Note that the accusations Nonlinear lists in the document, with quote marks, are sometimes quite different than what Ben Pace put in his post. So even if you think they’ve strongly refuted a particular accusation, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve refuted something Ben said.
Yeah, I’ve been going back and checking things as they were stated in the original “Sharing Information About Nonlinear” post. Rereading it, I was surprised at how few specific loadbearing factual claims there were at all. Lots of “vibes-based reasoning” as they say. I think the most damning single paragraph with a concrete claim was:
Chloe’s salary was verbally agreed to come out to around $75k/year. However, she was only paid $1k/month, and otherwise had many basic things compensated i.e. rent, groceries, travel. This was supposed to make traveling together easier, and supposed to come out to the same salary level. While Emerson did compensate Alice and Chloe with food and board and travel, Chloe does not believe that she was compensated to an amount equivalent to the salary discussed, and I believe no accounting was done for either Alice or Chloe to ensure that any salary matched up. (I’ve done some spot-checks of the costs of their AirBnbs and travel, and Alice/Chloe’s epistemic state seems pretty reasonable to me.)
I think this is just false. Nonlinear provided enough screenshot evidence to prove that Chloe agreed to exactly the arrangement that she ultimately got. Yes, it was a shitty job, but it was also a shitty job offer, and Chloe seems to have agreed to that shitty job offer.
Also, the more I read about and cross-reference the Alice stuff, the less it makes sense. Either Nonlinear is putting on a masterclass Chewbacca defense, or none of the Alice information provided by either party is evidence of anything.
In terms of relevant factual claims in the post, here are some more:
“Chloe’s and Alice’s finances (along with Kat’s and Drew’s) all came directly from Emerson’s personal funds (not from the non-profit). This left them having to get permission for their personal purchases”
“From talking with both Alice and Nonlinear, it turned out that by the end of Alice’s time working there, since the end of February Kat Woods had thought of Alice as an employee that she managed, but that Emerson had not thought of Alice as an employee, primarily just someone who was traveling with them and collaborating because she wanted to, and that the $1k/month plus other compensation was a generous gift.”
“Over her time there she spent through all of her financial runway, and spent a significant portion of her last few months there financially in the red (having more bills and medical expenses than the money in her bank account)” (I think this one can be disputed depending on how the details of Alice’s Amazon business shake out, and I also think depending on the details of the reimbursement situation)
“From talking with both Alice and Nonlinear, it turned out that by the end of Alice’s time working there, since the end of February Kat Woods had thought of Alice as an employee that she managed, but that Emerson had not thought of Alice as an employee, primarily just someone who was traveling with them and collaborating because she wanted to, and that the $1k/month plus other compensation was a generous gift.”
“Alice quit being vegan while working there. She was sick with covid in a foreign country, with only the three Nonlinear cofounders around, but nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days. Alice eventually gave in and ate non-vegan food in the house. She also said that the Nonlinear cofounders marked her quitting veganism as a ‘win’, as they thad been arguing that she should not be vegan. (Nonlinear disputes this, and says that they did go out and buy her some vegan burgers food and had some vegan food in the house. They agree that she quit being vegan at this time, and say it was because being vegan was unusually hard due to being in Puerto Rico. Alice disputes that she received any vegan burgers.)” (I think this one feels pretty debunked based on the screenshots that Nonlinear sent, though I do also still assign some probability to Alice being able to clarify what is going on with this accusation given the facts that Nonlinear presented)
“Everyone lived in the same house. Emerson and Kat would share a room, and the others would make do with what else was available, often sharing bedrooms. Nonlinear primarily moved around countries where they typically knew no locals and the employees regularly had nobody to interact with other than the cofounders, and employees report that they were denied requests to live in a separate AirBnb from the cofounders.”
“The employees were very unclear on the boundaries of what would and wouldn’t be paid for by Nonlinear. For instance, Alice and Chloe report that they once spent several days driving around Puerto Rico looking for cheaper medical care for one of them before presenting it to senior staff, as they didn’t know whether medical care would be covered, so they wanted to make sure that it was as cheap as possible to increase the chance of senior staff saying yes.”
“One of the central reasons Alice says that she stayed on this long was because she was expecting financial independence with the launch of her incubated project that had $100k allocated to it (fundraised from FTX). In her final month there Kat informed her that while she would work quite independently, they would keep the money in the Nonlinear bank account and she would ask for it, meaning she wouldn’t have the financial independence from them that she had been expecting, and learning this was what caused Alice to quit.”
“In a conversation between Emerson Spartz and one of the employees, the employee asked for advice for a friend that wanted to find another job while being employed, without letting their current employer know about their decision to leave yet. Emerson reportedly immediately stated that he now has to update towards considering that the said employee herself is considering leaving Nonlinear. He went on to tell her that he gets mad at his employees who leave his company for other jobs that are equally good or less good; he said he understands if employees leave for clearly better opportunities. The employee reports that this led them to be very afraid of leaving the job, both because of the way Emerson made the update on thinking the employee is now trying to leave, as well as the notion of Emerson being retaliative towards employees that leave for “bad reasons”.”
“Many different people reported that Emerson Spartz would boast about his business negotiations tactics to employees and visitors. He would encourage his employees to read many books on strategy and influence. When they read the book The 48 Laws of Power he would give examples of him following the “laws” in his past business practices. One story that he told to both employees and visitors was about his intimidation tactics when involved in a conflict with a former teenage mentee of his, Adorian Deck. [...] In one version, he claimed that he strong-armed Adorian and his mother with endless legal threats and they backed down and left him with full control of the brand. This person I spoke to couldn’t recall the details but said that Emerson tried to frighten Deck and his mother, and that they (the person Emerson was bragging to) found it “frightening” and thought the behavior was “behavior that’s like 7 standard deviations away from usual norms in this area.””
“Someone else I spoke to reported him repeatedly saying that he would be “very antagonistic” toward people he was in conflict with. He reportedly gave the example that, if someone tried to sue him, he would be willing to go into legal gray areas in order to “crush his enemies” (a phrase he apparently used a lot), including hiring someone to stalk the person and their family in order to freak them out. ”
“After Chloe eventually quit, Alice reports that Kat/Emerson would “trash talk” her, saying she was never an “A player”, criticizing her on lots of dimensions (competence, ethics, drama, etc) in spite of previously primarily giving Chloe high praise. This reportedly happened commonly toward other people who ended or turned down working together with Nonlinear. ”
This conversation:
“Multiple people who worked with Kat reported that Kat had a pattern of enforcing arbitrary short deadlines on people in order to get them to make the decision she wants e.g. “I need a decision by the end of this call”, or (in an email to Alice) “This is urgent and important. There are people working on saving the world and we can’t let our issues hold them back from doing their work.” ”
“Alice reported that she would get [very intense compliments] near-daily. She eventually had the sense that this was said in order to get something out of her. She reported that one time, after a series of such compliments, the Kat Woods then turned and recorded a near-identical series of compliments into their phone for a different person. Kat Woods reportedly several times cried while telling Alice that she wanted the employee in their life forever and was worried that this employee would ever not be in Kat’s life.”
“Other times when Alice would come to Kat with money troubles and asking for a pay rise, Alice reports that Kat would tell them that this was a psychological issue and that actually they had safety, for instance they could move back in with their parents, so they didn’t need to worry.”
“Alice also reports that she was explicitly advised by Kat Woods to cry and look cute when asking Emerson Spartz for a salary improvement, in order to get the salary improvement that she wanted, and was told this was a reliable way to get things from Emerson. (Alice reports that she did not follow this advice.)”
“By the same reasoning, the employees reported that they were given 100% of the menial tasks around the house (cleaning, tidying, etc) due to their lower value of time to the company. For instance, if a cofounder spilled food in the kitchen, the employees would clean it up. This was generally reported as feeling very demeaning.”
“Alice and Chloe reported a substantial conflict within the household between Kat and Alice. Alice was polyamorous, and she and Drew entered into a casual romantic relationship. Kat previously had a polyamorous marriage that ended in divorce, and is now monogamously partnered with Emerson. Kat reportedly told Alice that she didn’t mind polyamory “on the other side of the world”, but couldn’t stand it right next to her, and probably either Alice would need to become monogamous or Alice should leave the organization. Alice didn’t become monogamous. Alice reports that Kat became increasingly cold over multiple months, and was very hard to work with.[7]”
“Alice reports then taking a vacation to visit her family, and trying to figure out how to repair the relationship with Kat. Before she went on vacation, Kat requested that Alice bring a variety of illegal drugs across the border for her (some recreational, some for productivity). Alice argued that this would be dangerous for her personally, but Emerson and Kat reportedly argued that it is not dangerous at all and was “absolutely risk-free”. Privately, Drew said that Kat would “love her forever” if she did this. I bring this up as an example of the sorts of requests that Kat/Emerson/Drew felt comfortable making during Alice’s time there.”
“Chloe was hired by Nonlinear with the intent to have them do executive assistant tasks for Nonlinear (this is the job ad they responded to). After being hired and flying out, Chloe was informed that on a daily basis their job would involve driving e.g. to get groceries when they were in different countries. She explained that she didn’t have a drivers’ license and didn’t know how to drive. Kat/Emerson proposed that Chloe learn to drive, and Drew gave her some driving lessons. When Chloe learned to drive well enough in parking lots, she said she was ready to get her license, but she discovered that she couldn’t get a license in a foreign country. Kat/Emerson/Drew reportedly didn’t seem to think that mattered or was even part of the plan, and strongly encouraged Chloe to just drive without a license to do their work, so she drove ~daily for 1-2 months without a license. ”
“Some unpaid interns (who worked remotely for Nonlinear for 1-3 months) said that they regretted not getting paid, and that when they brought it up with Kat Woods she said some positive sounding things and they expected she would get back to them about it, but that never happened during the rest of their internships.”
Yes, to be clear, many of these things are hearsay, and will be hard for either party to verify or falsify. But I think there really are a lot of pretty clear facts here that aren’t just “vibes-based reasoning”.
I think some of the concrete factual assertions in the post do appear to be wrong (like in the vegan case and conflating salary with outstanding reimbursements), and also omit a bunch of important context (like possibly, depending on how much money it made, the existence of Alice’s Amazon business or that for a decent chunk of their time at Nonlinear they stayed at the FTX apartments). And those are the ones that I am most interested in following up on, and I think it would be appropriate for Ben, Alice and Chloe to acknowledge, or provide additional evidence around if they want to argue that they are indeed true.
But I think dismissing Ben’s post as primarily vibes based reasoning seems quite strawmanny to me. Many of the accusations here seem substantial and not just vibes-based to me.
I did notice these. I specifically used the word “loadbearing” because almost all of these either don’t matter much or their interpretation is entirely context-dependent. I focused on the salary bullet-point because failing to pay agreed salary is both
1. A big deal, and
2. Bad in almost any context.
The other ones that I think are pretty bad are the Adderall smuggling and the driving without a license, but my prior on “what is the worst thing the median EA org has done” is somewhere between willful licensing noncompliance and illegal amphetamine distribution.
Hmm, at least for me many of the quotes above are substantially more load-bearing, but also not totally crazy that this differs between people. I do think in that case it might make sense to say “load bearing for my overall judgement of Nonlinear”, since I (and Ben) do think many of the above are on a similar or higher level of being concerning than the salary point, and Ben intended to communicate that.
I also want to highlight that I do currently believe that Alice was asked to smuggle harder drugs across the border than Adderall (though the Adderall one seems confirmed), and that Nonlinear are disputing this because it will be hard to prove, not because its false (though I am also not like 90%+ confident).
I think this is just false. Nonlinear provided enough screenshot evidence to prove that Chloe agreed to exactly the arrangement that she ultimately got. Yes, it was a shitty job, but it was also a shitty job offer, and Chloe seems to have agreed to that shitty job offer.
I don’t think you can describe that paragraph as “straightforwardly false”.
It is correct that Chloe’s compensation was verbally agreed to come out to around ~$70k-$82k a year (the $75k number comes from a conversation with Kat, Kat’s job interview transcript seems to suggest the total compensation would be $70k of benefits plus $1k/mo of stipend for a total of $82k[1]), and that’s why she was interested in the job. Nonlinear then offered a contract where $1k/mo of those $70k-$82k would be paid out as stipend, and she would be provided benefits adding up to the remainder (which wasn’t specified in the contract, but was explained during the relevant interview which Kat posted the transcript off).
However, the benefits did not add up to ~$60-$72k [2], and Nonlinear did not really have any accounting basis on which to claim that the benefits would add up to at least $60k-$72, which strikes me as pretty deceptive. The section you quote is pretty explicit that indeed part of the agreement was that the way Chloe would get compensated to a $70k-$80k equivalent was via being compensated indirectly via benefits, and that the issue at hand was that those benefits did not add up to their promised numbers.
So overall, this paragraph seems accurate to me. Which part here is false?
It requires some additional analysis to show why the compensation that Nonlinear claims does not actually add up to the promised amount of compensation. I encourage you to look through the posted “Alice + Chloe Finances” document and decide for yourself whether the listed expenses make sense to include as part of compensation.
Maybe I’m projecting more economic literacy than I should, but anytime I read something like “benefits package worth $X”, I always decompose it into its component parts mentally. A benefits package nominally worth $X will provide economic value less than $X, because there is option value lost compared to if you were given liquid cash instead.
The way I would conceptualize the compensation offered (and the way it is presented in the Nonlinear screenshots) is $1000/month + all expenses paid while traveling around fancy destinations with the family. I kind of doubt that Chloe had a mental model of how $40,000/yr in fancy travel destinations differs from $70,000/yr in fancy travel destinations. There could potentially be unrecorded verbal conversations that would make me feel differently about this, but I don’t currently feel like Chloe got materially shafted other than that she probably didn’t enjoy the travel as much as she thought she would.
Yeah, I agree that a compensation package costing $X will be worth less than $X, and as an employee it totally makes sense to adjust for that.
But then I think separately it’s important that the package did actually cost $X, especially if the $X was supposed to include many of the things that determine your very basic quality of life, like food, toiletries, rent, basic transportation, medical care, etc. I also think it matters how far Chloe got into the hiring process of Nonlinear on the assumption that total compensation would be “equivalent to $X”, which to be clear, I don’t currently know the details off.
She was interviewed three times and was told about compensation during the second interview.
We only mentioned the “equivalent to” thing once in an offhand manner. Every single other communication that we have on record is just talking about all expenses paid plus a stipend. [Edit: it was actually two places we found. The other was on the job ad, saying “Compensation: $60,000 - $100,000″]
And the compensation did not actually cost $70,000, like we said in that conversation. It cost more!
We added up everything and shared it with her. She knew and didn’t tell Ben. Worse, she told Ben the opposite. She told Ben no accounting had been done for that and showed him her own accounting that she knew was incomplete and thus inaccurate.
Wait, that link goes to an archive page from well after Chloe was hired. When I look back to the screen captures from the period of time that Chloe would have seen, there are no specific numbers given for compensation (would link them myself, but I’m on mobile at the moment).
If the ad that Chloe saw said $60,000 - $100,000 in compensation in big bold letters at the top, then that seems like a bait and switch, but the archives from late 2021 list travel as the first benefit, which seems accurate to what the compensation package actually was.
Good catch! That’s quite weird—why would you update a job ad to include compensation information after closing applications?
Here are the versions I see:
2021-10-22, 2021-11-18, 2021-12-03: “Pay: amount dependent on role fit and employee needs”, “The application deadline is November 1st, 2021, midnight UK time”
Chloe worked there from January 2022 to July 2022.
So it looks to me like what we were looking at was a post-Chloe version, probably trying to hire her replacement, and the version Chloe would have seen didn’t have that information.
I think this one is a bit different: with the interview it reads reasonably clearly to me that you’re talking about a low amount of cash plus expenses, but the job ad doesn’t say anything about that. Was the transcribed interview (which I think I remember you saying was the second one?) the first time you raised that almost all the compensation would be via covering expenses?
I don’t think I’d feel much better about the situation if the travel expenses had added up to $70k. It’s not reasonable to bill an employee for their boss’s travel tastes (even people who like traveling rarely want to spend 80% of their income on it, and those that do want to choose their own trips).
even people who like traveling rarely want to spend 80% of their income on it
Two additional perspectives for looking at how much we should expect this to be a bad deal:
Spending 80% of your income on traveling is uncommon, but spending 80% of your income on housing, food, and transportation while paying a premium for living in a desirable location is actually pretty common among young professionals?
After graduating college I spent several months washing dishes for ~$200/wk, because I wanted to spend the summer at at a camp that charged vacationers ~$800/wk. I knew what I was getting into, had a good time, and don’t feel like I was exploited.
I think “Chloe made an informed decision to do this” is a reasonable argument. I don’t think the evidence so far proves that was what happened[1], but if proven I’d agree it answered my concern on this front.
But if that’s the argument, why bring up the amount Nonlinear spent on her at all? The question would be whether they covered the agreed upon expenses to the agreed upon level (no promising luxury housing and delivering tenements- admittedly unlikely to be the problem here- and no promising medical care and then arguing about necessary expenses- and it sounds like there was ambiguity on what would be covered there). Nonlinear could spend less than projections while still following the agreement and it would be fine.
If you are calculating expenses, it’s a mess. Many people do spend 80%+ of their income on housing, food, medical, etc, but you still can’t count $1 on housing your employer chose as equivalent to $1 on housing you chose. It’s (probably) not $0 either, housing is housing, but figuring out the discount factor is hard even when everyone feels good about the situation. Figuring it out now seems impossible.
As I see it the options are:
Nonlinear and Chloe agreed she’d be paid travel expenses + a stipend. The $ total of the expenses is irrelevant as long as they covered what they said they would.
Nonlinear led Chloe to believe she’d be paid $N in salary, and then coerced or tricked her into accepting expenses + stipend. The dollar value of the expenses is irrelevant here too.
Nonlinear and Chloe agreed she’d be paid a stipend plus $70k/year in travel and living expenses, with most living choices made by Nonlinear. This agreement begs for trouble. How do you divide expenses? Do you split the airbnb evenly? By bedroom? Is it fair Kat + Emerson get a discount for sharing a room when they’re dating? What happens when Chloe’s boyfriend visits? How much does Chloe value that trip to St Barts when what she wanted was a day away from her job? How do you check if the boss is reporting honestly? This is the scenario in which actual expenses incurred are most relevant, but it’s such a doomed agreement I can’t bring myself to care.
The contract looks pretty clear, but by Kat’s own account Chloe seemed to be operating under a different set of beliefs while working. This might be a reading comprehension issue on her part, but I think there’s a lot of room for her to feel misled by verbal statements made earlier. Or by the job listing, which lists compensation as $60k-$100k/year without mentioning much of it will be paid in travel.
Nonlinear and Chloe agreed she’d be paid travel expenses + a stipend. The $ total of the expenses is irrelevant as long as they covered what they said they would.
That’s currently my view, yes. The evidence NL has provided for this (contract, texts, transcript) seems pretty strong to me, and while I could imagine Chloe presenting counter evidence (was never sent the contract, screenshots are misleadingly cropped) it’s not what I’m expecting?
EDIT: But thanks for pointing out the job ad: if a role is advertised that way and someone applies expecting that I’d think there would be more than NL has said on the way to ending up with the arrangement they seem to have gone with. I’ve now asked Kat about it.
EDIT2: The job ad bit is all a red herring: it’s post-Chloe and the original one just said “amount dependent on role fit and employee needs”.
why bring up the amount Nonlinear spent on her at all?
Isn’t it Ben and Chloe who are bringing this up? And then NL is engaging because the amount spent does seem to matter to some people?
Her correctly explaining in her own words how the compensation package works seems like more than enough evidence that she understood the compensation package she was signing up for. The fact that we also sent her a work contract and also recorded the original conversation in question and you can see it yourself I think proves more than can usually ever be proven in such cases that she made an informed decision about the compensation package.
FYI, when I click on some proportion (possibly 100%?) of these links to the Google doc (including the links in your comment here) it just takes me to the very start of Google doc, the beginning of the contents section, and I can’t always figure out which section to click on. Possibly a mobile issue with Google docs, but thought I should let you know 🙂
Thanks for letting me know! Strange. It shouldn’t be doing that. Usually if you wait a couple of seconds, it’ll jump to the right section. It’s working on both my mobile and laptop.
If you try waiting a couple seconds and that doesn’t work, let me know. Maybe DM me and then we can troubleshoot, then we can post the solution up when we figure it out.
Thanks for checking! Have now figured out the issue, the thing I described was happening when Google docs opened in safari (which I knew), but I’ve now gotten it to open in the app proper.
The “spending 80% on travel” is quit misleading, because it comes from counting AirBnB costs as “travel” expenses. That would make sense if they were just traveling for a short period of time, say, to go to an EAG, but if you only live in AirBnBs, then counting that as travel instead of rent seems misleading.
If that’s true, I have spent $0 on housing in the last 4 years, and that doesn’t seem right.
If you don’t count housing as a travel expense, then it comes to only 6% on travel, which is pretty reasonable given that we literally travel full-time.
(Also, it’s irrelevant because rent shouldn’t count as travel expenses, but even if we did count it, it would still only come out to 68%, not 80%. I don’t know where this 80% is coming from.)
It’s not reasonable to bill an employee for their boss’s travel tastes
From the evidence above the deal was pretty clearly $1k/mo + NL pays for stuff. Reading the interview transcript, Kat’s saying this can be thought of as being worth $70k isn’t an offer to pay $70k with deductions for stuff.
Now, Chloe clearly didn’t end up liking the deal and I think the deal was probably not legal [1][2], but those are different objections!
[1] When they were in Puerto Rico $1k/mo ($5.68/hr) was below the minimum wage.
[2] Multijurisdictional employment is famously complex, and digital nomads commonly ignore the legal requirements of working from the various countries. I have no evidence on how NL handled this, but since it’s so hard and so rarely done right my guess is NL commonly was employing Alice and Chloe illegally.
80% of the money we spent on their compensation was not going to travel. Copy-pasting comments from the thread over here where this number was originally said:
″
spend >80% of their income as travel
Where are you getting that number from? It was a mix of rent, food, medical, productivity tools, etc. Some quick math I did shows that only 6% of the money we spent on her was for travel.
Total spent on her when she was compensated with room, board, travel, and medical + stipend: 17,174
990/17174 = 6%
(I didn’t include the flight from the Bahamas to London because that was when she was picking her own cash salary, rather than the all expenses paid + stipend. We’d just already booked it before she’d switched to cash.
If you want to include that, it’s hard, because then should we include the cash comp or not?)
It’s also important to emphasize that even though compensation is not the same as purely cash pay, she signed up for the compensation package that she got. When she asked to get compensated purely in cash, we said yes.
So it’s not like she was forced to spend money in a certain way. It’s like if you signed up for a fellowship that covered room and board and a stipend. Later, you decide that you want to spend the money differently, so you talk to the person in charge and they say it’s fine for you to be purely compensated with cash. There’s no forcing you at any point in that process to spend your money in a particular way.
Second follow up comment:
most people in Alice or Chloe’s shoes would’ve preferred to be paid the equivalent cash amount
Alice did, and then when she asked she got it. Chloe never requested this.
It’s really important that they signed up for this. If we had promised them $75,000 cash salary and then instead gave them this compensation package, I think that is indeed unethical and unfair. However if they knew what they were signing up for and it was clearly communicated and they said yes, then that is totally fine and an informed choice they made.
I don’t see an alternative. I can’t read minds. I couldn’t change their comp package if I didn’t know they wanted to. And when I did know, I said yes.
If they chose this compensation package when they could have applied for other jobs with a more standard package or could have asked for a standard package, then they did indeed choose this compensation package.
Additionally, we need to be able to distinguish between “this was what they chose” and “this was what they would have preferred if they could have had anything in the world right away without having to ask”.
Like, imagine I applied the same standards to funders. “I asked for $50,000 and they gave me $50,000, but I would have preferred $75,000. Yes, I didn’t ask for $75,000, but most people in my shoes would prefer $75,000 over $50,000.” (Or replace with whatever numbers make most sense to you)
This follows the same structure of the argument “Alice and Chloe signed up for a all-expenses-paid + stipend compensation package and they got that, but they would have preferred a cash salary of a similar value to the comp package. Yes, they didn’t ask for that, but most people in their shoes would prefer a cash salary over the other comp package.”
Or maybe a better analogy is a charity applying for funding and the grantmaker donates but with earmarked funds. All orgs would prefer unearmarked funds (flexible funds are more useful than earmarked ones), but that doesn’t mean it’s unethical for a donor to earmark their donations.
Is rent a travel expense?
Counting rent while traveling if this was a part-time travel experience seems reasonable. For example, if they usually live in the Bay area and they’re expected to travel to London for EAG, the cost of the Airbnb in London is clearly a travel expense.
However, if they are always traveling and they do not have a permanent place anywhere, that does not seem like a travel expense but rather just regular rent. Neither of them had a permanent place. Alice had been nomadic before she even met us. Counting that as a travel expense in this context doesn’t make sense and will lead to people being misled.
Think about it. Otherwise then, for the last 4 years I have paid zero rent? Clearly, if you are a full-time nomad then airbnbs are just rent, not travel.
How to calculate total compensation
I quickly googled “when people describe a compensation package do they usually include medical” and the first result said:
“Health Insurance Benefits are a huge piece of your overall compensation package. This can include Medical, Dental, Vision, as well as HSA/FSA accounts. When calculating how much your benefits are worth, think about what percentage your employer is going to be covering. Is your employer covering 100% of the cost? 80%? Does that change if you were to include a spouse or dependents in the coverage? These are all important questions to ask when evaluating an offer package and figuring out how much your health benefits are worth.”
Since Google knows my history, I thought maybe it’s giving me a biased result. So I tried searching in incognito mode so it wasn’t taking into account my recent posting, and it gave the same results.
Now, I do think that a compensation package is clearly different from cash salary. We say that right away at the almost the very beginning of our post. But we did not describe it to them or to anybody as a $75,000 salary cash. We described it as a compensation package that we estimated to be worth around $70,000.
Once, off hand, in a recorded interview. Every single other communication was just saying all expenses paid plus stipend.
They were informed about this beforehand and they signed up for it. If they had wanted something different, all they had to do was ask. Or they could have applied to a different job. When Alice did, she got it.
If people come away from reading this thinking that we said that we paid them both a cash salary of $75,000 or that it’s the same as a $75,000 cash salary, then they made the same mistake that Chloe seems to have made. Chloe kept on saying that we offered to pay her something equivalent to a $75,000 cash salary. We were saying that this was worth around $70,000. I think her interpreting it this way led to a lot of suffering. We tried to explain it to her a bunch of times that that was not what we were saying but she did not seem to be able to update. I do think people seem to struggle with this a lot.
I think the main thing though, and the way I think about it at least, is as a consequentialist. I don’t think in terms of how much money is it worth etc. I tend to think of it as are you getting your needs met? What about your preferences? And I think the key is that she was living an exceptionally comfortable lifestyle. She was living the almost exactly the same lifestyle as myself.
She also had plenty of freedom and options. She publicly says she had savings and we covered everything so well that, as far as we can tell, all of her stipend went into savings as well. She got her dream job 2 and 1⁄2 months after she quit. And she could have gotten a regular dev job far faster if she wanted.
I don’t know how she would have spent the money otherwise, But that seems irrelevant. It seems like if somebody got a scholarship that included room and board, and then they get upset, because they would have spent it on a different house. If they accept the scholarship, then that is how they would spend it. They would spend it on that house and that food, because that is what they chose. They could have just tried to get a different scholarship or a job. In fact, if you accept that scholarship, and then speak to the people who gave you it and say that you would prefer cash instead and they say yes, that is exceptionally generous and way outside the norm of what is expected.
If a scholarship/fellowship/job offered you room and board and you accepted and then later asked for cash instead I suspect that 98% of them would say no.
She is trying to make it sound like a hardship and us being unreasonable when it is incredibly unreasonable to ask for your compensation package to be changed so quickly after you accepted it.
Most people do not ask for changes in compensation until they’ve been working for at least a year.
Most people if they’re offered room and board + stipend never get the option of switching to cash only.
Most people don’t accept a compensation package and then later say they would have preferred a different compensation package and therefore they were financially controlled.
Most people don’t go to the EA Hotel and say that they’re being financially controlled because they got room and board and a stipend and couldn’t choose to spend the money on something else.
Most people don’t say that a scholarship offering to pay for room and board is somehow bad because the student could have used that money to spend less on a room or paid for a different room.
Sure, everybody would prefer that. But they are not entitled to that.
Sure, some people might misinterpret a compensation package being estimated to be worth $X as being the same as a cash salary of $X. But as long as you clearly communicate what they’re signing up for and they have other options and they choose the compensation package, then nothing wrong was done. If they later change their mind and want something different, they have to ask or quit and find a job that meets their criteria. They can’t make a choice, later want to make a different choice, then try to pillory an person for not reading their mind and giving them everything they ask for right away.
People can’t say “They told me I’d get paid $X and I got paid $X but I think $Y would be better, therefore we have to warn the community about the ‘predator’ in our midst, ‘chewing up and spitting out’ the youth of the community.”
They can say “They offered me $X and I got paid $X, and I would have preferred $Y, and when I asked for $Y, I got $Y.”
They can say “They offered me $X and I got paid $X. I would have preferred $Y, but I never asked for $Y and that made me sad. I guess I should learn from this and get better at asking people for things instead of expecting mind-reading and getting everything that I want immediately without asking.”
Was medical considered part of compensation? In the appendix you describe it as Emerson “generously covering” them, and that Alice never had an agreement to have them covered.
I know it’s hard having lots of critical attention and upending your schedule to respond to inquisitive internet people, but if you were able to be a bit more concise I think it would be really helpful for readers. Your comment is ~2k words, but reads to me like it has more like 750 words worth of things to say.
Yeah, I agree. I find it quite difficult to write concisely. I am trying to get better, but as you can clearly see, I have not succeeded to the optimal amount yet. 😛
I have noticed that you are asking yourself “can I believe this?” when assessing Alice and Chloe’s claims and “must I believe this?” when assessing our claims. Please try to apply similar evidentiary standards to all claims.
she would be provided benefits adding up to the remainder (which wasn’t specified in the contract, but was explained during the relevant interview which Kat posted the transcript off).
Where does it say that in the transcript? I’m reading it again and I just don’t see where we say anything even like that.
And it would be really weird to say that too. I’ve never heard of somebody offering room & board + a stipend who’s said that it has to add up to a certain amount, otherwise you pay the difference (but you don’t pay the difference if the costs go over).
Kat’s job interview transcript seems to suggest the total compensation would be $70k of benefits plus $1k/mo of stipend for a total of $82k
This isn’t what was said. It was (paraphrasing to get rid of verbal tiks): “So what we’re thinking is basically, like having a package where it’s about equivalent of being paid like 70k a year in terms of:
Housing
Food
Travel
Random fun stuff
$1k a month for things not covered by that.
Saying “and then on top of that” is just another way for saying “and”. It was a verbal conversation, not a legal contract.
I have noticed that you are asking yourself “can I believe this?” when assessing Alice and Chloe’s claims and “must I believe this?” when assessing our claims. Please try to apply similar evidentiary standards to all claims.
This seems to confidently speak about the internals of my mind, which isn’t always a bad thing to do, but in this case I don’t think is accurately capturing reality. My guess is its best to keep at least this conversation at the level of facts and arguments.
And it would be really weird to say that too. I’ve never heard of somebody offering room & board + a stipend who’s said that it has to add up to a certain amount, otherwise you pay the difference (but you don’t pay the difference if the costs go over).
I did not say here that you “have to pay the difference” (and I don’t think anyone else has said that).
I don’t understand the relevance of this screenshot. I don’t think it matters for anyone’s model whether Chloe thought of the $1000/mo as salary or stipend. She says “you mentioned that everything is covered”, which is vague and doesn’t tell us what exactly she thought was covered.
Yes, I agree that the literal contract is quite relevant, though again, nobody said that there was such a clause. The relevant component is whether the expectation was set that the benefits would add up to ~$70k, and whether that expectation was set accurately. If my employer sells me on a job by offering me a compensation package they estimate to be worth $70k, and then they spend much less than that, then that clearly seems like cause for a legitimate grievance.
I do think the contract generally does matter. It also matters a bunch when Chloe actually signed the contract since it determines for how much of your relevant work period you were on the same page about at least the legal context. Could you confirm when Chloe actually signed the contract?
Note that the accusations Nonlinear lists in the document, with quote marks, are sometimes quite different than what Ben Pace put in his post. So even if you think they’ve strongly refuted a particular accusation, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve refuted something Ben said.
Yeah, I’ve been going back and checking things as they were stated in the original “Sharing Information About Nonlinear” post. Rereading it, I was surprised at how few specific loadbearing factual claims there were at all. Lots of “vibes-based reasoning” as they say. I think the most damning single paragraph with a concrete claim was:
I think this is just false. Nonlinear provided enough screenshot evidence to prove that Chloe agreed to exactly the arrangement that she ultimately got. Yes, it was a shitty job, but it was also a shitty job offer, and Chloe seems to have agreed to that shitty job offer.
Also, the more I read about and cross-reference the Alice stuff, the less it makes sense. Either Nonlinear is putting on a masterclass Chewbacca defense, or none of the Alice information provided by either party is evidence of anything.
In terms of relevant factual claims in the post, here are some more:
“Chloe’s and Alice’s finances (along with Kat’s and Drew’s) all came directly from Emerson’s personal funds (not from the non-profit). This left them having to get permission for their personal purchases”
“From talking with both Alice and Nonlinear, it turned out that by the end of Alice’s time working there, since the end of February Kat Woods had thought of Alice as an employee that she managed, but that Emerson had not thought of Alice as an employee, primarily just someone who was traveling with them and collaborating because she wanted to, and that the $1k/month plus other compensation was a generous gift.”
“Over her time there she spent through all of her financial runway, and spent a significant portion of her last few months there financially in the red (having more bills and medical expenses than the money in her bank account)” (I think this one can be disputed depending on how the details of Alice’s Amazon business shake out, and I also think depending on the details of the reimbursement situation)
“From talking with both Alice and Nonlinear, it turned out that by the end of Alice’s time working there, since the end of February Kat Woods had thought of Alice as an employee that she managed, but that Emerson had not thought of Alice as an employee, primarily just someone who was traveling with them and collaborating because she wanted to, and that the $1k/month plus other compensation was a generous gift.”
“Alice quit being vegan while working there. She was sick with covid in a foreign country, with only the three Nonlinear cofounders around, but nobody in the house was willing to go out and get her vegan food, so she barely ate for 2 days. Alice eventually gave in and ate non-vegan food in the house. She also said that the Nonlinear cofounders marked her quitting veganism as a ‘win’, as they thad been arguing that she should not be vegan. (Nonlinear disputes this, and says that they did go out and buy her some vegan burgers food and had some vegan food in the house. They agree that she quit being vegan at this time, and say it was because being vegan was unusually hard due to being in Puerto Rico. Alice disputes that she received any vegan burgers.)” (I think this one feels pretty debunked based on the screenshots that Nonlinear sent, though I do also still assign some probability to Alice being able to clarify what is going on with this accusation given the facts that Nonlinear presented)
“Everyone lived in the same house. Emerson and Kat would share a room, and the others would make do with what else was available, often sharing bedrooms. Nonlinear primarily moved around countries where they typically knew no locals and the employees regularly had nobody to interact with other than the cofounders, and employees report that they were denied requests to live in a separate AirBnb from the cofounders.”
“The employees were very unclear on the boundaries of what would and wouldn’t be paid for by Nonlinear. For instance, Alice and Chloe report that they once spent several days driving around Puerto Rico looking for cheaper medical care for one of them before presenting it to senior staff, as they didn’t know whether medical care would be covered, so they wanted to make sure that it was as cheap as possible to increase the chance of senior staff saying yes.”
“One of the central reasons Alice says that she stayed on this long was because she was expecting financial independence with the launch of her incubated project that had $100k allocated to it (fundraised from FTX). In her final month there Kat informed her that while she would work quite independently, they would keep the money in the Nonlinear bank account and she would ask for it, meaning she wouldn’t have the financial independence from them that she had been expecting, and learning this was what caused Alice to quit.”
“In a conversation between Emerson Spartz and one of the employees, the employee asked for advice for a friend that wanted to find another job while being employed, without letting their current employer know about their decision to leave yet. Emerson reportedly immediately stated that he now has to update towards considering that the said employee herself is considering leaving Nonlinear. He went on to tell her that he gets mad at his employees who leave his company for other jobs that are equally good or less good; he said he understands if employees leave for clearly better opportunities. The employee reports that this led them to be very afraid of leaving the job, both because of the way Emerson made the update on thinking the employee is now trying to leave, as well as the notion of Emerson being retaliative towards employees that leave for “bad reasons”.”
“Many different people reported that Emerson Spartz would boast about his business negotiations tactics to employees and visitors. He would encourage his employees to read many books on strategy and influence. When they read the book The 48 Laws of Power he would give examples of him following the “laws” in his past business practices. One story that he told to both employees and visitors was about his intimidation tactics when involved in a conflict with a former teenage mentee of his, Adorian Deck. [...] In one version, he claimed that he strong-armed Adorian and his mother with endless legal threats and they backed down and left him with full control of the brand. This person I spoke to couldn’t recall the details but said that Emerson tried to frighten Deck and his mother, and that they (the person Emerson was bragging to) found it “frightening” and thought the behavior was “behavior that’s like 7 standard deviations away from usual norms in this area.””
“Someone else I spoke to reported him repeatedly saying that he would be “very antagonistic” toward people he was in conflict with. He reportedly gave the example that, if someone tried to sue him, he would be willing to go into legal gray areas in order to “crush his enemies” (a phrase he apparently used a lot), including hiring someone to stalk the person and their family in order to freak them out. ”
“After Chloe eventually quit, Alice reports that Kat/Emerson would “trash talk” her, saying she was never an “A player”, criticizing her on lots of dimensions (competence, ethics, drama, etc) in spite of previously primarily giving Chloe high praise. This reportedly happened commonly toward other people who ended or turned down working together with Nonlinear. ”
This conversation:
“Multiple people who worked with Kat reported that Kat had a pattern of enforcing arbitrary short deadlines on people in order to get them to make the decision she wants e.g. “I need a decision by the end of this call”, or (in an email to Alice) “This is urgent and important. There are people working on saving the world and we can’t let our issues hold them back from doing their work.” ”
“Alice reported that she would get [very intense compliments] near-daily. She eventually had the sense that this was said in order to get something out of her. She reported that one time, after a series of such compliments, the Kat Woods then turned and recorded a near-identical series of compliments into their phone for a different person. Kat Woods reportedly several times cried while telling Alice that she wanted the employee in their life forever and was worried that this employee would ever not be in Kat’s life.”
“Other times when Alice would come to Kat with money troubles and asking for a pay rise, Alice reports that Kat would tell them that this was a psychological issue and that actually they had safety, for instance they could move back in with their parents, so they didn’t need to worry.”
“Alice also reports that she was explicitly advised by Kat Woods to cry and look cute when asking Emerson Spartz for a salary improvement, in order to get the salary improvement that she wanted, and was told this was a reliable way to get things from Emerson. (Alice reports that she did not follow this advice.)”
“By the same reasoning, the employees reported that they were given 100% of the menial tasks around the house (cleaning, tidying, etc) due to their lower value of time to the company. For instance, if a cofounder spilled food in the kitchen, the employees would clean it up. This was generally reported as feeling very demeaning.”
“Alice and Chloe reported a substantial conflict within the household between Kat and Alice. Alice was polyamorous, and she and Drew entered into a casual romantic relationship. Kat previously had a polyamorous marriage that ended in divorce, and is now monogamously partnered with Emerson. Kat reportedly told Alice that she didn’t mind polyamory “on the other side of the world”, but couldn’t stand it right next to her, and probably either Alice would need to become monogamous or Alice should leave the organization. Alice didn’t become monogamous. Alice reports that Kat became increasingly cold over multiple months, and was very hard to work with.[7]”
“Alice reports then taking a vacation to visit her family, and trying to figure out how to repair the relationship with Kat. Before she went on vacation, Kat requested that Alice bring a variety of illegal drugs across the border for her (some recreational, some for productivity). Alice argued that this would be dangerous for her personally, but Emerson and Kat reportedly argued that it is not dangerous at all and was “absolutely risk-free”. Privately, Drew said that Kat would “love her forever” if she did this. I bring this up as an example of the sorts of requests that Kat/Emerson/Drew felt comfortable making during Alice’s time there.”
“Chloe was hired by Nonlinear with the intent to have them do executive assistant tasks for Nonlinear (this is the job ad they responded to). After being hired and flying out, Chloe was informed that on a daily basis their job would involve driving e.g. to get groceries when they were in different countries. She explained that she didn’t have a drivers’ license and didn’t know how to drive. Kat/Emerson proposed that Chloe learn to drive, and Drew gave her some driving lessons. When Chloe learned to drive well enough in parking lots, she said she was ready to get her license, but she discovered that she couldn’t get a license in a foreign country. Kat/Emerson/Drew reportedly didn’t seem to think that mattered or was even part of the plan, and strongly encouraged Chloe to just drive without a license to do their work, so she drove ~daily for 1-2 months without a license. ”
“Some unpaid interns (who worked remotely for Nonlinear for 1-3 months) said that they regretted not getting paid, and that when they brought it up with Kat Woods she said some positive sounding things and they expected she would get back to them about it, but that never happened during the rest of their internships.”
Yes, to be clear, many of these things are hearsay, and will be hard for either party to verify or falsify. But I think there really are a lot of pretty clear facts here that aren’t just “vibes-based reasoning”.
I think some of the concrete factual assertions in the post do appear to be wrong (like in the vegan case and conflating salary with outstanding reimbursements), and also omit a bunch of important context (like possibly, depending on how much money it made, the existence of Alice’s Amazon business or that for a decent chunk of their time at Nonlinear they stayed at the FTX apartments). And those are the ones that I am most interested in following up on, and I think it would be appropriate for Ben, Alice and Chloe to acknowledge, or provide additional evidence around if they want to argue that they are indeed true.
But I think dismissing Ben’s post as primarily vibes based reasoning seems quite strawmanny to me. Many of the accusations here seem substantial and not just vibes-based to me.
I did notice these. I specifically used the word “loadbearing” because almost all of these either don’t matter much or their interpretation is entirely context-dependent. I focused on the salary bullet-point because failing to pay agreed salary is both
1. A big deal, and
2. Bad in almost any context.
The other ones that I think are pretty bad are the Adderall smuggling and the driving without a license, but my prior on “what is the worst thing the median EA org has done” is somewhere between willful licensing noncompliance and illegal amphetamine distribution.
Hmm, at least for me many of the quotes above are substantially more load-bearing, but also not totally crazy that this differs between people. I do think in that case it might make sense to say “load bearing for my overall judgement of Nonlinear”, since I (and Ben) do think many of the above are on a similar or higher level of being concerning than the salary point, and Ben intended to communicate that.
I also want to highlight that I do currently believe that Alice was asked to smuggle harder drugs across the border than Adderall (though the Adderall one seems confirmed), and that Nonlinear are disputing this because it will be hard to prove, not because its false (though I am also not like 90%+ confident).
I don’t think you can describe that paragraph as “straightforwardly false”.
It is correct that Chloe’s compensation was verbally agreed to come out to around ~$70k-$82k a year (the $75k number comes from a conversation with Kat, Kat’s job interview transcript seems to suggest the total compensation would be $70k of benefits plus $1k/mo of stipend for a total of $82k[1]), and that’s why she was interested in the job. Nonlinear then offered a contract where $1k/mo of those $70k-$82k would be paid out as stipend, and she would be provided benefits adding up to the remainder (which wasn’t specified in the contract, but was explained during the relevant interview which Kat posted the transcript off).
However, the benefits did not add up to ~$60-$72k [2], and Nonlinear did not really have any accounting basis on which to claim that the benefits would add up to at least $60k-$72, which strikes me as pretty deceptive. The section you quote is pretty explicit that indeed part of the agreement was that the way Chloe would get compensated to a $70k-$80k equivalent was via being compensated indirectly via benefits, and that the issue at hand was that those benefits did not add up to their promised numbers.
So overall, this paragraph seems accurate to me. Which part here is false?
It requires some additional analysis to show why the compensation that Nonlinear claims does not actually add up to the promised amount of compensation. I encourage you to look through the posted “Alice + Chloe Finances” document and decide for yourself whether the listed expenses make sense to include as part of compensation.
Maybe I’m projecting more economic literacy than I should, but anytime I read something like “benefits package worth $X”, I always decompose it into its component parts mentally. A benefits package nominally worth $X will provide economic value less than $X, because there is option value lost compared to if you were given liquid cash instead.
The way I would conceptualize the compensation offered (and the way it is presented in the Nonlinear screenshots) is $1000/month + all expenses paid while traveling around fancy destinations with the family. I kind of doubt that Chloe had a mental model of how $40,000/yr in fancy travel destinations differs from $70,000/yr in fancy travel destinations. There could potentially be unrecorded verbal conversations that would make me feel differently about this, but I don’t currently feel like Chloe got materially shafted other than that she probably didn’t enjoy the travel as much as she thought she would.
Yeah, I agree that a compensation package costing $X will be worth less than $X, and as an employee it totally makes sense to adjust for that.
But then I think separately it’s important that the package did actually cost $X, especially if the $X was supposed to include many of the things that determine your very basic quality of life, like food, toiletries, rent, basic transportation, medical care, etc. I also think it matters how far Chloe got into the hiring process of Nonlinear on the assumption that total compensation would be “equivalent to $X”, which to be clear, I don’t currently know the details off.
She was interviewed three times and was told about compensation during the second interview.
We only mentioned the “equivalent to” thing once in an offhand manner. Every single other communication that we have on record is just talking about all expenses paid plus a stipend. [Edit: it was actually two places we found. The other was on the job ad, saying “Compensation: $60,000 - $100,000″]
And the compensation did not actually cost $70,000, like we said in that conversation. It cost more!
We added up everything and shared it with her. She knew and didn’t tell Ben. Worse, she told Ben the opposite. She told Ben no accounting had been done for that and showed him her own accounting that she knew was incomplete and thus inaccurate.
[EDIT: this was not the right job description; see below]
@Elizabeth brought up what looks like the job description for Chloe’s position, which has “Compensation: $60,000 - $100,000”. These seem to be in tension?
Wait, that link goes to an archive page from well after Chloe was hired. When I look back to the screen captures from the period of time that Chloe would have seen, there are no specific numbers given for compensation (would link them myself, but I’m on mobile at the moment).
If the ad that Chloe saw said $60,000 - $100,000 in compensation in big bold letters at the top, then that seems like a bait and switch, but the archives from late 2021 list travel as the first benefit, which seems accurate to what the compensation package actually was.
Good catch! That’s quite weird—why would you update a job ad to include compensation information after closing applications?
Here are the versions I see:
2021-10-22, 2021-11-18, 2021-12-03: “Pay: amount dependent on role fit and employee needs”, “The application deadline is November 1st, 2021, midnight UK time”
2022-07-03: “Application Deadline: July 21st”, “Target Start Date: September”, “Compensation: $60,000 - $100,000 / year”.
Ben’s post has:
So it looks to me like what we were looking at was a post-Chloe version, probably trying to hire her replacement, and the version Chloe would have seen didn’t have that information.
Ah, you’re right. So we said twice how much we estimated the compensation package to be worth. Will edit original comment to reflect that.
I’m sorry, as Daniel pointed out above this is from a later version of the job description, so this was all in the wrong direction.
I think this one is a bit different: with the interview it reads reasonably clearly to me that you’re talking about a low amount of cash plus expenses, but the job ad doesn’t say anything about that. Was the transcribed interview (which I think I remember you saying was the second one?) the first time you raised that almost all the compensation would be via covering expenses?
I don’t think I’d feel much better about the situation if the travel expenses had added up to $70k. It’s not reasonable to bill an employee for their boss’s travel tastes (even people who like traveling rarely want to spend 80% of their income on it, and those that do want to choose their own trips).
Two additional perspectives for looking at how much we should expect this to be a bad deal:
Spending 80% of your income on traveling is uncommon, but spending 80% of your income on housing, food, and transportation while paying a premium for living in a desirable location is actually pretty common among young professionals?
After graduating college I spent several months washing dishes for ~$200/wk, because I wanted to spend the summer at at a camp that charged vacationers ~$800/wk. I knew what I was getting into, had a good time, and don’t feel like I was exploited.
I think “Chloe made an informed decision to do this” is a reasonable argument. I don’t think the evidence so far proves that was what happened[1], but if proven I’d agree it answered my concern on this front.
But if that’s the argument, why bring up the amount Nonlinear spent on her at all? The question would be whether they covered the agreed upon expenses to the agreed upon level (no promising luxury housing and delivering tenements- admittedly unlikely to be the problem here- and no promising medical care and then arguing about necessary expenses- and it sounds like there was ambiguity on what would be covered there). Nonlinear could spend less than projections while still following the agreement and it would be fine.
If you are calculating expenses, it’s a mess. Many people do spend 80%+ of their income on housing, food, medical, etc, but you still can’t count $1 on housing your employer chose as equivalent to $1 on housing you chose. It’s (probably) not $0 either, housing is housing, but figuring out the discount factor is hard even when everyone feels good about the situation. Figuring it out now seems impossible.
As I see it the options are:
Nonlinear and Chloe agreed she’d be paid travel expenses + a stipend. The $ total of the expenses is irrelevant as long as they covered what they said they would.
Nonlinear led Chloe to believe she’d be paid $N in salary, and then coerced or tricked her into accepting expenses + stipend. The dollar value of the expenses is irrelevant here too.
Nonlinear and Chloe agreed she’d be paid a stipend plus $70k/year in travel and living expenses, with most living choices made by Nonlinear. This agreement begs for trouble. How do you divide expenses? Do you split the airbnb evenly? By bedroom? Is it fair Kat + Emerson get a discount for sharing a room when they’re dating? What happens when Chloe’s boyfriend visits? How much does Chloe value that trip to St Barts when what she wanted was a day away from her job? How do you check if the boss is reporting honestly? This is the scenario in which actual expenses incurred are most relevant, but it’s such a doomed agreement I can’t bring myself to care.
The contract looks pretty clear, but by Kat’s own account Chloe seemed to be operating under a different set of beliefs while working. This might be a reading comprehension issue on her part, but I think there’s a lot of room for her to feel misled by verbal statements made earlier. Or by the job listing, which lists compensation as $60k-$100k/year without mentioning much of it will be paid in travel.
That’s currently my view, yes. The evidence NL has provided for this (contract, texts, transcript) seems pretty strong to me, and while I could imagine Chloe presenting counter evidence (was never sent the contract, screenshots are misleadingly cropped) it’s not what I’m expecting?
EDIT: But thanks for pointing out the job ad: if a role is advertised that way and someone applies expecting that I’d think there would be more than NL has said on the way to ending up with the arrangement they seem to have gone with. I’ve now asked Kat about it.
EDIT2: The job ad bit is all a red herring: it’s post-Chloe and the original one just said “amount dependent on role fit and employee needs”.
Isn’t it Ben and Chloe who are bringing this up? And then NL is engaging because the amount spent does seem to matter to some people?
My original comment is pushing back against habryka doing so.
Whoops, thanks! Lost the thread here...
The evidence that she made an informed decision are:
Interview transcripts where you can see how we explained it to her. We recorded the actual conversation in question, so you don’t have to try to guess
Work contract
Text messages she herself sent before joining us showing that she understood how the compensation package worked
Her correctly explaining in her own words how the compensation package works seems like more than enough evidence that she understood the compensation package she was signing up for. The fact that we also sent her a work contract and also recorded the original conversation in question and you can see it yourself I think proves more than can usually ever be proven in such cases that she made an informed decision about the compensation package.
Your document says you sent the contract to Chloe 6 days after her start date. When did she sign it?
FYI, when I click on some proportion (possibly 100%?) of these links to the Google doc (including the links in your comment here) it just takes me to the very start of Google doc, the beginning of the contents section, and I can’t always figure out which section to click on. Possibly a mobile issue with Google docs, but thought I should let you know 🙂
Thanks for letting me know! Strange. It shouldn’t be doing that. Usually if you wait a couple of seconds, it’ll jump to the right section. It’s working on both my mobile and laptop.
If you try waiting a couple seconds and that doesn’t work, let me know. Maybe DM me and then we can troubleshoot, then we can post the solution up when we figure it out.
Thanks for checking! Have now figured out the issue, the thing I described was happening when Google docs opened in safari (which I knew), but I’ve now gotten it to open in the app proper.
Good points! Added some more points here as well.
The “spending 80% on travel” is quit misleading, because it comes from counting AirBnB costs as “travel” expenses. That would make sense if they were just traveling for a short period of time, say, to go to an EAG, but if you only live in AirBnBs, then counting that as travel instead of rent seems misleading.
If that’s true, I have spent $0 on housing in the last 4 years, and that doesn’t seem right.
If you don’t count housing as a travel expense, then it comes to only 6% on travel, which is pretty reasonable given that we literally travel full-time.
(Also, it’s irrelevant because rent shouldn’t count as travel expenses, but even if we did count it, it would still only come out to 68%, not 80%. I don’t know where this 80% is coming from.)
From the evidence above the deal was pretty clearly $1k/mo + NL pays for stuff. Reading the interview transcript, Kat’s saying this can be thought of as being worth $70k isn’t an offer to pay $70k with deductions for stuff.
Now, Chloe clearly didn’t end up liking the deal and I think the deal was probably not legal [1][2], but those are different objections!
[1] When they were in Puerto Rico $1k/mo ($5.68/hr) was below the minimum wage.
[2] Multijurisdictional employment is famously complex, and digital nomads commonly ignore the legal requirements of working from the various countries. I have no evidence on how NL handled this, but since it’s so hard and so rarely done right my guess is NL commonly was employing Alice and Chloe illegally.
80% of the money we spent on their compensation was not going to travel. Copy-pasting comments from the thread over here where this number was originally said:
″
Where are you getting that number from? It was a mix of rent, food, medical, productivity tools, etc. Some quick math I did shows that only 6% of the money we spent on her was for travel.
Math from this doc
Flights:800+190=990
Total spent on her when she was compensated with room, board, travel, and medical + stipend: 17,174
990/17174 = 6%
(I didn’t include the flight from the Bahamas to London because that was when she was picking her own cash salary, rather than the all expenses paid + stipend. We’d just already booked it before she’d switched to cash.
If you want to include that, it’s hard, because then should we include the cash comp or not?)
It’s also important to emphasize that even though compensation is not the same as purely cash pay, she signed up for the compensation package that she got. When she asked to get compensated purely in cash, we said yes.
So it’s not like she was forced to spend money in a certain way. It’s like if you signed up for a fellowship that covered room and board and a stipend. Later, you decide that you want to spend the money differently, so you talk to the person in charge and they say it’s fine for you to be purely compensated with cash. There’s no forcing you at any point in that process to spend your money in a particular way.
Second follow up comment:
Alice did, and then when she asked she got it. Chloe never requested this.
It’s really important that they signed up for this. If we had promised them $75,000 cash salary and then instead gave them this compensation package, I think that is indeed unethical and unfair. However if they knew what they were signing up for and it was clearly communicated and they said yes, then that is totally fine and an informed choice they made.
I don’t see an alternative. I can’t read minds. I couldn’t change their comp package if I didn’t know they wanted to. And when I did know, I said yes.
If they chose this compensation package when they could have applied for other jobs with a more standard package or could have asked for a standard package, then they did indeed choose this compensation package.
Additionally, we need to be able to distinguish between “this was what they chose” and “this was what they would have preferred if they could have had anything in the world right away without having to ask”.
Like, imagine I applied the same standards to funders. “I asked for $50,000 and they gave me $50,000, but I would have preferred $75,000. Yes, I didn’t ask for $75,000, but most people in my shoes would prefer $75,000 over $50,000.” (Or replace with whatever numbers make most sense to you)
This follows the same structure of the argument “Alice and Chloe signed up for a all-expenses-paid + stipend compensation package and they got that, but they would have preferred a cash salary of a similar value to the comp package. Yes, they didn’t ask for that, but most people in their shoes would prefer a cash salary over the other comp package.”
Or maybe a better analogy is a charity applying for funding and the grantmaker donates but with earmarked funds. All orgs would prefer unearmarked funds (flexible funds are more useful than earmarked ones), but that doesn’t mean it’s unethical for a donor to earmark their donations.
Is rent a travel expense?
Counting rent while traveling if this was a part-time travel experience seems reasonable. For example, if they usually live in the Bay area and they’re expected to travel to London for EAG, the cost of the Airbnb in London is clearly a travel expense.
However, if they are always traveling and they do not have a permanent place anywhere, that does not seem like a travel expense but rather just regular rent. Neither of them had a permanent place. Alice had been nomadic before she even met us. Counting that as a travel expense in this context doesn’t make sense and will lead to people being misled.
Think about it. Otherwise then, for the last 4 years I have paid zero rent? Clearly, if you are a full-time nomad then airbnbs are just rent, not travel.
How to calculate total compensation
I quickly googled “when people describe a compensation package do they usually include medical” and the first result said:
“Health Insurance Benefits are a huge piece of your overall compensation package. This can include Medical, Dental, Vision, as well as HSA/FSA accounts. When calculating how much your benefits are worth, think about what percentage your employer is going to be covering. Is your employer covering 100% of the cost? 80%? Does that change if you were to include a spouse or dependents in the coverage? These are all important questions to ask when evaluating an offer package and figuring out how much your health benefits are worth.”
“A total compensation package goes beyond your new hires’ base pay rate. It also includes items like health insurance, bonuses, and paid time off”
When I Google “how to calculate the value of your compensation package” these are the first results:
“To calculate total compensation for an employee, take the sum of their base salary and the dollar value of all additional benefits. Additional benefits include insurance benefits, commissions and bonuses, time-off benefits, and perks.”
“Total compensation is the combined value of your salary, bonuses, a 401(k) match, free office coffee, and more. All those freebies or conveniences that feel like work perks—including your PTO—are actually parts of your total compensation package, and they can have just as much value as your salary.”
Since Google knows my history, I thought maybe it’s giving me a biased result. So I tried searching in incognito mode so it wasn’t taking into account my recent posting, and it gave the same results.
Now, I do think that a compensation package is clearly different from cash salary. We say that right away at the almost the very beginning of our post. But we did not describe it to them or to anybody as a $75,000 salary cash. We described it as a compensation package that we estimated to be worth around $70,000.
Once, off hand, in a recorded interview. Every single other communication was just saying all expenses paid plus stipend.
They were informed about this beforehand and they signed up for it. If they had wanted something different, all they had to do was ask. Or they could have applied to a different job. When Alice did, she got it.
If people come away from reading this thinking that we said that we paid them both a cash salary of $75,000 or that it’s the same as a $75,000 cash salary, then they made the same mistake that Chloe seems to have made. Chloe kept on saying that we offered to pay her something equivalent to a $75,000 cash salary. We were saying that this was worth around $70,000. I think her interpreting it this way led to a lot of suffering. We tried to explain it to her a bunch of times that that was not what we were saying but she did not seem to be able to update. I do think people seem to struggle with this a lot.
I think the main thing though, and the way I think about it at least, is as a consequentialist. I don’t think in terms of how much money is it worth etc. I tend to think of it as are you getting your needs met? What about your preferences? And I think the key is that she was living an exceptionally comfortable lifestyle. She was living the almost exactly the same lifestyle as myself.
She also had plenty of freedom and options. She publicly says she had savings and we covered everything so well that, as far as we can tell, all of her stipend went into savings as well. She got her dream job 2 and 1⁄2 months after she quit. And she could have gotten a regular dev job far faster if she wanted.
I don’t know how she would have spent the money otherwise, But that seems irrelevant. It seems like if somebody got a scholarship that included room and board, and then they get upset, because they would have spent it on a different house. If they accept the scholarship, then that is how they would spend it. They would spend it on that house and that food, because that is what they chose. They could have just tried to get a different scholarship or a job. In fact, if you accept that scholarship, and then speak to the people who gave you it and say that you would prefer cash instead and they say yes, that is exceptionally generous and way outside the norm of what is expected.
If a scholarship/fellowship/job offered you room and board and you accepted and then later asked for cash instead I suspect that 98% of them would say no.
She is trying to make it sound like a hardship and us being unreasonable when it is incredibly unreasonable to ask for your compensation package to be changed so quickly after you accepted it.
Most people do not ask for changes in compensation until they’ve been working for at least a year.
Most people if they’re offered room and board + stipend never get the option of switching to cash only.
Most people don’t accept a compensation package and then later say they would have preferred a different compensation package and therefore they were financially controlled.
Most people don’t go to the EA Hotel and say that they’re being financially controlled because they got room and board and a stipend and couldn’t choose to spend the money on something else.
Most people don’t say that a scholarship offering to pay for room and board is somehow bad because the student could have used that money to spend less on a room or paid for a different room.
Sure, everybody would prefer that. But they are not entitled to that.
Sure, some people might misinterpret a compensation package being estimated to be worth $X as being the same as a cash salary of $X. But as long as you clearly communicate what they’re signing up for and they have other options and they choose the compensation package, then nothing wrong was done. If they later change their mind and want something different, they have to ask or quit and find a job that meets their criteria. They can’t make a choice, later want to make a different choice, then try to pillory an person for not reading their mind and giving them everything they ask for right away.
People can’t say “They told me I’d get paid $X and I got paid $X but I think $Y would be better, therefore we have to warn the community about the ‘predator’ in our midst, ‘chewing up and spitting out’ the youth of the community.”
They can say “They offered me $X and I got paid $X, and I would have preferred $Y, and when I asked for $Y, I got $Y.”
They can say “They offered me $X and I got paid $X. I would have preferred $Y, but I never asked for $Y and that made me sad. I guess I should learn from this and get better at asking people for things instead of expecting mind-reading and getting everything that I want immediately without asking.”
Was medical considered part of compensation? In the appendix you describe it as Emerson “generously covering” them, and that Alice never had an agreement to have them covered.
I know it’s hard having lots of critical attention and upending your schedule to respond to inquisitive internet people, but if you were able to be a bit more concise I think it would be really helpful for readers. Your comment is ~2k words, but reads to me like it has more like 750 words worth of things to say.
Yeah, I agree. I find it quite difficult to write concisely. I am trying to get better, but as you can clearly see, I have not succeeded to the optimal amount yet. 😛
I have noticed that you are asking yourself “can I believe this?” when assessing Alice and Chloe’s claims and “must I believe this?” when assessing our claims. Please try to apply similar evidentiary standards to all claims.
Where does it say that in the transcript? I’m reading it again and I just don’t see where we say anything even like that.
And it would be really weird to say that too. I’ve never heard of somebody offering room & board + a stipend who’s said that it has to add up to a certain amount, otherwise you pay the difference (but you don’t pay the difference if the costs go over).
This isn’t what was said. It was (paraphrasing to get rid of verbal tiks): “So what we’re thinking is basically, like having a package where it’s about equivalent of being paid like 70k a year in terms of:
Housing
Food
Travel
Random fun stuff
$1k a month for things not covered by that.
Saying “and then on top of that” is just another way for saying “and”. It was a verbal conversation, not a legal contract.
The contract states clearly that there wasn’t any “and then we’ll pay the difference if it’s below $70k” clause.
She clearly communicated that she understood the compensation package before she arrived.
This seems to confidently speak about the internals of my mind, which isn’t always a bad thing to do, but in this case I don’t think is accurately capturing reality. My guess is its best to keep at least this conversation at the level of facts and arguments.
I did not say here that you “have to pay the difference” (and I don’t think anyone else has said that).
I don’t understand the relevance of this screenshot. I don’t think it matters for anyone’s model whether Chloe thought of the $1000/mo as salary or stipend. She says “you mentioned that everything is covered”, which is vague and doesn’t tell us what exactly she thought was covered.
Yes, I agree that the literal contract is quite relevant, though again, nobody said that there was such a clause. The relevant component is whether the expectation was set that the benefits would add up to ~$70k, and whether that expectation was set accurately. If my employer sells me on a job by offering me a compensation package they estimate to be worth $70k, and then they spend much less than that, then that clearly seems like cause for a legitimate grievance.
I do think the contract generally does matter. It also matters a bunch when Chloe actually signed the contract since it determines for how much of your relevant work period you were on the same page about at least the legal context. Could you confirm when Chloe actually signed the contract?