JamesVI

Restaurants.

Usually just before opening or just before the dinner rush. You go over specials. assign sections, etc.

Construction.

Scrum is (allegedly) inspired by the morning briefing on a construction site where the electricians warn the plumbers they are going to turn on the power to floor X.

Military.

Before every mission and daily standing orders for officer of the day, officer of the watch etc.

One has lower capacity than the other (probably due to small differences when they came off the manufacturing line resulting in them aging differently).

Or maybe the difference in distance between the AirPods and the signal source is just enough that one has to frequency hop or request retransmission of corrupted packets more often than the other, resulting in higher power consumption (I’m almost completely ignorant of the Bluetooth protocol so I don’t actually know how it handles dropped/bad packets)

"i've "known" this guy for ~10 years now"

Ha. I have one of those too. His wife keeps getting it wrong too, so I get emails asking my opinion on various purchases/kitchen renovations. I used to reply "wrong email address", now I just give my opinion.

I hope he likes the kitchen counters he "agreed" to.

The situation you witnessed and heard about made you sufficiently uncomfortable to create a throw-away account to ask HN for advice. That level of discomfort is sufficient to report it to HR. For all you know there have been other complaints made in the past and this incident will complete a picture of a pattern of troubling behavior.

It isn't your responsibility to gather proof or to make a career-impacting decision about these two people, that's for HR, legal and senior management to deal with, and they have the tools and processes to actual investigate. (Check your employee handbook, companies I have worked for in the past require employees to cooperate with HR investigations and refusing to comply can lead to termination). If there really wasn't any problem then HR will take no action (they don't want to get sued for wrongly terminating a manager either).

At this point I would say no,

Document and hand off to HR. If the colleague comes to you and asks if you reported to HR then you can be honest and say you did because you were concerned for their well-being.

Talking to them doesn't really help them. It forces them to decide if they want to endorse you talking to HR or to claim it was "no big deal". HR is (supposed to be) trained to deal with this kind of situation and should be better equipped to decide how to proceed.

Like LinuxBender said, document everything.

You don't say where this happened; local laws and customs will prevail. In California (for example) most companies will require you to report sexual harassment (which is what you are describing). If you (or coworkers) see it and say nothing you can be fired for failing to report when it eventually gets out (which it will).

Write down everything you know personally and everything that you have been told. Take it all immediately to HR. Don't ask your colleague what they want to do, and don't take this to the manager's boss.

HR will talk to your colleague. If they say nothing happened, or that they welcomed the attention, then either the manager or the employee will be reassigned so there isn't any real or perceived power imbalance and they can continue to do whatever they both want. If your colleague says that the manager got them drunk, or made unwanted advances then HR will follow the necessary process (involving the manager's manager) to terminate the manager.

I've managed teams in California, and I'm currently in a long-term relationship with a former co-worker, so I've navigated these waters from both sides.

All I’m saying is that the schedule of payments for medical care in the US is largely driven by what Medicare pays for each treatment code. The Medicare payment schedule is set by a board that is largely dominated by “procedural” doctors (surgeons). The only procedure in psychiatry is ECT, so a psych dept can charge a lot more for ECT than (say) a course of CBT.

I’m not trying to imply that psychiatry is coin-operated, but if ECT is “funding the department” there is an incentive to propose ECT, even if the science doesn’t support that.

Assuming you are in the US, a psychiatrist isn’t going to involuntarily commit you unless you threaten to hurt yourself or someone else. (It’s fine to say that you’ve had those thoughts in past, but if you say that you are thinking of doing it now then they have to do something both because of the law and because of liability issues).

If your symptoms are “in remission” then now is a perfect time to talk to someone. They won’t feel under time pressure to prescribe medication and they can do a full work up to figure out what the issue is, and help prevent future problems.

As other people have said, many mental health issues have overlapping symptoms (my personal favorite is that chronic sleep deprivation can look almost identical to ADHD), and diagnostic techniques and treatment regimes do change over time. Leverage the massive investment someone else has made in medical school to get a reliable diagnosis.

If you get a diagnosis and are in treatment I think you’ll find it easier to honestly explain both your gap in employment history and why you are worth taking a chance on now.

That said, be aware that psychiatry does suffer from the same over-prescription problem as the rest of US medicine and that there are financial incentives for hospitals to direct you towards ECT (it’s a “procedure” so they can charge more than for a simple office visit).

Stack ranking is a terrible way to measure performance. If managers can’t figure out how to objectively measure performance using tools like skill matrices then they are just bad managers.

I’ve left companies because they used stack ranking. When I’ve been in a position of authority I’ve crushed any attempt to introduce stack ranking (or “calibration” or any other variant).

First line managers should be able to determine if an individual is performing at, below, or above expectations on their own merits. If they can’t you should fire the second line manager for failing to train the first line manager.

Jack Welch introduced stack ranking as a way to force managers to terminate poor performers who were being kept around too long. That’s a distinct issue (under empowered or gutless managers) that should (again) be fixed by training and holding managers accountable.

It’s mostly a benefit for employers. It reduces the penalty for underpaying people. No one is going to up and quit because they get paid more than people on the team who they perceive as equals (or even if they get paid less than people they clearly perceive as more senior), but they’ll certainly bail if they feel relatively underpaid.

The only thing keeping salaries secret can possibly achieve is paying people less than their peers (in the same company or the same industry).

In other counties salaries (or at least relatively narrow bands) are well known and the world hasn’t ended.

One of the things I was most proud of my time at Second Measure (and this is due to the cofounders) is that we had 11 “levels” for engineers and data scientists and everyone at a given level was compensated (pay and equity) exactly the same. If you figured out the level of someone on the team (and we were transparent about the criteria used for leveling) you could pretty much work out their comp by extrapolating from your own.

World didn’t end. People didn’t quit en mas. Some people left because they felt under compensated. They were wrong; they weren’t as good as they thought and I’m fine they decided to leave. (Some people also left because they got insanely good offers elsewhere and I genuinely congratulated them and wished them well).

Talk about your compensation with your coworkers. Then use that information to demand fair compensation.

That’s great for the cofounders and current execs, who are probably all getting very low interest loans secured by their equity.

How do the rest of the employees and ex-employees get to realize the value of their efforts?

Correct. Atherton isn't a great example. There's literally no downtown, so any homeless people would have to set up camp right outside some (very rich) person's (giant) single family home on a street with no sidewalk. Even in less affluent parts of the Bay Area unhoused people typically cluster in business or industrial districts rather than residential neighborhoods filled with single family homes.

You see unhoused people in downtown Menlo Park, Palo Alto, and Los Altos which are almost as wealthy as Atherton, and there was temporary outrage last year when it was reported that Menlo Park PD had paid for a one-way cab ride for one of the regular unhoused residents up to Pacifica (they claimed that she asked them to get her there so she could get her hair cut by a friend).

What PragmaticPulp said.

I also watched an acquired founder act out. Although in my case they exited without leaving a bunch of money on the table, they made life unpleasant for people in both the acquired and acquiring company before and after they left. There are people who worked with them for years who would never join another startup with them because they were so self-indulgent.

It’s only 104 weeks for (presumably) a lot of money, and you are (presumably) getting a lot more out of this than the rest of the employees at your acquired company who (presumably) didn’t get a lot of say over who acquired them (unlike you).

Bury your ego and focus on creating the best possible outcome for the people who bet on you when your company was young and success was not assured. Presumably some of them are planning to stay with the acquiring company long-term; don’t create a situation where they get branded as “troublemakers” because of something you do now.

You might have the opportunity to be personally influential in the strategic direction of the (bigger) acquiring company. That might not be your first choice of long-term career, but right now you have an opportunity to do something different that might actually be fun (for a while).

Even if you don’t and your job is literally “integration” for the next two years just suck it up and do the best job you can for your people.

If you are planning to exit ASAP then even the politics can be fun because they don’t really impact you long term. Spend your time figuring out who the players are, who has the power, what motivates them. Find the team that was trying to build whatever you are now providing (and who hate you with a passion for taking the money they could have used) then defang them or co-opt them. At the very least make sure that your team don’t inadvertently walk into the middle of some political fight.

That said, this is also your opportunity to be literally irresponsible. You were in charge of a startup. You couldn’t really unplug and the buck stopped with you. Now (presumably) you are a couple of layers down in the org. Enjoy the new luxury of showing up late on Monday, leaving early on Friday, having a regular lunch break, disconnecting over the weekend, taking all your PTO.