Did you incorporate in US and move your family to the US? Did the pressure to do long hours cease once you finished the YC programme and got funding?

> Our lives, and the lives of our kids are much better for it.

This implies some level of financial success from your participation :-)

I would actually go so far to say that if you are doing a startup and have kids, YC is by far your best chance of creating a successful startup without having to go through financial distress. In that sense it is the most family friendly incubator. Having done 4 startups always with kids, I speak of experience.

> When you have kids you are more aware of the consequences of failing, you value your time more and are less likely to "play house" as PG calls it, in my opinion.

Yes I agree with this. I think having kids is kind of training for some aspects of start-up life. Definitely in juggling a lot of things at once with limited time.

In terms of success I just wanted to know if it carried on beyond the YC incubator period and it sounds like it has so well done and good luck with it :-)

"It was hard and it required sacrifice." because of the implicit bias brought up by the GP. For someone in their mid twenties, no relationship or dependents, moving for 3 months is no big deal. Good, even.

No, how did you get that? I'm also not suggesting they shouldn't. It's just not at all what I was talking about.

I feel that while it is very important to have honest discussions regarding employee expectations, in this particular case Andreas is being particularly disingenuous and stating facts that are plainly false. As the CEO of Unbabel, I find it hard to let wrong factual information be posted about Unbabel. There is a great deal of subjectivity in these matters and we are sensitive to the fact that being fired is not an easy thing, which is why I will try to stick to the facts. Despite the unwarranted distraction all this caused, we wish to put this matter behind us and wish Andreas well in his future endeavors.

The offer letter he received, which was in English, stated clearly the “at will” nature of the contract. The relevant clause is below.

- "While we hope that your employment with the Company will be mutually satisfactory, employment with the Company is for no specific period of time. As a result, either you or the Company is free to terminate your employment relationship at any time for any reason, with or without cause. This is the full and complete agreement between us on this term. Although your job duties, title, compensation and benefits, as well as the Company’s personnel policies and procedures, may change from time-to-time, the “at-will” nature of your employment may not be changed except by an express writing signed and dated by both you and the President of the Company."

This was also explained thoroughly upon signing of the actual contract, which was a standard contract of full time employment within the Portuguese law, which includes 3 months trial period, by default. At the time we did not have our contract translated to English, which is why we took great pains to make sure everything was clear, but shortly after all the contracts were translated to English.

Furthermore, as I stated before, when he was let go we gave him more severance than was required, we paid him one extra month of salary and added another $1000 on top of it to compensate for unforeseen expenses. We have tried to the best of our ability to not make sure that Andreas had enough to get back to Sweden, if that was what he wished.

As Andreas admits, the company loaned him money to pay rent, helped him find a house, and treated him with respect, courtesy and welcomed him to the team. Andreas worked with 4 different co-workers and got negative feedback from all of them. There was a fundamental problem of communication with Andreas and there appeared to be a systematic misunderstanding of goals, as well as constant exacerbation of minor problems.

Communication is two-way channel, so obviously this was not necessarily the fault of the individual, and a high growth startup is certainly an environment that is suitable for misunderstandings, since we rely on a lot of assumptions, which is why over communication is extremely important. In any case it felt to us that there wasn’t a good fit between Andreas and the team. We hired 8 employees around the same period, and 7 of them continue to be productive, happy and valuable members of the team. Of the 8 employees, 5 are not Portuguese, creating a very diverse group.

Andreas himself was very happy until the day he was fired, which shows that he was unaware of the consequences of his behaviour, or even of the issues that existed already, which is both potentially a core reason for the problems of communication and why the decision was unexpected.

This particular situation will certainly make us improve our hiring and screening processes in order to improve the fit and I thank the HN community for pointing out ideas we can try, like remote working and better defined trial periods. It is also important that we improve employee communication and give more concise feedback to employees.

Unbabel is committed to being an international company, with employees from many countries. We pay well above Portuguese average and our goal is to hire the best individuals from anywhere in the world to be part of something meaningful.

We are working hard to solve a hard problem in human communication and take very seriously the fact that we need exceptional people in our team in order to to achieve our vision. We are fortunate to have an amazing team and will continue to strive for maintaining high standards and good culture fit.

Andreas acquired an unfortunate view of Portugal while he was here. We tried hard to make his experience a wonderful one and Portugal is without a doubt an amazing place to live. We have a great climate, it is very safe, most people speak English, it is a modern place and it is very easy to get 100MB internet speed in your home. It is close to the US and Portugal has always had a hacker mentally, since the days of the discoveries and Vasco da Gama, much due to the need to find solutions to being surrounded by Spain, which at the time was a problem. These and many other things is why Algarve (south of Portugal) was rated the best place in the world to retire by Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathleen-peddicord/best-places...).

If you are curious about Unbabel’s hiring practices and what is like to work at Unbabel, I would be happy to answer personally.

1.) Unbabel is a YC company that recently raised 1.5M

2.) Andreas is a contractor that was given a 3-month at-will contract, for a job that required him to move to Portugal from Sweden.

3.) He worked for 1 month and then was let go and given pay for 1.5 months.

4.) He managed to lose all his money that he made while working for Unbabel, due to a 4 month rental agreement that Unbabel helped him secure a week before Unbabel fired him.

I am not sure if the founders are psychopaths, but there are clearly psychopathic behaviors here. Here's an employee that put his trust into the company to move and sign a contract he couldn't understand, and the company did the following things:

1.) Could not even pay out 1.5 month of contract left (after raising 1.5M)

2.) Could not handle the rental situation

3.) Could not help this guy land on his feet

4.) Could not apologize to Andreas after the article has posted, or manage to help compensate

5.) Continues to answer with posts that try to emphasize how great it is to work for the company or work in Portugal

If this wasn't a YC company we would be alot harder on the company.

I'd challenge vasco_ to take a look at what this situation is like from Andreas' perspective, and then explain why an apology or greater assistance to him was unnecessary or impossible.

Just because you write something in a contract does not make it so. Labor laws exist for a reason, and chances are that the "at will" nature of the contract would have not been cause if you had fired him after the three-month trial period.

As someone who has flown halfway across the world for a job, I feel for Andreas (luckily for me things have turned out better than for him). The thing I'm trying to figure out is not only whether what happened was legal, but also whether what you did was, for lack of a better phrase, a dick move.

I can understand that hiring people can be difficult to get right. But if you ask someone to move to a different for you, if you decide it's not right in the end, not giving them some sort of severance (even if it's just 2 weeks pay) doesn't seem like the "startup" thing to do.

I've only been on the employee side of the relationship, so there might be things I'm not seeing. But if you hired 8 people in the same period (and you weren't planning on firing the guy from the outset), I can't see it being a cash flow problem. That money could be considered part of hiring costs, and the professional relationship could terminate as amicably as possible.

I don't think you really get credit for 'treating him with respect', if (according to your description) you seem to have caught him by surprise by letting him go immediately. Most people can't find jobs on a 24 hour notice. Loaning him money to help pay for rent is cool, but should also have been a sign to you that maybe he didn't have much money to deal with becoming jobless.

I can understand letting him go if he didn't fit the team. I can't understand letting him go after uprooting him without helping him transition back.

Andreas' complaint is that Unbabel violated Portugese labor law with regards to his employment, by terminating him prematurely, and nothing you've said indicates that his complaint is without merit.

Your comments here and elsewhere on HN reflect a consistently poor understanding or disregard of the legal and regulatory environment you have chosen to locate your business in. You're a startup, but that doesn't excuse you from following the law.

About a week before they fired me they helped me land a 4 month contract for a new apartment and even lent me the money for the deposit and two months rent to be deducted from future pay checks. When they fired me they deducted everything from my final pay, and since I couldn't afford to fulfill my rental contract I never got the deposit back.

Is that statement true? If it is, the most charitable thing I can say is that you are either deeply dishonest or else borderline incompetent. Surely you knew that Andreas was not a good fit by that time. Why would you go out of your way to screw him over? If it is not true, what actually happened?

This was also explained thoroughly upon signing of the actual contract, which was a standard contract of full time employment within the Portuguese law, which includes 3 months trial period, by default. At the time we did not have our contract translated to English, which is why we took great pains to make sure everything was clear, but shortly after all the contracts were translated to English.'

While there are similar terms in the German law (6 months in most cases) at least in Germany it makes a really bad impression if people get fired while in the trial period. This is about one step above "hellbanning" the employee, since you can rely on the fact that the next employer where you apply, will ask lots of question if you were fired in the trial period. Thus if a company fires people unfairly while the employee was in trial, the employee has reasons to react really harshly.

I really don't know how this is in Portugal, but if there is a similar culture, I can understand Andreas Wild completely.

I am a co-founder and CEO of Unbabel. I feel that I should respond to these allegations.

1 - The contract we had with Andreas was full time employee contract. The first three months were "at will" which means that either one was free to terminate the relation at any time. We have a signed contract to prove it and I am happy to share a sample of the contract to anyone that wants. When we fired him, we not only paid him what we owed, but we paid him an extra 15 days of work in addition to $1000 dollars to offset any unexpected costs. Which we didn't have to. We also have receipts of all the transactions, If need be.

2 - We fired him because he was a terrible fit to Unbabel. It became clear very quickly that it would not work. In the end the responsibility of hiring him was ours, and we are really sorry it did not make the right choice. This made it clear that we have room for improvement in our hiring processes.

3 - He did really well on interviews and we went to considerable lengths to bring him to Portugal. We paid his airplane ticket, we lent him money for rent, we helped him search for a house, amongst other things. I am personally really proud that Unbabel is an example of how we can capitalize on excellent talent in Europe and Andreas was the first person from Sweden. We have people from 5 nationalities at Unbabel and we pride ourselves in having a great environment to work with.

4 – We believe that the culture of the company is extremely important and we devote a lot of energy to it. Everyone in Unbabel is expected to participate actively in the company Meaning that they are part of the planning, and encouraged to be autonomous in creating the best products possible. We truly enjoy working with each other and spending time together. For example, every week we go surfing on Wednesday morning in the beautiful beaches of Lisbon. It is not mandatory, but every one has loved it so far. It is an amazing way make sure that every week we hang out together outside the company.

We try really hard to make sure that working at Unbabel is an amazing experience. We pay well above average for Portugal, which means that you get a really good life here. We offer health insurance, surf lessons, catered lunches once a week and beers on Friday afternoon. We give you autonomy and agency, we are transparent about the company every employee has a chance to make a difference. Come and see for yourself what it is like to work at the best Translation Startup in the world. A position just opened up :)

The OP basically called into question the quality and stability of Unbabel's platform ("The code was a tangled mess of mindless duplication, half-implemented features and misleading comments. Of the few automated tests that existed, most didn't even run anymore") and the competence of the people behind it ("The team lead was the only one who knew anything about the system and he was either busy trying to patch things up by himself or working with the other person they had hired for my position before I got there"). The subtle implication of the post: the OP may have been terminated because he recognized these things.

Are the OP's claims true? Who knows, but the response here doesn't directly address them at all. Instead, there's ambiguous language like "terrible fit", corporate-speak like "we believe that the culture of the company is extremely important" and a poorly-timed "A position just opened up :)"

Frankly, if I was the founder of a tech company and I made the decision to respond publicly to a situation like this, the claims about my platform and the competence of my team would be my focus and I'd address them head on. After all, such claims could become very harmful when encountered by prospective employees, customers and partners. Given that, it's curious they were completely ignored.

In my experience, a lot of code is like this, and the majority of startup code is like this. I have found there's almost zero correlation between startup success and good coding practices. I have no data, but I suspect there's a negative correlation.

Before you protest, I know that your code is a shining example of clarity. But if you consider all the incentives for a startup, there's much more value in being experimental, and highly responsive to customer demands, than there is in charting a stable, long term course. People celebrate pivots like it's cool, but this is what it does to the code.

Just a forewarning for anyone who is going from a more corporate world into startupland.

The idea here is that you do the best you can within the constraints, not that you use your start-uppishness as an excuse to be sloppy or to produce crap.

In fact, the majority of the real messes I see are not in start-ups but in more established companies where the original developers have long since moved on. Large codebases where very few people (if any!) have an idea of what is really going on.

I have been at startups where it's a total mess that will never be cleaned, and I've been at startups where the code is always tip-top because everyone knows you get big B2B points for implementing their dream feature right after a regular "how are you liking our service" followup.

I haven't worked at mega-corps, but I've seen bits of code that is so much worse than imaginable that I expect there are places that scrape pretty far below the bottom of the barrel, but that might just be a volume issue (the worst 1% of code will be mostly mega-corp code because most of _all_ code is in mega-corps).

If the founder made an in-depth reply explaining that "No, we don't suck, we use language X, framework Y and methodology Z", then that just opens up a pointless side discussion about whether the X+Y+Z stack sucks, and how much exactly.

All that will remain in search engines, so in a few years' time the company will appear in public searches as a company that uses X+Y+Z even if they have moved on.

Note that this wasn't a debate about languages, frameworks or methodologies. The OP flat out referred to the company's code as "tangled mess of mindless duplication, half-implemented features and misleading comments" and claimed that only one employee "knew anything about the system." The response here mentions surfing on Wednesday but doesn't dispute any of the OP's claims about the state of the company's technology and technology organization. That looks horrible.

As a company you want to shut this sort of discussion down as quickly as you can. A detailed rebuttal may appear to do that but doesn't - the more you say, the more you raise questions, invite rebuttals and encourage further debate.

Maybe this doesn't answer some claims and they suffer some very slight damage because of that, but far worse damage is often (possibly even usually) done by detailed replies which keep the story going and fuel the fire.

He wouldn't be the first one.

I had a bunch of jobs, where I had to work with crappy code and have seen many people getting "terminated" because they prefered to complain about it.

I complained too, but I worked with what was given, when it didn't change after a few years (most of these "the whole system is fucked up changes don't come easy) I just quit.

These things are self evident to any programmer who isn't in their first year of work. I can't see anyone being fired over recognizing what their experience allows, especially since you hired them for that experience.

Why? A former employee criticizes the company they were fired from -- that carries essentially zero weight to pretty much anyone, and you seem to be among very, very few who took it at face value. Heck, even if they weren't fired and didn't have the axe to grind, people complain about "spaghetti" code with such vigor and frequency in this industry that it has become essentially meaningless: It's the standard fall-back when someone is in over their head -- attack others, malign their code and technology, and try to pull up yourself by tearing down others.

Further, how in the world can you complain about them commenting on a "personal" matter, when they are responding to a guy who posted a highly-critical extortion rant. I call it an extortion rant because he even claims that if he warned them that they need to pay up or face his public flailing.

That's incredibly lame.

First, hiring people based on interviews is known to be a bad procedure. To determine if a person fits a company, you have to let them do some actual work first. Working remote for a period of time is good, but if you're looking for an on-site employee: fly them out, pay them and cover all their expenses for a week, and have them work at least three days. Both sides could have figured out so much about each other if you had only done this.

Then, if someone still turns out to be a bad fit long-term, firing that person is a good decision. Both as a CEO and as the company, you have to take the high road, and make sure you're way more generous than you need to be (especially if that employee moved to another country for you). Clearly you went a step in the right direction there as you stated, but it's still not enough. You should have sat down with that guy and figured out together what it would take to get him back home as smoothly as possible.

Finally, your communication style. It's hard to come out on top when you're faced with this kind of criticism. But keep in mind that you allowed this situation to develop in the first place. While it's certainly your responsibility to raise buzz and sound enthusiastic on behalf of your own company, don't fall into the trap of congratulating yourself too much. We're here because something went wrong, not because everything is beyond awesome over there. Acknowledge that. Implement measures to avoid this in the future. And "a position just opened up :)" is certainly not the right tone at the moment.

Most inappropriate HN job posting, ever.

Is it perhaps a culture/language barrier? Do they even realize how callous their little segue is?

Interesting! I will need to be more careful in my own writing... :)

All that to say, props on making the difficult decision early.

Maybe I'm reading too much into your comment, but are you saying that enjoying surfing is a necessary part of your company's “culture fit”?

If someone is physically or otherwise disabled or unable to participate, does that preclude them from being a part of your company?

I'm not at your company to have fun. Beyond a paycheck, job satisfaction and personal growth would be nice, but surfing, nerf guns, pinball etc are things I'd prefer to do in my spare time with friends and family, thanks.

Sure, the annual company retreat or Christmas party are expected, but there's nothing worse than a bunch of co-workers trying to have "fun" because it's an unspoken requirement of the company culture.

What I'm asking about is ”De facto”. If practically, you are letting go of people who can't or won't surf with you on the weekends because of ”culture fit issues”, surfing becomes a de facto (but not de jure) requirement of the job. And the reason I'm asking about it is that it has been mentioned as one of the four points related to letting this employee go. Otherwise, why is it even in the response? Notice that it is not part of the advertisement (which comes later, outside the points).

In Asia on the other hand, it literally is mandatory to socialize with your employer.

It sounds like exactly what you said: OP was a bad fit for this company. Rather than sour grapes and trying to publicly shame Unbabel (for what? Recognizing a bad fit and acting on it?), OP should take this as a lesson learned.

((

EDIT: In light of gamblor956 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8259687)'s response, I should clarify that what I found tasteless and possibly illegal was the posting of this personal information, not the arrangement itself (about which I think it is wisest to offer no opinion).

))

I agree with bkeroack (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8259618) that Andreas's posting this rant publically may not have been desireable (although the poster says that your company was given some warning about the content appearing), but I think that does not give you the ethical right to compound the wrong by complaining about the poster ("he was a terrible fit"), or the ethical or legal right to post sensitive and private information about an employee.

Without commenting on the merits of the situation (I have no idea who is in the right, and think that this kind of unpleasantness should probably not have made the front page), I think that it would have sufficed to say that his allegations are demonstrably untrue, but that you cannot provide documentation due to privacy concerns, without giving personal information about his performance and salary details.

http://www.portugalglobal.pt/EN/Biblioteca/Documents/Portuga...

This is not a complaint. I agree that "terrible" may be a bad word, but not being a correct fit is not wrong.

Not all people are great for all jobs. Even if they have the technical qualities.

A basketball player runs a lot on a game, but that doesn't mean he/she would be a great sprinter, as an example.

Culture fit is needed as much as a technical match

.oO(What's with the code quality though?)

There needs to be great care addressing company culture. It may be clear what those values are when the team is small and made from people with similar backgrounds and life experiences. But how do you expect those values to be transmitted to others? If you don't clearly state your mission, vision and values, then you are going to have a hard time justifying any decisions based on company culture.

I was in the military were they have a thing called mandatory fun time. basically, you are required to go to a bbq or some other "fun" thing. I hated it. I'm one of those people who draw a hard line between work and the rest of my life. when I'm at work, I'm working crazy hard to get the job done. period. when I'm not at work, I'm doing my own thing. period. I have no desire to mix the two.

> beers on Friday afternoon

again, this is a negative, from my perspective. I would much rather be home relaxing or out drinking with my friends then forced to go out with coworkers. I like my coworkers, and we are friends, but the minute you try to take my Fridays away is the minute I start looking for a new job.

I'm an good employee. I work hard and over deliver compared to what I'm payed. but I will not give up my freedom for my job. no way.

and it doesn't matter of you say it isn't mandatory. if you hold company events, they are mandatory. a rose by any other name it's still a rose.

IMO, the obsession with culture fit and team bonding is really just a way to trick engineers into devoting more of their life, mindshare, and personal freedom to laboring for your startup.

For instance, not hiring someone because they don't want to go for beers on a Friday can accidentally become a proxy for excluding certain religions at which point you can be in all sorts of bother legally.

Depending on your content, Unbabel quality is quite good. Our hope is that it will be as good as Gengo.