Expect to be pilloried after you leave - Avis employé Engineer Expensify.com

Hey _____, long time no talk! I assume you’re referring to this paragraph of my recent “Expensify’s Firing Strategy” blog post: “When we had hired our 100th person into Expensify, over 60 were still working at the company. That means up to that point, 40 people had either quit or been fired. (And of those who quit, nearly all did so when they found their peers increasingly unwilling to tolerate to their disruptive attitudes, and thus less fun to work with — misery loves company, and if your peers aren’t as miserable as you, you leave to find others who are.)” However, I think you should be focused on the very next paragraph: “At the start, the terminations were pretty messy. We didn’t have a good sense of what was our fault, their fault, how to anticipate and avoid problems coming down the pipeline, or how to deal effectively with problems when they appeared. There were many dark days.” You were one of those 40 -- and an early one, at that. I call them the “dark days”, but it’s interesting you describe it as “At the time, the culture was decent.” The culture wasn’t decent -- it was toxic. Yes, we had engineers whose “technical acumen ... was beyond reproach”, and it’s amazing how far that can get you. But when you keep the technical excellence while removing the toxicity, the difference is night and day. I’d also point you back to the very first first paragraph of that post: “Nobody likes to talk about firing. It’s not something to celebrate: if you need to fire someone it means you screwed up. Either you hired the wrong person, or — more common — you hired the right person, but failed to enable their success. Either way, the blame falls on the company (not the individual), so it’s no surprise that companies tend to avoid talking about their failures.” Accordingly, the correct answer to your question of “Either … they completely biffed the hiring process and failed to manage performance effectively, or it's a case of sour grapes" is the former. There was definitely a reality where you could have succeeded at Expensify, and we didn’t give you an environment where you could thrive -- that’s on us. But regardless of how you paint it, the solution to that toxic environment was for the people creating it to quit or be fired. And as painful a process as that is, I wouldn’t choose the alternative. As for whether a “Grand Exit is in the cards”, it’s true it doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s looking increasingly like it’ll happen through IPO rather than acquisition simply because the number of potential acquirers decreases as we grow. But that exit-focused attitude was one of the contributors to that toxic environment, and I’m much more excited to have a team focused on the path than the destination. Regardless, I hope your current gig works out, and good luck to you! PS: The “free lunch” perk is a strange detail to highlight, but you’ll be happy to know it was reinstated shortly thereafter. Given the choice between temporarily cutting that perk to get profitable, or raising more cash to fuel burn, we opted for the former.