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?
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?