"alleges Seagate knew that the position for which he was hired did not actually exist, but falsely represented that it did so in order to use Vaidyanathan’s credentials to better market one of its divisions to be sold to another company"
Wow. This happened to me once, many years ago. Never thought of suing over it, but I am still angry about it. I'd prefer not to get into all the details or name names, but I had published some papers in a specialized hot domain that was highly mathematical, and owned some modest but important IP. This company hired me, and then trotted me out in meetings with suitably impressed clients to get three multi-million dollar contracts. Once they had the contracts, they dismissed me. They also tried to steal my IP despite our licensing agreement, but that's another matter. They are now out of business, but they did so by leveraging the existence of the development contracts to flip the company to a bigger company that didn't realize it was buying a pig in a poke. The three owners of the privately held company were sociopaths who then took off with the acquisition money.
So details are a little different, but basic idea is I got shafted in the same way as that guy. I was hired only to be a prop in a scam where my existence as an employee was only used to screw over clients for money as part of a larger scam to sell off a company to another company for profit and pocket the money.
It's very cool that Minnesota has a law prohibiting lying to people to get them to come work for you. I wasn't in Minnesota and am fairly sure that I wouldn't have had any case even if it had occurred to sue over this specific aspect of it.
>a law prohibiting lying to people to get them to come work for you //
Isn't fraud a general prohibition in most legal jurisdictions? Why would it matter that the company personnel committing the fraud were doing so in the arena of employment as opposed to sales or whatever?
[IANAL] Technically, there was no fraud. They made a job offer, he accepted, and they (most likely) properly compensated him within the bounds of the offer. So, in terms of that specific business transaction, there was no intentional deception made for personal/business gain (they made good on the job offer), or to damage a specific individual (they paid him according to the employment contract). Employment being at-will in most of the US, Seagate was completely within their rights to let him go anytime they wanted, for any reason. There's no case, there. Seagate was not playing fair, but they were still within the bounds of the law.
However, the actual intent of creating the job in the first place was done under false pretenses, and MN has a specific (albeit old and obscure) law against that.
Actually the actual law broken was not the creation of the job, but the inducement w/o due disclosure to the applicant:
"181.64 FALSE STATEMENTS AS INDUCEMENT TO ENTERING EMPLOYMENT.
It shall be unlawful for any person, partnership, company, corporation, association, or organization of any kind, doing business in this state, directly or through any agent or attorney, to induce, influence, persuade, or engage any person to change from one place to another in this state, or to change from any place in any state, territory, or country to any place in this state, to work in any branch of labor through or by means of knowingly false representations, whether spoken, written, or advertised in printed form, concerning the kind or character of such work, the compensation therefor, the sanitary conditions relating to or surrounding it, or failure to state in any advertisement, proposal, or contract for the employment that there is a strike or lockout at the place of the proposed employment, when in fact such strike or lockout then actually exists in such employment at such place. Any such unlawful acts shall be deemed a false advertisement or misrepresentation for the purposes of this section and section 181.65."
The parent commenter is simply observing that "fraud" is a harder case to make than a specific violation of a statute narrowly tailored to exactly this guy's case.
Given the obscure statute which won this guy his judgement, it seems reasonable to assume he had better legal representation than is available on an HN thread.
FWIW I didn't look at the specifics of this case I was merely responding to the parent comment which implied that there had been a fraud.
My query was with the suggestion that such fraud would only be unlawful/illegal if there was specific statute against fraudulently engaging an employee and that if there were not then such frauds would be of null legal consequence for the perpetrators.
If I had a dollar for every time someone wanted to "hire" me just to be able to qualify for a given government contract, I'd be a millionaire.
No, not really, but I'd have a meal at one of the ludicrously expensive restaurants down the street from my office.
Many times, when I said that I didn't have the time for a freelance job, they even told me I wouldn't have to actually work. All they needed was to present my name so they would qualify. I wouldn't even be required to be present at client meetings.
Of course I refused.
OTOH, had I accepted, I could possibly be a millionaire. Either that or be in jail. ;-)
I know you prefer not to name names, but I think it would benefit a lot of people to be on the lookout for the three owners of that company.
I'm sure there is someone out there, who would create a new throwaway account and reply to this comment, who had a similar experience with the same company, and who would name the company and owner names.
I think he's done the greater service to everyone reading by not naming names. The likelihood that anyone on HN will end up doing business with these three is very unlikely. However, there is a good chance one of us would run into someone employing the same tactics. That's what we should be on the lookout for.
He said he's not going to name names. Let it rest.
It's frustrating that we watch this same argument play out every time someone anonymizes the details of any story. We don't need to litigate this point. If someone says they don't want to reveal details, it's rude to try convincing them to change their mind.
He said he'd prefer not to. There's no harm in my gentle persuasion. If you're getting frustrated at a natural human interaction, maybe you need to step back and figure out a better way to handle that frustration.
Without the names, "being on the lookout" means that you have to look at everyone and think about whether or not they're using similar tactics (i.e. "they could be anyone"). With the names, the first step of "being on the lookout" is checking the known-bad list, which could make you less vigilant with everyone else (i,e. "at least I know this person isn't one of them"). That It would be an irrational mistake to make, but I suspect it would also be a common one.
Just drives home the point that you have to do your research before joining a new company, I'm not criticizing you at all, by the way, its just the more I have thought about software businesses the more I have realized how people can be used in this sort of fashion. I've gotten myself into an untenable situation before with a startup where I felt misled, for me, however I was able to quickly move on and I didn't have any IP that was exploited, so it wasn't that big a deal.
Wow. This happened to me once, many years ago. Never thought of suing over it, but I am still angry about it. I'd prefer not to get into all the details or name names, but I had published some papers in a specialized hot domain that was highly mathematical, and owned some modest but important IP. This company hired me, and then trotted me out in meetings with suitably impressed clients to get three multi-million dollar contracts. Once they had the contracts, they dismissed me. They also tried to steal my IP despite our licensing agreement, but that's another matter. They are now out of business, but they did so by leveraging the existence of the development contracts to flip the company to a bigger company that didn't realize it was buying a pig in a poke. The three owners of the privately held company were sociopaths who then took off with the acquisition money.
So details are a little different, but basic idea is I got shafted in the same way as that guy. I was hired only to be a prop in a scam where my existence as an employee was only used to screw over clients for money as part of a larger scam to sell off a company to another company for profit and pocket the money.
It's very cool that Minnesota has a law prohibiting lying to people to get them to come work for you. I wasn't in Minnesota and am fairly sure that I wouldn't have had any case even if it had occurred to sue over this specific aspect of it.