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On the one hand I recognise a lot of the teams and work issues this developer had. But reading between the lines it seems like this dev wanted it all, equity wi

On the one hand I recognise a lot of the teams and work issues this developer had. But reading between the lines it seems like this dev wanted it all, equity without commitment, weeks of remote work without formal agreement, a quick cash out over adding value to the company...Seems very entitled to me. It looks very one-sided as well. Everything had to come from the company and its management, nothing from his side.

300bps 7y ago
I agree. And his “Low Performer” review and denying the remote work request are obvious attempts to manage him out the door which worked.
- eequah9L 7y ago
  Denying remote work is a common policy even in cases when nobody wants to manipulate you anywhere. It's really not hard to imagine that a gentlemant's agreement is not upheld when said gentleman is not around to push your agenda anymore.
  - fhbdukfrh 7y ago
    The only thing harder than working remote is managing a remote. It requires the combination of a super disciplined high performer and counter intuitive communication strategies, both of which are rare and hard to pull off.
- purple-again 7y ago
  This is 100% what I was reading between the lines and it become more and more clear as the article went on. This WAS a low performer that the company was trying to manage out the door.
aedron 7y ago
This does come across as an inexperienced developer with a high opinion of his own worth, and rather clueless about how organizations work. I actually came away with a good impression of Snap from the description. Even the supposedly nightmarish engineering director could, from another angle, possibly be seen in a good light: Insisting on proper analysis and design before a project commences, taking a deep interest in the technical part of the project. The author disagreed with a bunch of points and that might have been enough for him to lose all respect for him. In the end he gets bored with his actual work and lets himself be hijacked by some line function to develop internal tools for them, outside of the purview of any manager. Unsurprisingly he ends up an organizational orphan. Which means no one goes to bat for him to squeeze in several weeks of remote work, which sounds like a pretty outlandish demand to my ears. To think that the fact that some random person once 'approved' it makes any difference just goes to show the naïvety. Obviously he didn't get it in writing from someone able to make that decision, and that's the only thing that matters.
- kalkin 7y ago
  > Even the supposedly nightmarish engineering director could, from another angle, possibly be seen in a good light: Insisting on proper analysis and design before a project commences, taking a deep interest in the technical part of the project. In what world is it a good idea for an engineering director to take a deep interest in technical details of a project? Suppose that the director was right and author was wrong in ~all of their disagreements, but just that the author was simply telling the truth about two things: the director spending two weeks doing design mockups, and intervening to specify the type of a database column. This makes the director somebody who is (a) not doing their actual job, and (b) probably nightmarish to work for no matter whether you are a "low performer" or a superstar. You cannot be an effective manager and simultaneously maintain enough engineering context to make good technical decisions. If you want to be involved in detailed technical design, you need to switch your career track back to IC. And if you are running a company and you want either good technical decisions or high morale among your engineers, you can't tolerate managers playing at being engineers instead of doing their actual jobs. (With something like a manager maintaining a small low-priority internal tool, or doing a rotation onto an engineering team for a week to refresh their intuitive handle on the state of the codebase & tooling but no expectation of being a net-positive contributor, being the exceptions that prove the rule.)
  - fjabre 7y ago
    Couldnt agree more with this and having experienced something similar I will never work for a micro manager again.
  - corebit 7y ago
    Good managers are good leaders, which means they sometimes need to teach. There's nothing wrong with an engineering manager teaching someone about the proper type for a database column as an exercise in actual leadership and mentorship of their development team.
    - Topgamer7 7y ago
      But forcing you to change tests from using sqlite to mysql because of int vs smallint is an overreaction. If I was to prioritize moving tests from sqlite to mysql, over getting functional requirements done, I'd be nuts. Especially if the tests catch 99.9999999% of issues. Its very unlikely to have an issue with this type of thing. That's not a good manager, that's a moron.
noego 7y ago
> equity without commitment The guy was perfectly willing to stay for the long-haul. > weeks of remote work without formal agreement Taking people at their word is "entitled"? > a quick cash out over adding value to the company The guy was faithfully performing all the duties assigned to him. Is he drinking the company kool-aid and devoting his life to his company? Thankfully no. Your employer is not your family, nor is it a cult. Is the author naive? Maybe. Opinionated? Definitely but with good reason - the director was later fired, how often does that happen. Entitled? I see nothing of the sort.
- thiscatis 7y ago
  > Maybe I could get a high equity offer, and if the stock turned around I’d stand to make a large sum of money. If it didn’t, I could quit in a year or two and go somewhere more stable. If this is the intention of any of my candidates coming in and they call this "real commitment" to work for my company they would not pass the phone interview. Seriously?
  - noego 7y ago
    > If this is the intention of any of my candidates coming in and they call this "real commitment" to work for my company they would not pass the phone interview There is a very easy way to filter out candidates who want to leave in 1-2 years. Structure your equity vesting so that there's minimal vesting for the first 2-3 years, with a sizable severance package to protect against involuntary termination. I don't understand why you would give someone 30% equity after 2 years, if you're then going to begrudge them leaving.
    - subsaharancoder 7y ago
      The Amazon way of vesting which is 5-15-40-40, those who stay past the 2yr mark have generally made a commitment to the company and its culture.
slaunchwise 7y ago
He had a gig where he could come early, leave early, and work remotely instead of taking vacation. With the potential for life-changing money. He left because they made him follow the same rules as everyone else. He thought oddball office space management was worthy of hundreds and hundreds of words in an essay. He said more about himself in this piece than I dare say he meant to. That said, the short stories might have worked in an unreliable-narrator way.
- gen220 7y ago
  Not meaning to pass judgement on the author, but I agree that the literary value of this article holds promise! To me, there was something vaguely Dostoevskyan about this piece. There's the dithering nature of the conversations described (never addressing the point, always going in circles), the incessant references to people by their acts of intrigue and rank (is the "associate director" today's "titular councilor"?), the general absence of content describing the "real" work the characters are nominally paid for, except as an accessory to some greater plot point that circles back into the previous two themes. I guess that medium-to-large-sizd tech orgs are good on the path towards becoming a labyrinthine, 19th Century, Russian bureaucracy! I hope that some comparable literature emerges from such fertile soil .
  - shalmanese 7y ago
    > I guess that medium-to-large-sized tech orgs are good on the path towards becoming a labyrinthine, 19th Century, Russian bureaucracy! I hope that some comparable literature emerges from such fertile soil . Things that happen in Silicon Valley and also the Soviet Union: https://twitter.com/atroyn/status/1014974099930714115 https://twitter.com/atroyn/status/1014974099930714115
croh 7y ago
I don't see any entitlement here. Author perform all his duties but he didn't get what promised. He joined company after very serious considerations. This trade-off might not be big for you but it was for him. Author might be at fault few times, but remote work was his explicit condition. In whole process, it is author who lost everything and nothing happened to organization/HR. This is completely careless attitude. Sadly this is global issue. Thats why having everything written out in agreement is very important. 'Queen of the office' is inspirational Korean sitcom on these cults, must watch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nEoPIGIOTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nEoPIGIOTI
- Jare 7y ago
  > He joined company after very serious considerations He joined the company despite being aware of many red flags, just because he hoped to endure the shit until he could cash out. These are considerations, but not really what I'd call "serious" in a professional context. I'm pretty sure there may have been lots of broken pieces at Snap (the stuff about condos as offices can't just be made up, and is insane), but what I can read between the lines is that he brought a few new ones along himself. The remote work thing is something you either get signed by the company, or is a personal agreement with another person (and nobody else is bound by it). It's fine to be naive and make that mistake at the time, but to then insist on it in a post like this? That's not naivete, that's a massive disconnect, and you can expect other parts of his story to be similarly out of sync with reality, either by omission or by distortion.

300bps 7y ago

I agree. And his “Low Performer” review and denying the remote work request are obvious attempts to manage him out the door which worked.

eequah9L 7y ago
Denying remote work is a common policy even in cases when nobody wants to manipulate you anywhere. It's really not hard to imagine that a gentlemant's agreement is not upheld when said gentleman is not around to push your agenda anymore.
- fhbdukfrh 7y ago
  The only thing harder than working remote is managing a remote. It requires the combination of a super disciplined high performer and counter intuitive communication strategies, both of which are rare and hard to pull off.
purple-again 7y ago
This is 100% what I was reading between the lines and it become more and more clear as the article went on. This WAS a low performer that the company was trying to manage out the door.

aedron 7y ago

This does come across as an inexperienced developer with a high opinion of his own worth, and rather clueless about how organizations work. I actually came away with a good impression of Snap from the description. Even the supposedly nightmarish engineering director could, from another angle, possibly be seen in a good light: Insisting on proper analysis and design before a project commences, taking a deep interest in the technical part of the project. The author disagreed with a bunch of points and that might have been enough for him to lose all respect for him. In the end he gets bored with his actual work and lets himself be hijacked by some line function to develop internal tools for them, outside of the purview of any manager. Unsurprisingly he ends up an organizational orphan. Which means no one goes to bat for him to squeeze in several weeks of remote work, which sounds like a pretty outlandish demand to my ears. To think that the fact that some random person once 'approved' it makes any difference just goes to show the naïvety. Obviously he didn't get it in writing from someone able to make that decision, and that's the only thing that matters.

kalkin 7y ago
> Even the supposedly nightmarish engineering director could, from another angle, possibly be seen in a good light: Insisting on proper analysis and design before a project commences, taking a deep interest in the technical part of the project. In what world is it a good idea for an engineering director to take a deep interest in technical details of a project? Suppose that the director was right and author was wrong in ~all of their disagreements, but just that the author was simply telling the truth about two things: the director spending two weeks doing design mockups, and intervening to specify the type of a database column. This makes the director somebody who is (a) not doing their actual job, and (b) probably nightmarish to work for no matter whether you are a "low performer" or a superstar. You cannot be an effective manager and simultaneously maintain enough engineering context to make good technical decisions. If you want to be involved in detailed technical design, you need to switch your career track back to IC. And if you are running a company and you want either good technical decisions or high morale among your engineers, you can't tolerate managers playing at being engineers instead of doing their actual jobs. (With something like a manager maintaining a small low-priority internal tool, or doing a rotation onto an engineering team for a week to refresh their intuitive handle on the state of the codebase & tooling but no expectation of being a net-positive contributor, being the exceptions that prove the rule.)
- fjabre 7y ago
  Couldnt agree more with this and having experienced something similar I will never work for a micro manager again.
- corebit 7y ago
  Good managers are good leaders, which means they sometimes need to teach. There's nothing wrong with an engineering manager teaching someone about the proper type for a database column as an exercise in actual leadership and mentorship of their development team.
  - Topgamer7 7y ago
    But forcing you to change tests from using sqlite to mysql because of int vs smallint is an overreaction. If I was to prioritize moving tests from sqlite to mysql, over getting functional requirements done, I'd be nuts. Especially if the tests catch 99.9999999% of issues. Its very unlikely to have an issue with this type of thing. That's not a good manager, that's a moron.

noego 7y ago

> equity without commitment The guy was perfectly willing to stay for the long-haul. > weeks of remote work without formal agreement Taking people at their word is "entitled"? > a quick cash out over adding value to the company The guy was faithfully performing all the duties assigned to him. Is he drinking the company kool-aid and devoting his life to his company? Thankfully no. Your employer is not your family, nor is it a cult. Is the author naive? Maybe. Opinionated? Definitely but with good reason - the director was later fired, how often does that happen. Entitled? I see nothing of the sort.

thiscatis 7y ago
> Maybe I could get a high equity offer, and if the stock turned around I’d stand to make a large sum of money. If it didn’t, I could quit in a year or two and go somewhere more stable. If this is the intention of any of my candidates coming in and they call this "real commitment" to work for my company they would not pass the phone interview. Seriously?
- noego 7y ago
  > If this is the intention of any of my candidates coming in and they call this "real commitment" to work for my company they would not pass the phone interview There is a very easy way to filter out candidates who want to leave in 1-2 years. Structure your equity vesting so that there's minimal vesting for the first 2-3 years, with a sizable severance package to protect against involuntary termination. I don't understand why you would give someone 30% equity after 2 years, if you're then going to begrudge them leaving.
  - subsaharancoder 7y ago
    The Amazon way of vesting which is 5-15-40-40, those who stay past the 2yr mark have generally made a commitment to the company and its culture.

slaunchwise 7y ago

He had a gig where he could come early, leave early, and work remotely instead of taking vacation. With the potential for life-changing money. He left because they made him follow the same rules as everyone else. He thought oddball office space management was worthy of hundreds and hundreds of words in an essay. He said more about himself in this piece than I dare say he meant to. That said, the short stories might have worked in an unreliable-narrator way.

gen220 7y ago
Not meaning to pass judgement on the author, but I agree that the literary value of this article holds promise! To me, there was something vaguely Dostoevskyan about this piece. There's the dithering nature of the conversations described (never addressing the point, always going in circles), the incessant references to people by their acts of intrigue and rank (is the "associate director" today's "titular councilor"?), the general absence of content describing the "real" work the characters are nominally paid for, except as an accessory to some greater plot point that circles back into the previous two themes. I guess that medium-to-large-sizd tech orgs are good on the path towards becoming a labyrinthine, 19th Century, Russian bureaucracy! I hope that some comparable literature emerges from such fertile soil .
- shalmanese 7y ago
  > I guess that medium-to-large-sized tech orgs are good on the path towards becoming a labyrinthine, 19th Century, Russian bureaucracy! I hope that some comparable literature emerges from such fertile soil . Things that happen in Silicon Valley and also the Soviet Union: https://twitter.com/atroyn/status/1014974099930714115 https://twitter.com/atroyn/status/1014974099930714115

croh 7y ago

I don't see any entitlement here. Author perform all his duties but he didn't get what promised. He joined company after very serious considerations. This trade-off might not be big for you but it was for him. Author might be at fault few times, but remote work was his explicit condition. In whole process, it is author who lost everything and nothing happened to organization/HR. This is completely careless attitude. Sadly this is global issue. Thats why having everything written out in agreement is very important. 'Queen of the office' is inspirational Korean sitcom on these cults, must watch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nEoPIGIOTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nEoPIGIOTI

Jare 7y ago
> He joined company after very serious considerations He joined the company despite being aware of many red flags, just because he hoped to endure the shit until he could cash out. These are considerations, but not really what I'd call "serious" in a professional context. I'm pretty sure there may have been lots of broken pieces at Snap (the stuff about condos as offices can't just be made up, and is insane), but what I can read between the lines is that he brought a few new ones along himself. The remote work thing is something you either get signed by the company, or is a personal agreement with another person (and nobody else is bound by it). It's fine to be naive and make that mistake at the time, but to then insist on it in a post like this? That's not naivete, that's a massive disconnect, and you can expect other parts of his story to be similarly out of sync with reality, either by omission or by distortion.