Ask HN: I’m starting a new job and things feel off. Am I overreacting?
I accepted an offer and I was asked to join four to five calls with vendors ahead of my start date. This felt like “work” to me since each call takes prep and led to follow-up calls. Having not yet worked in the role, I’m also lacking context on the business problems leading us to chat with these vendors in the first place. To be frank, it feels very unnecessarily rushed which is ringing some alarm bells.
My new boss says it’s not really a big deal to ask me to join these calls before my start date. I suggested we either move my start date up ahead of the calls I was asked to join or I invoice for my time ahead of starting. He scoffed at both but mentioned “they’d take care of me” with “maybe an extra vacation day”. Vacation time at this company is “unlimited” so I don’t really see that as a perk.
I should mention the reason he’d like me to join the calls is that I will be using the tool from the vendor we select. It’s nice to be consulted but it doesn’t feel right to be asked to join work calls without being compensated. I wouldn’t push this angle but I also suspect it’s illegal.
My boss has also made several comments about the work I’ll be doing that have sounded very uneducated on the subject matter. I am walking into this job with the understanding that education will be a piece of my job but it was a surprise to learn the level of maturity of my boss’s understanding.
There have been other things that have felt unprofessional. IT mailed me my computer just before Christmas without talking to me, making me feel like I had to spend an extra day waiting on a FedEx package instead of hitting the road for holiday travel.
They promised an email on a certain date with my login credentials for my work email address and it didn’t arrive. HR has scheduled on-boarding Zoom sessions with our personal email addresses, exposing our personal emails to everyone else in the cohort starting on the same day (20-30 people).
Am I overreacting when I think about these signals? I guess the best I can do is get in there and see what the job is like, but all of these have combined to make me feel less than great about joining this company.
82 comments
[ 0.35 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadCharitably, the new boss just has some tight constraints making them need someone to start immediately. Less charitably, new boss is seeing how far this person can be pushed regardless of laws or normalcy.
So are you there to help build the maturity level of the whole org or is it something you can contribute to and assist others in developing? It sounds like you have a sense for such things. Working on the company's pre-IPO maturity could be a huge win for stakeholders like yourself ( or could land yourself solidly on the side of the stakeholders ).
On the other hand, if the assumptions you operate on depend on the maturity of other systems - no sense in building up their K8s helm if all they have now is Windows Server pets - then you might find it very hard to pull the direction you thought you were brought onboard to work toward.
Regard the place the same as they'll regard you. Make a list ( not on their computer ) of things you see, file under Good | Meh | Bad, and track for BIG RED FLAGS until your 90-day point. If you make it to 90 with no BIG RED FLAGS, and the data leans positive, then you have a list of things to work on. Otherwise, line up some interviews.
The laptop & e-mail things is not unusual and a not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Communication could be better and BCC should have been used. But e-mail addresses are not exactly secret.
The joining calls is a pretty big red flag. But seems to have reasonable logic behind it. It sounds like you're going to be the expert & primary user of these vendor's software. Probably best for both sides if you're involved ASAP. In the end, 4-5 hours worth of unpaid calls isn't that big of a deal. Not a bad thing either to start working with a favor in the bank.
On the other hand, I always assume people are trying to do good... Sometimes it may not look like it, but maybe that's because of some other factors.
just maybe:
- there are some new topics with vendors, that you will need to steer when you join, and actually it would benefit you later to join these calls.
- they couldn't set another date, but maybe the vendors are not that flexible and company will have to wait another month or so
- 4-5 meeting, it's like 4-5 hours, if you are going to work there for 6 months it's gonna dilute to nothing
- maybe he asked you to join the calls, but you can just not accept the invite, refuse, and nothing bad happens
- principal-agent problem, sometimes bosses do not know the details
- they mailed you the computer, why do you care, they can re-mail it
edit: I see other commenters are like "well, standard practice, not necessarily that terrible". Am I living in a bubble or is it just Europe?
You are right, instead if you work at all they have to pay you for the whole week.
It’s quite normal to see people start Tuesday on payroll, finish on Thursday, and they don’t get paid those whole weeks. They typically get those days paid, even if for example you “offboard” by lunchtime on your last day of work.
From California but similar everywhere:
> Pursuant to California law, an exempt employee must receive his or her full salary for any week in which the employee performs any work without regard to the number of days, or hours worked.
https://www.yourlegalcorner.com/articles.asp?id=135&cat=emp
If employers don't like this, they can pay overtime instead.
In this case with OP, my guess is that left them two choices:
1/ Accelerate start and then as you note, pay the whole period even though it sounded like this occurred before Christmas, was only a few calls then a vacation.
2/ Pay an invoice, which is mucky since it’ll probably involve supplier setup via AP, they’re clearly a W-2 equivalent person so perhaps this complicates other things like tax or benefits, etc.
If the person is “unencumbered” (not currently employed or subject to something contractual like garden leave which prevents them assuming the new employment) and if there was real value to having them participate in the calls then certainly the easiest would be (1.) - and IME, this is how larger employers would do it.
Consider this, I don't know what this software does but a lot of the conversations around software are confidential. Did they just invite a random stranger into a call with potentially privileged information?
I can envision a scenario where someone could complain for not being included in these conversations. Imagine you start a new job and the manager says “btw, we signed a contract with this vendor two weeks ago, so this is the tool you’ll use for the next three years. We thought about asking your input, but you technically weren’t an employee then.”
I fully agree, pushback/pressuring would make this unacceptable. But I'm not seeing that in the post, even before correcting for the storyteller's (understandable) bias.
In my mind, the conversation is something like:
"hey can you join this call?"
"not unless you pay me for it"
"that's tricky to set up, but we'll make it up to you when you start"
It's still OK to say no to this, but it kind of feels like you'd start off on the wrong foot. The manager isn't trying to get away with having you do actual work for free -- they are not asking for anything like reports or deliverables. It's just dialing into a few Zoom calls (and "prep", which is extremely ambiguous and could use clarification by OP).
The vacation thing can also be a very real benefit. I don't think a lot of people would take PTO in their first couple of weeks, but your manager can say "thanks for joining the call earlier this month, how about you take this Friday off?"
Fun fact though, many US employment contracts also insanely long and come with many restrictions. I don't see why you wouldn't just say "my current contract doesn't allow this, and it's probably in new company's interest to have a clean transition for IP law's sake" or some other vague reason
Most US employees are employed “at will” and don’t have contracts …
You can always say no or provide strict times where you can help and typically there aren't any hard feelings.
I think the company is a little disorganized- perhaps no professional managers for the size of the company.
That said, I think you’re overthinking it and to me you come off a little as a high maintenance employee.
They are obviously excited to have you and are onboarding you quickly. For every story like this, there’s another where someone doesn’t even get a laptop the first week, or they don’t even have time to invite the person to meetings (sometimes they don’t have a desk, a keycard, etc).
The vendor calls might need to happen sooner to meet budget deadlines, who knows? You could easily say you are on vacation but would be happy to listen in via phone, which seems like a fine compromise for both sides.
Aren't the people who were slow on the hire also the people who set the budget deadlines?
I realize "high maintenance" has a negative connotation... but it has nothing to do with self respect. Admittedly it's not a popular view but that was my honest feedback.
The one thing that seems out of line is expecting you to be on a call, unpaid, before your start date. That is far enough out of line that it is a problem. I'd just say no to such calls. It is your managers job to keep the place running until your start date, not yours.
But honestly, the bigger red flag to me is $150ARR. First of all, $150 what? K? M? If 'K' this is too small to have 500 people and be looking to IPO - red flag. If 'M', they are too big to not have their act together on having professional managers - yellow flag.
If I were you, I would take this all as evidence that they have grown beyond their current skill level, and it will be a dysfunctional company. But most medium-sized companies are in this boat. The question you need to ask yourself is whether the compensation is sufficient that you can put up with the crap or not?
This might be expected in a 40-person company that was 5 ppl six months ago and heading to 100 this quarter.
But a 500+ person company, hiring cohorts of 20-30+ people, supposedly preparing for an IPO?
Nope.
Many smaller companies have a far better process that actually gets people up to speed better. This looks -at best- like consistently haphazard scrambling, with low ethics.
Also, if they want you to do work before your "start date", they can move up your start date and start paying you. If they even said, "hey, we'd like you to participate in a handful of calls the weeks before, we'll pay 1/3 of your pay as a signing bonus, is that OK with you, or do you really need a break /moving time / etc. before you start?" that'd be cool. But just expecting you to drop everything for their disorganization up front is bad.
Unless there are some contrary huge positive indicators, I'd keep looking.
(also note that you are concerned enough to write this, which also tells me that you kind of already know the answer and are just looking for confirmation)
In any case, I wish you good fortune with your decision.
Even if you stick with it, these are the traits of a guy who will accept you spending 80 hours a week wiping his backside, then screw you over on the startup payoff.
And same applies to hiring. In my last 2 roles i wad hired as a team leader or engineering manager, while the company was actively interviewing for juniors to be placed in my future team. I asked to be involved in the hiring process before my start date in order to avoid surprises.
I am not aware if it is illegal but it is certainly unprofessional to ask someone to contribute to the business while not being a representative of the business yet, leaving pay issues aside. It's unclear why they are comfortable having you make decisions when, for all they know, you may do something that makes the company legally liable. Further, many vendors require NDAs, depending on the sort of vendor call. Seems like silly risk to me.
Certainly it is a red flag but I don't think I would sound the alarm quite yet.
FWIW: I’ve led organizations of 250+ people for years and can’t remember running into something like your situation in that set of experiences. If we had, then we’d likely have just delayed the vendor calls until you were on board, however, <500 companies often have ‘task urgency’ where >25k companies just say “Another 3 weeks won’t hurt much”.
Subject matter expertise is always nice to have in leadership for sure but isn’t guaranteed. I’ve no idea your skill set or that of your new manager but particularly with larger teams you’ll invariably have multiple disciplines, of which they’ll be more comfortable with some and less with others.
I think you’re reading too much into IT mailing your productivity equipment - all the usual suspects like FedEx and UPS support “Vacation Holds” as well, so you could likely have taken off and everything would have just been there when you returned.
“Unlimited Vacation” at most companies is a bit of a trap. Primarily, in my experience at least, it exists to avoid both process overhead (tracking time) and financial liability (since accrued vacation counts as such). Many US companies still train their managers to expect the amount of time someone takes off to be roughly equivalent to what they had in vacation days before the switch to “unlimited” occurred, so 10-15 days PTO, and 7-10 observed holidays. Maybe a handful of sick or personal days.
I was in a similar situation where I was pulled into calls right away, but I was dealing with fires and clients. I communicated to my boss and it helped. I had the most growth at that company, but a lot of the major red flags that showed up during my first week were the same problems I was dealing with when I left.
Since you're working with a tool (and want education), your manager just may want to expose you to the vendor to help you succeed. It may be that talking with the vendor in this way may not be easy to set up.
And I say this because it sounds completely normal to me for this size of a company.
That said, if "best intent" is still not enough to justify their requests and actions to you, then that's on you to decide the work style and company you like. And if you feel you have the opportunity to pursue opportunities elsewhere that best fits your comfort zone, then you should.
If you have a bad gut feeling about your boss, trust your gut and look elsewhere if you have a choice.