It sounds as though this guy just got tired of running his company, realized he couldn't sell it for the price he wanted and decided to just walk away from it.
He could have handed the reigns over to someone else. He could have sold for a lower price- there's always someone willing to buy if you go low enough. He could have pivoted the company to doing something he was more excited about. He could have done anything.
But the most important thing he could have done was be transparent and open with the people his decisions would impact. Being a leader means you stand there and deliver the bad news, and take the heat from people mad at you. Dropping a bomb and then hiding to avoid the flak for it is a cowardly move.
Adding "Ryan Carson" to the list of leaders I don't want to work for in the future.
There isn’t always someone to buy a company at any price. That is definitely a myth. There are a lot of risks to an acquisition (eg sexual harassment, IP litigation, security vulnerabilities etc) and if an acquirer doesn’t think the upside is worth it, then you’d have to pay them to acquire you.
When you buy a company you buy its debts and liabilities also, be it sexual harassment issues to be settled, or dumping toxic waste all of this has to be factored in to the risk of acquisition.
On a side note, without knowing the details, its a bit unfair to lay all this at the CEOs door step. It very well could be he was given the boot, and as part of his exit, he is given severance with a non-disclosure agreement.
Sells his house, buys a boat, and walks away, it seems more like he was pushed than it would be, I just got tired of dealing with it.
Wouldn't be the first time a CEO got ousted because of a failed acquisition.
I have no knowledge of him, or who he is as a person, just saying we don't know the current narrative is accurate.
"Carson sold a mansion for over $3.2 million, but couldn’t afford to pay severance to his employees?
Apparently."
"Carson sold a mansion for over $3.2 million, and bought a boat, but couldn’t afford to pay severance to his employees?
Apparently."
I haven't had a chance to look into how Treehouse started. However, a CEO's role is not to fund a company with their personal finances. If the CEO bought a boat with company funds, or received windfall bonus, that would be an issue. While these are examples of tone deaf behavior from this CEO, I don't understand why these questions are being harped on like this.
A little weird to assume he “made” $3.2 million from the house. Who knows what he bought it for, what he owed on it, what his profit in the transaction was, etc.
Maybe he’s neck deep in debt? Maybe he spent all his money on a boat assuming a windfall would come that never came. There can be any number of reasons someone would sell their house as their company goes under.
Seems pretty clear he was fully planing on the acquisition to go through. Which may be haphazard, but happens.
The most likely answer to, “Why did he fire everyone instantly with no severance?” is “Because there is no money.” It seems very likely after the acquisition fell through there was simply nothing left.
Nobody wants to layoff 90% of staff as CEO, so it is understandable to put it off for as long as possible. It's hard to admit things are that bad. If they did the layoffs early enough to have enough cash to pay severance, then this story would have come out months ago. Instead, the CEO held out hope that a deal would come through to make it no longer his problem. The deal fell through, and now they've burned through the cash that could have been used for severance. So instead of severance, they kept their jobs that much longer which is essentially what severance is meant to cover.
I'm not excusing CEO's behavior. It was 100% poorly managed. However, it is a learnable lesson for others that could be in this position. This is a forum full of startups or hopefuls. Not all startups will succeed. There are tough decisions to be made. Nobody will be happy about potential loss of their job. There's always the decision to keep people informed with the potential of panic ship jumping vs going all in on a bet of selling the company.
You're factually correct, but one of the CEO's functions is maintaining morale amongst employees by at least appearing to exercise inspiring leadership. I don't know enough about the company to blame Carson for its failure, but optics matter in his role.
Meh. I’m pretty annoyed about over-the-top wokeness too, but this was shit management. It is understandable that people would be furious and thus inclined to amplify every slight.
Sure, there might be lack of inspiring leadership, but really can you expect a CEO of a failing startup to sell his house and distribute the proceeds between workers? I don't think this is a reasonable expectation, inspiring or not.
yeah, so he's a bad boss. that in and of itself is not a crime.
I get it. People are pissed off about not having a job and the no severance is just salt in the wound. Lashing out at the CEO is obvious and justifiable. Stretching that ire into the CEOs personal finance is not serving the cause in a meaningful way. Absolutely, bitch&moan about his Insta posts. Bitch&moan about the fact the CEO wasn't willing to sacrifice some salary as a gesture to offset. Lots of examples of how badly this CEO handled this. Definitely will not look good in his future CEO job interviews.
No one said anything about criminal liability: this is just about being a scumbag. A CEO is a receptacle of trust: they get to see things rank-and-file don't get to see. Leveraging that information asymmetry to profit at the risk of people who put just as much (in a lot of cases more) effort and skill into the success of the company as you do may not make you a criminal in a legal system that has decided a few decades ago to commit civilization suicide by grinding away labor protections, but it sure does make you a scumbag.
Live in modest house and give the people who sacrificed for you like a week of severance or something. Anything.
apologies for introducing a new phrase into an emotional conversation. I didn't mean "is not a crime" in the literal sense of the word. It's just a phrase used to mean things other than criminal activity are causing someone to receive attention like this.
It's not just about him spending money. It's about him clearly not doing everything he can to fix the situation.
When you're buying a boat and spending all your time sailing as you are supposed to be putting together a deal to save the company, and then that deal falls through, people are going to wonder if maybe there was more you could have done if you hadn't been buying boats and playing.
The "doing everything [you] can to fix the situation" won't work if the other party isn't interested. For all we know, this may have been the case. And there are many valid reasons for someone to focus on their personal life. My point is, we don't have the full picture.
It absolutely is. When your boss asks for overtime and weekends to support the company in a startup culture, they take the most valuable thing any of us has. The exchange is about more than money and time: they are also expected to pour their time and effort into this one idea with similar, if not equal, sacrifices. They sink or swim with you.
This putz was too cowardly to lead honestly, and too incompetent to get a deal done to protect the livelihood of his team. If he knew he was checked out, he could have explored restructuring and letting the team buy in, maybe allowed them to reach out to their network and replace him. Instead all those hours of effort were reduced to nothing while he ran away from his responsibilities.
Fuck people like that, and fuck their boats and their Instagram feeds. They steal time away from our families for no benefit to us our society at large.
If you as a CEO feel burnt out etc and can't be bothered anymore to run the company and can't find a buyer, but the folks who joined your company are still invested because they believe in the vision, then let them buy the company from you. I'm sure some arrangement could have been made, even if you're not getting the millions you were expecting.
At least you'd protect your personal brand when you go and do your next venture.
But the way Ryan handled this is really poor - especially those sailing boat shots, while his employees had to worry about finding the next job.
Poor leadership and he totally burnt his personal brand imo.
What it clearly demonstrates is that the CEO was far less invested in the company than those who worked for him.
What the attempts at building a norm along the lines of, "It isn't a crime, so people shouldn't talk about his finances" is about attempting to keep people from noticing that is almost always the case. It is class-defense, and what won't look good in future CEO interviews is that he was gauche-enough to draw attention to the difference between incentives-in-theory and the real world.
I don't understand, why are you so eager to nitpick the exact manner in which some anonymous Treehouse employee gets to critique his fucking asshole of a CEO?
Because it cheapens the argument. Complain all you want on the fact you have an absentee CEO where the employees are struggling with the decisions that were made while said CEO is galavanting around. Absolutely, complain away. The CEO does not owe the company money to fund severance packages. To comment about that is just lowering the signal to noise ratio.
Wouldn't it weirder if he kept the mansion? Perhaps he might not have been able to pay the mortgage anymore so he sold it? It's a bit shocking how tone deaf the the Instagram posts are though. Not really excusable when you're totally ghosting your company.
Again, how the CEO manages thier personal finances is really no concern and irrelevant to the conversation as long as there was nothing improper with the company's payment arrangement with the CEO.
It really sounds like this CEO just checked out. Sounds like the board should have stepped in and either replaced him for being an ineffective steward of the company. Which just goes to show that the CEO has fault, but there are others that were asleep at the wheel as well.
Severance, in the US, is not a given and is not a mandated thing. If a company is in financial distress, why does it seem that money to pay severance is magically available when they don't have the money to pay wages? Are you suggesting the writing on the wall should have been seen earlier so that they could have made the decision to dismiss the employees while the bank account was flush enough to cover severance?
Except the reason the CEO got rich enough to afford a mansion and a boat is because he accumulated for his personal use the value created by his employees. That alone is reason to ask, "is this really fair?"
Do you have a source saying his $1.8m mansion (his purchase price) was from the value created by his employees? $1.8m homes are certainly expensive, but clearly the board approved his salary and they were the ones primarily funding it, not the employees.
The boat may of been bought from the appreciation of the home.
You should've asked that question when you joined the company and learnt that he had a mansion. Of course you didn't because it's based on a stupid premise that people should be paid based on your perception of fairness.
Fair? It's a corporation. CEOs get paid significantly more than employees. It is a fact of life. You do not have to continue employement at a company if you think the pay scale is not fair. Good luck finding a job where you think things are fair. When you do find that job, please, make a Show HN so that others might be able to leave their unfair situations.
CEOs of publicly traded companies, where a significant chunk of their compensation is stock which can be sold on an open market, sure but not all CEOs.
In my entire career the highest paid people in a private company (including multiple high growth B2B startups) has always been the top sales people. Not the sales manager, not the CEO, an individual contributor Sales person. As you hit more and more above quota, accelerators kick in where you commission percentage increases massively. And our CEO loves writing them those checks because good sales people way more than pay for themselves.
I guess if you assume the structure and systems of 21st century capitalism are "a fact of life", like breathing and reproduction, you could make the argument that it's OK.
because it's a perfect symbol of the breakdown our society is experiencing. His life is completely unaffected by the failure of his company, while the employees who were passionate about the mission are left with nothing.
From what I can tell the company didn’t fail, just downsized. That’s mundane, not ‘a perfect symbol’. Downsized employees of tech companies aren’t ‘left with nothing’ they got paid for the work they did and will have no difficulty finding a new job.
They downsized 90%! Saying that they haven't failed yet strikes me as needlessly pedantic.
Yes, employees of a tech startup are probably compensated pretty well and have great job prospects. However, their wealth is probably negligible compared to the CEO, despite them appearing to care much more about their work than the CEO does. I understand that most people will say that this is fair and the market has determined their worth, but even if that's true the people who get the short end will resent it and see that they have more to gain by toppling the system than by working inside it. Wealth Inequality is an existential threat to western capitalist democracy, and if it's not rectified it will lead to revolution. If you are in favor of our current system and wish to preserve it, wealth inequality must be addressed.
Yeah that’s a really wild take from the authors. Nobody knows what’s that 3.2M is, maybe the guy was in debt, or that was all he had. Sure he doesn’t sound like someone I’d ever want to work even next to, but to suggest that the founder is supposed to burn his personal net worth to the ground to pay off employees of a failed venture is disgustingly entitled and cannibalistic on the authors’ part.
I’d take no severance over some guy having to sacrifice his or his family’s livelihood so that he can provide 10 people with parachutes.
Another case totally of course if that mansion was bought with company funds. In that case it’s fraud and charges.
While it can be put into a work contract, its never been in any contract of mine (I assume it is in contracts for union employees and for some executives). Many states do require that companies above a certain number of employees have to give notice, usually called WARN acts (and it looks like Oregon's requires 60 days notice according to https://www.oregon.gov/highered/institutions-programs/workfo...). Employees do need to pay out any unpaid holiday or sick time (which is why unlimited vacation is bad, since you don't get cashed out).
Normally when you get severance, it's in exchange for liability from lawsuits and to prevent bad press and sharing of trade secrets. What this does is make it much harder to sell Treehouse since there's now a fair amount of liability attached.
I'm trying to find the part that should outrage me and I'm not finding it. Startups fail. You can make up whatever internal metrics you want ("graduation rate" "are students happy?") but at the end of the day, revenue needs to be greater than expenses. If they lose money making students happy, that's a charity, not a business. If they structured the organization as a business, then that's an existential problem.
I look at startup employees as being very similar to investors; instead of investing money, you invest time. Most startup investments fail; the investors lose everything. You have to know that going in.
Nitpicking the instagram posts also seems pretty petty. We're criticizing the CEO for spending time with his family and walking around in the rain? People do stuff outside of work, even though there's work that they could theoretically be doing. Most people consider that healthy, and even CEOs that failed badly still deserve some recreational time. (It would be pretty cringey if the CEO looked up your Instagram account and posted a blog post like "why are you visiting your parents when there's still bugs open against your component!", right?)
(I take particular exception to the "Carson enjoys a climate-related disaster (#hurricanehenri) two days after announcing a severe reduction in force" caption. It's not like he willed the hurricane into existence, or could do anything to stop it. Why are we mad at him for climate change and random natural disasters? The dude is bad at being a CEO, but he's not God!)
Is a company that's been going for 10 years still a startup? Perhaps it's just me, but I just wouldn't assume that joining a 10 year old company (especially one that had essentially been spun out of a another venture, Think Vitamin) was a risky venture in the silicon valley startup kind of a way?
But I strongly agree with you on the metrics thing. Sure, all those feel-good internal metrics are important, but if your subscription business has fewer subscribers this month than last then that's bad news. Complaining that "keeping the company solvent" was the CEO's main focus is a weird thing to complain about.
I have to agree with this. On the basis of results, I'm not sure that this person was a particularly good CEO or leader, but I'm also not sure that I'm qualified to make that judgment.
If you want to be mad about climate change, or economic inequality, or the lack of social safety nets in the USA, that's reasonable, but I'm not really sure that it's fair to pin this on Carson.
Maybe it's because you're looking for 'outrage' in the first place.
What I saw was poor leadership and straight-up callousness. Failing to communicate with affected employees is one thing. Ducking under the cover of 'Google algo killed us' is convenient. But holding off on a formal announcement until the last working week is pure cowardice.
Move along then, the blogpost is meant for regular humans who might actually feel outraged when their seemingly-stable employer (at least through Nov 2022) suddenly decides they don't feel like running the company anymore and burns it to the ground
You have to understand that there is some risk working on social causes versus turning the gears of a money machine. If there weren't any risk, everyone would be working on online learning or curing cancer instead of figuring out how to shave off a nanosecond in an automated trading system or getting newspaper readers to click one more ad.
I work at a startup, and most of our code is open source. That makes the job more enjoyable, but I also realize it comes with a risk. Someone could just read the code, take the best parts, and sell and market it better than us. That's a risk that you just have to live with. And, I can personally mitigate some of the risks -- keep my technical skills sharp, save money, etc.
I empathize with the people that lost their job; it's a huge disruption and their lives will never be the same. But I think it's unfair to blame the CEO for climate change because he enjoyed going for a walk in the rain. It's not related in any way.
Two things that always seem apparent to me when reading missives like this:
1. It's just my opinion, by I find things like this always reflect incredibly poorly on the author, especially since the author appears somewhat clueless as to why someone would think it would show them in a bad light. It would be one thing if there were some egregiously bad behavior (e.g. stories of Adam Neumann come to mind, as do the recent articles about Ozy Media leadership). But this basically just comes off as a bitch session: the CEO is rich, he did a bad job announcing the layoffs, we got no severance, etc. etc. When that happens, you say "fuck that guy" and move on. Nobody really cares about your laundry list of slights.
2. Now, all that said, I normally only see missives like this where leadership tries to build a false emotional bond with employees: "We're a mission-driven company, we're changing the world, we treat each other like family, yada yada." So some (usually less experienced, less jaded employees) take this message to heart and truly do form an emotional bond with the company, so when business conditions change and there are layoffs, they take it incredibly personally. Thus, my point is really that leadership only has themselves to blame when they cultivate a "we're a big family" vibe and then are surprised when people are extra pissed that their "family members" are kicking them to the curb.
Just a bit of advice: treat your employment like business, because that's what it is. You can work hard and take pride in your work, but also understand that you might get cut if the business need arises. Getting laid off always sucks, but I think it's easier to do if you have a healthy detachment from work.
It is astounding to read this point of view that people should just shut the f** up and be OK with being treated like shit because that'S BusiNEss BABY.
What does the author hope to accomplish from this blog post? Congrats, the world now knows he had a CEO who over-promised and under-delivered, and who looks to have handled layoffs at his company poorly. I mean, get in line.
If the author was actually trying to do something with this post (e.g. expose criminal behavior as the recent Ozy Media articles have done, or expose a broken, misogynistic culture in hope of affecting some change like Susan Fowler's post on Uber did), I could understand. But this just seems to be a pissed employee who wants to vent - which I understand, I just don't understand what he wishes to accomplish with this public bitch list.
> It's just my opinion, by I find things like this always reflect incredibly poorly on the author
Ironic considering the comments that follow. Like
> basically just comes off as a bitch session
I do think your points could have merit but you’re articulating them in a rude way that detracts from your argument.
Yes, the love bombing approach to corporate culture in trendy tech startups is a nasty manipulation technique we should all watch out for, but we should also have some respect and compassion for employees that buy into it and get their hearts broken. Should they have known better? Yes. Is this not that bad in the grand scheme of things? Probably. But comments like this don’t help.
Just a bit of (unsolicited) advice: articulate criticism respectfully with empathy for the criticized. It will make your arguments much more effective.
Maybe it is better to elaborate the point really being made, the thing that motivates that people need to tone these things down. People need to be mature enough to accept and be prepared for the fact that the employer that provides them an income can go under and leadership has failed to articulate issues in the company in a timely manner.
The "love bombing" doesn't help, but, of course, they are hiring and retention techniques. I think it is similar to an ideological propaganda that has led to wars. Whether you accept the 'mission' or not, you're out of control in the end unless you are the leadership. When this stuff does come up, at best, all I can do is ignore it, particularly aware of the fact that I worked at a company for a long time, like my current employment and surviving a layoff, company restructures, etc.
Maturing from "my co-workers are my family and we are doing great things" to just seeing it as a job is probably the best thing to do. I hope that instead of raging against this CEO, upset employees instead receive both gainful employment again and a sense that a company is just a company.
When TreeHouse first launched I traded a series of emails with Ryan. He seemed to me to be a nice, genuine guy.
He'd already had success as an entrepreneur, he never needed to ever work again. Yet he challenged himself to build something much bigger that stood a chance to change the world. Sometimes it just doesn't work out.
His actions at the end indicate to me that he was just burned out. But in my opinion he should have announced the firings himself no matter how painful and quit a few months earlier when he could have paid severance, no excuse for that.
I have no idea what's going on of course, but I think this is exactly what would happen when a normally nice and competent CEO of a struggling company goes into a deep burnout.
(Note: i dont know whether Carson was normally nice and competent, but this article itself describes Treehouse as a great place to work and toxic asshole CEOs don't usually build such places. So I'm really just extrapolating from there)
Treehouse was the first online resouce that made programming "click" for me almost 10 years ago when I started thinking about changing careers.
I absolutely loved their short, fun videos followed by quick quizzes and programming challenges. I basically completed everything they had for Ruby, Python, JavaScript, HTML and CSS back in the day.
Unfortunately they didn't keep up the pace with interesting classes, and I would come back after a few years and resubscribe to see mostly the same courses, just re-shot.
I was still recommending Treehouse for people completely new to programming, though.
It is a dire scenario, but I hope they can bounce back from this.
Unrelated to the politics of the company and this post, Treehouse was one of the best products I've ever subscribed to. I learned how to develop Android Apps via TT as a sophomore in college and within a month was working on paid projects. I run a software development firm and have had employees use TT to quickly get up and running. I haven't had close to this experience with other code learning tools.
I'm just a casual observer but I can't help to notice that in one screenshot someone was calling this CEO a "white tech dude" and how we should make him mad. What's up with that phrase lately, started noticing it a bit too often.
Also a person from another screenshot wanted "safe space" in work Slack.
More people have been gaining awareness about the lines along which inequality occurs, and race is one of them, so that must be why you’re seeing the phrase more often lately.
As for the employee who was asking for a safe space to gather with other employees who are being fired on such short notice and without severance, that’s a reasonable request.
There's no denying the inequality that exists in tech. I find the "another white dude" comments don't really add much though and can even come off as veiled racism.
I don’t see how it doesn’t add much—the tweet pointed out his race to point out his privilege. Can you explain where the veiled racism is in that? Because I’d hate to think that we’re actually making the CEO the victim here.
> Can you explain where the veiled racism is in that?
Sure. It implies his success is because of his race. It also implies his bad behavior is because of his race. Both of these statements ignore his agency and individuality, and suggest white people are, as a group, poorly behaved and undeserving of the success they work for.
Attributing negative stereotypes to people based on group characteristics is bigotry, and doing so based on race is racism.
Imagine it were attributing his succeed to being jewish, or his bad behavior to being black. It should be pretty obvious that those would be socially unacceptable. The fact that it's currently popular among some groups to hate white people doesn't make it any less racist.
Implying that his success is about his race is not exactly a racist sentiment though. In order for it to be racist it needs to be discriminatory (heck, by your own definition of racism, success is not a “negative” stereotype). Such an implication points out to the fact that society gives an unfair advantage to some people just because of their race.
> Implying that his success is about his race is not exactly a racist sentiment though.
Agreed. I also agree that the comment can point out privilege. I do think more often than not when people say "white tech dude" they mean it in a negative way, implying that all white guys in tech are the same and bad. Do you ever see this phrase in a more positive light?
No, but that would be because racism or inequality is impossible to see in a positive light unless you actually like it. I still don’t see why seeing racism/i equality as bad is inherently racist in itself.
> more often that not when people say “white tech dude” they mean it in a negative way, implying that all white guys in tech are the same and bad
This is why we’re talking about the specific tweet in the article and not other uses of “white tech bro” that we cannot account for. Context matters. The usage of “white tech bro” here was referring to the archetype of straight white American male in a position of power, which actually comprises majority of people in power in America, which is a long shot from “all white guys in tech are the same and bad”. It’s really just pointing to the privilege and you’re infusing a far-fetched racist connotation to it.
It's political/cultural tribalism and being anti-white is the dominant establishment position in US elite circles (tech, media, some areas of explicit politics etc).
It is a position that suffers no backlash or threats of job loss or cancelling in contrast to anything similar for other identity groups. Similar, industry conferences and hiring practices etc can even explicitly single out and promote favoring other identity groups ("women/minorities who code", explicit racial hiring quotas etc) but could never in a million years pursue similar efforts for white men.
There's a similar issue with online dating: the better an online dating service is at matching people, the higher their subscription churn rate.
A customer who had been using an online dating service for many years is presumably a great revenue source but a bad experience for people they are matched with!
The result of this is that online dating becomes mostly about new user acquisition - you've got to keep new people coming in to keep the service useful.
It's not a charity organization that can run deficit financing. If you have fewer and fewer paying users, you have to make harsh decisions. They are never easy. How one handles those decisions and conversations with the employees that will be affected shows the class of the CEO/board. This example shows they had none.
I’d be frustrated in the author’s shoes but far too much attention is paid to the CEO’s personal finances.
Who knows what he walked away with after he’d sold his house and cleared the mortgage. Presumably he needs to buy another house afterwards. Either way it doesn’t matter in the slightest because that’s not related to the business. What sense would it make to invest personal funds in a failing business? How much of a dent would it have even made with 45 full time employees?
Treehouse seem primarily skewed toward beginners but I wonder if the market for beginner programming and computing content is too saturated? Udemy dominates for paid computing-related video courses (for beginners) and YouTube covers the free tutorials option.
The production quality of the videos at Treehouse is high, but the quality of the instruction varies by teacher.
The link below is to a small, but helpful, YouTube channel called Tech Course Review. It reviews online learning platforms (Udemy, Pluralsight, etc) and has an informative review of Treehouse from December 2020:
> Did he check in individually with any employees? Never.
How the fuck does this author know this? The boss could have spoken to any number of employees with the author being none the wiser. FAQ my arse -- this is a whinge from a disgruntled former employee...
Don't get me wrong, the CEO of this place was probably not the nicest guy, but this is clearly loaded a certain way. The use of the word "never" instead of just plain-vanilla "no" is also a bit of a give-away.
Their product was good when I sampled a few courses, I will say that. I interviewed with them a looong time ago, though, and what I can say is everyone I met there felt really bought in to what they were doing. They were proud to work there, and proud of the product they were creating.
This is all really shitty - startups fail, and companies wind down, sure. And I get this is only one side of the story but it really sounds like the founder got his and didn't give a shit about anyone else. That's pretty much textbook how not to do it. But hey, at least he has a boat and a smarmy instagram account!
I did business in PDX for a number of years... while I love the city, the startup / tech scene there was absolute fubar. It was fake it until you make it taken to an extreme. Weirdly insular, cliquish...so many snake oil salespeople. Couldn't find any actual hirable talent at any price. Some of the weirdest encounters of my career, where you looked at all of these "companies," Treehouse included, and knew they just didn't pass the smell test. Everything in that whole town was like a cult of personality.
I used TreeHouse in the past, it used to have very good websites on web development.
But the CEO always seemed... weird. I remember he appeared randomly in one video, seemed obvious he had forced it.
Also looks as though the CEO "removed management" in 2013. As in get rid of all the manager roles. Also seems people didn't work Fridays (in other words had a 4 day a week).
It would be interesting to me to learn if any of these things were the reason for the decline of TreeHouse.
the flat hierarchy is kind of weird but not completely unheard of. W. L. Gore & Associates (makers of Gore-tex) is well known for pursuing this sort of org structure and they're not in any danger of going out of business.
I owe much of my current success as a professional software engineer to the instructors at Treehouse. As an intern, I went from 0 to learning the fundamentals of JavaScript on both the front and back end. It was the one site that helped React finally click for me.
I don't know if you are reading this, Andrew Chalkley and others, but thank you for making such lovely courses. I hope you find or have found something better out there!
I wish Treehouse had become a worker owned coop with democratic decision making and transparent finances. it could have even expanded and allowed others to create courses on it's platform, even better if they became a platform coop. I love the modularity of TH courses/'tracks'.
Loved his “Future of Web Design” conference a decade ago.
The TH product looked great (though I never used it).
I unfollowed his Twitter after constant posts about getting up at 4:30, working out etc.
He introduced me to HN!
Years ago, Treehouse had a refrenshingly easy to grasp, with great content, curriculum around web technologies. The tutors were super friendly and enthusiastic while retaining a good technical level (for the target) - I really praise their introductory courses. Shame to hear this, definitely some better communication was needed, but IMHO personal life details only take the real failures out of focus - business and people involved deserved much better out of the whole process.
I am baffled by the responses of some other commenters. How some can still defend the CEO here is beyond my wildest guess.
Sure, the boat and the house stuff are not really things that should put the CEO in bad light, that much we can all agree on.
Though I must say, if you're a CEO and you make such an effort to showcase every good thing going on in your life on Instagram, while you are firing 90% of your employees, that's just bad optics. I know I would be mad.
Secondly, another mistake the CEO did here is to not set the right expectations. How does "money runs out by November 2022" equate to "you're being fired this September"? It's an asshole move not to let your staff know that if the deal doesn't go through, layoffs are imminent.
Also, the comment about the CEO reaching out privately to people being fired -- I mean, wow. How low can you go? I have never been the company and CEO worshipping kind of guy, but I have mad respect for my CEO because he has constantly proven to be someone who cares about employees. Whereas this guy even lies to the media about something that can be easily disproven.
I think one of the hallmarks of a good leader is good communication internally. Can't speculate on what he was going through or the validity of said claims, but if he indeed did go radio silent in the midst of layoffs... yeah.
Does this mean their contracts had no mention of severance pay? How is it possible to not compensate when it's not the employees' decision to leave the company?
How disappointing. It was almost 10 years ago to the day I signed up for Treehouse and embarked on my career switch to software engineering. I hope they come back from this.
It is telling that this “Treehouse Insider” declines to take credit for their writing, while also maligning this CEOs personal life. Also, this picture caption:
> August 25: Carson enjoys a climate-related disaster (#hurricanehenri) two days after announcing a severe reduction in force
What an absurd, petty reach. As though hurricanes haven’t been happening since prehistory. The CEO in question may be terrible, but this author has lost all credibility in my eyes.
He could have handed the reigns over to someone else. He could have sold for a lower price- there's always someone willing to buy if you go low enough. He could have pivoted the company to doing something he was more excited about. He could have done anything.
But the most important thing he could have done was be transparent and open with the people his decisions would impact. Being a leader means you stand there and deliver the bad news, and take the heat from people mad at you. Dropping a bomb and then hiding to avoid the flak for it is a cowardly move.
Adding "Ryan Carson" to the list of leaders I don't want to work for in the future.