Whilst accusations without evidence can be problematic, you don't see the irony in asking someone to violate NDAs in a discussion about how willing this company is to sue people to prevent them violating NDAs?
I'm confused,the article itself says she signed a confidentiality agreement and that she broke the agreement. What did she think would happen? She got 36k for signing it. Was that just free money in her mind!?
I'm presumably thinking she thought I'm 5 months pregnant nobody will hire me and my kid needs a home so I'll take their money. I'm presumably she also thought that allowing them to continue tricking people into ISA agreements to learn as much as they can by watching youtube might be wrong.
It is free money until Lambda School actually gets it back. It's up to Lambda School to decide the if money and/or the precedent are worth the public relations cost of fighting about it.
What's more, they'd be well within their rights to sue her straight off the bat for damages/compensation, which would be much more than $36k.
They're not even doing that. They're saying "We gave you money not to talk. You talked, so give the money back". That is an incredibly accommodating position. Overly generous, in my opinion.
If this is all there is to the story, then Lambda School is doing nothing wrong here. Seems like a lot of people (media?) are just looking for the flimsiest excuse to keep piling on.
> Baez claims that Lambda tried to fire her in 2018 for not living up to a performance plan. When she told her manager she hadn’t received any documentation about this plan, she claims he walked back his comments and said she could stay. Baez says she decided to leave anyway because she no longer felt supported in her role. She was five months pregnant at the time and signed a nondisclosure agreement to get severance. Because of this agreement, The Verge agreed not to use Baez’s name in the article. She has decided to come forward publicly in this piece since the school is threatening legal action.
I have always had a bad taste in my mouth for Lambda school. I bought into the YC hype though and when friends asked me for a bootcamp I reluctantly told them that Lambda was a good place to go.
Really regret ever spreading that advice and glad that none of my friends actually went into the program.
If it helps, they probably still would have done it, regardless of what you said. I've found that even friends and family you explicitly tell "bootcamps are a scam" will ignore your advice, quit their jobs, drop 10's of thousands of their limited savings into them, then avoid the subject afterwards when they can't find those much promised programming jobs. That's how good bootcamp marketing is.
On the other side of the table, interviewing bootcamp grads... Only granted interviews for about 10-15% of the ones presented. Of those, most only did what was assigned, which really wasn't enough to be close to productive in terms of ramp up, and indicated that they wouldn't put the effort needed to being productive employees.
In the end, I'm really supportive of those who come into software outside college. I never went to college and some of the best developers I've worked with never went. What we do share in common is a LOT of effort beyond the minimum in terms of self driven learning and projects on the side. Open-source gives a huge amount of potentially highly visible work to demonstrate.
Yes, some may turn their noses up at someone who didn't go through a college program. Regardless of the path you take, you have to do more than just show up, and some really just don't have the natural ability to do certain kinds of work.
My advice to people is grab a book or two, and try to make something useful to you. Do it on github/gitlab if you can. It may be a crappy, one-off implementation, but you'll probably learn more than a bootcamp, and in the end you get something you and others might find useful.
I know a Lambda student that’s now on what they call labs. Not sure how to explain it but students are in teams & meetings with project managers, designers, other teams, etc. It kind of resemble working in a big organization. They are actually working in a real project with a real investor. I’m no expert, but think that the exposure to real interactions in an environment like that could help in the job search.
I cannot speak for Lambda specifically... but have been on interviews on the other side. When your only technical understanding as a developer is literally what you were assigned, with no personal effort beyond that, you will be very unlikely to be able to fit into most development environments, which imho requires a certain amount of discovery, research and ongoing reading.
You cannot just sit on your knowledge for 20+ years in this career path... some come close, but they hit a wall... I've also seen that when interviewing those with 20+ years of experience with nothing more recent.
In the end if you cannot/will-not grow, and this can include taking time during work hours, you won't succeed. When you're starting out, you have to bury yourself with learning to get a leg up for at least a few years. Later, you can get by with reading a few articles a day and maybe a couple experiments over a year. But you can not stop learning. And not putting extra effort in when starting out, to me at least, is a bad sign that you won't do well without someone holding your hand.
Thanks for sharing. May I ask, how can an applicant demonstrate “certain amount of discovery, research and ongoing reading“?
In this specific case, the student have a few GitHub repos of courses taken before enrolling in Lambda. One repo is in a different programming language. Would that help?
Naturally the article is leaning towards putting Lambda in a bad light, but honestly if she signed a document saying “don’t do X, collect Y$” and then goes and does X, it’s pretty simple, she should give back the money. You can’t both take the payday, and then am also try to take the high moral ground, even if you try to do it anonymously. “I didn’t think you’d figure out it was me” isn’t a valid defense against breach of contract.
You can't sign a contract that allows someone to murder you -- there's case law supporting that.
But you can sign a contract that limits your future ability to speak freely.
Regardless of what case law says about this, a lot of people appear to feel that this really shouldn't be a thing, particularly when there's a large power imbalance between the parties, and when the more powerful party is obviously trying to hide evidence of malfeasance, embarrassing secrets, etc.
What is the moral thing to do if you're the less powerful party and you feel that your counterpart is acting immorally in offering you a contract like this?
Maybe the moral position is not to take the money.
Maybe it's okay to take the money and leak it anyway (assuming you think you can get away with it), because your counterpart is already irredeemably unethical, and all you can do is try to make the best of a bad situation.
I don't think it's always so clear cut. Contracts shouldn't always be considered sacred.
There's often social pressure to shut up, sign whatever they put in front of you, and take the severance money. It can be extremely difficult to go against this pressure, especially if you're not particularly well paid or powerful and the company is throwing resources at trying to fire you.
I'm not suggesting that she should or shouldn't have done what she did here, I'm just trying to push back against all the commenters blindly stating that "she violated her contract! what did she expect would happen?"
It's true, that's what happened, and that's what one should expect. But there's more nuance to how this interaction works, and I think it's a little disingenuous to leave it at just that, especially if you're going to bring morality into the picture.
> There's often social pressure to shut up, sign whatever they put in front of you
For me it wasn't social pressure. Its 'at will' laws, employer can fire you for no reason whatsoever( unless its discrimination sort of deal), so ppl get what they can in form of severance.
The thing is legally it is just that black and white. If she wants sympathy or what have you that's fine but legally she has no leg to stand on - there is zero nuance there.
Are you asserting that an NDA about limiting what you can talk about an organization is not enforceable? Because I think a 30 second google search will literally find you thousands of such NDAs being perfectly legit.
I’m responding to your assertion that this is a simple open and shut case legally and she has zero recourse. You don’t know the facts and I suspect you’re not attorney. You have no idea whether that’s true or not.
The Verve article which is heavily slanted in her favour makes it sure seem like it's an open and shut case. But ping me if she wins a legal case here and I'll gladly admit I was wrong.
She was 5 months pregnant being threatened with termination for not complying with a performance plan she had never seen before. They were trying to get rid of her without doing the proper legwork to establish that she failed in any measuable fashion.
Depending on her other financial situations she might be facing financial disaster including uninsured, life destroying, medical bills plus the inability to get any other position while visibly pregnant.
It's highly likely that she was pretty much obliged to take the money regardless of how she felt.
And the lawyer tells you something like "maybe we could win against them in court, but it will take a year. Even if they settle, we're looking at 3 months." Meanwhile, she's still uninsured, etc.
The greatest trick the ruling class ever pulled was to convince their subjects to revere the arbitrary and capricious rules they created to enforce their rule.
I don't think we're likely to agree here, but I'll lay it out anyway.
The top-level comment tried to describe the moral high ground as directly dependent on strict adherence to the letter of the contract. This is the key issue that I object to in this thread.
An action being legal does not necessarily imply that the action is also moral, and vice versa. Context matters. Intent matters.
Is it moral for a company to ask an outgoing employee to sign a non-disparagement agreement in exchange for severance? Maybe. Did the company misbehave when trying to fire that employee? Is the lawyer or HR person offering the contract aware of what happened? Is somebody that's part of this chain of events knowingly trying to use this exchange to sweep a scandal under the rug? Is the company trying to use the personal or financial circumstances of the employee as leverage to get her to agree to something she normally would not agree to (i.e. "pseudo-duress")?
If any of these things are true, I don't think it's moral for the company to ask for this exchange. Her decision to accept or reject the terms of the contract does not change this, especially if the company tried to use their position of power to influence her decision.
Now, is she acting morally in trying to break the terms of the contract? I don't think it depends on whether or not she's pregnant, but I do think it depends on whether or not the company acted morally in offering her the contract in the first place.
The moral math here is super simple. It's just karma. "If you act immorally towards other people, they might feel morally justified in trying to screw you over. Maybe they're right... maybe you had it coming."
> trying to get rid of her without doing the proper legwork to establish that she failed in any measuable fashion.
i was fired before with one day notice. It came as total shock to me since i had very good preformance reviews before that. I researched this a lot and found out that employer can fire you for no reason whatsover. They don't have to establish anything.
Seems to depend on the state in the US whether that is possible or not... And in the rest of the developed world this obviously just isn't possible at all.
ok. yea if she can prove that she was fired based discrimination.
>trying to get rid of her without doing the proper legwork to establish that she failed in any measuable fashion.
I responded to this quoted comment sayin that employer has to establish poor performance. I was fired with any sort of "establish" and i found out that i couldn't do anything.
It's much different if the person being fired is pregnant (or of another protected class). The company has to go through many hoops to make sure they have valid, documented reasons to fire someone who is pregnant so as to not be misconstrued that the reason for the firing was the pregnancy.
They don't have to do that.
Bigger companies do that to avoid lawsuits, and to ensure that they are fair, but small companies can and do take HR risks. It is perfectly legal to fire a pregnant employee for any reason except that she is pregnant.
This is just not true. Companies in at-will states don't need to do any of that - they may choose to, but they don't need to. Literally everyone is a member of a protected class, because everyone has a race, a sex assigned at birth, and a national origin.
Good point everyone needs to be documenting why they terminate people so that if they accuse you of firing them for being this or that class you can slap a folder of documentation on the table.
Realistically being fired for being a pregnant female is a thing and being fired for being a white dude from Oregon isn't.
Technically true, but good luck convincing a judge you were fired because you're a white cisgender male in an industry dominated by white cisgender males.
>Recognized in a small minority of states, including California, this exception reads a covenant of good faith and fair dealing into every employment relationship. This exception means either that employer personnel decisions are subject to a "just cause" standard or that terminations in bad faith or motivated by malice are prohibited.
Lambda is based in CA.
Even hr at penny ante jobs establishes a narrative and documentation for reasons to terminate for good reason.
Contracts are re-negotiated all the time when circumstances change. Just consider this case: Lambda School paid their head of career services some money to be rid of her under the condition that she keep silent because they didn't consider her trustworthy. Now it turns out that every last bad rumour you head about Lambda School is in fact true, so this person feels that she should keep the money because you can't penalize someone for speaking the truth. We are back at the negotiating table because public opinion is justifiably very much against Lambda School.
I think people want to live in a world where breaking a contract is a serious moral quandary. The notion of an oath is old, and has seemingly always resonated as sacred. It's one of those lawful aspects of society that make people feel safer and more capable of trust.
They may want to, but the real world is one in which contracts are honored either to the extent that it's convenient, or that the penalties for not honoring them are worse than the result of doing so. In other words, "breach of contract" is basically a cost of doing business, especially for a corporation. And, if your counterparty doesn't have the resources to sue, you can get away with almost anything.
> Maybe the moral position is not to take the money.
This would have been the correct route
> Maybe it's okay to take the money and leak it anyway (assuming you think you can get away with it), because your counterpart is already irredeemably unethical, and all you can do is try to make the best of a bad situation.
No this sets you up for even more financial harm and makes you untrustworthy ... if you can't follow a simple agreement that you are freely signing how can I trust anything that comes out of your mouth.
> I don't think it's always so clear cut. Contracts shouldn't always be considered sacred.
If the contract is legal it should be - if your unsure if it's legal talk to a lawyer. Without contracts being actually enforceable if one party believes it's immoral then everything goes to shit.
I was responding to an assertion about who has the moral high ground here.
The law does not dictate this. Repercussions that stem from breaking the law also have no bearing on whether or not an action can be morally justified.
You are talking about whether a position can be legally justified. The two are not the same thing.
You and I have a disagreement privately lets say over a potted plant. In the end we decide to part ways and I say here you can have the potted plant lets just never have this come out again I never want to hear about this argument again. You shake my hand and agree that's fair, take your potted plant head home and immediately call all of our mutual friends and begin to say all kinds of horrible things about me.
Who was the immoral one there? I'd argue the one who broke the final agreement
The entire point of a settlement / severance / etc is the two parties saying you know what we are done of this fight - here is what makes you feel happy to walk away from it ($$) and here is what makes us feel happy (to not have to hear about it anymore).
Your example is a mockery of what was claimed, and I think you're being disingenuous.
You're using a generic "disagreement" and "potted plant" rather than "employer tried to improperly fire an employee" and "$36,000 severance for a non-disparagement agreement." I think you're doing this deliberately in order to make the letter of the agreement seem more important than the details of what happened.
If your question is serious, then no, I don't think the immoral one is necessarily the one who broke the final agreement. In certain cases, the one who acted poorly first might be the immoral one. Signing and then breaking an agreement could, in some cases, be a response that is morally justifiable, even if it is illegal, and even if there are legal reprecussions. If the retaliating party takes it too far, then they might be the immoral one.
I'm making no claims about what was or wasn't morally justifiable in this particular story. But I'm shocked that so many people seem to think that a contract is sacred and that a person who breaks one is automatically the immoral party.
The actual circumstances of the situation matter more than whether or not a written agreement is broken. There are times when deciding to break a contract after signing it is morally justifiable. There are even times when signing a contract with the intention of breaking it later might be morally justifiable.
Is it really that difficult for people to come up with a contrived example here? Coercion? Duress? Extreme power imbalances between the signing parties? Implied threats? Lying to get out of a dangerous situation? Do people not even see these things as possibilities? It seems blindingly obvious to me that the circumstances matter.
It's showing them in a bad light because they have proven to be unambiguously skeevy, dishonest, and disreputable. At least part of how they treated her is illegal.
While non disclosure has a valid use case to protect valuable business info from competitors its hard to argue with a straight face that it ought to be used to hide wrongdoing. Such an agreement is unconscionable and therefore invalid.
If they predicated her severance on compliance with an immoral and invalid clause that would appear to be their problem. The invalid nature of the clause doesn't require her to give the money back.
If everything she said was true, it probably wasn't a breach of contract. I was threatened to be sued for the same violation when I left a negative Glassdoor review at a previous employer. I ended up taking it down because I didn't have the time or money to go to court, but after some more research, I found out that what I did wasn't against the agreement. Legally, disparagement is statements that are false, so as long as she wasn't lying, she should be in the clear. She'd probably have to be able to prove that what she said was true though. The confidentiality part isn't as clear cut though; in my case, nothing was marked as company confidential, and the plans were even written on ground-level whiteboards next to the windows, but the company still tried to claim the information was all confidential and violated the agreement.
So you image a world, where if an evil entity exists, you cannot morally do anything to get rid of that evil, if you have signed a contract previously that doesn't allow any of the actions necessary to combat the evil?
If you want to insist on that definition of morality that I would just invent a new word that has a more important meaning.
She signed a deal not to talk for cash... and then talked.
Maybe Lambda stinks but it would seem she chose to violate the agreement.
Maybe she was concerned about what she experienced later, but how much does someone care about a topic when they choose to make money by not talking about it....
> Why would she violate an agreement and expose herself to legal liability if she didn't care?
Because she thought she could do it anonymously and keep the money and run? Not rocket science.
The point OP was making was that if she felt strongly about speaking out she shouldn't have signed.... and if she did sign for money to not talk she must not have felt that strongly about it.
I still don't understand. You're repeating the assertion that if she took the money that means she didn't care, but she went out of her way to talk to the press. She spoke to the press anonymously which means she would not be able to benefit from the press coverage in any way - 100% downside for her.
You can argue specifically that she shouldn't have taken the money (I'll agree to disagree on that one) but the basic assertion here makes no sense. The desire for anonymity makes it clear that the violation of the agreement was not some sort of self-serving attempt to have it both ways.
"She spoke to the press anonymously which means she would not be able to benefit from the press coverage in any way"
People who have a bone to pick sometimes want to slam a spot just for the sake of slamming them if they felt burnt - rightly or wrongly.
I assert she didn't care because if a person truly had principles they wouldn't take hush money ... they would just speak their mind. If you take hush money, and then try to reneg on the agreement you instantly become untrustworthy in my books.
She did it anon because she thought she would have gotten away with slinging mud, when she got caught she came out to the public and tries to play a sympathy card about how she was 5 months pregnant.
Sorry this is case of someone trying to have their cake and eat it too.
> She spoke to the press anonymously which means she would not be able to benefit from the press coverage in any way - 100% downside for her.
Tons of bad anonymous reviews on glassdoor from people who got fired. I wrote one myself :D . Money is not the only benefit for bad mouthing your old employer
There may be a valid reason to sign such an agreement without actually meaning it - to trick the opponent into believing you are not going to take any action so they fail to prepare and to mitigate your attack. In some cases this is the only chance.
Lot of people in hackernews seem to stick up for bad guys, why is that?
People sign things without looking at them, especially when in desperate situations. Why adopt a stance that further weakens the position of the poor and unconnected, are the rich and connect not powerful enough already? Do we really need to allow "don't tell the truth" contracts to stand?
Lots of techies have lots of money and assume everyone else is as financially secure as them and just able to walk away from a bunch of money when their employer fucks them over.
Lambda has been documented screwing people over. Of course they'd screw over their own employees. It's their modus operandi.
>Lot of people in hackernews seem to stick up for bad guys, why is that?
Lots of people immediately want to believe the pregnant woman is the good guy even though she broke a contract she legally signed and they know no other details ... but it's easy to hate on the company ... why is that?
People aren't sticking up for Lambda, they are sticking up for the basic concept of you are an adult... you signed a legal contract... don't come crying if you break it and there are consequences.
I didn’t know about the working conditions. Now I know, because they are threatening her and because of this article. Next time I hear about them, I am going to remember this article.
Sometimes it is best to keep quiet, is it not?
Yes, I do understand she got paid for her silence.
I think the suing part is not about the $36k, rather it's to give a message that they won't tolerate it (otherwise other people who signed similar agreements might feel empowered to speak up as well).
"Nothing like those statements was reported to us by her or anyone else about her, and if they were, we’d take immediate action. Out of respect for the employee, we can’t comment in deeper detail on this situation."
That's the most cyclomatically complex, passive-aggressively voiced weasel wording I've read in a long time. How about a little respect for the English language, huh?
I sure hope they don't teach people to write code like they write PR legal speak.
The first line uses the passive voice. Despite that it’s a clear statement.
The main action in the other two (“we’d take” and “we can’t comment”) are active because “we” is the subject and acts on the object. A negative statement like “cannot comment” isn’t passive voice.
Also, passive aggressive doesn’t mean using the passive voice aggressively. It means assenting to some encroachment in a way that signals hidden belligerence.
Hopefully that was helpful (passive aggressive! Sorry.)
It seems pretty clear from the context of the article that the comment you quote is them denying that she ever reported being called a “feisty Latina” and a “bulldog”.
But, I'm not really sure why that matters - from the same article, it appears that she left because she was told she was not meeting some (perhaps) unknown performance plan, not because she had racist and sexist language used against her.
The media have had their knives out for Lambda for quite a while. A reporter's instinct is to view anything that's booming with skepticism; and to lionize the underdogs. There is a certain tension and surprise in both takes (even if they are, in their way, predictable perspectives). Both of those trends are at play in Lambda coverage, which reveals the weird and systemic conservatism of the tech press.
The problem with lionizing underdogs is that, if you take a broad enough sample of underdogs, they represent the general population, and the general population has its share of jerks and liars. We can't assume Lambda's former employee is good just because she is less powerful than the company.
But the story implies, with its choice of verbs in the headline (Lamba "threatens" while Baez "comes forward"), which player the reporter wants us to sympathize with. They could just as easily have written that Baez "breaks her word" or "defrauds" the company, while Lambda "enforces agreement".
I deeply disagree with the people questioning whether contracts should be honored, particularly after you walk out the door with the cash.
ok old blueyes.. you are not helping the argument here. In my opinion Lambda has an ex-employee who left under allegations of performance despite allegedly not being notified and yet being 5 months pregnant and now Lambda is suing her for 36k which is a trivial amount of money. What Lambda needs to do is IGNORE the negative press and FOCUS on customer satisfaction. Do not SUE former employees. It will not end well.
>ok old blueyes.. you are not helping the argument here
Whose argument are they not helping - your bleeding heart narrative?
> In my opinion Lambda has an ex-employee who left under allegations of performance despite allegedly not being notified and yet being 5 months pregnant and now Lambda is suing her for 36k which is a trivial amount of money.
You kind of leave out the part where the adult female who since she is 5 months pregnant should be really balancing all risks to her financial well being if she has been terminated signed a contract saying she wouldn't do X and then went and did X anyway.
> Do not SUE former employees. It will not end well.
I find NDAs rather problematic. The main purpose they seem to serve is to hide corporate malfeasance. It would be nice to have a public register for NDAs, such that one could determine how many are being issued by a particular entity (obviously without knowing the content of the NDA). If I was a student, and I found that the bootcamp I was thinking about signing up for was issuing a lot of NDAs, it would be useful information.
The primary purpose of NDAs is to keep confidential information confidential. Every business has information about their operations and plans they want to keep confidential, in order for their competitors and suppliers not to have an advantage.
Essentially every knowledge work employee signs a nondisclosure agreement during their employment. Most who leave reaffirm the agreement in return for severance. So statistics of NDAs would just tell you how many employees an outfit has.
An employee who knows of actual lawbreaking can report it to authorities and be protected as a whistleblower. There's no protection for telling journalists that the company had execution problems.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] threadThey're not even doing that. They're saying "We gave you money not to talk. You talked, so give the money back". That is an incredibly accommodating position. Overly generous, in my opinion.
If this is all there is to the story, then Lambda School is doing nothing wrong here. Seems like a lot of people (media?) are just looking for the flimsiest excuse to keep piling on.
Really regret ever spreading that advice and glad that none of my friends actually went into the program.
In the end, I'm really supportive of those who come into software outside college. I never went to college and some of the best developers I've worked with never went. What we do share in common is a LOT of effort beyond the minimum in terms of self driven learning and projects on the side. Open-source gives a huge amount of potentially highly visible work to demonstrate.
Yes, some may turn their noses up at someone who didn't go through a college program. Regardless of the path you take, you have to do more than just show up, and some really just don't have the natural ability to do certain kinds of work.
My advice to people is grab a book or two, and try to make something useful to you. Do it on github/gitlab if you can. It may be a crappy, one-off implementation, but you'll probably learn more than a bootcamp, and in the end you get something you and others might find useful.
You cannot just sit on your knowledge for 20+ years in this career path... some come close, but they hit a wall... I've also seen that when interviewing those with 20+ years of experience with nothing more recent.
In the end if you cannot/will-not grow, and this can include taking time during work hours, you won't succeed. When you're starting out, you have to bury yourself with learning to get a leg up for at least a few years. Later, you can get by with reading a few articles a day and maybe a couple experiments over a year. But you can not stop learning. And not putting extra effort in when starting out, to me at least, is a bad sign that you won't do well without someone holding your hand.
In this specific case, the student have a few GitHub repos of courses taken before enrolling in Lambda. One repo is in a different programming language. Would that help?
On the other hand I and others have been successful in utilizing a bootcamp as part of a career transition.
Like so many education things, effort and the skills of the students play a huge part in success.
Initial advantages sure, but you still have to be capable.
You can't sign a contract that allows someone to murder you -- there's case law supporting that.
But you can sign a contract that limits your future ability to speak freely.
Regardless of what case law says about this, a lot of people appear to feel that this really shouldn't be a thing, particularly when there's a large power imbalance between the parties, and when the more powerful party is obviously trying to hide evidence of malfeasance, embarrassing secrets, etc.
What is the moral thing to do if you're the less powerful party and you feel that your counterpart is acting immorally in offering you a contract like this?
Maybe the moral position is not to take the money.
Maybe it's okay to take the money and leak it anyway (assuming you think you can get away with it), because your counterpart is already irredeemably unethical, and all you can do is try to make the best of a bad situation.
I don't think it's always so clear cut. Contracts shouldn't always be considered sacred.
There's often social pressure to shut up, sign whatever they put in front of you, and take the severance money. It can be extremely difficult to go against this pressure, especially if you're not particularly well paid or powerful and the company is throwing resources at trying to fire you.
I'm not suggesting that she should or shouldn't have done what she did here, I'm just trying to push back against all the commenters blindly stating that "she violated her contract! what did she expect would happen?"
It's true, that's what happened, and that's what one should expect. But there's more nuance to how this interaction works, and I think it's a little disingenuous to leave it at just that, especially if you're going to bring morality into the picture.
For me it wasn't social pressure. Its 'at will' laws, employer can fire you for no reason whatsoever( unless its discrimination sort of deal), so ppl get what they can in form of severance.
I’m responding to your assertion that this is a simple open and shut case legally and she has zero recourse. You don’t know the facts and I suspect you’re not attorney. You have no idea whether that’s true or not.
Depending on her other financial situations she might be facing financial disaster including uninsured, life destroying, medical bills plus the inability to get any other position while visibly pregnant.
It's highly likely that she was pretty much obliged to take the money regardless of how she felt.
> You talk to a lawyer in that situation
Stop and listen to yourself.
Do you honestly not see how someone in this situation might not believe that retaining a lawyer is a realistic possibility for them?
Morally? At this point she's standing on higher ground than you.
I think this idea that she is pregnant this somehow not responsible has some terrible implications.
The top-level comment tried to describe the moral high ground as directly dependent on strict adherence to the letter of the contract. This is the key issue that I object to in this thread.
An action being legal does not necessarily imply that the action is also moral, and vice versa. Context matters. Intent matters.
Is it moral for a company to ask an outgoing employee to sign a non-disparagement agreement in exchange for severance? Maybe. Did the company misbehave when trying to fire that employee? Is the lawyer or HR person offering the contract aware of what happened? Is somebody that's part of this chain of events knowingly trying to use this exchange to sweep a scandal under the rug? Is the company trying to use the personal or financial circumstances of the employee as leverage to get her to agree to something she normally would not agree to (i.e. "pseudo-duress")?
If any of these things are true, I don't think it's moral for the company to ask for this exchange. Her decision to accept or reject the terms of the contract does not change this, especially if the company tried to use their position of power to influence her decision.
Now, is she acting morally in trying to break the terms of the contract? I don't think it depends on whether or not she's pregnant, but I do think it depends on whether or not the company acted morally in offering her the contract in the first place.
The moral math here is super simple. It's just karma. "If you act immorally towards other people, they might feel morally justified in trying to screw you over. Maybe they're right... maybe you had it coming."
Lots of people subscribe to this idea.
i was fired before with one day notice. It came as total shock to me since i had very good preformance reviews before that. I researched this a lot and found out that employer can fire you for no reason whatsover. They don't have to establish anything.
>trying to get rid of her without doing the proper legwork to establish that she failed in any measuable fashion.
I responded to this quoted comment sayin that employer has to establish poor performance. I was fired with any sort of "establish" and i found out that i couldn't do anything.
https://employment.findlaw.com/losing-a-job/at-will-employme...
Realistically being fired for being a pregnant female is a thing and being fired for being a white dude from Oregon isn't.
There is a grab bag of exceptions that vary by state. Please see
https://employment.findlaw.com/losing-a-job/at-will-employme...
I'll excerpt a relevant part
>Covenant of Good Faith Exception
>Recognized in a small minority of states, including California, this exception reads a covenant of good faith and fair dealing into every employment relationship. This exception means either that employer personnel decisions are subject to a "just cause" standard or that terminations in bad faith or motivated by malice are prohibited.
Lambda is based in CA.
Even hr at penny ante jobs establishes a narrative and documentation for reasons to terminate for good reason.
It's an HR nightmare to fire a pregnant woman, most would rather just avoid that particular claim and pay a few more months of salary
Re-negotiation happens between the two parties, one person can't simply choose to break the agreement becasue they feel it is fine.
> Now it turns out that every last bad rumour you head about Lambda School is in fact true
Source?
The purpose of an NDA is typically to penalize someone if they speak the truth.
This would have been the correct route
> Maybe it's okay to take the money and leak it anyway (assuming you think you can get away with it), because your counterpart is already irredeemably unethical, and all you can do is try to make the best of a bad situation.
No this sets you up for even more financial harm and makes you untrustworthy ... if you can't follow a simple agreement that you are freely signing how can I trust anything that comes out of your mouth.
> I don't think it's always so clear cut. Contracts shouldn't always be considered sacred.
If the contract is legal it should be - if your unsure if it's legal talk to a lawyer. Without contracts being actually enforceable if one party believes it's immoral then everything goes to shit.
The law does not dictate this. Repercussions that stem from breaking the law also have no bearing on whether or not an action can be morally justified.
You are talking about whether a position can be legally justified. The two are not the same thing.
You and I have a disagreement privately lets say over a potted plant. In the end we decide to part ways and I say here you can have the potted plant lets just never have this come out again I never want to hear about this argument again. You shake my hand and agree that's fair, take your potted plant head home and immediately call all of our mutual friends and begin to say all kinds of horrible things about me.
Who was the immoral one there? I'd argue the one who broke the final agreement
The entire point of a settlement / severance / etc is the two parties saying you know what we are done of this fight - here is what makes you feel happy to walk away from it ($$) and here is what makes us feel happy (to not have to hear about it anymore).
You're using a generic "disagreement" and "potted plant" rather than "employer tried to improperly fire an employee" and "$36,000 severance for a non-disparagement agreement." I think you're doing this deliberately in order to make the letter of the agreement seem more important than the details of what happened.
My moral calculus is explained clearly here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22533048
If your question is serious, then no, I don't think the immoral one is necessarily the one who broke the final agreement. In certain cases, the one who acted poorly first might be the immoral one. Signing and then breaking an agreement could, in some cases, be a response that is morally justifiable, even if it is illegal, and even if there are legal reprecussions. If the retaliating party takes it too far, then they might be the immoral one.
I'm making no claims about what was or wasn't morally justifiable in this particular story. But I'm shocked that so many people seem to think that a contract is sacred and that a person who breaks one is automatically the immoral party.
The actual circumstances of the situation matter more than whether or not a written agreement is broken. There are times when deciding to break a contract after signing it is morally justifiable. There are even times when signing a contract with the intention of breaking it later might be morally justifiable.
Is it really that difficult for people to come up with a contrived example here? Coercion? Duress? Extreme power imbalances between the signing parties? Implied threats? Lying to get out of a dangerous situation? Do people not even see these things as possibilities? It seems blindingly obvious to me that the circumstances matter.
While non disclosure has a valid use case to protect valuable business info from competitors its hard to argue with a straight face that it ought to be used to hide wrongdoing. Such an agreement is unconscionable and therefore invalid.
If they predicated her severance on compliance with an immoral and invalid clause that would appear to be their problem. The invalid nature of the clause doesn't require her to give the money back.
Its not illegal, every severance comes with that clause. Show me a single case where this was deemed illegal.
If you want to insist on that definition of morality that I would just invent a new word that has a more important meaning.
Maybe Lambda stinks but it would seem she chose to violate the agreement.
Maybe she was concerned about what she experienced later, but how much does someone care about a topic when they choose to make money by not talking about it....
How is that relevant here? She talked about it. Why would she violate an agreement and expose herself to legal liability if she didn't care?
Because she thought she could do it anonymously and keep the money and run? Not rocket science.
The point OP was making was that if she felt strongly about speaking out she shouldn't have signed.... and if she did sign for money to not talk she must not have felt that strongly about it.
You can argue specifically that she shouldn't have taken the money (I'll agree to disagree on that one) but the basic assertion here makes no sense. The desire for anonymity makes it clear that the violation of the agreement was not some sort of self-serving attempt to have it both ways.
People who have a bone to pick sometimes want to slam a spot just for the sake of slamming them if they felt burnt - rightly or wrongly.
I assert she didn't care because if a person truly had principles they wouldn't take hush money ... they would just speak their mind. If you take hush money, and then try to reneg on the agreement you instantly become untrustworthy in my books.
She did it anon because she thought she would have gotten away with slinging mud, when she got caught she came out to the public and tries to play a sympathy card about how she was 5 months pregnant.
Sorry this is case of someone trying to have their cake and eat it too.
Tons of bad anonymous reviews on glassdoor from people who got fired. I wrote one myself :D . Money is not the only benefit for bad mouthing your old employer
She didn't choose to make money by not talking about it. She took the money, then talked about it.
It's one way of fighting back in a situation where one party is financially superior to the other.
Legally, Lambda School probably has a good case for getting the money back, but it might be unwise for them to pursue it.
Hmmm, I thought that if you sign an agreement... it does not matter whether you "mean it" or not. You signed it, so it has to have some meaning.
Or, can you back out of a signed agreement by saying "Oh, I did not mean it"?
Not an expert, but seems dubious/shady.
Your honour you see I signed it so I could trick them! It was super sneaky - anyway so since I signed it left handed I don't have to honour it right?
People sign things without looking at them, especially when in desperate situations. Why adopt a stance that further weakens the position of the poor and unconnected, are the rich and connect not powerful enough already? Do we really need to allow "don't tell the truth" contracts to stand?
Lambda has been documented screwing people over. Of course they'd screw over their own employees. It's their modus operandi.
Lots of people immediately want to believe the pregnant woman is the good guy even though she broke a contract she legally signed and they know no other details ... but it's easy to hate on the company ... why is that?
People aren't sticking up for Lambda, they are sticking up for the basic concept of you are an adult... you signed a legal contract... don't come crying if you break it and there are consequences.
Sometimes it is best to keep quiet, is it not?
Yes, I do understand she got paid for her silence.
Good luck hiring from here on out.
So long as 'pg or someone doesn't double down on their love of them, at least, but that'd be incredibly unlikely.
Then again...
That's the most cyclomatically complex, passive-aggressively voiced weasel wording I've read in a long time. How about a little respect for the English language, huh?
I sure hope they don't teach people to write code like they write PR legal speak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclomatic_complexity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_voice
It also uses Trump's favorite template: It isn't, but if it is, it doesn't matter. That means it is, and it matters.
The main action in the other two (“we’d take” and “we can’t comment”) are active because “we” is the subject and acts on the object. A negative statement like “cannot comment” isn’t passive voice.
Also, passive aggressive doesn’t mean using the passive voice aggressively. It means assenting to some encroachment in a way that signals hidden belligerence.
Hopefully that was helpful (passive aggressive! Sorry.)
But, I'm not really sure why that matters - from the same article, it appears that she left because she was told she was not meeting some (perhaps) unknown performance plan, not because she had racist and sexist language used against her.
The problem with lionizing underdogs is that, if you take a broad enough sample of underdogs, they represent the general population, and the general population has its share of jerks and liars. We can't assume Lambda's former employee is good just because she is less powerful than the company.
But the story implies, with its choice of verbs in the headline (Lamba "threatens" while Baez "comes forward"), which player the reporter wants us to sympathize with. They could just as easily have written that Baez "breaks her word" or "defrauds" the company, while Lambda "enforces agreement".
I deeply disagree with the people questioning whether contracts should be honored, particularly after you walk out the door with the cash.
Whose argument are they not helping - your bleeding heart narrative?
> In my opinion Lambda has an ex-employee who left under allegations of performance despite allegedly not being notified and yet being 5 months pregnant and now Lambda is suing her for 36k which is a trivial amount of money.
You kind of leave out the part where the adult female who since she is 5 months pregnant should be really balancing all risks to her financial well being if she has been terminated signed a contract saying she wouldn't do X and then went and did X anyway.
> Do not SUE former employees. It will not end well.
Do not break contracts - it will not end well.
Essentially every knowledge work employee signs a nondisclosure agreement during their employment. Most who leave reaffirm the agreement in return for severance. So statistics of NDAs would just tell you how many employees an outfit has.
An employee who knows of actual lawbreaking can report it to authorities and be protected as a whistleblower. There's no protection for telling journalists that the company had execution problems.