11/11/2022 0 Comments Pandora radio employees![]() There were a couple of news stories that came out the same time the lawsuits did, but given the exploitative nature and shaky legal ground of an otherwise well-liked tech company, it was not in as many places as you think. However, it isn’t particularly widespread. It’s on the Pandora Radio Wikipedia page. What struck me was how the story has been basically buried, and when it is told, how it’s been framed. Learning about Pandora’ salary deferral prompted me to dig a bit deeper. And Westgreen is one more example of the fabricated lone (male) tech genius guided only by their own fortitude and ambition, leaving out entirely the connections, luck, and contributions from a large team that required to get the work done. It adds to the myth of the world-changing, earth-shattering website, when the truth is that really all the website does is stream music in, I will admit, a gratifying order. I think it’s one more instance on a long list of a large tech company using bold promises and a lofty vision as a way to justify employee mistreatment. It’s why the practice is illegal in the first place, and why several employees chose to sue the company years later.Īs I’m sure you can tell, my feeling on the matter isn’t mixed. This illusion of choice also leaves out the dishonest and uneven power dynamic in place when a CEO strings along employees for years with dreams of something larger than themselves. However, employees reportedly had no idea how long it would take to receive their backpay. If any employee was unsatisfied with the arrangement, they could leave. None of the employees that stuck it out were entitled to equity or bonuses as a result of their steadfastness.Įach employee had a choice. ![]() That claim is dubious at best, but it has also never been disputed so take that however you want.Īt the end of the two years, the employees received their entire backpay in one lump sum. This is something Westgreen has claimed not to have known at the time. If you’re wondering, deferring salaries is illegal in California, where Pandora operates. After that, Pandora was finally able to secure another round of funding. In the end, Pandora employees went with a deferred salary for two years. A week went by, and he gave that same speech. But, he said, if they could just hold on a little bit without pay, there was potential to change the world. Believing deeply in the project, co-founder Tim Westgreen got in front of his employees and told them he couldn’t pay them. In 2001, Pandora Radio ran through their initial funding of 2 million dollars. That occasionally comes through in my writing and I like it that way. Yet the web is a lifelong passion and I do love it and I have hopes for what I believe it can be. I try my best to bring truth to the history of the web because I think that project is worthwhile. I wouldn’t consider myself a great historian. A great historian can masterfully weave their ideology into their text, letting it act as a guide without overpowering the facts of the past. The bias of our objective history textbooks is made plain through what’s included and, even more importantly, what is not in the text. But no history and no historian is without an ideology. There’s a myth we’re taught about history. PANDORA RADIO EMPLOYEES HOW TOI also learned how to filter bias from my own writing. How to filter bias from the histories that I read. Back in college though, I learned how to do research how to follow secondary sources to primary sources and draw connections between them. ![]() Instead, I coded websites and that led to a career that I love and am grateful for. I never quite made it to true academic status. Parsing out this particular story about Pandora gives me a unique opportunity to pull back the curtain and talk about how I do my research and how I chose to write the stories that I write.Īs an added bonus, I get to make a slightly bigger deal about a practice I find deeply troubling. I’ve been doing this long enough that it’s not often I’m confronted with something that a) I’m not familiar with and b) brings to light reasonable ethical and ideological concerns. ![]() I mentioned it briefly in my post, but I want do a bit more than that. This is not something I ever heard before, even in passing. Pandora deferred the salaries of its employees for over two years in the early 2000’s after it ran out of funding. Let’s start with something I learned doing research for my last post: ![]() When I look at a story, sometimes I have to look past the history that has already been written to find the truth that was hiding behind it. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |