Calacanis' Side of the Resignation Story
An email with the subject line every CEO loathes: Resignation.
Ugh.
Another promising Gen Y-er leaves after one year and a couple of days, shockingly right on time to vest their first cliff of stock options (25%). Via email? At nearly midnight? To go to a 15-year-old competitor that we're trying to crush?
No "hey boss..." discussion? No "I know it's unprofessional to leave after 12 months, but I feel this is an important career move. Can I explain my thinking?"
CEOs and founders understand that folks leave, but that discussion is customary. A late-night resignation email isn't appropriate. The most frustrating part is not losing a great person--which happens--but rather watching someone with promise set their career back five years in order to have their salary jump ahead by three years.
Trading massive advancement to pop your salary, is a career move I could never understand. Back in the day when I was employable I would never have made that trade off--instead I cultivated my network. Nothing puts me on tilt like talented young people trading long-term rewards and career development for short-term greed and negative expectations.
"Congratulations on being employee 4,235 at a dying company" was the most I could muster as an e-mail response while parked at a light, getting on the 10 freeway. Oh yeah, today was your last day. And since you're going to a competitor, please don't show up at the office.
Right after I hit send I had that familiar moment: "did I really just say that?"
It's not easy being me. I've got a version of tourette's where instead of yelling obscenities at inappropriate times, I say something brutally honest without regard to my reputation or the other person's feelings. There's no reason to make the kid feel bad on the way out when I could have just said "Good luck, we will miss you greatly!"
What's the benefit of telling people how you really feel when the result of doing so only results in unpleasantness?
C'est la vie. No one is perfect. We all have flaws and the best we can hope for is that our virtues outweigh them right?
Oh, it turns out my response is now on your blog, Hacker News and TechCrunch.
Great.
34 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 77.7 ms ] threadas much derided as yahoo is, it is still one of the biggest sites on the internet which is putting out some great tech, when you get a chance to go to somewhere with people like douglas crockford and steve souders as peers its pretty hard to count as a step backwards from anywhere.
Perhaps, but I've never seen anyone I respect advise doing exit interviews of any sort. While this article is HR department centric, it covers the issues very well: http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/haexit.htm
I agree that Yahoo is the C-list, but Mahalo is the bigger resume stain, unless you're making a career in spam.
It seems to me that he really made the choice between working on a spam engine and working with a lot of talented people on interesting products that are used by hundreds of millions of people. Calcanis not having anything good to say about Yahoo is expected, but there's a lot more to Yahoo than the Google fanboys would have you believe.
I'd say moving to Yahoo is a good move.
What does Mahalo have? A scraped HTML linkfarm. Which are dime a dozen, except this one somehow evaded the google ban so far.
The whole "trying to crush Yahoo" notion is just surreal to me. Not only do I not see that happen. But I also think many people would miss yahoo and their products, whereas I have never seen anyone say anything positive about Mahalo.
Really?! Sounds reasonable to me. It also sounds like their compensation might be setup to encourage the exact thing he's complaining about.
The most frustrating part is not losing a great person--which happens--but rather watching someone with promise set their career back five years in order to have their salary jump ahead by three years.
Trading massive advancement to pop your salary, is a career move I could never understand.
When I read the resignation email it sounded like the guy was looking forward to some new technical opportunities. I suspect Jason may have misunderstood some people's motivations and what their idea of "massive advancement" is. Given that he didn't try and get a pay rise, I don't think this was about popping his salary.
Evan Culver as much as said Mahalo was a shitty place to work (http://twitter.com/evanculver). If the CTO is quitting it can't be that great for a programmer.
My impression of Jason is that he underpays people, overworks them, and doesn't hold himself to the same standard. Does he take a significantly below market salary (or no salary?) Does he actually clock in 9+ hours a day on Mahalo? Is he the first one there in the morning and the last one out?
From the outside it seems like he spends a lot of his time playing around on his side projects. Hanging out with cool people. And generally taking it easy. No one wants to kill themselves working for a guy that seems to be having fun doing unrelated things. VCs are even less okay with that, as far as I know. How long will they put up with him launching/running side companies?
My guess is that within 18 months he will not be the CEO of Mahalo. He will be much happier doing things he genuinely likes and is genuinely good at, such as This Week in Startups.
Mahalo has been going backwards in my opinion. About a year ago it seemed like a prettier social news site. Now it seems like a flashier/social yahoo answers clone.
The big ask a question box on the homepage has to go.
He is in the Mahalo building every day and helps us with hiring. So, another example of loyalty.
Seriously, you have no idea. Mark and I have been close friends since 1994 or 95 and I think I might know the situation a little better than you.
I mean, it feels like you're looking to make this into something bad... I think it's GREAT if someone I work with moves on to another company I'm associated with.
anyway, enjoy the rest of your day trolling on HN
What I see is you perfectly okay with your CTO resigning his job after 3 years, but coming down harshly on a programmer for resigning after 1 year. That seems unfair and hypocritical, and that's why I pointed it out. You can safely ignore me, or point out why I'm wrong. You don't need to resort to name calling or get upset.
My quitting Mahalo was in no way a comment on either Mahalo or Jason -- it was about me, my life, and stuff going on in it: and what i wanted to do next.
Jason is telling it like it is. And I'm totally stoked about ThisWeekIn and it fits much better with where I want to do -- and I'm frankly delighted to be working with Jason on it, given both our friendship and his experience. And he has a gun to my head and made me write this :)
(In all seriousness: JCal is telling the truth, I promise.)
- Mark
I can't see how they're even playing the same game.
One is a former portal struggling to reinvent itself. Perhaps with moderate success when compared to the Goorilla. But still with a noteworthy standing in a wide range of areas; Flickr, delicious, YUI, Messenger, Mail.
The other is a spam link farm, run by a CEO suffering from a strong case of delusions of grandeur. A single "product" that google could shutdown in a blink tomorrow.
So. The gnat crushing the elephant, really?
Calcanis' reputation: minus 1.
I am curious to know if this is a real thing?
EDIT: Just to clarify, I am not saying it isn't, I am genuinely curious.
Having lived with it for 30 years I wouldn't classify it as something to cast about lightly as some kind of metaphoric excuse for being an asshole.
An employee doesn't owe an employer anything more than the employer owes the employee (which is not much). If a better opportunity comes up, who is the employer to prevent the employee from advancing their career?
Update:
Jason in October of 2008: "We’ve laid off a just under 10% of our full-time staff, cut our overhead by doing smart things like renting desks (we have six offices in Santa Monica fyi), and reorganized our editorial department to focus on freelance positions over in-house editors."
Freelance positions, huh? You can't have it both ways, Calacanis. As an experienced businessman you should know this.
http://calacanis.com/2010/04/27/red-jackson-gen-y-loyalty/
Now, the entire piece is over 3k words. It's a commitment, I know. Most people in the world, and sadly commenters in HN of late, seem to follow a pattern of "skim and flame." (i.e. read for 90 seconds, grab a quote out of context and write a flame).
If there are folks who want to ask me questions about the overall theme I'm willing to discuss/debate/take my lashings. All I ask is that:
a) you read the whole thing, wait 60 seconds and then write some questions. b) submit questions in #/bullet format and try to keep them on the shorter side so I can get to as many of you as possible.
Side note: The Gen Y folks on Hacker News are, in general, the 1/3rd that kick ass. The 1/3rd that I created TechCrunch50, This Week in Startups and Open Angel Forum for. The folks who are doin' work and damage on the daily.
best @jason
People are loyal to people and institutions they respect. People and institutions that give them value in their lives. There is no respect simply because you're in charge. No loyalty just because you're the leader. Those coaches worked long and hard to earn the respect of their players, and that is why they are loyal.
You're barking up the wrong tree. There is nothing inherently broken about "Gen-Y". They are just as capable of loyalty as any generation that came before. The real questions you need to reflect on are these. Are you respectable? Are you worthy of loyalty?