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I found this article very confusing. While the wage is very low ($19000) the overall issue is the cost of rent. I could understand if the letter was directed to her landlord. Cost of utilities, travel and food would all be liveable for a year if the rent was halved by a room mate or rent control. It doesn't make sense to get mad at the company providing you with most of what you need to survive.
Also surely you know before deciding on the Bay Area that you're going to have either a min acceptable salary or a max acceptable rent. Saying yes to two things that don't add up is a recipe for a cycle of self inflicted misery.
Companies factor in local cost of living into their salary packages and the author is pointing out the business problems (i.e. high turnover of entry level employees) caused caused when Yelp failed to do this.
Salaries in New York are higher than those in Des Moines, and if companies want the benefits associated with locating in the Bay Area they are going to have to pay employees more. Even entry-level and lower-skilled ones.
Let's assume she was getting $12 an hour to do that work. That salary is ridiculously low for the Bay Area. Granted, they are paying for health, life, and dental insurance premiums. Still, most companies in lower COL areas pay at least $12 an hour for customer service work.
Apparently her poverty is a bit of an exaggeration.
To everyone criticizing the author for various "failings" such as lack of personal finance skills, getting an English degree, choosing to live in the Bay area: exactly whom do you think is going to fill this role under the parameters the employer is offering? Would it help you be happier if it was someone in the same situation who chose not to raise the issue publicly?
Nobody, until the employer puts up wages to make the job pay enough? That's how a free market works - if people are willing to do the work at an absurdly low wage, that's what'll happen.
If you want a different outcome, you either need some form of housing change in SF, organised labour, or realistic minimum wage laws.
The author has failed the open letter litmus test, where the positive result is reserved for thoughtful discourses of potential public interest or concern. This Medium post read more like something you tell your friends after a few drinks - and even then, they would be silently thinking, "We're all in the same boat but I haven't sunk yet so quit complaining!"
At the end of the day, the author - like anybody living in the free world - has the choice to pack and move to a more accommodating work/home situation.
You seem to be under impression that the issue she raises is somehow not 'Talia is an entitled person unable to critically evaluate and plan her life'
> exactly whom do you think is going to fill this role under the parameters the employer is offering? Would it help you be happier if it was someone in the same situation who chose not to raise the issue publicly?
Thats something for employer to think about and solve, not internet mobs.
"who", not "whom"
What a horrible idea. How could this person think that this would benefit them in any way? She got fired, and secured herself a spot in endless unemployment. In San Francisco, no less, where her mounting debt prevents her from buying groceries and paying her phone bill.
Seriously, I would never ever hire someone who wrote something like this. This is a one way ticket to being eternally jobless. Her best next course of action is to delete the hell out of that post.
And then she has the gall to ask for donations to her paypal and venmo? Lord. Give me a break.
I'm saddened to read such dismissive comments on HN. I think it takes someone to have been in a similar position to understand the plight of the OP. The CEO had a chance to fix this and do the right thing, but firing her was the easy thing to do.
> Seriously, I would never ever hire someone who wrote something like this.
The fact that nobody writes about these issues is the reason why some companies take their non-tech employees for granted.
Did she actually get fired for writing this? I agree it was in poor taste. I think a lot of it was trying to be funny, but failed.
The author has an English degree and is interested in writing things that people read. The article is well written.
This may be a new concept for you, but people don't always do things for their own benefit. She might have thought that it was worth writing this even though it wouldn't benefit her.
If I worked at Yelp I might be questioning why we spend so much money on frivolous things like coconut flavored water vs. providing our customer support co-workers with a better wage.
This applies to tech companies more widely. Would you take less snacks, less free beer, less hiring gimmick benefits to increase the wages of those making the least at your company?
Taxes are high enough (especially on high income employees) that if the employer can count it as an expense, and it doesn't count as employee income, then it's worth providing as long as the employee would be willing pay ~60% of its cost from their post-tax income. Factor in bulk discounts and the figure is more like 50%.
Unfortunately, the debate on payroll/income taxation never really addresses such distortions, and gets stuck on "come on, an extra 10% isn't as big a deal for you".
probably because the pool of candidates for positions that imply better wage is much smaller and it's harder to find and recruit a candidate, so such small things like free beer and snacks become more important?
ps also, most likely wage of those making the least in the company has no correlation to goods such as free food etc.
Never write these kinds of letters unless you're sure the first response isn't going to be "You're only tech support. Good luck finding a new job."
In fact, it's never a good idea to write these kinds of things in the first place.
Heck, I work for a great company that provides free snacks (credit for the vending machines) and unlimited free sodas/sparking waters/coconut water/etc, and I'm not going to complain about any of it, even if I dislike some of the flavors or my favorite is out of stock for a day or two...
> In fact, it's never a good idea to write these kinds of things in the first place.
She was trying for her own version of "The things we think but do not say!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TohbD69ugSA
The only thing I got out of this was that the author needs to learn personal finance skills.
If she just got a roommate and sold her car, she could easily afford to eat and more. I can't imagine how one person who claims to spend a lot of time at work manages to rack up a $120 PG&E bill.
They claim they make $8.15/hr after taxes. That's around $16k/yr. I don't know how well they are budgeting, but I wouldn't want to try to live in the bay area on that salary. This letter might not have been a good idea, but I don't see how she had a decent job.
Yeah, I know. I wouldn't think of living without roommates in the bay area at her age.
It sounds like she moved to the bay area with a fantasy about what her life would be like, and some optimistic ideas about work, and she never stopped to do the math.
Hopefully she'll learn from this experience. Everyone has to learn the value of planning and thinking strategically at some point in time - for some it's 14, for others it's 40.
She totally needs roommates. It appears she has $221/mo after paying rent to go to everything else. That's financially suicidal. If she got just one roommate to share that $1245 apartment, she'd almost have the $600 she said she wanted.
I am astounded that someone with so little compassion exists.
$8.15 an hour after taxes.
Could her point have been made about the state of bottom ranking tech workers without naming Yelp? This is not a rhetorical question.
Specifics of the author's personal situation aside, it's unclear why any well funded tech company in San Francisco is paying poverty wages for positions that seem to require more aptitude than similar paying jobs. It doesn't make sense from an economical standpoint if employee churn is as high as she claims, because hiring/interviewing/training costs a non-zero amount.
>it's unclear why any well funded tech company in San Francisco is paying poverty wages
Because they can? Isn't it how it works.
This is just not the way to deal with the problem, shaming the CEO and company publicly in full view of the Internet, more so when you're a current employee of the company.
This is juvenile, imho.
Did she first try reaching out to the CEO privately? She could've sent this same message to him in an email to get his attention. I'm absolutely empathetic to her situation (living on $16K a year is something I can't even begin to fathom) but this ain't the way to go about it. It's not slavery.
Yelp (and many, many other corporations) can and should do better, in providing a livable wage to their employees. The coconut waters, roasted almonds, and kombucha should go away. It's a waste of money appeasing to overly pampered engineers (I'm an engineer, btw) and saving costs paying brutal wages to the lower-rung employees.
Companies need to learn to shed fat, not muscle.
All that aside, this really shows poor judgement on the part of the person venting like this in public.
There is no such thing as "Shaming a CEO." It's part of the job to get shit on, and to handle it.
You didn't explain why this way was incorrect, juvenile, or poor judgement.
She dismisses it as irrelevant, but this part (in italics) really stood out as the important insight:
>Coming out of college without much more than freelancing and tutoring under my belt, I felt it was fair that I start out working in the customer support section of Yelp/Eat24 before I’d be qualified to transfer to media. Then, after I had moved and got firmly stuck in this apartment with this debt, I was told I’d have to work in support for an entire year before I would be able to move to a different department. A whole year answering calls and talking to customers just for the hope that someday I’d be able to make memes and twitter jokes about food. If you follow me on twitter, which you don’t, you’d know that these are things I already do.
It seems she would have done better to get mentorship in building up awareness of her tweets so she could have a kind of "portfolio" to show off to media companies.
This is not to put the blame on her, but highlight a more general problem with the labor market, and how bad it is at connecting candidates with positions they're qualified for, and how employers end up putting unnecessary barriers as a filter. If the labor market were more transparent, we would have less problem with discrimination as well, since employers could see more of the good aspects of candidates rather than judge merely by the bad.
One of the reason why I want to limit or remove anti-discrimination laws is that I want to focus on more effective and less costly methods instead. I suggested a compromise to limit the laws to manual labor and the like.
Personally, I am more interested in the general practice of doing things like this than the exact nature of the complaints. Particularly, I want to fix the problems and the CEO should be able to respond too.
Depending on how much reach this gets, it may have been a brilliant career move for her, though I don't think it was intentional really. (Edit: That is, I think she was being genuine when writing this and I don't think this was a "PR Stunt" or whatever the individual level of that would be)
She has a degree in English and wants to be a writer. She writes a real person's perspective on income inequality during the presidential election debates where it's a major campaign issue. On top of that she even gets fired for it, making the whole thing even more authentic.
I wouldn't be surprised if she manages to get a job offer from a left leaning publication relatively soon.
I read this almost as a form of 'suicide by cop' in the workplace.
To me it reads as though the author is unhappy with the job they signed up for, but instead of exerting the mental fortitude to resign, is instead throwing a public tantrum lashing out at the CEO in public.
What was the imagined outcome? All that will come of tarnishing the employers brand and degrading yourself like this will be an immediate dismissal and a social 'blacklisting' preventing future job opportunities.
Is that the desired outcome? I feel like this discussion thread is going to outlive the authors career.
The biggest issue here is the rent. You can definitely find places in the East Bay, near BART stations, for less than $1000 for a bedroom/studio. Add a roommate, and you're looking at less than $500 per month for rent.
And if you're willing to live in a somewhat crappier area, you can might be able to go as low as $300-400/month with a roommate.
Why are Yelp's CSRs based in SFBA to begin with?
follows her twitter link.
>> 30 yr old white dudes are evil mansplainers ...something something, paypal me money.
Closes browser tab.
Is there some sort of secret template out there for e-begging, I don't understand why I am to give her my money. Why particularly her, what about the rest of customer reps at Yelp.
If we dehumanize others we dehumanize ourselves. We are not objects, we are not economic systems, we are living social beings with all the flaws and all the potential, each and every one of us.
The individual clearly has to wisen up, and this reads like a welcome to the real world but that should not detract in any way from the real suffering caused by exploitative wages.
If a full time Yelp 'job' does not allow an individual to afford basics like shelter and food, let alone education, healthcare or family on what basis does it qualify to call itself a 'job'? This is exploitation.
The individual is not demanding luxuries from life, it can't be 'entitled' to expect basics like food and shelter after a day's work. So is it the individual or Yelp that is behaving in an entitled manner? And to fire someone for pointing this feels fundamentally wrong and boneheaded.
There is zero point for Zuckerberg or any other SFO millionaire to have billions in their accounts they can't use while real human beings who work for them have to suffer like this for months on end with rice bowls. How does that make any sense, in any way?
The cold and impoverished view on this thread justifies dismissing out of hand any 'concerns' from engineers on threads about outsourcing, work visas or any social thread that requires empathy as simply the market speaking. If you can't empathize with others don't expect empathy when it comes to your own personal situation?
You can't complain about outsourcing and also justify the market and unrealistic wages as one logically leads to another.
It's a real shitty situation. The Bay Area has a very clear rent control issue. But in the real world, when these opportunity costs stop being, companies relocate and allocate resources to regions where living wages and happy workers make sense.
But i'm struggling to be sympathetic here. Maybe not being in SF contributes to that perspective.
Isn't employment-at-will wonderful? /sarcasm
It would be way more difficult to fire someone in any other developed country.
Long winding story for the final line to be the real sell;
"...but any help until I find new employment would be extremely appreciated. My paypal is tjbenora@gmail.com."
TL;DR I don't like my job, give me money.
test
Yelp CEO and his HR can bla-blah-blah all they want but reality is this: the company and its executives are making millions while some of their lowest paid coworkers are literally starving. This is f..d up.
I think the issue that Talia Jane is raising here is that the company (Yelp) can easily fix this problem for their own low pay employees by raising wages or subsidizing housing but instead the company decides to turn a blind eye on this issue.
What will it cost Yelp to raise standard of living for their lowest paid co-workers? a few million a year perhaps? Will it really make a huge difference in profits for the company in the long run?
Is it all about making money for the corporations in America today? Is this the world we want our kids to live in?