[MrLeftHand]

This is some nasty stuff.

I feel sorry for the guy literally working there less then a day and getting the boot.

Shows some really serious problems in management. Who the hell hires people when they know very well they won't stay and make the whole staff redundant. Well, except for friends and family of course. Either it was a lack of communication between management and HR, or they just really didn't give a flying f*ck.

Another grim story about startup life. Not everything that has four legs is a unicorn apparently.

[n00b101]

I know someone who left a finance job in NYC to move to London. Was fired in his first week; the trading desk he had joined was abruptly closed down. I guess senior management kept the plans secret from the line managers who kept on hiring without knowing what was coming. So I don't think this sort of thing only happens in start-ups (if anything, I would guess this type of thing is more likely to happen in a large company where your hiring manager is several levels down from the CEO and might not have any idea that his business unit is about to be closed/divested/relocated/etc).

[jrockway]

Big companies definitely do things like this.

When I was hired by Google, I lived in Chicago. They wanted me to relocate to NYC because there weren't any open positions in Chicago at the time. Within a week of joining I got an email sent to all engineers in NYC asking if anyone wanted to move to Chicago. SIGH.

Oh well, it's good to see the world.

[jackweirdy]

That's awful; not least because (depending on their role) gardening leave might apply, preventing them from getting a job in the finance industry for months

[jsprogrammer]

The company should be responsible for lost wages due to the solicited employee's detrimental reliance on the company's representations.

[retube]

would get gardening leave for sure, prob 3 months. That doesn't stop you looking for new work tho, and the leave itself is not a problem, all banks expect to have to wait 3 months before a new recruit can join.

[yardie]

It's not just restricted to startups. I know a few stories of F500s who hired people then fired them days or weeks later. In one case one guy never made it to his desk.

I don't think HR was given any heads up. I imagine management wanted to keep everything business as usual until the last moment.

[giarc]

Atleast with F500s you could imagine that it's simply an issue of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. With startups of this size, you imagine that people doing the hiring are also aware of the pending move and mass layoffs.

[extra88]

Yeah but that's more understandable because they're big bureaucracies and there would be too many people to include in the secret.

In what bizarro world is the head of HR not a part of management?

[jsprogrammer]

Why is a company conspiring to keep secrets from employees?