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Zynga To Employees: Surrender Pre-IPO Shares Or You're Fired
ardmhacha writes "Zynga seem to think they were overly generous handing out stock to early employees. Fearing a 'Google Chef' situation they are leaning on some employees to hand back their unvested stock or face termination. From the article: 'Zynga's demand for the return of shares could expose the company to employment litigation—and, were the practice to catch on and spread, would erode a central pillar of Silicon Valley culture, in which start-ups with limited cash and a risk of failure dangle the possibility of stock riches in order to lure talent.'"
I can't imagine how an action like this can be legal in terms of anyone wanting to take it to court - surely the employee would win hands down, but I can't also see how it would be beneficial in the long run. Srely if you took your employer to court like this (and assuming you won) and went back to work - surely the culture there after that must be very antagonistic. Wouldn't the employer then be looking for any excuse and going through all the hoops to have that person leave the company anyhow.
The only way I can imagine to pursue this would be to take them to court, win (I assume quite easily) and then start looking for another job as the workplace has become hostile - which sort of leads to where they are going in the first place... "Give it back or you are fired" OR "Ha, I won, now I need to find other work...". It just seems to be a half dozen here and six there.
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No. AFAIK if they don't give ownership of the shares back, they get to see their company ownership grow, even if they are fired.
That's not how that works. Contracts with unvested stocks always involve, "you must work with the company until such and such date" clauses. They get fired, they lose the stocks.
So yeah, sue the bastards.
Totally true, they have a very strange history, from their funding coming from the Russian mafia, to the events of today.
The place itself is supposedly a real grid to work in, so it is likely all these employees deserve their options. However, management always holds the power in situations like this, and more importantly, the investors that control management. If they are indeed controlled by the Russian mafia, isn't it better that these programmers give up their stock options rather than lose fingers?
This particular tactic is definitely new, but the entire culture of sociopathic behavior is nothing new to large American corporations. This one has simply found a new way to be total assholes.
Given that they're in California, which is a very employee-friendly state (one of the few I believe where non-competes are unenforceable), hopefully they'll lose their shirts after some newly-fired employees sue their sorry asses.
Yes. Their management is well known for doing all kinds of borderline illegal stuff. Seriously, look up stories about how they got started.
Not just borderline. I don't know about this mafia control stuff, but I remember their direct pixel for pixel use or art assets from...was it Age of Empires?
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I think it is class prejudice in the modern world. I don't think there is a problem with the chef in Google, but other executives look at a working class man who risked his career with a start-up and received a very large reward and think that should not be right. To them, working people should stay in their class where they belong and not become multi-millionaires regardless of the risk and hard work they took or did.
It sounds to me like those people who give lottery tickets as a gift and then sue the recipient for a share when the tickets turned out to be big winners - because they say they did not mean to give so much to the recipient.
Truly bizarre and illogical in my view.
If you quit, you can't collect unemployment. If you refuse, then they have to decide to fire you ... and either way, you've still go the shares.
Also, this could be interpreted as constructive dismissal, in which case you can tear up that non-compete you signed, since they have broken the terms first.
Sadly, it happens. Usually it's in the form of reducing retirement benefits after employees have already put the time in.
I worked at a company that would fire employees who got close to the point at which they were "vested" in their retirement plan. At one point they had to scramble around and fire a poor guy who had been there almost ten years; they discovered he had enough vacation time to put him over the vesting period (which then was ten years).
That was when I - and several others - started looking for new jobs.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
There used to be a common misperception that the age of expansion of the American West was lawless with murdering, theft, and rape a daily occurance. People were actually quite civilized, often more so than today. You were very likely to be shot dead for acting like an a*hole, especially to a lady. A vigilante hanging of people that wouldn't conform to the norms of society was often performed during a Sunday picnic, so the children would have an up close and personal experience of what would happen if they made poor choices in life.
In my past life, I quite often found that when my drug-dealing friends said that they would do something, it happened. Even if they got shot to make it happen. I got screwed over so many times by the preacher's kids, and other scumbags like them, it wasn't funny. It almost got to where a suit and tie meant someone was out to rob me/lie to me/screw me over. "Real" people backed up their word with their life.
I think the biggest lesson I've learned in life is that when people are held accountable for their actions with the valid threat and rapid application of violence, they act the most "civilized". It's almost like dealing with small children, sometimes the closest way to get a lesson to their brain is through their butt. It seems like every "civilization" that removes or reduces the threat of violent consequence to members for their actions, doesn't last long. They go down in flames of revolution, political corruption, and general anarchy. They look much like we do today.
When you want something built, come see me. If you want correct grammar and spelling, get a F*ing liberal arts student.
Up until 2006 or so, I used to get mod points regularly, every week.
Then suddenly I stopped getting mod points. That was about 5 YEARS ago.
*Nothing* for 5 YEARS.
Then, suddenly, yesterday, I got some again.
What the hell kind of algorithm can lead to a 5 YEAR hiatus in mod point allocation?