I know it’s just an anecdote but as a customer I kind of believe this.
I just completed a transaction with them that had to be extended beyond the rate lock window. For about 10 days there was a daily back and forth where they asked me to provide some documentation. I would provide the requested documentation and about 12 hours later I would receive a task of uploading the same required documentation.
The document was a 50ish page legal document that required someone to look at it. It’s clear nobody was actually spending any effort on it. Even calling my loan officer wasn’t getting me anywhere. It wasn’t until the deadline approached that they called me and wanted to get it all sorted out and they extended my rate lock.
The way management handled this looks horrible but if there’s any truth to these employees essentially stealing wages from their employer then they’re lucky they’re just being fired and not being prosecuted.
> but if there’s any truth to these employees essentially stealing wages from their employer then they’re lucky they’re just being fired and not being prosecuted.
Do you think the company just happened to be extremely unlucky and only hired dishonest employees?
If your company is at a stage where your support employees are only working 2 hours a day, and where a customer cannot get support for what they need in less that 10 days, it's an issue with the management and the organisation, unable to provide motivation to their employees, or the condition they need to work effectively, it's not bad luck with hiring.
And thinking that just firing those people is going to solve the issue is burying their head in the sand. Maybe the ones that didn't get fired will work a bit harder in the short term, driven by fear, but on the long term it can only get ever more demoralizing.
Apparently this is 9% or 15% of the employees (there's some discrepancy). So not "only".
I agree that it's on management if employees are only working 2 hours a day and getting paid 8... but one of the things management can do about it is lay off the excess employees. Either they aren't needed or they need some different people.
9 percent of your workforce isn't going to work 2 hours a day, man. Almost nobody can handle being that much of a lazy, sleazy piece of crap. What probably happened is that the idiot CEO decided to check productivity via some BS metric, then discard all the time his employees had to spend on anything else
I've been on the receiving end of that before, it's infuriating.
And if the 10-15% range was true, that’s a major management screwup. A couple of bad hires, sure, it happens but when you’re talking hundreds of people there’s something systemic at fault, which is solely in the realm of management’s responsibility to hire and monitor.
Based on the excuse he gave to Forbes I’d bet you’re right. I’d especially believe some kind of internal inefficiency – e.g. having everyone need to have sign-offs by someone in an understaffed role – or simply having inefficient internal processes meaning that what he thinks is a 2 hour task actually taking much longer.
Another possibility would be something like having over-hired either due to misjudgment or to look like a bigger business to investors and then blaming the workers for not having enough work to do. I remember seeing that from the dotcom era, along with people who were very proud of 7 figure Oracle clusters handling hundreds of transactions per day. Senior management was so focused on IPO riches that they allowed if not actually encouraged it.
Do you have examples? This sounds rather a lot like a racist stereotype unless you’re using “entire countries” to mean something more like corrupt elites misdirecting people who don’t have alternatives.
That was actually the country I had in mind with the second part of my comment because the emigrants I’ve known always made it sound like the problem was squandering productivity rather than innate laziness — if your boss is corrupt and incompetent, and you don’t work harder because you know there will be no benefit from doing so, “lazy” doesn’t seem accurate.
A similar story revolves around the American South. Southerners used to be stereotyped as lazy until indoor plumbing & antiparasitic drugs eradicated hookworm and air conditioning mitigated the climate’s impact on office productivity. “Lazy” was, well, a lazy way to characterize a more complicated situation.
Back office (paperwork reviews and processing) was/is done in India, hence the time zone latency. They tried to make up for it with the web app, but mortgage banking relies on too many people processes (title, survey, appraisal, underwriting [even with automated underwriting and “Day One Certainty”] etc) to wring enough efficiencies to scale in a SaaSy sort of way.
I was in the middle of a refi with them during this and took my business elsewhere. Maybe their SPAC go public plans are running out of runway in a rising interest rate environment.
It is also heavily automated. I used to work for a company that sold a document management package that was integrated with a variety of high speed scanners with OCR and for a time almost all of the new business was with US banks wanting to speed up the processing of mortgage documents.
After talking with one of the customers we were all very sure that the US mortgage business was in trouble. Not 'crashing and destroying the economy' bad but on unstable ground.
Garg is documented in this article as abusive. This is a fact. Now given that he has a track record of abusive behavior, I wouldn’t believe anything negative he’d say about the layed off employees.
The CEO is in charge. He mishandled scaling the company, and so the blame for the failures of the company fall to him. Even if there was massive fraud inside the company, that’s still the CEO’s fault for letting it get so bad. Abusive failures always blame everyone else.
If I want to charitable, maybe he thinks by trashing a bunch of people that lost their jobs, will stem the loss of morale by the remaining employees.
I just experienced the same thing! It was so frustrating to see that no one was looking over the documents. Finally I took a day off and sat on the phone with them all day to figure it out. It was a worse process that dealing with an actual mortgage broker.
Is a systemic issue. It had to start long before almost a thousand people decided to commit a crime. Assuming it's true. I tend to not trust framing that comes from the top end of a power imbalance.
edit: This isn't Twitter. Don't stop at 1 and decide you read enough to go off on someone. Read the entire comment.
If the work wasn't there, or they found a way to 'game' the system, then that is on management. I'm sure all of us goof off at some point during the day/week - it just seems that these people were able to do it a LOT.
But yea, if you aren't doing the work assigned to you, then you can't expect to keep being paid - but stealing it is not.
why is Better.com using that language? all that workers can do is sell their labor time, while the property-owners they work for do not (since they earn rents from ownership). in this case, the workers create and develop some intellectual property (software), yet do not own the fruits of their own labor and are instead paid a wage. in other words: workers work on things that are not democratically held in common ownership (even actively made artificially scarce as an intellectual property).
my point is: we could argue the workers are rightfully taking back more than what they are paid under our current economic system, since the property-owners take too much to begin with; they steal — to use your word — by not sharing the (intellectual) property, the source of wealth.
edit: i've edited to clarify that I am responding to the definition of the word stealing used by Better.com. as Kye/OP pointed out below, this is not Kye's personal definition for the word stealing and it was terminology they copied verbatim from this current context (used by one of the parties involved).
Much of "time theft" is covered by people struggling to focus continuously for 8 hours at a time 5 days a week. That's not theft, that's unrealistic expectations.
This article talks about things like timesheet fudging and practices like 'buddy punching', not getting distracted by a news article here or there, or getting a non-work phone call between the hours of 9 am and 5 pm
Given that companies typically want to maximally exploit their employees while paying the minimum wage they can, I don't really care about employees doing a little exploiting in the other direction.
Of course it depends on the company - I think people tend to do this kind of thing when their employer is hostile or exploitative. People typically respond well and work hard when they're treated fairly.
If an employee is selling their time to answer customer inquiries and is not, in fact, answering available customer inquiries, what else would you call it?
If it happens as frequently as claimed? I'd call it total managerial incompetence. Call metrics are well defined and it is easy to see if someone is doing no work. If the line managers are slacking off like that, what does that say for their management (and so on and so on)?
But as others have stated this should have been taken care of earlier. To fire them and then give the excuse afterwards meant they allowed the actions to happen.
I'm sorry, if you feel like you're not being paid enough, the solution is not to commit wage fraud against your employer.
There are plenty of employee-owned companies out there that would fit your ideals, people can work for them if they want that ownership. Or start their own. Otherwise, no, they don't get to own the output of their work. That's the way it is.
> I'm sorry, if you feel like you're not being paid enough, the solution is not to commit wage fraud against your employer.
i'm pretty sure you did not read the second part of my comment as you did not engage with it's argument (that the definition of the word 'steal' is political). i don't think saying "I'm sorry" and then stating your opinion is an argument.
> There are plenty of employee-owned companies out there that would fit your ideals, people can work for them if they want that ownership. Or start their own. Otherwise, no, they don't get to own the output of their work. That's the way it is.
It's not about ideals, it's about the core logic of our current economic system: the accumulation of capital by one class.
Idealism or whatever can't do anything to fight back against coercive and alienating capitalist property relations where one class (property-owning) benefits at the expense of another class (the working class).
Since you mentioned it, the reason I didn't engage with your argument about the word "steal" because I think it's frankly ridiculous and clearly not worth arguing about. We share no common ground, so we will never agree.
Read the rest of the comment. I am clearly not in favor of that framing. I was going along with it for a moment to demonstrate why it was a bogus framing.
"Wage theft" in these terms is a thing only in the US. In legal terms, and in most of the developed world, "wage theft" is the unlawful denial of wages from employers to employees.
> It's usually called time theft when employees are on the clock but doing things they shouldn't be doing.
This is what you originally said.
Clocking for another employee, that is time card fraud, not "time theft". "Time theft" is not even a legal term.
There is a recent push to coin the term "time theft", in order to group anything that may not be considered working during work hours as a "crime".
An employee may commit fraud by not working and still collecting wages, which is a crime, but this tends to be used as an excuse for employers to make it look that any work time used for non working matters, is illegal. Break a bit longer than usual? Time theft. Taking a personal call? Time theft. Pooping at work? Believe it or not, time theft.
There are plenty of examples out there where managers try to curb and reduce employee breaks, even with ludicrous signs advertising "how to avoid committing time clock fraud" [1], and also plenty where those employees get canned accused of "time theft", but if you live in the US, in an "at will employment" state, it is enough that the reason is not illegal for an employer to do so.
But again, there is not such a thing as "time theft". "Time theft" is a made up term to scare people into total submission while at work.
> Fudging timesheets and practices called "buddy punching" are what I'm talking about.
as someone else already responded to you: "I think people tend to do this kind of thing when their employer is hostile or exploitative. People typically respond well and work hard when they're treated fairly."
So essentially the management was so incompetent they failed to notice their employees were underperforming. For how long? And did the responsible - management, and probably also the CEO - get fired?
I concerned that you're jumping to prosecuting employees for the systemic failure of a company to operate well.
Without being privvy to the company's internal state, how could you possibly differentiate between management problems and deliberate staff malfeasance?
I you have ONE incompetent or crooked employee, then sure, the employee is the problem... But if you have 900 incompetent/crooked employees, I think it's much more likely that you have a management problem.
If all those employees were truly so awful, why did Garg wait til the mortgage market started cooling off to fire them? Or could it be that the company has been poorly managed for quite a while, but it's more emotionally convenient to the CEO's ego to blame the workers rather than address his own shortcomings?
I had some similar issues with purchasing a new house through them. It was obvious no one was actually reading the documentation, or even actually listening when I asked/mentioned things ahead of time that I thought might be issues. The things I pointed out early on did turn out to be more complicated.
There was even an issue where I went for a higher rate to get credits, and suddenly that number changed - and no one mentioned (or even seemed to notice). Only when I noticed it, was there anything done about it.
It really seems like the US-based loan officers/team does not look at your file at all unless directly pinged by you.
> The way management handled this looks horrible but if there’s any truth to these employees essentially stealing wages from their employer then they’re lucky they’re just being fired and not being prosecuted.
Not excusing laziness/fraud, but it’s an open secret that billable hours from consultancies of all ilks are wildly overstated.
Yeah, we went through better.com for our refinance because the rate and fees (no loan origination fee!) were the absolute best but I saw a bunch of reviews saying their contact with Better simply ceased and they couldn't get their loan finished. Luckily, we didn't have that issue and our reps were great.
For some reason they cancelled our inspection without telling us or the sellers. Worse, they told the inspector that the inspection was cancelled because we were changing lenders.
The listing agent eventually called the inspectors to find out what was up and the sellers were furious when they heard we were changing lenders. We were accused of all sorts of bad faith tricks to keep the home under contract.
Better’s lie set the tone for the rest of the transaction. We missed all of our deadlines, the sellers walked away, and we were stuck. It got so bad that our agent refused to try to resurrect the deal with a new offer.
I eventually convinced a local lender to guarantee that she could put a loan together in less than 26 days and made our agent bring a new offer to the listing agent. If he hadn’t, I would have done it myself.
The sellers were suspicious so they set a new closing date that was months later than the original. We’d already packed so we had to live in a completely NYC apartment with boxes stacked floor to ceiling for months (I had to pack my desk just to make room for our boxes. Instead of a week or two, I had to work on the floor all summer. My back and neck still hurt), AND my gf missed her first Summer in the Midwest (where Winter is the best 8 months of the year.)
Better was awful. This is just one story, there are a few others from the months we had to deal with them. If a mistake is made Better is not structured to recover from it. They just blame their byzantine process and babble about how x, y, and x departments are on it, but, no, you cannot contact anyone in those departments.
Always use a local lender.
I’m so glad that we’re not going to be sending money to Better for the next 30 years.
I just completed a transaction with them that had to be extended beyond the rate lock window. For about 10 days there was a daily back and forth where they asked me to provide some documentation. I would provide the requested documentation and about 12 hours later I would receive a task of uploading the same required documentation.
The document was a 50ish page legal document that required someone to look at it. It’s clear nobody was actually spending any effort on it. Even calling my loan officer wasn’t getting me anywhere. It wasn’t until the deadline approached that they called me and wanted to get it all sorted out and they extended my rate lock.
The way management handled this looks horrible but if there’s any truth to these employees essentially stealing wages from their employer then they’re lucky they’re just being fired and not being prosecuted.