negotiate. By the time they were laid off without a cushion it was too late. And that’s not available to everyone- Wave paid well, but emergencies happen, any one of them could have a really good reason their emergency fund was empty.
So the main thing I want to pitch here is that “getting yourself into a position where virtue is cheap” is an underrated strategy.
Rereading my emails, it looks like I noticed the provision and pushed back on it, and was told I needed to follow up with a different person. I can’t find any record of having done that, and don’t remember any of this well. Looking at timestamps, though, my guess at what happened is that I was intending to follow up but ran out of time and needed to accept the offer as-is.
(We did have enough of a financial cushion that we could have waived severance without risk to our family, but it was also enough money that I didn’t want to risk it.)
I forget how long they gave us at first (my deadline got extended). I do think that companies should give people long deadlines for this, and short deadlines are maybe the most antisocial part of this? People are predictably stressed out and have a lot to deal with (because they’ve been laid off or fired), and now they have to read complicated paperwork, find a lawyer, and negotiate with a company? That’s a lot.
Non-disparagement and non-disclosure feel complicated to me and I can see how strong blanket statements became the norm, but using tight deadlines to pressure people on significant legal and financial decisions seems quite bad.
Uh, this could be quite expensive. For example, if someone with a salary of $250k is given 16 weeks plus two weeks for every year of service that could easily be $100k+.
Well, either the information is worth that much or more (to someone), in which case the true value of the option Wave is offering is ~0, or it’s not, in which case the package deal is worth some non-zero amount that might still be significantly less than the headline value of the unencumbered financial benefits.
By successfully executing these agreements, Wave and their terminated employees managed to capture some value for themselves, at the cost of imposing negative externalities on parties not directly involved (Oli, other prospective Wave employees, would-be startup employees more generally).
And I’m saying (a) we should probably assign some blame to all parties involved in creating this externality and (b) Oli himself might be in a position to do something unilaterally to disincentivize others from creating or benefiting from it in the future.
Even a limited monetary offer might be a way to add force / credibility / publicity to the approach that Ben and Oli appear to already be taking, of making it well-known that they consider making these kinds of offers to be harmful and norm-violating. So it seemed worth throwing out there as a suggestion, even if it unrealistic or unworkable at scale.
What do you think the altruistic value in 2017 (ex-ante) was of negotiating releasing one laid off Wave employee from a non-disparagement+non-disclosure? (When the alternative is that they stay quiet about their time at Wave, not say selectively positive things.)
Pretty low! I know nothing about the specifics, but I personally would probably not have predicted that the information gained from such a release would be worth much to anyone. One reason is that I predict (retrodict?) that if there were a lot of value in this information, at least one of the laid-off employees would have declined the severance agreement or negotiated for better terms.
Also, in my model, a lot of the value isn’t exactly altruistic. In a lot of possible worlds, most of the value would accrue in the form of a better working life for well-off people who in principle have the resources and selfish interest to pay for such benefits, even if there’s no mechanism for them to actually do so. The counterfactual EA who learns that e.g. Lincoln Quirk is a terrible boss (but everything else about Wave is otherwise as it appears), instead goes off to work in some equally high-paying and high-impact role, but is personally happier during their working hours.
I really appreciate this as a push towards holding people/companies to a higher moral standard, and as an expectation that you think about such questions yourself rather than falling back to “well everyone else is doing it”.