I fail to see giving workers more information about the potential future of their career, so they can adequately plan and change direction if they feel the need as a bad thing. Just pulling the rug out from under them and not giving them a chance seems pure evil.
There's definitely tension. That said, I'll go further than the usual startup qualifiers (e.g. You SHOULD™ be aware of the risks.)
Getting accurate financials is tough even when a company isn't cooking the books, let alone when a company is misleading investors. Here's an extreme: "Over-transparency" didn't help Enron's employees.[1] All of the information was there, but people refused to believe it. For startups, it's hard to remain disciplined and realistic about hype from an internal perspective.
Meanwhile, I'm sympathetic to keeping information privileged within private companies.
No one forces them to take the gig. If they're smart folks they should have already done the math that "Hm, we're pre-profit, raised $X million a year ago and burn about $15k * Y employees a month... We probably have about Z months left!"
Seriously, burn is not that hard to ballpark, engineers who are smart enough to code should be able to do this math and make a calculated risk.
ballpark is nearly uses. The difference between X and 2X is huge and it's very hard to make the estimate tighter, and you don't know what not-profit metrics will impress investors to put more cash into further growth. Many many companies run for 10 years pre-profit.
I think even in your "non-GAAP" metric case, I would hope an employee has an idea of the risks and isn't banking on near-term payouts (months, not years).
Parent's merely suggesting a Q&D sanity check that would help a lot of people who choose blissful ignorance. If you feel like I'm oversimplifying, would you mind elaborating further or sharing examples?
No one is likely to share it with potential hired directly for the same reason you aren't likely to outline all the ways you might fail at the position in your job interview.
If employees are concerned about it, they should just ask. Good, ethical companies will be more straight with you than shady ones.
It's definitely unfriendly to employees, but is rampant across companies. Gusto, for example, has a clause in their bylaws which blocks employees from selling shares.[1]
Want to buy a house or pay down debt? Not up to you. They keep it secret because candidates would absolutely push back if they knew their options were worthless unless/until the company IPOs.
