*WrkRiot. 1forOne's twitter and facebook profiles are gone and WrkRiot matches the description perfectly (including the doggy avatar and a large number of Asian employees).
It's actually dangerously obvious who some of the people mentioned in the story are, just from the descriptions. It might be a good idea to anonymize characters further by changing ethnicity/nationality and gender.
"Name and shame" feels good but there's a huge danger in pillorying people just based on a single person's account.
WrkRiot seems to be the company in question and their online presence is so laughable nobody here likely feels bad for making fun of them, especially because of the behaviour the author describes. But the story is not just about a company but also about individuals.
Consider WrkRiot's head of marketing, for example. The author portrays her very negatively (outright trying to take the author's credit, being generally incompetent and engaging in deceptive and hostile practices). Whether you personally find the author trustworthy or not, if you only go by the article this is essentially hearsay.
Whether the allegations are true or not, she might face problems because of them (e.g. when trying to apply to new jobs). The author OTOH can maintain plausible deniability because the article never explicitly named any names (just gave enough identifying information to allow HNers to deduct the identity of the company and the employees).
I'm not saying the author is lying. I'm not saying WrkRiot or its CEO is innocent. I'm just saying there's no way to know as an outside how much of the story is true and what details have been left out (knowingly or not).
This is why in criminal investigations "due process" is a thing. Otherwise you end up with mob rule and character assassination -- and accusations tend to stick even if they're proven wrong and malicious.
It should be noted that the criminal justice system is not there to give justice to individuals. The district attorney functions as the representative of state interests.
If you are a victim of medical malpractice, the district attorney will not find healing for you. If someone wrongfully injures you, a criminal case will not return even an inch of your wholesomeness. If someone cheats or robs you of $50k, the district attorney will not help you pay your bills.
Civil court is the provided forum for issues of individual justice, and there individuals will find themselves paying alone, and in a position of imbalance, only a stupid person would fight for themselves. In the game of civil justice, where one might seek healing or remedy, you must pay for the prerogative to play.
True, but at least some of the accusations seem to imply criminal behaviour on part of the founder(s). Manipulating screenshots from the bank and passing them off as real sounds like forgery to me -- but I admit I'm not intimately familiar with the US criminal justice system.
That said, of course there are safe conclusions to draw from this story (especially the ones that hold true in general) but all personal accusations should always be taken with a grain of salt, especially if you have no personal knowledge of any of the people involved.
> If you are a victim of medical malpractice, the district attorney will not find healing for you. If someone wrongfully injures you, a criminal case will not return even an inch of your wholesomeness. If someone cheats or robs you of $50k, the district attorney will not help you pay your bills.
This is not entirely true. While the general civil/criminal purpose distinction you make is broadly correct, there are provisions for "restitution" within the criminal court system that overlap substantially with the compensatory function of the civil court system, so its not accurate to say that the DA will not help you recover funds or that a criminal case will not restore your losses.
I understand where you're coming from, and initially had upvoted your comment. The problem is that there are shifting goalposts as to the definition of "fuck over". Here specifically it's pretty clear some unethical and illegal behavior occurred. There's no question it was right to out the shitty company. But encouraging people to out people they feel they've been wronged by sets the stage for tragic mistakes. The media is especially guilty of this, even if it isn't outright libel. I would be much more agreeable to your suggestion if people were generally much less trusting. But people are really awful at critical thinking with this kind of thing.
Yes, we should out bad actors. But we should also avoid witch hunts. I agree with pluma 100% here. Plausible deniability is important as there are always at least two sides to every story.
That said, Penny's account of life at the mystery startup sounds startlingly like that of my experience at Motionloft many years ago. The difference there is that the (ex-)CEO was convicted, and my experience was corroborated by another ex-employee and by one extremely pissed off vendor.
I wasn't crazy about the idea, but the stack was interesting (and gave me some great learning opportunities). Ultimately Motionloft was more marketing than tech driven and I bailed right around the time Mills hoovered up all the money.
Amusingly the `whois` records for wrkroit.com mention 1FOR.ONE CORPORATION as the registrant organization. Here is a snippet of the records:
Domain Name: WRKRIOT.COM
Creation Date: 25-aug-2016
Registrant Name: ISAAC CHOI
Registrant Organization: 1FOR.ONE CORPORATION
Registrant Street: 2005 DE LA CRUZ BLVD
Registrant Street: SUITE 131
Registrant City: SANTA CLARA
Registrant State/Province: CA
Registrant Postal Code: 95050
Registrant Country: US
Registrant Phone: +1.4083447484
Registrant Email: MYSUBS@HALLFORONE.COM
This is just pure opinion, but to me it is hard to read and unprofessional. It is certainly unique, but it doesn't project seriousness, which is what I want out of a job discovery service. Omitting the vowel just has the ring of a shady knockoff, scammer, or malware site that capitalizes on typos. Maybe I'm just not used to seeing the consonant string in trademarks or company names, but it strikes me as peculiar rather than creative or edgy.
Second thought: this is a company which can't even manage to register "workriot.com". Even if "WrkRiot" is the brand, I would expect them to grab the domain with the more obvious spelling and have it redirect to wrkriot, but it turns out "workriot.com" is registered to a Finnish hosting provider sitting on the domain. So to recap: the domain with the more obvious alternate spelling of the company is (very likely) up for sale but they still haven't managed to acquire it. That does not engender much confidence in their marketing or management.
In general misspellings are considered bad for SEO because search engines suggest correcting their name to something else. I'm not sure whether that applies here but I have seen it for startups that vowel drop weirdly, etc.
I started actively trading around 5 years ago, and only picked longs another 5 years before that. It's difficult to give an exact % because I'm not a day trader per se. I trade around a position I know well, but do day trades when I spot an opportunity. Sometimes you know something will happen, but only on a short time frame.
For example, I went into oil stocks earlier this year, and I knew that the market was panicking over the low oil price. So some days the market would bounce back right when the oil pits close at 2:30 (since the oil correlation can't get much worse then). Take a chance to ride the way back up, why not? But you can't do this all the time, which is why I gave you this esoteric example.
Well, if you still want a percentage, I'd say 10-20% might be a reasonable achievement.
"Where did my money go" budgeting has never worked for me. I've been way more successful with planning ahead every $ of income as I get it and then manually tracking expenses. Budgeting had to become an actual activity for me, and not just something done automatically by a webapp. I'm a huge shill for YNAB[0]. The software is really nice but basically it's a glorified (paid) spreadsheet. My fiance and I agree that the methodology it forces you to use, though, has easily saved us thousands so far.
What's worked best for me is putting all of my income into one account and then just giving myself a fairly low monthly 'allowance' into my personal checking account (at a different bank), from which I spend out of (including rent, student loans, etc.). It took a few iterations to get the monthly value correct so I wasn't running much of a deficit or a surplus.
But now it's good and I don't sweat the small stuff, and I can skip eating out in order to buy a new bike part or whatever. I do look quarterly-ish and see what I am actually spending on.
I do something similar, albeit a bit leakier. I have all my money coming in to one nexus account, and then I have weekly/biweekly/monthly outflows of everything (bills, stock investments, transfers to 3x different banks, mortgage). I keep that account with a bunch of buffer, but ignore all my other accounts. Each month I keep that main account 'floating' is another month where all those other accounts are growing. If I ever dip too low, I can supplement with one of my other accounts.
It's not a great solution, but it's the one that I've stuck with best.
I couldn't agree more - I tried mint for a while and I basically did nothing with it besides checking my transactions.
YNAB completely changed how I view my money. Now when I go to buy something, I don't just go spend. I see how much I have in that category, and if it's not enough, I either move money to it from another category, or not buy it.
It's been very helpful for me in my goal of saving more than 50% of my take home pay.
Wow, this news was crushing. I was on the fence about getting ynab for a couple of months now and I was going to get it sometime this week. Coincidentally the trial of ynab made me detest subscription models more than I already did and then they became a subscription model! This is really saddening.. Are there any good replacements that you are aware of (since I do know that ynab is essentially a glorified spreadsheet, but I do like their methodology).
What I hate more is the thought of having my financial data stored in some shady, cobbled together, cloud service, hosted somewhere on Amazon AWS.
I predict, that it is only a question of time until they will encounter some disastrous data leak.
Begin a YNAB user for more than a year now, I am really angry at them for this move. So I'll guess I have to move on to something else after the support for the YNAB4 apps will be shut down.
I completely agree. We've got support until December so I'm considering replicating as much of YNAB 4's methodology and functions as possible in either Excel or Google Sheets when I have free time.
Yea I've been on the fence about trying that out, especially since it's missing some key features (reporting, the calculator). At least YNAB4 is supported til the end of 2016, gives them time to get the new one fixed up.
This is my plan as well. I'll continue to use classic thru it's end-of-life support cycle and then revisit nYNAB and see if they've managed to at least hit feature parity.
I'm a big fan of YNAB as well (classic, web just isn't there yet and normally I'm the first to jump on the web bandwagon). I'm still just getting started with it but it's an awesome tool!
It's like watching a primitive civilization independently re-invent the modern world's technology. This poses ethical questions. Should we have intervened and told them about Maven, when we see them still struggling with their version of Ant?
I lost my HOME to some greedy capitalist who bought up our entire street and forced me to sell. She then built hotels only the rich could afford. I ended up bankrupt.
Please write to Human Rights Watch about my situation*
For a project that goes a bit deeper (branching, i/o, etc) consider writing a Chip8 simulator. There's lots of games written in chip8 bytecode to test with!
