> That said, many early employees would have corrected these problems if they were widely known.

How can anyone on the outside be sure there aren't comparable problems which still aren't widely known? I just don't see a reason to believe what Zenefits says because their marketing literature says compliance a lot more now.

>How can anyone on the outside be sure there aren't comparable problems which still aren't widely known?

I'm not sure how any company can provide this proof. However, the rage felt by all the truly dedicated individuals who watched their equity decline in value has drastically changed the culture, everyone is on watch to make sure that doesn't happen again. In addition, new technology and new teams have the explicit purpose of monitoring and maintaining compliance, which I believe are effective. The internal shift to being a "compliance company" is not just marketing speak, it is real.

You can't, which is one of several reasons why the original fuckup was so serious. Your track record matters. Why would a new customer go with Zenefits over someone who's always taken compliance seriously?

If equity value is what's motivating people's desire to not illegally cut corners, I see little reason to assume they won't revert to previous behavior once the spotlight is off, especially as time passes and personnel changes.

> someone who's always taken compliance seriously

Personally, I don't believe there is such a thing. The only careful doctor is one who has made a bad decision that killed a patient; the only careful military officer is one who has had a strategy of theirs fail and lost soldiers under their command. Everyone else has too much bravado, and no emotional revulsion to shortcuts, and so can't be be trusted with real responsibility.

You seem to be claiming that the only people who can be trusted in mission critical scenarios are those who have seriously failed with a non-negligible impact before, as though that is a rite of passage to true understanding. How are you defining failure?

I disagree with the idea that meticulous caution can only be learned by personally failing first. I believe it is fully possible to learn and emotionally internalize the necessity of proper protocols, rules and behaviors in a variety of safety and compliance contexts by learning from the failures of predecessors, and without needing to commit those failures personally.

If this were not the case, wouldn't e.g. insurance companies weight risk analysis algorithms more favorably towards drivers with an accident history, and penalize drivers with no accident history? (This is a simplistic example, but you hopefully get the idea). Do pilots need to experience catastrophic crashes in order to achieve true risk awareness? Do companies need to experience serious security breaches in order to take security seriously? (Many of the most secure companies in the world, perhaps most of them, have never had a headlining security vulnerability).

To continue with your analogy, I see no a priori reason to assume that a doctor is incapable of following e.g. comprehensive checklists to limit surgical error without first experiencing a failure that causes a patient's death. Likewise, I see no a priori reason to assume the same doctor would improve by virtue of having a patient die in surgery.

I think that claim requires evidence to be taken seriously, to say nothing of your secondary claim that people who have not failed have "too much bravado" to be trusted with responsibility.

It's not that you can't have people who are inherently conscientious (heck, it's considered a personality trait); it's rather that it's very hard to filter the non-conscientious people out by anything other than attrition, because in conscientiousness-rewarding industries, the non-conscientious have every reason to pretend to be otherwise.

With the checklist analogy: some doctors are willing to follow checklists; other doctors aren't. Of the doctors who have killed a patient from not following an available checklist, usually all are willing to follow a checklist—for the ones that still aren't, and kept on killing patients, have been disbarred. "Did a bad thing and is still a doctor" is a sort of survival-bias heuristic for filtering out the non-conscientious.

Here's another way to think about this: a soldier might have trained for years and years, and be very good at all the arts of war. But most people would prefer to staff a "hand-picked" strike force with veterans—soldiers who has been in a number of battles, and in particular have been engaged in a number of individual combats—rather than just people with "natural talent." Because attrition ensures that the only veterans who survive are the ones who know their business.

Things like surgery or a military operation are very different than creating a system to avoid licensing requirements. The people who make the life support system for the surgeon or the comms for the officer always take compliance seriously.

This comment would be a lot stronger if it did not come from a throwaway account.

Genuine question: why would you make a throwaway to say a former employer, which fucked up, is taking ownership of its mistake and making serious changes to improve itself?

They're probably forbidden from speaking publicly about this by their PR people, no matter whether it's positive or negative.