FiveFingerDiscount.com? 418
phillippaxton writes: "According to this link, dot-bomb victims are creating their own severance packages, no doubt walking away with the typical office tchotchkes (staplers, tape dispensers, etc.) but also big ticket items such as plush furniture, copiers, high-powered network servers, etc. One anecdote cites someone who lifted $445,549 of equipment, then tried to sell it on eBay as a company liquidating their assets." On the other hand, the fact that it's illegal to stiff your employees out of wages due them, even in a bankruptcy, isn't mentioned in the article...
Insurance companies (Score:2, Insightful)
If anyone knows where I can get an Aeron cheap though, let me know...
Sign of the times. (Score:3, Insightful)
two wrongs (Score:4, Insightful)
If (ex-)employees have a legitimate grievance with their employers, they can bring them to court. If they win, they get paid, and if they don't, they can chalk it up to misfortune and move on. It's ludicrous to suggest that getting stiffed out of wages goes anywhere toward justifying theft.
Why blame myself for the mistakes of others? (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, hello? If a company goes bankrupt (usually due to a crappy business model or incompetent management), why should the guy at the bottom (secretary, router tech, janitor) blame themselves?
I'd say the 80/20 rule holds true here - 20% of the employees are responsible for 80% of the business. If the 20% aren't doing their jobs, then the remaining 80% have a right to be upset with them. After all, the company does have a responsibility to operate in the best interests of all employees, not just the 20% that form the upper management.
Now, of course, stealing servers, routers and laptops is just wrong, but perhaps this should serve as a wake-up call to the management - it's time to start treating your employees right!
Re:Getting wages owed you (Score:4, Insightful)
You go after them in bankruptcy court. Michael's intimation that somehow the employees' theivery is justified in these situations is just so stupid it makes me sick.
As for whether or not you can go after the assets of the CEOs, I believe you cannot. IANAL, but as I understood it companies are structured to protect the shareholders and executives from the creditors of the company. Now, if some of them were personally negligent, this might be different, but problems arising from their actions as executives of the company are probably not actionable.
Re:The nerve of these geeks... (Score:4, Insightful)
A zealous opinion indeed. In fact, when I first read the article, I wholeheartedly agreed with you. Once I got over the emotional charge and saw the situation from a rational perspective it became very simple: These employees don't own this equipment, period. This is the only conceivable arguement. You have to remember that these geeks are getting paid for their 80 hour weeks. They are not entitled to the equipment that their employers paid for.
Double standard (Score:4, Insightful)
Much ado about nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
The most common items stolen from tech companies by employees are laptops and handheld computers that cost less than $1,500 per item, asset managers say. But they are also seeing an increase in big-ticket theft.
The writer gives ZERO facts in support of this.
One anecdote cites someone who lifted $445,549 of equipment
The anecdote refers to a MOTOROLA (hardly a dot-bomb) employee. The employee used his "security clearance" to steal a lot of stuff; I'd infer that there were multiple thefts over time while still employed. Either that or Motorola is too stupid to disable employees' access cards when they fire them, or maybe their security guards let people cart out half a million dollars' worth of equipment whenever they feel like it.
The second largest number mentioned is $100,000...
somebody had cut a hole through the wall and stolen $100,000 worth of computers.
This is a flat-out case of robbery robbery. The writer carefully worded it to make it look to a casual reader like an ex-employee had stolen it but gives ZERO evidence for this proposition.
The only news here isn't news...laptops and PDAs walk off. If you call someone and say "Don't bother coming back," they'll take you at your word, even if they've got a company laptop at home.
Re:Simple reasoning. (Score:2, Insightful)
Consider the other creditors (including other employees) of the bankrupt company, who would otherwise share in the potential value of those assets.
Working for free (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Getting wages owed you (Score:3, Insightful)
As for your saying that Michael's statement that the stealing is justified is stupid and that all these disputes should be resolved in court, I can only say that right now I owe $2000 on my credit cards, ~$2000 to other creditors (gas, electric, phone, cell, cable, etc), have student loans to repay, owe $300 on my checking account and now it seems the one place I can actually live I will no longer have as the landlord no longer wants tenants in his house. I cannot afford to wait for bankruptcy court. I need money NOW. If my sleazebag employer had at least had the common courtesy and decency to warn me that the company was in trouble I would have been able to make some sort of preparations. But they left me high and dry and evicted from my apartment. I have been living since July 27 off donations from my family. I don't even know what to tell them at unemployment, as they have only 3 categories for "why you left your job": fired, discharged (laid off), or quit. I was none of these. I simply stopped getting paid. The company still considers us all employees and expected us to all work for free. I am serious about that. They thought we would all work for free. Anyway, I can understand why people would steal. The day before the payroll didn't happen, the company bought 60 new computers -- Athlon 1ghz 1gb ram whiteboxes -- to use as servers. I want at least 20 of them in repayment. I'm not planning to steal them, but I doubt I'll ever see my money (knowing the conman who is the CEO).
Advocating theft is "interesting"??? (Score:2, Insightful)
As for people feeling "cheated" about their options and pay - well, guess what, you entered into that employment voluntarily. If after twleve months you feel the deal was not equitable, you are a moron for having ever entered in it, plain and simple.
You are the master of your fate you amoral fuckers. Just because life hands you a lemon, you don't get a blank check to commit theft.
Re:Advocating theft is "interesting"??? (Score:1, Insightful)
And all it costs them to take a laptop is their own dignity. Evidently that isn't worth much to most of the posters anyway.
Re:The law in Canada... (Score:3, Insightful)
The law very clearly states that you liquidate all assets (including laptops etc) at the best price you can get within a short timeframe, and you pay the creditors off in the order stipulated by the law.
If an employee is stealing goods from a bankrupt company, they are not stealing from the shareholders or from the VC, but from the creditors that came before them (unless the VC's investment is in the form of cash debt as opposed to equity, at which point he will have a higher position in the payment order).
There are very sound financial reasons for why this order of payment is considered right. Primarily because if you ask someone to take a purely financial risk in a business (ie Debt but no say in the running of the company or selling them goods or services on credit), then a failure to ensure that they get their money back early within the framework of a liquidation, will make them unwilling to finance this kind of investment in the first place.
Dot coms were not the victim, by and large, of bad management. They were based on poor investment in the first place as their assumptions about market size were over-reaching from the very beginning. People who chose to dump promising careers in established industry, or chose to not go into those industries in the first place because they thought they could make more money in the dot-com sector, were taking exactly the same risk as equity holders. The equity holders still got paid less at liquidation than employees (equity holders come last in the list). When someone joins a company with a screwed up business model, they are choosing to enter into a risk, and have their eyes wide open. When the company fails, they get paid AFTER the liquidator and the creditors. In a company whose main asset is a "good" idea, there's no way the equipment is even going to be enough to pay off the creditors, so it's unsurprising that a number of employees have received less than (sometimes none of) the amounts outstanding to them. This always happens in liquidations, but you don't always hear of people walking off with the furniture. I don't see why any exception should be made in judging the behaviour of dot com employees when they take things that do not belong to them.
It's a sad fact of life that when a business fails, not everyone who is owed money gets paid as there isn't enough money in the bank to pay them. Being dishonest by trying to jump the queue when it's not your right is morally ambiguous at best, and criminal at worst.
To the poster who said his VC screwed around with the assets and somehow clawed cash back - I'm not condoning the VC doing anything illegal/immoral either, so I can't comment on that, although if the VC was an equity holder, I don't see how that would allow them to get money back, unless the rules are very different there.
Re:Getting wages owed you (Score:2, Insightful)
I assumed he was a con man when he decided to lie to both the investors and the public about the plans for the company. Around February it was apparent that he planned to use the company and its product simply as a vehicle to launch his daughter's modeling career (going so far as to claim she and he [neither of whom have ever written even a line of HTML, much less C++] wrote the entire application, both on the client and server side). However, at that time my options were extremely limited as I had only been working there for about 5 months, and my main reason for taking the job was to gain programming experience. 5 months of experience isn't very useful, especially when the project isn't even complete and you've got essentially nothing to show for those 5 months.
While I'll be the first to admit that I wasn't the most financially responsible person on the block, I don't think any amount of planning could have prepared me for the level of underhandedness to which my employer sank.
Oh, if anybody is wondering, the company was Aimster [aimster.com], which has now gone so low as to try and profit off the WTC disaster [aimster.com]. While the page now claims that 100% of the money generated will go to the Red Cross, it initially said that "a portion" of the money would go to Aimster's "fight for freedom". Then I guess they took a lot of flak for that, and changed it (copying the text nearly verbatim from PayPal's donation page [paypal.com]) but I seriously doubt that the red cross will see a dime of any money generated from that page. And I'm pretty doubtful that the poster they're trying to sell even exists.
A lot of what I wrote above is irrelevant to this subject, but the depths to which Aimster's CEO will sink appalls me more with each passing day.
Re:Sign of the times. (Score:2, Insightful)
Very difficult to do, especially if it's a startup company.
If it's a startup company you're taking a big risk by working there. If you want stability, work for Microsoft, and even then, put a few months pay into a low risk savings account. On the other hand, if you can afford to take the risk, many of these startup companies are the most fun and highest paying jobs to work for.
If the risk is really a problem for you, find out about the main investors and executives. When I started working for my first internet company, a simple search on Yahoo showed lots of information about the previous investments that our lead investor made, and I even found out some information about the former companies of our CEO. If I had particularly cared (I didn't mind risk, so I didn't), I could have contacted those previous companies and asked for even more information.
Above all, remember that if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Maybe you really have won the lottery by getting that company to choose you over all the other candidates, or maybe that company has just found the biggest sucker. Ultimately you always have to take some risk, but there are ways you can minimize it.