Startup told me "everyone is being let go" - turns out I was the only on
Posted by SnooFloofs3704@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 84 comments
Need to vent and maybe get some perspective on this. The company is Provably Technologies (provably.ai).
Got hired at a startup in January as a backend engineer (Rust). Recruiter sold me on a "long-term stable position." I turned down another offer for this. Dove in, worked hard - refactored their entire backend architecture, rewrote their proof pipeline, shipped critical fixes. All in under 2 months.
Then the CEO calls me. Says they lost their funding, they're letting everyone go except the founders. Sucks, but okay, startups fail. I worked through my notice period and moved on.
Fast forward to last week. I open LinkedIn and their product lead is posting company updates. Their designer is still there. Their crypto engineer is still there. Literally everyone is still working there on reduced pay.
I was the only one let go. I was never even offered the option to stay at reduced pay. When I messaged the CEO and asked why, he couldn't answer. Just called me "childish" for asking.
I built the backend their product runs on. And I was the one they cut. Make it make sense.
Has anyone else been through something like this? How do you even process this?
CapstickWentHome@reddit
I did some contract work for a tiny AI related startup a few years back. CEO called me out of the blue and said thanks, but they're shifting focus. I got the impression that most everyone was affected, but it was just me, likely because I was the most expensive.
They didn't remove me from slack or the git repo, so I got to watch them potter around aimlessly for another year, bring in a team from Eastern Europe before finally closing up shop. Fascinating stuff.
new2bay@reddit
Wow. How did they not notice you were still on their Slack channels? lol
CapstickWentHome@reddit
God only knows. I'd just set my status to "away", and I guess they interpreted that as permanently offline.
PsychologicalCell928@reddit
Let me guess - your code is stable and works? The people they kept haven't delivered what is required yet?
I've seen this play out a number of times.
The first time I worked for a company building large scale scanners; big enough to scan blueprints.
When funding got tight all of the people who had successfully delivered their components - whether hardware or software - were let go. The ones retained were those who had either missed deadlines or delivered components that didn't yet meet specifications.
It was an interesting strategy - let's bet the company on those that have a track record of non-delivery.
Guess what happened to the company?
Tolexx@reddit
That's quite strange. I really wonder what the logic behind that decision making is. Sounds insane to me.
Quick-Benjamin@reddit
It'd a hail-mary. The hope is that if they can just finish x, y and z before they run out of runway then they'll survive.
They can't afford to recruit or on-board new people and even if they did they wouldn't have time to get them up to speed.
SnugglyCoderGuy@reddit
Fucking 'devops guy'. Devops is a philosophy, not an employee position.
Quick-Benjamin@reddit
I agree that's how it should be. But in practice most companies have just reinvented Ops.
Instead of devs knowing how to write pipelines it's usually just a new silo.
Dizzy_Picture6804@reddit
I feel like it could be because they thought the people who actually did their work, would be harder to keep on for lwoer pay, and the ones who didn't were probably already thinking they wasn't that great and they could keep them on easier/lower pay etc.
CardboardJ@reddit
Maybe it makes more sense when you hear that I had a job where I was offered a performance bonus if I stayed a year and shipped a specific critical feature. I shipped it one month early got my bonus then was immediately fired and given 3 months severance.
They hired a junior developer for less than half my wage about 6 months later to maintain it.
The people that hit deadlines and make easy to maintain stuff get paid like it. But when a company wants to hunker down, stop building new stuff, and weather a bad economy those highly paid employees look like a liability. The better you build it the cheaper the employee they can replace you with as soon as it's done.
There is no company loyalty anymore.
showerhandles@reddit
You run out of money and need to fire someone to stay alive a little longer. To get revenue you need tasks finished. The only tasks not finished are by group x while group y has done their part so they cant contribute to revenue. Only group x can. Fire group y, hope group x delivers before company dies, rehire group x or their replacements. Company lives.
mechkbfan@reddit
Agreed
Ideally you'd fire 75% of everyone late, and move the guys that can deliver into it.
PsychologicalCell928@reddit
One other trick I learned while at that company. I was renting a room from another guy at the company. Good guy and we became friends. Periodically he and I would have lunch with the accountant and then once a month or so we'd have drinks after work.
It was the after work trick that I learned from him. The accountant would have two or three drinks and talk about bills going unpaid, about the contentious meeting with the investors, about the missed revenue targets.
It was through her that we learned that the first unit that we shipped was actually shipped to a warehouse - not to a customer. The shipping ceremony, the cake, etc. were all performances to keep staff morale up, to generate some industry news, and to give prospective customers a better feeling about the company.
( TBC - there was an actual customer for the unit. However the purchase got tied up in the customer's annual budget cycle. It would be a few more months before funds were available. )
circalight@reddit
Way too many people don't realize that companies run on a lot of short-sighted, stupid motivations... not clear, rational ROI.
SnugglyCoderGuy@reddit
Bold move Cotton. Let's see how this plays out.
mechkbfan@reddit
lol, my mate who worked at an Australian bank told me they did the same thing. Some seriously stupid shit but they make so much money it probably barely affected their bonuses
ExperiencedDevs-ModTeam@reddit
Rule 9: No Low Effort Posts, Excessive Venting, or Bragging.
Using this subreddit to crowd source answers to something that isn't really contributing to the spirit of this subreddit is forbidden at moderator's discretion. This includes posts that are mostly focused around venting or bragging; both of these types of posts are difficult to moderate and don't contribute much to the subreddit.
stikves@reddit
They needed a short term contractor, but did not want to advertise it that way.
I'm not sure what your legal course of actions are. However wrongful termination may or may not apply here. Especially if they lied about their circumstances.
Are you willing to fight this? That is the main question. Depending on your answer -- again I do not know if you haev a case -- talk to a lawyer.
If not, you have vented, move onto a better job, and let them worry about their failures.
SnooFloofs3704@reddit (OP)
yeah, literally the words of their recruiter - "Hey, hope you had great weekend and dicided that long term and stability in workplace is important to you and would start your new role in Provably at Januarry 2nd, right ? 😄"
I made a wrong choice, during this weekend I was deciding which offer to accept.
drearymoment@reddit
Maybe I'm just a stick in the mud, but that message from the recruiter sounds super unprofessional to me. Not just the typos, but the guilt trippy "you're gonna do what's best for your career, right? riiiight?"
gefahr@reddit
I assumed that was paraphrasing lol. That can't be verbatim. Would love to see the actual email now, though. Or was this on a call?
Nyefan@reddit
I dunno, I had an absolutely insane interaction with a recruiter at the end of a 6 round interview process just a couple weeks ago. I have a feeling a lot of professional recruiters have changed careers since the covid boom.
stikves@reddit
happens to all of us, I too have several regrets in declined offers.
but you get more over time.
CorrectPeanut5@reddit
They need a short term contractor, but contractors who know anything about consulting wouldn't touch the gig with a 10 foot pole. Not because of the work, but because you could get stiffed very easily and have very little resource.
Italophobia@reddit
File unemployment
gefahr@reddit
Not saying it's right, but nothing in this post suggests wrongful termination.
If they told OP that this was a reduction in force (used terms like workforce reduction, role elimination, etc).. and they hire someone back into the same role, who has the same qualifications as OP, then... it might be worth a consult, but no one is taking this case on contingency, and you're very unlikely to recover enough to make it worth your time.
Still a shitty way to treat someone.
hiddenhare@reddit
I'm surprised to hear that's true in the US. If the employee were here in the UK, there'd be a strong case for fraud by false representation.
Contractors are much more expensive than employees. The employer tricked somebody into being a "discount contractor" by giving them a fake permanent role with the intention of firing them after two months. I'm not a lawyer, but the fraud here seems obvious: there were direct lies in writing, those lies induced somebody to sign a contract under false pretenses, there were further lies surrounding the dismissal itself, and it's easy to calculate damages (the market rate for a contractor, minus what the company actually paid).
Ch3t@reddit
I don't think I could work for any company whose name ends in ly, ify, or able. Doesn't Calendly just roll of the tongue? They all sound amateurish. That's what I'll call my startup: www.Amateur.ish.
meekazhu123@reddit
Tell us the name, why I feel like I know this company.
RedditUserData@reddit
I was at a failing start up. They fire either the most expensive people and the people they don't like first. I survived the first layoff at my start up. I found a job a few months later, 3 weeks after I left they laid off everyone else except the two cheapest devs. Our cto made an investor do the firing because he didn't want to do it.
localhost8100@reddit
Same scenario. They kept me and other Dev who were in visa, they made us move from lcol to vchcol. Laid off the whole team (10 devs). They were paying us so low that both of us devs stayed together as roommates.
We evenyually left within 3 months of moving. My manager as pikachu face and blaming big tech for paying us too much and ruining us young devs.
ventur3@reddit
Seems like CTO said if you’re not going to pay them then you have to fire them
RedditUserData@reddit
Nah, they had $4 million in the bank which at that time was roughly 2 years of run way, they couldn't get anyone to pay for the product for a year, the writing was on the wall.
The investor wasn't even aware what was happening or that he was going to do it until the day of, the CEO had already planned to fire them the week before.
gekigangerii@reddit
"long term stable"?
Minimum-Reward3264@reddit
.ai is the only thing that’s hiring, man
GoodishCoder@reddit
Well that's not true lol. All the boring non tech companies that hire big dev teams are still hiring devs.
chicknfly@reddit
Can confirm. Two companies extended offers for DevOps roles — both are in insurance.
Medium-Custard8415@reddit
sounds like a nightmare. definitely worth warning others about them.
SpaceToaster@reddit
Next time someone uses the words long-term, and stable have them get it in writing.
Onedome@reddit
You don’t want to work for habitual liars anyway. You are better off staying quiet then once you get your next gig you create some Glassdoor reviews and let them have it in creative ways. Kind of hard getting the next job when your previous employer says things that hurt your chances for the next job offer.
PersianMG@reddit
I'm all for the name & shame. Let's go OP!
dacydergoth@reddit
I've given up on startups. Every one I have worked for has screwed me over. Now I work for cash not fairy dust.
SignificanceShotc@reddit
Yep. to anyone else reading this: they do not give a fuck about you, I promise you. They will cut you out the instant they start struggling. All the bullshit team-building stuff they try to push is trying to create a cult "family" mentality to push you to do more hours than you're obligated to do. Also never ever work for a company that will give you extremely low salary in exchange for equity. It practically never works out.
Trick-Interaction396@reddit
Always build your stuff to fail without you
Golright@reddit
Cheapest consultancy hire ahahhah They tricked you
GoodishCoder@reddit
My guess is they ran out of high impact work for you so when they lost their funding it was decided you were non essential while the others were still needed.
FatefulDonkey@reddit
This is expected from someone who names their company Provably.
Great_Distance_9050@reddit
Figured it was crypto related when you brought up proof pipeline and rust. It's a shame because the blockchain space is filled with rust roles, it's just that the space keeps building products nobody wants.
Stunning_Budget57@reddit
They gonna blockchain all the tokens 😭
Foreign_Addition2844@reddit
Named and shamed.
smartgenius1@reddit
I'm a very experienced staff-level engineer and was recently let go from a company after just 1 year there. They had an urgent business need to fix their performance or they were at risk of being removed from the app store. I helped them craft and execute a plan to re-architect their entire application from frontend to backend and was able to prove (via boot time metrics) that their application was booting over 30% faster across all devices. Some older devices saw improvements of up to 40s from the time the app icon was clicked to when the app was usable.
Anyway, once they were happy with their numbers, I was let go. They really only needed me to fix their app performance and once that was solved they didn't need me for anything else.
It sucked at first but I totally understand it. I'm expensive and the only reason they hired me was because their business would've been at risk without me intervening.
timle8n1-@reddit
Totally understand it? Crazy talk. Don’t hire someone - a long term move - for a short term problem. Get a contractor and say we need this from you and that’s all.
smartgenius1@reddit
To be fair, neither of us knew how long it would take to get the results they needed. They'd tried for 5 years prior to me joining but I'd had solved similar large scale performance issues in the past and those solutions applied to their use case. I did it in 1 year but it might've taken 3.
Melodic_Crow_3409@reddit
It turns out this position was not stable. I’ve been there.
The lesson is, the recruiter should be the last person you listen to when considering a position. If you walked onto a car lot, would you let the sales person be your sole advice in making the purchase? No, you would do a ton of your own research beforehand.
The recruiter could always say that they thought the position was stable. But no startup can be considered stable in my opinion. I’ve seen these places go under all the time.
_gaff@reddit
Does anyone know the ceos name?
throwaway_0x90@reddit
That's rough, but I think your energy would be better spent elsewhere rather than stalking their LinkedIn and checking on other past-coworkers.
So_Rusted@reddit
did u.juat join a company and refactor everything in rust?
BigLaddyDongLegs@reddit
It's because they know they can twist the other devs arms into taking less pay because they're not performing. You're probably on higher pay than the rest of them too.
So theyet you go, outsource your job to someone cheap and offshore, now that you've set a good foundation.
Neither-West-9032@reddit
sounds like they used you and moved on
Connect_Detail98@reddit
I'm reading the description of their product and I have no idea what it does. Could you explain?
gefahr@reddit
I didn't look at the website and have never heard of these people, but if as described by you: yes that's an incredibly valuable problem to solve. It's called "grounding", and it's important for a few reasons. But consider even just this one: if you have such an automated fact checker for retrievals from e.g. a RAG approach, the hallucinations are far less problematic, because you can just reject those and automatically invisibly rerun the prompt (with or without additional guidance).
Connect_Detail98@reddit
This isn't grounding, this is checking that your grounding mechanism can't be tampered with, and that the agents can't lie to each other about the data extracted from the grounding mechanisms.
IMO this is mostly for security. For data integrity using hashes should be enough.
gefahr@reddit
Yeah I tried to get at that in my edit.. I'm not even sure how this could work as claimed, though. Their explanation doesn't really pass the sniff test for me.
But supposing it does, being able to confirm grounding was "real" is valuable outside of the security use cases.
youngstarr37@reddit
They dont need you no more
bwmat@reddit
So why didn't they tell him that instead of lying to his face?
youngstarr37@reddit
lol welcome to adulthood buddy
chhuang@reddit
imaging a world if everyone is honest and respectful. It seems every ethics and moral we're taught as kid just get throw out the window by these people.
bwmat@reddit
Like actually though
onemanforeachvill@reddit
They are but mature enough to tell it straight, they are delusional, they were worried about the legal aspect so lied. Pick one or all three.
slopirate@reddit
Because they're dishonest.
scandii@reddit
I mean this in the best of ways, but pretty much at no time in your life will someone spell it out to you.
there are entire groups of people who's professional job it is to portray things in a way they aren't without lying for the sole benefit of their employers, such as the recruiter OP is talking about.
SideburnsOfDoom@reddit
They gave you BS , so what makes you think that product lead on LinkedIn is telling 100% accurate truth now?
I've seen people still marked "employed" on LinkedIn long after they left the building. I don't judge that.
Yeah, that would be a hard no from me.
Still, what do you expect from Crypto?
SnooFloofs3704@reddit (OP)
Nah, I talked to CEO yesterday (who fired me) - everyone is still there.. he created this fkng story... and when I showed my "wtf" he started to call me childish, lol...
I did my work actually very good, their entire back-end was full of shitty AI code, all rewritten, all covered with tests...
SideburnsOfDoom@reddit
I'm just advising for continued scepticism of all of these things.
You can check the claims if you care that much about it, but I don't think it's very important. It won't change the outcome.
PlasticSynth@reddit
You were their everyone uwu
slopirate@reddit
Just be careful. People like this have no morals, and may try to sue you over this post.
HelloSummer99@reddit
If it's any consolation, almost nothing will be used in 5 years of code you write in the first two years of a startup. Especially the persistence layer. Simply, you can't just "one and done" a backend in an early stage company.
klimaheizung@reddit
Your mistake. Next time, you have to confirm the financial situation. If they don't want to share the numbers with you, then don't join them. As simple as that.
Thinker83@reddit
I would like to do this in the future. How would you go about this what exactly would you ask to see?
letsbreakstuff@reddit
Assume any startup with a whiff of blockchain is a scam, whether the delusional founders realize it or not
Minimum-Reward3264@reddit
Fucked up. That’s why as soon as you finish something it’s time to go. They want to build good enough thing to sell, nobody cares about maintenance or clean code, they just want cash in.
Lonely-Leg7969@reddit
It sucks but I would expect nothing less from a crypto startup.
Sad-Penalty@reddit
I do not know your personal circumstances, but I think you won the lottery here. The people that remained took not just a pay cut (how much?) but also payroll instability (will they even be paid their lower salaries) and having to go through the rest of the protracted pain that a failing startup is.
If you can not get over why you were laid off and not the rest, maybe the backend was not important in the grand scheme of things. Maybe they needed a flashier front-end presentation instead, so that they can get sold for peanuts or get an additional round of funding. Very often it does not matter if the product works at all and what the back-end is. I have seen cases where large companies acquire startups whose code has hard-coded paths and only works on someone's presentation laptop.
GumboSamson@reddit
> Has anyone else been through something like this?
Friend, you need to work on a country that has some worker protections. That would be illegal where I live.