There are specific issues I had with how my former employer decided to part ways with me, and I want to write into code that this type of pump-and-dump investing with people’s lives and futures is not actually a form of benevolent dictatorship like ***** may think, but instead a form of fascism in which you limit the speech of many in favor of elevating the speech of a few, all while crushing lives and making a toxic work culture in the process.

This isn’t a trickle down economy where by allowing the faucet to pour to the less fortunate, you are begetting that good things happen without your influence. You must do the bare minimum to meet the needs of your people beyond money. This is why making good friends with Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have been vital to *****.

So, like those moguls, its important to make sure that it’s unclear how to actually come forward with critique. An employee comes forward with specific, limited critique. You respond not with calm, cool, collection. You loudly shout “go find a new job” to please investors, while whispering “please, don’t leave me” to keep internal chaos contained. You are telling the ones you like “get ready for layoffs, buy this coin to profit their loss, but don’t tell anyone”.

It’s easy to think those who are dissenting have no critique to offer. It’s fun to live in a hug-box, cause it’s all love. Alarmingly, many of the specific critiques in another post similar to this have come true. You have hired too fast, fired people, and now years afterwards, fabricate employee count while continuously relying on automation to displace workers possessing moral and ethical intent. The people in your management don’t only have a condescending attitude, but it’s paired with being unable to take, digest, process, or reflect on criticism or things you have said in the past. Despite the $460 Million stock compensation costs, you’ve failed to adhere to “taking ownership”.

Elon Musk has shown how well the wealthy use the crime of plausible deniability to commit fraud and sexual assault, and that same acting can be seen when he speaks in public compared to communication with employees. When speaking to the public, he acts approachable, but internally, the system is designed to never be seen or heard from. The company is not located in any one place. The company also lacks the ability to follow through on its procedures. The company also has completely lost morale and therefore moral incentive. Everyone enjoys the high wages and compensation, so it doesn’t promote action when seeing poor conditions or assault, it promotes silence and fear the status quo may be disrupted. So, my friend and former boss, in the optimism you are not willfully ignorant, I am hoping you are simply misguided, in that your backlash to that post was misguided.

That post which was momentarily censored, is an organic result of nobody telling you what’s really going on. You have to figure it out yourself, you have to make sure HR and other departments are actually doing the work. They will not tell you, they have no moral incentive to disrupt that status quo as you are clearly quick to let go of employees and generally make an unpredictable environment. This is not “because of crypto”, this is related to how people are behaving at your work. I can tell from the work environment that you do NOT check up with HR personally, in my opinion. Otherwise you wouldn’t lash out at employees from a distance. When you responded to that post, you failed to understand that this employee could have taken every other channel to reach you, but inside your dictatorship, the letter never reached the castle out of FUD. Maybe then it is you, who is the problem, when you critique your own employees from afar, while you so fervently hold onto the idea that a closed loop feedback system is fundamentally wrong for your workplace.

This idea of praise in public, critique in private. In comparison to you slamming this post, the critique itself is almost praise, does that make it clear? They asked for working conditions, you called it dumb and in my opinion, that also went into the decision to fire people. People want to work for you and make it better, and it’s hard for anyone to see what you did as anything but “no, I will not make the workplace better, I will fire everyone if that means I can be as racist, or as sexist, be as political, or have as toxic of a work environment as I please”. Sounds… Horrible… Sounds like old finance…

Unfortunately, everyone has a right to speech B*A*, even your employees. They especially also hold the right to assembly, which is my greater hope for the future, and how I hope to maybe to work with you again someday. Make no mistake, I want to be a part of the solution. Theoretically the reason you are so booty-tickled is because that post didn’t jump out and directly tell you what things to fix inside your company. But dude, that’s your job, is to read the post and make that discerning judgement! This post should have been a red flag things are going wrong on your left and right, not some far away threat you’ll never see again. Given the namaste attitude and chill affect to all news you have been given otherwise, it came off just… so wrong… it clearly struck a nerve, and I want to help. If I can’t help you though, I am absolutely solving the problem of the workforce you helped to create. It’s a matter of whether YOU would like to take ownership, my friend. Would you be open minded to a union, for the sake of the few employees still wanting to make this decentralized workforce the best place to be in finance?

A post made on this same platform is free speech that was removed temporarily. The post had literal feedback, and unlike your previously poor digestion, it’s easy for someone to swallow their pride and take ownership in the feedback they are being given, to eat crow and start fresh. By not reading and responding to the claims raised, I think you would have made it clear that existing systems surrounding you are failing, not enforced, and you are being deceived by those closer to you. I will tell you my opinion on why that is, and how you can fix it.

*****, you made a very toxic workforce in which I was literally unable to contact higher ups when I had important things to discuss. You see, I chose work from home because of mental health issues. Before working this job, I was homeless. Entirely sober, just fell on very hard times during Covid in Missouri, where many protections you’d consider today for rental assistance, were unavailable early on. I drove away to Oregon. I was living in my car, but that was broke down and I was on the street with only a laptop. Eventually, I saved up enough money to write this future employer a resume on Burger King WiFi. I described to their hiring manager, that I had been interested in Crypto since 13, going as far as to modify my BIOS of my 660Ti to get the better Hashrates for DOGE and Ravencoin and perform some of the first decentralized exchanges in the metaverse. I was so excited to work for that company, and it many ways, it has changed my life forever and for the better. I am sure, even most of us who have been deeply hurt, can say the same for the machine that has been made by my former employer. The people I met at your company shared stories and music that I will remember forever, and to that part, there are some aspect of your company’s culture I would never give up. There are aspects of the culture that even still make me miss people. Yet, in another lens, it would be hard to return when so many of those people are likely gone, and don’t feel the same at all, only to move on with their life and ditch that dead dream. There is a reason for that feeling of betrayal, and it’s because employees realized all too late that this system is designed to not cater to the needs of the employees. No wonder they would think all of crypto is just a scam, if they feel the same about their former employer.

One of those ways I saw this happen in live time, was realizing that the computer, all computers, every computer, is being watched. This was made clear directly though a notice, but made passively clear when my manager A*H* started messaging me in a way where only someone who could see my every action on my computer would respond. This came without warning, was punitive and discriminatory, and my mental health was severely affected. I had been working for maybe two months when one day, I was being messaged every ten minutes or so.

It only happened one day, but after that, came another form of digital harassment from my manager which proved to me that all data is being live-streamed essentially, and I wasn’t doing anything wrong, it was purely discriminatory and a personal grievance on the part of the manager. I am unsure if notes on my computer were edited, but I understood a very literal livestream of my entire computer was being transmitted at all times, so at the same time, I was then confused that the notes I was writing about my issues with management were never addressed. At some point, my notes took up more of the screen than my script. I had been writing a log about my efforts to get in touch with another manager, C*Z*, per their workflow.*

I tried everything I could to either start a review of my performance, or directly, meet with a higher up. I was told that could happen based on performance, but even when also trying to get a meeting directly, no methods ever worked, and I was let go before you ever got my private criticism, per your own rules to raise these concerns discreetly.
*
B*A*, I need you to listen and understand why you are in this position, where employees have to make posts on a platform you tried to replace in angst. The humble leader of crypto only is acting humble, as behind the scenes, you’ve made the perfect environment to ensure everything from abuse, assault, and neglect would never be noticed by you. You have encouraged praise in public, critique in private, but that doesn’t hold true when your employees are critiques?

B*A*, at a pizza parlor, the busboy better be the best critic in town. If I am going to be the boss counting the money, and I know the pizza machine works, alls’ I gotta do is make sure the busboy is doing the job of checking the pizzas. If the busboy says, “Hey boss, your pizza machine needs replaced, its making bad working conditions”, do you tell the busboy they are dumb, over-explain processes to hand wave concerns, and repetitively tell honest people with good in their hearts to ‘get lost and find a new job’? Especially since you normally have a flat affect, I don’t understand why this hurt you so badly, unless it’s an act and there’s some truth in their claims and insecurity in your responses. You feel like you weren’t told directly, I’m telling you, out of malice or willful ignorance, the system actually prevents you from knowing the ground truth.

I spoke with A*H* about a cold transfer I received from a off-shore employee who was whispering in the mic. It was clear to me from context clues that she was doing this because she was terrified of getting caught doing this action at her job, which was confusing, since this is an expected element of her job. When talking to A*H* about this issue, she noted that the reason this could be was because they were in a call center, and she was worried about the other people in the call center being so loud that’s why she was close to the microphone in that call. This doesn’t make sense, I wasn’t asking about the audio quality, I asked about their working conditions. I made it clear, what I was question was; is this employee possibly whispering because they are afraid of working here?

”That’s Entirely Possible Too.” - A*H*

Sounds like we could have been a model for what it’s like to work for web3, but when we launched in India (only to delete from evidence, the embarrassing presentation that bragged about how it easy it was to begin lobbying the Indian Government), we made “just another call center” and had to bail. At minimum, that sucks, at best, it’s kinda racist, and frankly, you need to provide good working conditions to your average employee before you begin another venture of the same now in the EU. Leave the charity to GiveCrypto, and do not become a benevolent dictator or (in)effective altruist of finance to yet another emerging market, please. You messed that one up, and frankly, I don’t know how to do it better. I don’t have a solution to offer on this point other than; you shouldn’t have. I don’t need to tell you how to do your job better to be able to point out these clear failures.

I faced a type of discrimination, but I felt targeted in a way to where I was sent off to my own island of solace within the company, already alienated by remote work, but targeted by my schedule, and further segregated via chatrooms. This was carried out through my particular manager. All I wanted from December was to change managers, and it could never happen in any workflow. It was clear she didn’t care about me or like me, which is fine since incompatibility should be able to be resolved within a company, but I could not get another manager despite being assured all I had to do was follow procedure. I can only describe this and most conversations along the process as being boiled alive like a frog in hot water. One of the ways to get in touch was directly, but since that wasn’t working, I understood that if my performance dwindled, I would meet a higher up. Our Performance reviews would consist of 5 minutes of the manager trying to get the graph to display in the right way so I’d understand I was underperforming, despite also understanding and confessing how these metrics are skewed. It made an environment where employees were punished weekly for things they didn’t do, let alone how the new hires must have felt with the same reviews. It also did lead to the preferred action though, as I was to be coached after enough poor reviews, in which goals and rules changed weekly. Meetings where very much “whose line is it anyway” as managers in real-time changed KPIs and charts to justify the weekly narrative.

I knew of this discrimination, and tried desperately to communicate with a higher up that I needed to meet to discuss, at this point, my mental health, as well as a new manager that will listen to my needs and not belittle me and outright ignore me. I would describe them as micro-aggressions that ultimately added up into making sure schedule conflicts would arise as I was the only nightly employee in the West Coast, yet I would be punished for failure for attendance despite working full time, overtime, and through every holiday. My girlfriend would even comment how tense I became after meetings, which would be rescheduled from 4pm, my shift, to 10am, when I would still be sleeping from working the night prior. Seeing these notifications on my phone, I was expected to never unplug and always be delivering, even in my off time. Lots of soft asks for unpaid labor, while otherwise, generally abusive to employees, so there’s no motivation to take on those extra assignments. Despite everyone understanding these KPI failures were not my fault, I would get the equivalent for a “strike” for not always being on the clock, not attending meetings, and other issues that should have not been cast as if I was the one personally responsible for their failure to coordinate and expect unpaid, on-call labor.

It’s the manager’s job to understand I work west cost time and a late shift, and it’s always been easy to see that is my time zone on multiple platforms such as the internal message platform itself, so it crossed the threshold into malicious intent since I couldn’t believe, after a while, this was simply ignorance. This was malice, since after many times this happened, where it was admitted by A*H* “It was some of you, some of me” but ultimately all three strikes counted and it lead to a performance review, which was described as more hands on, but in practice, there was a ‘recharge week’ where the during this time, higher ups met and decided who to fire behind closed doors. In a sense, I was looking forward to the end of my conduct process, failing, and finally getting what I wanted. Direct communication with higher up about what I need to thrive as an employee. I didn’t expect the final step would change to instead fire me, but I saw this documentation change between conflicting internal documentation.

The last day I worked, I was to hear if I had completed this month review well, and I was optimistic to prove my case either way, as I had worked hard and was ready to finally justify this to another party. There were signs that my job was at risk, calls were dwindling, but most specifically I got a survey that may have not been meant for me, but looked like a survey for managers and one of the questions was a yes or no “would you fight to keep this employee”. I thought, damn, don’t suppose everyone’s gonna like seeing that. The manager had long been treating me with a condescending attitude, but this time, it was there right as the call started for the final day of my coaching.

(as noted by the previous post, all of my communication with management was as though I was being talked down to)

What was being shown were these metrics related to performance that constantly change and recently elevated, and as expected my manager explained that because I was already being reprimanded, that I was now going to escalate to what I thought was a peer to peer.

I actually noticed internal documents conflict on this process, while T1 facing documents on a “new” website showed this process ending in me teaming up with a higher up like C*Z*, but on what they told employees was the old website, that directory was updated and instead, this process actually ended in being fired.

I started to catch on when the call ended with very little fanfare compared to what I had expected. A*H* she said something to the affect of seeing what will happen next. After that, I took a break, and I said to my girlfriend, “wow, I think I just got fired”. She reassured me, I wasn’t fired, and this was just one of those times where I am paranoid. It’s true, I have mental health issues and can take things very personally at times, or feel like people are out to get me, or people are watching me. This job became very unhealthy for that combo, but my she was there for me, telling me that the work culture is just getting in my head. I sat down, and took calls for the rest of the day. Maybe looked at music people were sharing in the internal messenger. I signed off, tried to check slack on my phone, and noticed phone permissions were revoked. Deep down, I knew, and saw strange flickers when I turned off. I realized I had to pretend tonight was fine, and I didn’t see anything, despite thinking deep down, there’s a good chance that computer may never turn back on.

The next day, I open my computer and a white screen appears. It’s Management Locked. I doubted a virus, but it was possible, in either case such a big hack would be news worthy, so I go to search for more details. I only open Chrome on my Android Phone, and the Google Now story shows it, the news story showing my employer laid off 1,100 employees. I lift down and I see I have a new email from one of your employees, asking me to apply for the token they pumped before capitalizing on my layoff.

Not a single word from you. In this case, you deferred to others for dirty work, despite the job not being for the faint of heart.

If it all sounds numb, it has all felt numb. I feel like many employees have been a mix of blessed and traumatized by this work environment. The bare minimum I can do is document it, and try to improve future workforce environments in Web3.

B*A*, here is the final paragraph. Your system for reviews are meaningless, now that employees are scared, now that employees struggle to get in touch with HR about important mental health issues… You have made the perfect environment where a post here is one of the last ditch efforts a good employee has at telling you the truth about what it’s like to be under your influence, while still working for you to solve the problem!

Let us be clear, this lack of support was a purposeful erosion and endemic. You cannot tell me that part was willfully ignorant as literal pillars of support for internal structures were being dissolved, while we where assured systems were functional should we need help with crisis calls. This transfer service for suicidal customer was only active 9-5 Monday to Friday, and in an industry where suicides happen daily, this was concerning. It shows you don’t care about the employees taking these traumatic calls, and you don’t really care about going the extra mile for when they happen. In my opinion, you have made a culture of toxic individualism among most of your workforce, where the real advantage is to keep the secret of how you have your job close, or it could be used against you competitively. Especially in light of insider trading, and political donations, if B*A* wants to be the face of regulation, reputation, and the face of crypto humility, he should rethink his over-reaction to a manager nearly admitting labor abuses, and see that as a stain in the company history that will take a few years to recover from. The job itself, the people I met, and some aspects of the culture truly elevated my life and I would work for you, B*A*, in the very next day. Money and culture cannot afford your time, however. People wanted to ultimately get to know you, get closer to you, be assured you are a good person. The last advice I can give is you need to be closer to your workforce, and not communicate as though you are Sam Walton. No, you are just B*A*.

Brave, Confused, Overly-Confident B*A*.

At first, I censored your name, because the last time an employee raised grievances, you wanted them to directly accuse you, to dodge trying to fix the problems.

Make no mistake.

Message sent.

I hope you don’t move hell and high water to remove it from the internet.

Otherwise, will you leave me on read, too?

I’d enjoy your response, and cooperation, in making a Web3 employee union.

Sincerely,

NonAdjective.ETH