Came in here to post exactly this. Publicly rescinding an employee offer by a CEO is amateur hour and shows a clear sign of immaturity. Caveat emptor.

If you read the complaint, the potential employee essentially worries that zenefits won't be technically challenging and it won't be a name brand place that opens doors by having it on your resume. And if we're honest, the 2nd bit is definitely important for your career.

A ceo who isn't a prick might have said we understand your concerns: here's [blah blah blah] reasons that our work is more technically challenging than it may appear from the outside or from your limited time interviewing here, and it's a personal and/or company goal to be recognized for the quality of our technical achievements as a peer of google.

I happen to think that zenefits is not particularly technically challenging and is mostly wiring together integrations with 3rd party systems, but I'm open to being wrong. Nonetheless, this might have won them the employee without being a dick.

While I agree that the CEO was an idiot there, I also don't have a huge amount of respect for anyone who judges where they work by whether it is a "buzzword like Uber".

I'm going to be unusually blunt here: I don't buy that name recognition isn't part of your equation (even if only a small or subconscious part). I could be totally ass-backwards wrong. You could have a mental discipline to make these sort of decisions in a far more principled fashion than myself or any engineer I've ever met; but that statement makes me set my Bayesian prior where I set it. At the end of the day, we all know that name recognition _is_ a component to how future opportunities may play out, like it or not, and as engineers trained (hopefully) in the art of considering the possible outcomes and impact of our actions, it would be going against our nature to pretend that having "Google" or "Microsoft" on your resume will not open doors.

College is a prime example of this. Why are certain schools (Ivys, primarily) so highly recognized? Do they universally have better programs? Sometimes, sure, but so much of their cache comes exclusively from the institution itself being a signaling mechanism of exclusivity, and as was put, "buzzwordyness".

In my view, it would be irresponsible to NOT consider any potential added value of positions when comparing them. You are not doing a disservice to either company or your own integrity as an engineer as long as the work you do is sound, and to suggest that you should put your own best interests aside because a given metric isn't "tasteful" seems shortsighted. (I do not mean to suggest that hopping companies to ride trends is something to be looked up to, but that when you make a decision, the more data that helps you obtain a positive outcome the better.)

I think I have a bit more respect for such behavior. Mercenary behavior and making work decisions based on the potential resume-building impact is a completely natural response to the ways in which the job markets have changed since the 90s.

Everyone can, and should, consider how a job will help them advance their own careers. This is exactly why I quit COMPANY_X. At the time, their codebase was entirely based on not one, but two obsolete technology stacks. If I didn't leave quickly, I would have been locked into that narrow ecosystem for the rest of my life, at a "flattened" company with almost zero opportunity for career advancement. It would have been almost like someone deciding to move into COBOL programming starting in 2016.

And I have been frequently laid off as a result of startup failure, acquisition redundancy, or just the company's loss of contract work. There is no longer any loyalty from the typical employer to the typical employee. If you can manage to work your entire career at a single company, you are an extreme outlier, because at many, if an accountant predicts you will be unprofitable next week, you will get laid off on Friday afternoon, with no severance package.

So asking yourself "would this look good on my resume?" is something you should do very frequently, even if you are currently content where you are. We wouldn't need to chase after buzzword-related experience if HR didn't look at those buzzwords when hiring people!

And anecdotally, the name of a previous employer has helped me to get hired at another company. After COMPANY_X, my future co-workers told me at the interview, "COMPANY_X is great! We know they hire only high-quality people, and we also know that the best all want to leave after about two years. PERSON_1 and PERSON_2 used to work there!"

But buzzwords matter. MIT, Stanford, FB, Google all things that make a resume look better. Would you want Java on your resume or JS and React right now? The candidate was absolutely right in the analysis even though it should not have been shared in public.

it's a kid fresh out of college, though -- how is he supposed to know any better? working for a name brand makes the decision a safer decision; i'd put the onus on those advising him to point out why that's not the best metric for making this decision.

When one is at the point where they can kind of pick and choose where they want to go because they have an awesome resume and a great body of work, then let them choose how they wish. If I were going to my first or second job, I would go with Google or Facebook or Uber over a smaller/lesser known company as they would be great signaling mechanisms for my resume for future opportunities.

This is the kind of stuff that haunts companies when prospective employees are doing research on where to work. Not easy to get rid of either.

Yep, I wouldn't work at a company that was unhappy I didn't drink the koolaid before I even began working there.