
Zenefits, a Rocket That Fell to Earth, Tries to Launch Again - bilifuduo
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/technology/zenefits-a-rocket-that-fell-to-earth-tries-to-launch-again.html?partner=linkedin
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siliconc0w
I bullish on Zenefits, the 'scandal' seemed highly manufactured. So much ink
spilled over 'The Macro'. Any member of HN would have likely done the same
thing. The sales staff used very common software to avoid starring at a screen
for a legally mandated 52 hours to avoid what is basically just layers of
industry protectionism. It didn't pass the tests for them. The other things
called out also seem like cheap shots like throwing parties for high
preforming sales staff or not having a lot of backend automation which no
startup has and which might not even be possible giving the partners they need
to work with and the backward state of many of these protected industries.

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jimbo999
What do you mean by "just layers of industry protectionism"? Are you referring
to labor law?

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siliconc0w
I'm referring to compliance/licensing requirements that have little to do with
protecting consumers and everything to do with creating barriers of entry.
Things like 'mandatory hours of instruction' which in no way translate to
useful applicable knowledge. See also real estate broker or bar exams.

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colechristensen
Wait, why do you think the state bar associations, their admission processes,
and the requirements that attorneys pass them are bad?

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stickfigure
Why do you think they are good? Serious question - would you comfortably hire
an attorney based solely on a pass/fail credential?

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rtpg
more poignantly: would you ever hire an attorney who could not pass the bar
exam?

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sten
That’s apples to oranges. Would you hire a programmer who hadn’t gone to
University?

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jazzyk
Actually, I would. There are not too many left, but I worked with a couple of
people who did not have a college degree. They were certainly competent
enough.

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jimmywanger
Just curious, what is the benefit of staying with the Zenefit name and brand?

It's fairly toxic, as it is associated with debauchery and fraud. Wouldn't you
want to raze the brand to the ground and start with something else, even if
you're keeping the same tech stack and sales contracts?

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sfifs
They're notorious in tech circles. How notorious are they in the circles of
small business owners and HR mangers?

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ams6110
Not very. In many cases, probably unheard of.

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terravion
Also, the Zenefits service works. If HR compliance and administration is the
business equivalent of going to the dentist for tooth removal, Zenefits is at
least anesthesia during the procedure.

Not to condone violating laws, but if the old management was ignoring the
insurance equivalent of dealer franchise or taxi medallion laws, and that now
has the new management super serious about compliance--that's just an even
better service for us users.

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Nothorized
How much companies have succeeded at reinventing themselves after a scandal ?

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rfrank
How many people even believe that Zenfits has effectively addressed its
compliance/culture problems? I know I don't trust them.

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lrkrthrwwy94107
As a former employee, I can say it's totally different than it used to be.
Everyone associated with the problems has been shown the door, major house
cleaning. The atmosphere is much more serious now, it's a completely different
company.

That said, many early employees would have corrected these problems if they
were widely known. It was not the lax environment some articles made us out to
be. Everyone had to pull their weight and we were very serious about getting
everything right. It was a huge disappointment to discover that some
department leads allowed this stuff to exist, reducing the value of the many
late nights myself and others put in.

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rfrank
> That said, many early employees would have corrected these problems if they
> were widely known.

How can anyone on the outside be sure there aren't comparable problems which
still aren't widely known? I just don't see a reason to believe what Zenefits
says because their marketing literature says compliance a lot more now.

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lrkrthrwwy94107
>How can anyone on the outside be sure there aren't comparable problems which
still aren't widely known?

I'm not sure how any company can provide this proof. However, the rage felt by
all the truly dedicated individuals who watched their equity decline in value
has drastically changed the culture, everyone is on watch to make sure that
doesn't happen again. In addition, new technology and new teams have the
explicit purpose of monitoring and maintaining compliance, which I believe are
effective. The internal shift to being a "compliance company" is not just
marketing speak, it is real.

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rfrank
You can't, which is one of several reasons why the original fuckup was so
serious. Your track record matters. Why would a new customer go with Zenefits
over someone who's always taken compliance seriously?

If equity value is what's motivating people's desire to not illegally cut
corners, I see little reason to assume they won't revert to previous behavior
once the spotlight is off, especially as time passes and personnel changes.

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derefr
> someone who's always taken compliance seriously

Personally, I don't believe there _is_ such a thing. The only careful doctor
is one who has made a bad decision that killed a patient; the only careful
military officer is one who has had a strategy of theirs fail and lost
soldiers under their command. Everyone else has too much bravado, and no
emotional revulsion to shortcuts, and so can't be be trusted with real
responsibility.

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dsacco
You seem to be claiming that the only people who can be trusted in mission
critical scenarios are those who have seriously failed with a non-negligible
impact before, as though that is a rite of passage to true understanding. How
are you defining failure?

I disagree with the idea that meticulous caution can only be learned by
personally failing first. I believe it is fully possible to learn and
emotionally internalize the necessity of proper protocols, rules and behaviors
in a variety of safety and compliance contexts by learning from the failures
of predecessors, and without needing to commit those failures personally.

If this were not the case, wouldn't e.g. insurance companies weight risk
analysis algorithms more favorably towards drivers with an accident history,
and penalize drivers with no accident history? (This is a simplistic example,
but you hopefully get the idea). Do pilots need to experience catastrophic
crashes in order to achieve true risk awareness? Do companies need to
experience serious security breaches in order to take security seriously?
(Many of the most secure companies in the world, perhaps most of them, have
never had a headlining security vulnerability).

To continue with your analogy, I see no a priori reason to assume that a
doctor is incapable of following e.g. comprehensive checklists to limit
surgical error without first experiencing a failure that causes a patient's
death. Likewise, I see no a priori reason to assume the same doctor would
improve by virtue of having a patient die in surgery.

I think that claim requires evidence to be taken seriously, to say nothing of
your secondary claim that people who _have not failed_ have "too much bravado"
to be trusted with responsibility.

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derefr
It's not that you can't have people who are inherently conscientious (heck,
it's considered a personality trait); it's rather that it's very hard to
filter the non-conscientious people _out_ by anything other than attrition,
because in conscientiousness-rewarding industries, the non-conscientious have
every reason to pretend to be otherwise.

With the checklist analogy: some doctors are willing to follow checklists;
other doctors aren't. _Of the doctors who have killed a patient from not
following an available checklist_ , usually all are willing to follow a
checklist—for the ones that _still_ aren't, and kept on killing patients, have
been disbarred. "Did a bad thing and is still a doctor" is a sort of
_survival-bias heuristic_ for filtering out the non-conscientious.

Here's another way to think about this: a _soldier_ might have trained for
years and years, and be very good at all the arts of war. But most people
would prefer to staff a "hand-picked" strike force with _veterans_ —soldiers
who has been in a number of battles, and in particular have been engaged in a
number of individual combats—rather than just people with "natural talent."
Because _attrition_ ensures that the only veterans who _survive_ are the ones
who know their business.

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mathattack
Payroll, benefits and insurance are a tricky business. For customers, there is
only downside for mistakes. If a company goes with a player with a good
reputation then they have a good defense if something goes bad. ("I used the
best") If they bring in Zenefits post-scandal and there's a problem, how do
they explain it?

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ksylvest
Zenefits still doesn't have an API right?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6111669](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6111669)

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j2kun
> Trying to turn around a failing technology company is almost always a futile
> task — just ask Marissa Mayer at Yahoo or whoever it is who now runs
> BlackBerry.

It's amazing how one can respect the difficulty of a job while simultaneously
insulting "whoever it is" that does that job. It takes three seconds to google
"BlackBerry" and see in the automatically generated card: CEO: John S. Chen
(Nov 4, 2013–). Is this supposed to be some sort of journalistic negligence-
cum-style?

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quizme2000
NBC replayed a John Kerry Cyber Security sound byte and the Zenefits logo was
in the background. They were a sponsor of the Virtous Circle Conference. Not
sure if Zenefits should have been asked to sponsor this event.

"A virtuous circle is often described as a self-reinforcing system that
creates positive benefits throughout the economy."

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Herodotus38
Am I the only one who thought that this article was going to be about the
Ukranian (formerly Soviet) rocket named Zenit?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenit_(rocket_family)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenit_\(rocket_family\))

