Eh. About 1/3 of those seem bad, a 1/3 seem totally fine, and another 1/3 I'm just confused by. Example: HR is a function, not just a department. The fact t

Eh. About 1/3 of those seem bad, a 1/3 seem totally fine, and another 1/3 I'm just confused by. Example: HR is a function, not just a department. The fact that you don't have a full time HR person doesn't mean that the job they would have done is going to remain unfilled; it just means someone else has to wear the HR hat, probably the CEO. If you're taking a week off and expecting to use sick days rather than vacation time, a doctor's note does seem appropriate, and I have no idea why it's relevant that its a startup with only 10 people. Being asked to go to lunch while sick seems much dodgier, but the story presents the lack of a dedicated HR person as the punchline, when that seems irrelevant. You can't abuse sick leave just because the company is small. Similarly, having your head of network operations not understand the issue with your Cassandra cluster and just check the port responds to packets is...I dunno, I guess it's bad? Kind of? Assuming that his job description includes setting up Cassandra clusters, which it probably wouldn't be in many companies, so... On the other hand, there were enough stories there to make me feel pretty smug about my current job. But overall, the stories feel more like zen koans than actual stories. You read it, you stop, and you puzzle over it. It's bad that the head of HR doesn't normally personally do exit interviews...why? Or is the problem that the head of HR taking an interest in you? Are we meant to be upset she isn't doing more interviews, or that she isn't doing fewer? Or is the issue unrelated to the number of interviews? Are we meant to guess? Or the ones about pay rises for team members; are we meant to assume that this would normally be the author's job? Or is the complaint that it wasn't the author's job, but should have been?