11 ms·

All I Wanted Was to Work in Tech. Be Careful What You Wish For

96 points by monsieurpng 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
awat 9y ago
Good read. The sooner that society comes to grips with the concept that sociopathic behavior in a t-shirt and jeans is exactly the same as sociopathic behavior in a Prada suit the better.
- xkjkls 9y ago
  First of all, no one on Wall Street wears Prada suits. Prada suits are high fashion trash. They wear Zegna or Canali or bespoke. And second, what about this story reads you as sociopathic? Sure, there's alot of shuffling in this business, but how much worse is that than any other? Restaurants and bars close down all the time, and no one accuses restaurant and bar managers of being sociopaths.
  - snackbugs 9y ago
    Anecdotally I've heard my friends who work in small business food and alcohol places as servers, cooks, bartenders, etc. call their bosses and business owners sociopaths more than once in unrelated conversations.
    - xkjkls 9y ago
      I mean, that's always going to be a standard capital v. labor argument. What I'm saying is that industries like tech shouldn't be singled out for run-of-the-mill decisions.
      - jstewartmobile 9y ago
        They are, and they should be. Which industry gave us stack ranking?
        Domenic_S 9y ago
        Not tech. Jack Welch at GE gave it to us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
        xkjkls 9y ago
        Depending on how broad your definition of stack ranking is, every industry does stack ranking. Every single successful business has the problem of "we have this large amount of money in bonuses that we would like to distribute out to our employees and we want to figure out equitable way to do it". Invariably they end up having the rank and group the employees to do that.
        jstewartmobile 9y ago
        “The behavior this engenders, people do everything they can to stay out of the bottom bucket,” one Microsoft engineer said. “People responsible for features will openly sabotage other people’s efforts. One of the most valuable things I learned was to give the appearance of being courteous while withholding just enough information from colleagues to ensure they didn’t get ahead of me on the rankings.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-l...
        xkjkls 9y ago
        How’s that different than Jack Welch’s famous “fire the bottom 10% of your workforce” that he implemented in GE in the 80s? Honestly, it was close to textbook management strategy when originally implemented at Microsoft. Now, sure management science has advanced since then, and a lot of the ways that Microsoft implemented stack ranking at the beginning we’ve realized are counterproductive. But that doesn’t really change the core principle that they end up ranking employees at some point in time
  - awat 9y ago
    1.) I hardly think the brand of suit detracts from my point. 2.) Go read the comments on the article itself. It’s littered with antecdotes about training your own replacement, being fired before a stock vest, etc. 3.) I would argue that bars and restaurants are a different story all together. The article mentions being a contractor in charge of six-figure decisions which to me reads as a could treat people appropriately chooses not to.
    - xkjkls 9y ago
      > 1.) I hardly think the brand of suit detracts from my point. Not saying it does; I'm just saying you should learn some more about suits. > 2.) Go read the comments on the article itself. It’s littered with antecdotes about training your own replacement, being fired before a stock vest, etc. I did. The major anecdotes are: * layed off from a job with one month severance, three months healthcare, because the company realized it needed a different direction * multiple difficulties with interviewing and attempting to find a new job * another layoff when a company is acquired and his position is eliminated, where even the author says he considered his severence "more than fair" * one experience as a contractor where his contract was cancelled with no severence Sure, it's crappy to have all of those events happen to you, but other than the one contracting gig, I'd consider those layoffs extremely empathic and generous.
      - awat 9y ago
        I’m interested where you are going with this. I made what I thought was a pretty innocuous comment about actions mattering more than appearance. Are you making the point that tech in general is not building in some sociopathic behaviors as an industry?
        xkjkls 9y ago
        I think that backlash against tech has reached such a fever pitch at this point that a huge number of criticisms of it are overblown. Does tech have problems? Sure. But in order for the criticism of it to be effective, we shouldn’t mix it in with general compliants about our current economic system.
  - ericmcer 9y ago
    In a restaurant and bar though the employees are viewed as humans, they actually know the person deciding their fate and the reason for that decision. In his story there was always an invisible hand guiding decisions that could completely devastate or make his life.
    - xkjkls 9y ago
      I mean, the largest percentage of restaurant and bar layoffs are just due to the restaurant and bar closing. In that case, the invisible hand of the free market can be even more cruel than these. Especially since you won't get severance.
- jowiar 9y ago
  I interviewed with a bank recently, and was blown away by the level of professionalism I experienced compared to everywhere else in tech I've been. My mental image of finance was "bros a'broing", but the reality of the experience was professionals who were fully attuned to the reality of dealing with billions of dollars, and no delusions about how a few lines of javascript will change the world. Whereas when I went to Google, I was met with a mix of "you're changing the world, selling eyeballs to advertisers" and "It's so great, we get to dress like we're 12 and play like we're 12". Or the long since pivoted startup I interviewed who was doing their best to break the internet through awful PDF readers while in the office, everyone was ziplining and pogo-sticking around. (I await the mod slap for speaking ill of a YC company).
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Reading these threads as an European tech worker is weird. Or maybe I've missed all the pogo-sticking companies. The most I've seen was some people wearing inoffensive t-shirts and jeans, and a couple of companies which had a foosball table in the break room.
    - jowiar 9y ago
      VC Money is a helluva drug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWccN_uu0gY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWccN_uu0gY
      - 52-6F-62 9y ago
        Here I thought at first "well that looks relatively reasonable even though it's a big space." and then the go carts....
        solarkraft 9y ago
        Same here. I was prepared to say "Okay, that's silly, but they still work", but the zip line was a tad too much. Why would you have that in your office? Edit: They did a follow-up some years later (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v7v51le0lc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v7v51le0lc) and somewhat surprisingly they were still pretty similar! I guess they really know how to balance themselves, since they do seem to be putting out a good product.
vkou 9y ago
Unsurprisingly, modern white-collar work is incredibly anti-human. Blue-collar work is, as well, but in a different way. This is a natural consequence of our economic systems. Companies that won't burn you the moment that your department's RoI is <1, will be outcompeted or acquired by ones that will. Though it may seem that way, nothing about this state of affairs has to be immutable.
- xkjkls 9y ago
  In what way is this not the natural consequence of a system that attempts to optimize wealth? If there's a solution to this, it seems that the wealth once created should be distributed differently, rather than attempting to kill the goose.
  - jackhack 9y ago
    Proof: all those world-changing innovations just pouring out of socialist hotspots of the world, with their shared high living standards outpacing the rest. (/sarcasm). If Musk had not gotten wealthy on paypal, SpaceX wouldn't have been possible. Nor Tesla. If some country had capped his wealth at an arbitrary # (say, $1,000,000) none of this would have happened. Instead, there's a self-driving car in orbit around the sun and thousands of engineers doing amazing stuff. Opportunity is the natural consequence of a system that maximizes liberty. And yes, that opportunity is for success and failure. But by removing reward, you remove incentive, which reduces effort. Vicious circle. How is this difficult to understand?
    - solarkraft 9y ago
      > If Musk had not gotten wealthy on paypal, SpaceX wouldn't have been possible Cool, that's about one guy. I understand that wealth management often includes investing into companies actually doing something, those will most often still be motivated by efficiency (because otherwise they'll be out-competed). This capitalist system works well, but the humans in the market can be helped out by regulating (oh, the evil word) the companies to give their workers certain rights. This slightly limits wealth accumulation on the higher end not by setting a maximum bank account balance, but by giving money to people who need it (and spend it), thus stimulating the economy further. This is something all "developed" countries seem to have realised, with the exception of the USA. Or maybe not.
maxxxxx 9y ago
Is any this of this specific to "tech"? It just seems to confirm that a lot of companies are run by sociopaths (see Gervais principle) who don't care about the impact of their actions on the people that work for them.
- vokep 9y ago
  Is that really the case though? Do the leaders of such companies really have other options which still accomplish their goals? People are hired to accomplish the goals of the company, not the other way around. Seems to me like its not so much that companies are run by sociopaths but that workers have trouble empathizing with a CEO and understanding that nothing is guaranteed. Rarely are they going to be happy to lay people off, they know it causes problems for people. They're human too. Sometimes there isn't much of an option which preserves their interests. Some might react going "but that's just the problem, they only care about their interests" but...do you really care about theirs? Does anyone work long ours putting passion into a project because they hope to make the executives rich so they can feel good about how rich they made the executives? I certainly don't, I work passionately on something because I believe in what it does/what I'm doing/making, and secondarily for my own gain of wealth. A good CEO runs a company because s/he believes in an idea, and secondarily for their own wealth, and perhaps finally for the ability to create jobs and benefit people that way. But that is a final result of the process, not a primary goal. Of course there are CEOs which just want wealth but in tech space at least they are unlikely to go too far, more likely to fuck up in their greed.
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    I think with the rise of shareholder capitalism it has become OK to treat workers like disposable items. I grew up during a time when it was not OK to lay off people while giving a bonus to the CEO. Now that's normal practice.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - lliamander 9y ago
noonespecial 9y ago
All that churn sounds inordinately expensive. It almost seems like its time for someone to come along and disrupt the disruptors with a little good old fashioned loyalty and a modicum of institutionalized common sense.
- jpm_sd 9y ago
  Most of these "disruptive" companies are pissing away investors' money without actually accomplishing anything. They will never be productive or profitable, so there is no point in trying to out-compete them. Edit: as far as the BigCos are concerned, this is also true of many of their internal teams that are chasing "moonshots" in parallel to the main business model. The "investors" in this case are the profitable parts of the BigCo.
ngngngng 9y ago
It seems obvious to me that companies are inherently amoral. I'm not saying this is good, but does it really take a full blown sociopath to prioritize business goals over the repercussions of firing someone? I don't run a business, maybe I don't want to with this in mind.
- supreme_sublime 9y ago
  It doesn't seem like the "business goals" were why the author was fired, I'm not sure where you get that from. It is certainly possible that these companies simply couldn't afford to pay them. So it was a choice between firing them or being financially insolvent. I don't really know how firing one (or a few) people is less desirable over the entire company going under and everyone losing their jobs.
- WillPostForFood 9y ago
  Companies are inherently non moral, non sentient, legal constructs. Any sense of morality comes from the people in the company, and they can be highly moral, immoral, or anything in between.
  - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
    There's an interesting argument[1] that the behavior of corporations can be very accurately modeled as artificial intelligences that use humans as computing resources. If you accept that argument, it is no longer accurate to say that morality comes only from the people that make up the company, a company has its own agency that isn't just the sum of all of the decisions made by the individuals who make up the corporation. [1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you-broke-the-future.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you...
    - jpm_sd 9y ago
      Yes. The paperclip maximizers are already here.
- pixelbath 9y ago
jstewartmobile 9y ago
Even if you are in demand, none of these places have any honor. It is a shame too. People are usually ok at rolling with the punches if you just tell them one might be coming. That, and as tempting as it may be to lay it all at the door of capitalism, I'm not sure that's fair. Even in a competition, honor still has some value. I'd put more of the blame on the aphysical conflict-averse types office work generally attracts.
- lovich 9y ago
  In what world does honor have value for businesses? The business that is willing to like, steal, and cheat their way to higher profitability is going to outcompete the ones who will not. Even if they get bad PR just hire a company to clean up your image,rebrnd, or hide your activities behind a plethora of other companies and branda you own. Nothing in the history of corporations has shown any preference for honor on their part
  - jstewartmobile 9y ago
    I was talking capitalism. In a market transaction between individuals, trustworthiness of the other party has some value. You're talking corporations. "none of these places have any honor" I completely agree with you on corporations.
  - BigChiefSmokem 9y ago
    Honor is part of culture and culture is what attracts certain types of employees and customer loyalty.
  - Ascetik 9y ago
    >In what world does honor have value for businesses? The one we live in. Honor and integrity are matters of justice. It is honorable to pay an agreed upon price for widgets. It is just. If one deviates from that they are painted as dishonorable and people don't like doing business with someone who has the reputation of being dishonorable (companies that lie to their clients or don't pay their bills). >The business that is willing to like, steal, and cheat their way to higher profitability is going to outcompete the ones who will not. Banks can do this unfortunately, but not other companies. You don't build a legacy like Ford, or Samuel Gawith in England by lying, cheating and stealing or treating your customers like trash.
ef4 9y ago
What nobody told this unfortunate person is that working for a tech company is not the same as being a tech worker. I'm not defending the two-tier system inside many tech companies, just pointing out that it's real and it's maintained by market forces bigger than any one company. If a big Seattle software company lays off a team of programmers, recruiters are swarming around them by the end of the same day.
- mnm1 9y ago
  Absolutely. Not only that, but the experience as a tech worker is quite terrible at almost all companies and especially startups. The difference is, of course, that jobs are plenty and demand is high. If that's how they treat their developers, it should come as no surprise that everyone else is treated even worse. I can't imagine why anyone would want to work in this industry if they don't have some obsession with technology, nor that many people who don't have such an obsession make it long term. It's brutal, although probably less so out of the tech hubs like SF and Seattle, at small companies, and generally wherever people still have some human decency. Human decency in business, if it was ever there to begin with, seems to be declining heavily.
  - aaronchall 9y ago
    > the experience as a tech worker is quite terrible at almost all companies But then you acknowledge the economics ("jobs are plenty and demand is high") and also say everyone else is treated worse - so "terrible" relative to what then? Having been on the other side (hourly clerk and sales) I would say that tech workers are treated really really well.
    - mnm1 9y ago
      Having plenty of jobs and being in high demand have nothing to do with being treated well on the job.
- Kiro 9y ago
  Yeah, either you're a programmer or you're a second-class citizen in many tech companies.
leggomylibro 9y ago
A good reminder that 'tech' is more than the people sitting in front of screens [mis]mashing code together. It seems odd that the same code/infrastructure-y peculiarities of interviewing would get extended to marketing roles - why do you need a 5-person interview loop for things that revolve around communication and people skills? The only reason that those (awful) processes exist in the first place is because it's extremely difficult to judge a candidate's technical skills in a broad swath of concepts and technologies with limited time. But what sort of businessing doesn't require marketers? Is that sort of thing not reasonably figured out? The author's last contracting stint also smells sort of like the 'gig economy'. Sort of like how nowhere hires janitors anymore - the company which owns the building contracts services like that out to another firm which rarely offers full employment. Back to the 'rat race', eh?
nontechdude1 9y ago
wanting to solve a defined problem is a much better reason to join a certain company than on name alone. clearly the author just wanted a better salary. fine. i agree that this has a limit. if one were to want to fix facebook's problems, you'd inevitably have someone tell you no.
f4rker 9y ago
"I wanted an easy life but instead got reality" more news at 11
alephnan 9y ago
> They got unlimited paid time off (yes, you read that right—some companies offer unlimited vacation time to compete for talent). I started reading the article with skepticism after that. At my previous startup, unlimited vacation time ended up meaning no vacation time. Sounds great in theory, not in practice. When I left, I did not get reimbursed for the unofficial ~15 paid vacation days we're technically allowed.
- donretag 9y ago
  Exactly. I will never work again for a company with unlimited PTO.
  - 2trill2spill 9y ago
    I guess it depends on your company, At my company we have unlimited PTO and I definitely get more PTO days then people with a set number of PTO days at other companies.
    - otterley 9y ago
      Are you in engineering? Ask around sometime: The amount of time people feel entitled to take at “unlimited PTO” companies varies widely by department and role and how much competition there is for your position. People who feel extreme pressure to perform are likely to take much less time off, especially when they know they’re not entitled to a specific amount.
      - Posibyte 9y ago
        There's also this weird dynamic of not having number on paper. I once took off three weeks for vacation, first in a very long time, several years. When I got back, there was definitely this air of "so and so is finally back, working like the rest of us." Even with my direct management, it felt a lot like I had spent trust for time off. Since then, I've worked in a large corporate job for a while now as well, and it's different. Here, management and I can look at my PTO sheet and see I've accrued X hours so I can take off Y weeks, and that's earned. It feels more like a contractual obligation at that point, and not just an off-the-cuff spree.
RichardCA 9y ago
Back in my 20's I had a girlfriend who simply could not handle the opportunistic, hit-or-miss nature of finding work in tech. I ended up breaking up with her. I just couldn't tolerate that kind of friction and lack of support when I was already under the pressure of a job transition. Even when I succeeded in landing a better paying job she was never truly happy for me. From my point of view it felt like a lack of trust. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I see how I failed to understand the emotional burden I was asking her to carry for me.
nitwit005 9y ago
I haven't worked for that many companies, but every company I've worked for has fired a marketing department. Usually because they realized their marketing department was useless.
sevensor 9y ago
> I'd always heard growing up that if you make yourself indispensable, you'll never get fired. This is terrible advice. Indispensable people are your team's biggest weakness, and your boss knows it. If you become the single point of failure, you're a problem to be fixed.
- mrkstu 9y ago
  Yep, make yourself 'invaluable' instead. If you're always returning a disproportionate value, whatever the task, you are doing it right. If you make yourself 'indispensable', the best that can happen is that you're never fired but never promoted. The worst is that you're a target for replacement.
  - pkaye 9y ago
    Also you will be prone to burn-out because you might never get a break.
- gormz 9y ago
  Every company of reasonable size takes into account the "bus factor"
dahauns 9y ago
Yes, I can empathize with getting frustrated both facing the superficially hyper-positive, but in reality severely opportunistic and ruthless nature of startup culture, and with being treated like a freely interchangable, faceless number in a large company. Been there both, and it was harrowing. That said - and it's hard not to sound condescending here - halfway through the article I found myself agreeing with his girlfriend when she described his state of mind as "delusional". Going after what has been said in the article: What did he actually expect as someone with absolutely no experience and no education and/or skillset for the job beyond those transferable from being a waiter? (The often underrated value of those notwithstanding). And the primary motivation being "I want to work 'in tech' and have it made!" (And not, say, being interested in at least aspects of the core field or product of the company.) And the only actual mention of what his work was at those companies being "marketing" and "whiteboard[ing] the shit out of everything." (Because writing with colorful markers on a whiteboard makes you look important.) This screams "disposable", or more benevolently "likely one of the first to be let go when things go south", no matter the kind of company or field, or even the type of job at the company.
anonacct37 9y ago
I don't have as much sympathy for this person as I probably should. So someone decided being a waiter sucked and they wanted one of those cushy tech jobs. Without much self awareness as to why they exist or which jobs are valuable. Later in the article they almost figure it out: > One of the more apparent lessons I've learned during all this is that when working in tech, anyone is dispensable, from the C-suite to the sales floor. (Actually, IT is untouchable, and rightfully so.) This former waiter then proceeds to land not one but three tech jobs. Based on what qualifications? Apparently just good networking skills. Wow, what a rough industry. Oh I almost forgot they turned down a fourth job because that would have meant relocation. It sounds like "tech" was willing to give a go-getter chance after chance and either due to their performance or the company's performance it just didn't stick. Maybe despite many people being willing to give the author a chance, he/she just wasn't qualified to do the job?
falcor84 9y ago
I stopped sympathising with the writer after "... very smart people who deserved work...". The way I see it, if you come in with this mindset of the world owing anybody anything, then you are surely in for a big disappointment. The world doesn't care about a particular human any more than it cares about a particular amoeba.

96 points by monsieurpng 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

awat 9y ago

Good read. The sooner that society comes to grips with the concept that sociopathic behavior in a t-shirt and jeans is exactly the same as sociopathic behavior in a Prada suit the better.

xkjkls 9y ago
First of all, no one on Wall Street wears Prada suits. Prada suits are high fashion trash. They wear Zegna or Canali or bespoke. And second, what about this story reads you as sociopathic? Sure, there's alot of shuffling in this business, but how much worse is that than any other? Restaurants and bars close down all the time, and no one accuses restaurant and bar managers of being sociopaths.
- snackbugs 9y ago
  Anecdotally I've heard my friends who work in small business food and alcohol places as servers, cooks, bartenders, etc. call their bosses and business owners sociopaths more than once in unrelated conversations.
  - xkjkls 9y ago
    I mean, that's always going to be a standard capital v. labor argument. What I'm saying is that industries like tech shouldn't be singled out for run-of-the-mill decisions.
    - jstewartmobile 9y ago
      They are, and they should be. Which industry gave us stack ranking?
      - Domenic_S 9y ago
        Not tech. Jack Welch at GE gave it to us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
      - xkjkls 9y ago
        Depending on how broad your definition of stack ranking is, every industry does stack ranking. Every single successful business has the problem of "we have this large amount of money in bonuses that we would like to distribute out to our employees and we want to figure out equitable way to do it". Invariably they end up having the rank and group the employees to do that.
        jstewartmobile 9y ago
        “The behavior this engenders, people do everything they can to stay out of the bottom bucket,” one Microsoft engineer said. “People responsible for features will openly sabotage other people’s efforts. One of the most valuable things I learned was to give the appearance of being courteous while withholding just enough information from colleagues to ensure they didn’t get ahead of me on the rankings.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-l...
        xkjkls 9y ago
        How’s that different than Jack Welch’s famous “fire the bottom 10% of your workforce” that he implemented in GE in the 80s? Honestly, it was close to textbook management strategy when originally implemented at Microsoft. Now, sure management science has advanced since then, and a lot of the ways that Microsoft implemented stack ranking at the beginning we’ve realized are counterproductive. But that doesn’t really change the core principle that they end up ranking employees at some point in time
- awat 9y ago
  1.) I hardly think the brand of suit detracts from my point. 2.) Go read the comments on the article itself. It’s littered with antecdotes about training your own replacement, being fired before a stock vest, etc. 3.) I would argue that bars and restaurants are a different story all together. The article mentions being a contractor in charge of six-figure decisions which to me reads as a could treat people appropriately chooses not to.
  - xkjkls 9y ago
    > 1.) I hardly think the brand of suit detracts from my point. Not saying it does; I'm just saying you should learn some more about suits. > 2.) Go read the comments on the article itself. It’s littered with antecdotes about training your own replacement, being fired before a stock vest, etc. I did. The major anecdotes are: * layed off from a job with one month severance, three months healthcare, because the company realized it needed a different direction * multiple difficulties with interviewing and attempting to find a new job * another layoff when a company is acquired and his position is eliminated, where even the author says he considered his severence "more than fair" * one experience as a contractor where his contract was cancelled with no severence Sure, it's crappy to have all of those events happen to you, but other than the one contracting gig, I'd consider those layoffs extremely empathic and generous.
    - awat 9y ago
      I’m interested where you are going with this. I made what I thought was a pretty innocuous comment about actions mattering more than appearance. Are you making the point that tech in general is not building in some sociopathic behaviors as an industry?
      - xkjkls 9y ago
        I think that backlash against tech has reached such a fever pitch at this point that a huge number of criticisms of it are overblown. Does tech have problems? Sure. But in order for the criticism of it to be effective, we shouldn’t mix it in with general compliants about our current economic system.
- ericmcer 9y ago
  In a restaurant and bar though the employees are viewed as humans, they actually know the person deciding their fate and the reason for that decision. In his story there was always an invisible hand guiding decisions that could completely devastate or make his life.
  - xkjkls 9y ago
    I mean, the largest percentage of restaurant and bar layoffs are just due to the restaurant and bar closing. In that case, the invisible hand of the free market can be even more cruel than these. Especially since you won't get severance.
jowiar 9y ago
I interviewed with a bank recently, and was blown away by the level of professionalism I experienced compared to everywhere else in tech I've been. My mental image of finance was "bros a'broing", but the reality of the experience was professionals who were fully attuned to the reality of dealing with billions of dollars, and no delusions about how a few lines of javascript will change the world. Whereas when I went to Google, I was met with a mix of "you're changing the world, selling eyeballs to advertisers" and "It's so great, we get to dress like we're 12 and play like we're 12". Or the long since pivoted startup I interviewed who was doing their best to break the internet through awful PDF readers while in the office, everyone was ziplining and pogo-sticking around. (I await the mod slap for speaking ill of a YC company).
- icebraining 9y ago
  Reading these threads as an European tech worker is weird. Or maybe I've missed all the pogo-sticking companies. The most I've seen was some people wearing inoffensive t-shirts and jeans, and a couple of companies which had a foosball table in the break room.
  - jowiar 9y ago
    VC Money is a helluva drug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWccN_uu0gY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWccN_uu0gY
    - 52-6F-62 9y ago
      Here I thought at first "well that looks relatively reasonable even though it's a big space." and then the go carts....
      - solarkraft 9y ago
        Same here. I was prepared to say "Okay, that's silly, but they still work", but the zip line was a tad too much. Why would you have that in your office? Edit: They did a follow-up some years later (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v7v51le0lc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v7v51le0lc) and somewhat surprisingly they were still pretty similar! I guess they really know how to balance themselves, since they do seem to be putting out a good product.

vkou 9y ago

Unsurprisingly, modern white-collar work is incredibly anti-human. Blue-collar work is, as well, but in a different way. This is a natural consequence of our economic systems. Companies that won't burn you the moment that your department's RoI is <1, will be outcompeted or acquired by ones that will. Though it may seem that way, nothing about this state of affairs has to be immutable.

xkjkls 9y ago
In what way is this not the natural consequence of a system that attempts to optimize wealth? If there's a solution to this, it seems that the wealth once created should be distributed differently, rather than attempting to kill the goose.
- jackhack 9y ago
  Proof: all those world-changing innovations just pouring out of socialist hotspots of the world, with their shared high living standards outpacing the rest. (/sarcasm). If Musk had not gotten wealthy on paypal, SpaceX wouldn't have been possible. Nor Tesla. If some country had capped his wealth at an arbitrary # (say, $1,000,000) none of this would have happened. Instead, there's a self-driving car in orbit around the sun and thousands of engineers doing amazing stuff. Opportunity is the natural consequence of a system that maximizes liberty. And yes, that opportunity is for success and failure. But by removing reward, you remove incentive, which reduces effort. Vicious circle. How is this difficult to understand?
  - solarkraft 9y ago
    > If Musk had not gotten wealthy on paypal, SpaceX wouldn't have been possible Cool, that's about one guy. I understand that wealth management often includes investing into companies actually doing something, those will most often still be motivated by efficiency (because otherwise they'll be out-competed). This capitalist system works well, but the humans in the market can be helped out by regulating (oh, the evil word) the companies to give their workers certain rights. This slightly limits wealth accumulation on the higher end not by setting a maximum bank account balance, but by giving money to people who need it (and spend it), thus stimulating the economy further. This is something all "developed" countries seem to have realised, with the exception of the USA. Or maybe not.

maxxxxx 9y ago

Is any this of this specific to "tech"? It just seems to confirm that a lot of companies are run by sociopaths (see Gervais principle) who don't care about the impact of their actions on the people that work for them.

vokep 9y ago
Is that really the case though? Do the leaders of such companies really have other options which still accomplish their goals? People are hired to accomplish the goals of the company, not the other way around. Seems to me like its not so much that companies are run by sociopaths but that workers have trouble empathizing with a CEO and understanding that nothing is guaranteed. Rarely are they going to be happy to lay people off, they know it causes problems for people. They're human too. Sometimes there isn't much of an option which preserves their interests. Some might react going "but that's just the problem, they only care about their interests" but...do you really care about theirs? Does anyone work long ours putting passion into a project because they hope to make the executives rich so they can feel good about how rich they made the executives? I certainly don't, I work passionately on something because I believe in what it does/what I'm doing/making, and secondarily for my own gain of wealth. A good CEO runs a company because s/he believes in an idea, and secondarily for their own wealth, and perhaps finally for the ability to create jobs and benefit people that way. But that is a final result of the process, not a primary goal. Of course there are CEOs which just want wealth but in tech space at least they are unlikely to go too far, more likely to fuck up in their greed.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  I think with the rise of shareholder capitalism it has become OK to treat workers like disposable items. I grew up during a time when it was not OK to lay off people while giving a bonus to the CEO. Now that's normal practice.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - lliamander 9y ago

noonespecial 9y ago

All that churn sounds inordinately expensive. It almost seems like its time for someone to come along and disrupt the disruptors with a little good old fashioned loyalty and a modicum of institutionalized common sense.

jpm_sd 9y ago
Most of these "disruptive" companies are pissing away investors' money without actually accomplishing anything. They will never be productive or profitable, so there is no point in trying to out-compete them. Edit: as far as the BigCos are concerned, this is also true of many of their internal teams that are chasing "moonshots" in parallel to the main business model. The "investors" in this case are the profitable parts of the BigCo.

ngngngng 9y ago

It seems obvious to me that companies are inherently amoral. I'm not saying this is good, but does it really take a full blown sociopath to prioritize business goals over the repercussions of firing someone? I don't run a business, maybe I don't want to with this in mind.

supreme_sublime 9y ago
It doesn't seem like the "business goals" were why the author was fired, I'm not sure where you get that from. It is certainly possible that these companies simply couldn't afford to pay them. So it was a choice between firing them or being financially insolvent. I don't really know how firing one (or a few) people is less desirable over the entire company going under and everyone losing their jobs.
WillPostForFood 9y ago
Companies are inherently non moral, non sentient, legal constructs. Any sense of morality comes from the people in the company, and they can be highly moral, immoral, or anything in between.
- TheCoelacanth 9y ago
  There's an interesting argument[1] that the behavior of corporations can be very accurately modeled as artificial intelligences that use humans as computing resources. If you accept that argument, it is no longer accurate to say that morality comes only from the people that make up the company, a company has its own agency that isn't just the sum of all of the decisions made by the individuals who make up the corporation. [1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you-broke-the-future.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you...
  - jpm_sd 9y ago
    Yes. The paperclip maximizers are already here.
pixelbath 9y ago

jstewartmobile 9y ago

Even if you are in demand, none of these places have any honor. It is a shame too. People are usually ok at rolling with the punches if you just tell them one might be coming. That, and as tempting as it may be to lay it all at the door of capitalism, I'm not sure that's fair. Even in a competition, honor still has some value. I'd put more of the blame on the aphysical conflict-averse types office work generally attracts.

lovich 9y ago
In what world does honor have value for businesses? The business that is willing to like, steal, and cheat their way to higher profitability is going to outcompete the ones who will not. Even if they get bad PR just hire a company to clean up your image,rebrnd, or hide your activities behind a plethora of other companies and branda you own. Nothing in the history of corporations has shown any preference for honor on their part
- jstewartmobile 9y ago
  I was talking capitalism. In a market transaction between individuals, trustworthiness of the other party has some value. You're talking corporations. "none of these places have any honor" I completely agree with you on corporations.
- BigChiefSmokem 9y ago
  Honor is part of culture and culture is what attracts certain types of employees and customer loyalty.
- Ascetik 9y ago
  >In what world does honor have value for businesses? The one we live in. Honor and integrity are matters of justice. It is honorable to pay an agreed upon price for widgets. It is just. If one deviates from that they are painted as dishonorable and people don't like doing business with someone who has the reputation of being dishonorable (companies that lie to their clients or don't pay their bills). >The business that is willing to like, steal, and cheat their way to higher profitability is going to outcompete the ones who will not. Banks can do this unfortunately, but not other companies. You don't build a legacy like Ford, or Samuel Gawith in England by lying, cheating and stealing or treating your customers like trash.

ef4 9y ago

What nobody told this unfortunate person is that working for a tech company is not the same as being a tech worker. I'm not defending the two-tier system inside many tech companies, just pointing out that it's real and it's maintained by market forces bigger than any one company. If a big Seattle software company lays off a team of programmers, recruiters are swarming around them by the end of the same day.

mnm1 9y ago
Absolutely. Not only that, but the experience as a tech worker is quite terrible at almost all companies and especially startups. The difference is, of course, that jobs are plenty and demand is high. If that's how they treat their developers, it should come as no surprise that everyone else is treated even worse. I can't imagine why anyone would want to work in this industry if they don't have some obsession with technology, nor that many people who don't have such an obsession make it long term. It's brutal, although probably less so out of the tech hubs like SF and Seattle, at small companies, and generally wherever people still have some human decency. Human decency in business, if it was ever there to begin with, seems to be declining heavily.
- aaronchall 9y ago
  > the experience as a tech worker is quite terrible at almost all companies But then you acknowledge the economics ("jobs are plenty and demand is high") and also say everyone else is treated worse - so "terrible" relative to what then? Having been on the other side (hourly clerk and sales) I would say that tech workers are treated really really well.
  - mnm1 9y ago
    Having plenty of jobs and being in high demand have nothing to do with being treated well on the job.
Kiro 9y ago
Yeah, either you're a programmer or you're a second-class citizen in many tech companies.

leggomylibro 9y ago

A good reminder that 'tech' is more than the people sitting in front of screens [mis]mashing code together. It seems odd that the same code/infrastructure-y peculiarities of interviewing would get extended to marketing roles - why do you need a 5-person interview loop for things that revolve around communication and people skills? The only reason that those (awful) processes exist in the first place is because it's extremely difficult to judge a candidate's technical skills in a broad swath of concepts and technologies with limited time. But what sort of businessing doesn't require marketers? Is that sort of thing not reasonably figured out? The author's last contracting stint also smells sort of like the 'gig economy'. Sort of like how nowhere hires janitors anymore - the company which owns the building contracts services like that out to another firm which rarely offers full employment. Back to the 'rat race', eh?

nontechdude1 9y ago

wanting to solve a defined problem is a much better reason to join a certain company than on name alone. clearly the author just wanted a better salary. fine. i agree that this has a limit. if one were to want to fix facebook's problems, you'd inevitably have someone tell you no.

f4rker 9y ago

"I wanted an easy life but instead got reality" more news at 11

alephnan 9y ago

> They got unlimited paid time off (yes, you read that right—some companies offer unlimited vacation time to compete for talent). I started reading the article with skepticism after that. At my previous startup, unlimited vacation time ended up meaning no vacation time. Sounds great in theory, not in practice. When I left, I did not get reimbursed for the unofficial ~15 paid vacation days we're technically allowed.

donretag 9y ago
Exactly. I will never work again for a company with unlimited PTO.
- 2trill2spill 9y ago
  I guess it depends on your company, At my company we have unlimited PTO and I definitely get more PTO days then people with a set number of PTO days at other companies.
  - otterley 9y ago
    Are you in engineering? Ask around sometime: The amount of time people feel entitled to take at “unlimited PTO” companies varies widely by department and role and how much competition there is for your position. People who feel extreme pressure to perform are likely to take much less time off, especially when they know they’re not entitled to a specific amount.
    - Posibyte 9y ago
      There's also this weird dynamic of not having number on paper. I once took off three weeks for vacation, first in a very long time, several years. When I got back, there was definitely this air of "so and so is finally back, working like the rest of us." Even with my direct management, it felt a lot like I had spent trust for time off. Since then, I've worked in a large corporate job for a while now as well, and it's different. Here, management and I can look at my PTO sheet and see I've accrued X hours so I can take off Y weeks, and that's earned. It feels more like a contractual obligation at that point, and not just an off-the-cuff spree.

RichardCA 9y ago

Back in my 20's I had a girlfriend who simply could not handle the opportunistic, hit-or-miss nature of finding work in tech. I ended up breaking up with her. I just couldn't tolerate that kind of friction and lack of support when I was already under the pressure of a job transition. Even when I succeeded in landing a better paying job she was never truly happy for me. From my point of view it felt like a lack of trust. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I see how I failed to understand the emotional burden I was asking her to carry for me.

nitwit005 9y ago

I haven't worked for that many companies, but every company I've worked for has fired a marketing department. Usually because they realized their marketing department was useless.

sevensor 9y ago

> I'd always heard growing up that if you make yourself indispensable, you'll never get fired. This is terrible advice. Indispensable people are your team's biggest weakness, and your boss knows it. If you become the single point of failure, you're a problem to be fixed.

mrkstu 9y ago
Yep, make yourself 'invaluable' instead. If you're always returning a disproportionate value, whatever the task, you are doing it right. If you make yourself 'indispensable', the best that can happen is that you're never fired but never promoted. The worst is that you're a target for replacement.
- pkaye 9y ago
  Also you will be prone to burn-out because you might never get a break.
gormz 9y ago
Every company of reasonable size takes into account the "bus factor"

dahauns 9y ago

Yes, I can empathize with getting frustrated both facing the superficially hyper-positive, but in reality severely opportunistic and ruthless nature of startup culture, and with being treated like a freely interchangable, faceless number in a large company. Been there both, and it was harrowing. That said - and it's hard not to sound condescending here - halfway through the article I found myself agreeing with his girlfriend when she described his state of mind as "delusional". Going after what has been said in the article: What did he actually expect as someone with absolutely no experience and no education and/or skillset for the job beyond those transferable from being a waiter? (The often underrated value of those notwithstanding). And the primary motivation being "I want to work 'in tech' and have it made!" (And not, say, being interested in at least aspects of the core field or product of the company.) And the only actual mention of what his work was at those companies being "marketing" and "whiteboard[ing] the shit out of everything." (Because writing with colorful markers on a whiteboard makes you look important.) This screams "disposable", or more benevolently "likely one of the first to be let go when things go south", no matter the kind of company or field, or even the type of job at the company.

anonacct37 9y ago

I don't have as much sympathy for this person as I probably should. So someone decided being a waiter sucked and they wanted one of those cushy tech jobs. Without much self awareness as to why they exist or which jobs are valuable. Later in the article they almost figure it out: > One of the more apparent lessons I've learned during all this is that when working in tech, anyone is dispensable, from the C-suite to the sales floor. (Actually, IT is untouchable, and rightfully so.) This former waiter then proceeds to land not one but three tech jobs. Based on what qualifications? Apparently just good networking skills. Wow, what a rough industry. Oh I almost forgot they turned down a fourth job because that would have meant relocation. It sounds like "tech" was willing to give a go-getter chance after chance and either due to their performance or the company's performance it just didn't stick. Maybe despite many people being willing to give the author a chance, he/she just wasn't qualified to do the job?

falcor84 9y ago

I stopped sympathising with the writer after "... very smart people who deserved work...". The way I see it, if you come in with this mindset of the world owing anybody anything, then you are surely in for a big disappointment. The world doesn't care about a particular human any more than it cares about a particular amoeba.