I’m a senior software developer in Canada (earning ~US$70K in a good year) who, being late to the EA party, earns to give. Historically I’ve have a chronic lack of interest in making money; instead I’ve developed an unhealthy interest in foundational software that free markets don’t build because their effects would consist almost entirely of positive externalities.
I dream of making the world better by improving programming languages and developer tools, but AFAIK no funding is available for this kind of work outside academia. My open-source projects can be seen at loyc.net, core.loyc.net, ungglish.loyc.net and ecsharp.net (among others).
I agree with this. I think overall I get a sense that Kat responded in just the sort of manner that Alice and Chloe feared*, and that the flavor of treatment that Alice and Chloe (as told by Ben) said they experienced from Kat/Emerson seems to be on display here. (* Edit: I mean, Kat could’ve done worse, but it wouldn’t help her/Nonlinear.)
I also feel like Kat is misrepresenting Ben’s article? For example, Kat says
I just read that article and don’t remember any statement to that affect, and searching for individual words in this sentence didn’t lead me to a similar sentence in Ben’s article on in Chloe’s followup. I think the closest thing is this part:
I, too, was mentally tallying up benefits. Plane tickets, hotel fees and other perks might be that costly, but the business required her to travel so it seems like we shouldn’t treat it dollar-for-dollar like normal compensation.
More importantly I feel like there’s misdirection. Chloe’s claim was that a verbal agreement existed and wasn’t fully upheld; Kat rewrites this into a different claim, then labels it “False.”
No, you don’t get to do this. When your reputation is on the line and you’re being scrutinized, I expect you to be on your best behavior.
Ben’s article draws a sharp distinction between the reputations of Alice and Chloe, but Kat’s article lumps them together as “Alice/Chloe” 27 times (tbf, Ben also groups them about 19 times, but Kat’s lumping seems less appropriate to me, on average)
Kat says there were 21 Nonlinear employees but Ben refers to “their two in-person employees” as if there are only two plus Kat, Emerson and Drew. I assume the difference is made up by remote and former employees. But if Alice and Chloe were the only two in-person employees and had no relation to each other, Kat’s implication that they both lied or (in Chloe’s case) gave misleading accounts would be surprising if true.
Kat, if you’re reading this―I think you mean well, and my charitable reading is that (1) you are a proper EA at heart, (2) you have social skills but also some bad social habits, and (3) you wrote this from an emotional place that compromised your objectivity, which caused you to choose a highly defensive PR strategy in which you exaggerated the positions of Ben/Alice/Chloe in order to make them sound less reasonable. (Edit: or rather, to make their positions easier to refute. And let’s keep in mind that Ben did a “search for negative information” and did not build a “balanced case”.)
I might let that slide if it was just one employee who had a bad experience at every previous job, but there were two, plus Ben’s judgement and “many” anonymous sources. Plus, I agree with Ben that the policy “I don’t say bad things about you, you don’t say bad things about me” is not a good policy; “I speak charitably of you, you speak charitably of me” is the most I think one could reasonably ask for. So what you needed to do was reflect upon what mistakes you and Emerson made, and what you can do to begin to repair your reputations (e.g. recognize faults and apologize), and then do that. I wonder if you’re so convinced of your own innocence that you can’t see that the red flags that were discussed were actually red....
Kat reworded every claim made by Alice/Chloe/Ben, so I checked a few more:
Kat says “Alice/Chloe claimed Nonlinear failed to pay them. Later, they denied ever claiming this.” Now I’m really confused, like, did Ben publish more than one article? The one I read didn’t make it sound like that. It did indicate that Alice may have communicated poorly or deceptively (“catastrophic miscommunications”, Kat reportedly said), but I can’t find any claim from Chloe about not being paid.
Kat said “Chloe claimed: they told me not to spend time with my romantic partner”. It does seem a bit odd that Ben’s article doesn’t mention Chloe’s romantic partner being there for two months, since it does say “Alice and Chloe report that they were advised not to spend time with ‘low value people’, including their families, romantic partners, and anyone local to where they were staying, with the exception of guests/visitors that Nonlinear invited.” But since this part is a combination of what Alice and Chloe said, it’s not strictly accurate to say “Chloe claimed she was advised not to spend time with her romantic partner”, or to say “told” (which sounds like an order) rather than “advised”.
Kat said that Chloe said “I felt like they didn’t value me or my time”. I can’t find any statement to that effect in Ben’s article or Chloe’s big comment, but it did remind me of something: “Alice reported that she would get these compliments near-daily. She eventually had the sense that this was said in order to get something out of her. She reported that one time, after a series of such compliments, the Kat Woods then turned and recorded a near-identical series of compliments into their phone for a different person.” Kat’s response was basically that Nonlinear was generous and that “Kat showed so much gratitude that Chloe actually asked her to stop expressing gratitude”. But after what Alice said, I feel like Kat may have missed the point of whatever the paraphrase “they didn’t value me” was intended to refer to.
Kat said that Alice said that “Kat threatened my career for telling the truth”. There is a similar clause in Ben’s article, but it comes across differently: “Kat Woods’ texts that read to me [Ben] as a veiled threat to destroy someone’s career for sharing negative information about her.”
Kat refers to “Ben’s hypothesis − 2 EAs are Secretly Evil”. I don’t think that’s accurate (edit: but Kat likely does see it this way.)