10 ms·

Setting the story straight on quite a few issues

ReactiveJelly 6y ago
I do still hate JWZ for that. I hardly ever comment, and I'm punished for it. He's like those teenaged IRC admins who only let you on their server so they can choose your nick for you. The web's not a dumb pipe, it's a pipe I can beat people up with, apparently.
- lonelappde 6y ago
  JWZ is a lot of things, but he's never claimed to be a nice person.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mjw1007 6y ago
« I don't send out e-mails that are like this: Please get on your phone, turn off your wifi, and then navigate to HN, then to new, then find the post, THEN upvote it. Don't upvote it from the post itself. The company, however, does. A LOT. (Explains a few things, doesn't it?) »
- swiley 6y ago
  Yikes!!! I’d like to know which company this is.
  - KKKKkkkk1 6y ago
    Rachel's most recent job was at Lyft.
troughway 6y ago
>It's because of the unseemly element that comes out of the sewers on there sometimes. Not only sometimes. It's very prevalent. It's in both the attitudes of the commentators and the moderators. The commentary is very smug and given by people who have zero domain knowledge of the thing they are discussing, trotting it like they are experts on the thing. The moderation and the downvoting brigade is something else entirely. I often come across posts that are in the oblivion that had very good but highly contrarian points in somewhat dicey threads to begin with (of the political or personally puncturing nature). Warning people about breaking flimsy guidelines because they said something to upset the status quo? Honestly dang, you can do better than that. This has been going on for almost a decade now. It has caused HN to lose a lot of interesting people and interesting discussions. You don't see any more "Goodbye HN" posts - these people have long since left. Not sure what happened to MichaelOChurch. I guess he was finally banned because the establishment didn't like what he was discussing and the dirty laundry he was airing. And don't get me started on the person who would post the graph of people joining/leaving HN every time this kind of a thread came up. So now you know why JWZ did what he did.
frereubu 6y ago
Original article: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/05/22/boarded/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/05/22/boarded/ HN comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280610
renewiltord 6y ago
Haha, the original story is straight out of The Daily WTF. I'm cracking up. I'm not really going to read the HN responses or the responses to the HN responses since the whole thing seems like Internet Drama™ but the original post is condensed comedy. 2 minute timers to finish tasks like naming a dog! Love it.
JabavuAdams 6y ago
To OP: I wish you all the best. I didn't read or comment on the original article. One thing to consider is to not engage with the critics. It's hard, I know -- really I know. An engineering mind set might make you not want to "flip the bozo bit", and to learn as much from your detractors as possible. There may be strategic reasons to get your story out -- e.g. if your co-workers or potential clients are getting a distorted story, but the personal cost in time, annoyance, and loss of peace of mind is high. So maybe, if possible, take a usefully arrogant / narcissistic view as a form of sanity-protection. Why do you need to respond to a bunch of internet nobodies? Why waste your time dealing with HN's mental illness? Anyway, hope this doesn't poison your day. EDIT> Everyone even moderately notable eventually learns that you don't read the comments.
- floatingatoll 6y ago
  Ignoring the critics allows them to swell in self-importance and gather a crowd around them. Why did you choose to pressure someone else here to ignore “HN’s mental illness” and let it fester, rather than to pressure HN’s commenters here to stop being poisonous to others?
  - akiselev 6y ago
    Focusing on personal behavior is a bit more productive than trying to shape an internet community that's open to the public to some arbitrary standard of toxicity.
  - JabavuAdams 6y ago
    Because I've been in similar situations. There's a saying: "Don't wrestle with pigs because you both end up covered in shit, but they enjoy it." Also, Admiral Ackbar: "It's a traaaap.". > Ignoring the critics allows them to swell in self-importance and gather a crowd around them. Strongly disagree. Making your case and setting the story straight is of course reasonable, but in a way it gives power to your critics. Often it can establish power/dominance better to just be like "Who the fuck cares what you think? Replying to you is beneath me." But to do that without even saying it. You don't come off as an ass, and they are just howling on the internets. So ... ghosting. EDIT> By all means call out the bad behaviour, but like a comedian would, not like an engineer. An engineer answers point by point and tries to make a rational case -- too much effort and it won't stop the hate. A comedian says "So, these morons said X, look how stupid they are ... and that's why I don't read comments anymore." applause. <- low effort and deliciously dismissive.
AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
It's weird how what I consider the same kind of story can seemingly trigger universal empathy or universal derision. If the story is of the oft-posted, "My nightmare dealing with a legacy codebase" or "My nightmare delivering a project for an inept client" flavor, there's no shortage of people jumping in the comments to echo the sentiment and reinforce with their own stories. You change a few details, however, to the "My nightmare onboarding with a new company", and suddenly the comments dogpile on "Wow, this person must be incompetent!" sentiment. What's the secret sauce here? Age? Reputation? Subject matter?
- luckylion 6y ago
  > What's the secret sauce here? Age? Reputation? Subject matter? I suspect tone to be the secret sauce. You can rewrite most things in ways that at least some people will dislike without changing the facts. You can also rewrite them in a way that will solicit sympathy from those same people. Tone can change a lot.
  - AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
    Except the tone in all of the stories is overwhelmingly the same: I'm not stupid, what I'm being asked to do is stupid. And as I said, usually the commenters will give you the benefit of the doubt: yes, that legacy code sounds like it probably sucked, or yes, the client's requirements were nonsensical and contradictory. Except here.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      I have a different understanding of tone. I'm not stupid, what I'm being asked to do is stupid is the content, the tone is how it's written. You can sound arrogant, you can call people names, you can sound like you're about to ask to speak to the manager, you can add some self-deprecating jokes, you can show empathy for whoever created the mess while describing the problems you had with said mess etc, that's the tone. The content stays the same, but people will react very differently to it based on the tone. Some styles work for nearly all audiences, some don't.
swiley 6y ago
The team player thing was a huge lesson I learned recently. If you just defer to what other people say you’re likely to get things wrong, people hire you as a software engineer because they expect you to share your thoughts and that sometimes means disagreeing with the team.
- kiawe_fire 6y ago
  "Team player" is one of those things that seems to go along with other, almost contradictory things like "self-starter" and "takes ownership". In theory, they can be good things. In practice, it feels like they're often just used to justify poor decisions while "blaming the victim". If someone wasn't willing to work long hours for free to build better tooling to support the project, then she's "not a self-starter". If someone feels strongly about using a certain tech stack or architecture on a project and doesn't just go along with the old PHP 5.x or Python 2.x stack the company has always used, then she's "not a team player". To some extent, caring enough about your projects that you're willing to work the occasional weekend means ALSO caring enough about your project to have a say in the choices that are being made, or being unwilling to accept something as it is when you think it could be much better. It means getting frustrated when the feedback you are presumably being paid to provide goes unacknowledged. You can just not care, and show up, do the minimum amount of work and go home, but presumably managers don't want that out of their top tech talent. I'm not saying traits like "team player" and "self-starter" are mutually exclusive traits, but they also have consequences. They shouldn't be code for "just do what we ask of you". What I find a bit annoying from this article's feedback, though, is how many engineers seem happy to ALSO take these terms and weaponize them against their colleagues' opinions.
draw_down 6y ago
Oh boy. I don’t think this is a good idea, writing it nor taking such comments too seriously in the first place.
steve_adams_86 6y ago
I've left new jobs over things much less annoying than this. That she stuck it out is incredible. If you start at a company and they can't have a computer/desk/whatever you need ready without a good reason, that's a terrible start. I've worked with people with very little money or resources who still manage to create a quick, sane, respectful onboarding process. There's no excuse for anything else, and in my experience it's a great indicator of things to come.
KKKKkkkk1 6y ago
Reading this made me think why there are so few middle-aged engineers in tech. There have been several theories for this, such as ageism and the field's rapid expansion. Reading this made me wonder if they just get sick of it and leave. Friends had reached out to me. "We need a director for our reliability software engineering stuff". They asked for my help. They wanted to build something good, like the early days of a few former places I had worked at. I was willing to help out, but honestly, only as a contractor. I had enough of the full time tech thing for one lifetime already. Tech has an image of itself as a magical place where we're changing the world while getting to indulge our inner geeks. And yet a director title for an individual contributor and top 1% pay is not enough to close a hire. The top people are essentially taking early retirement. People in other fields (doctors for example) continue working long after retirement age. Maybe tech is not such a magical place?
- StavrosK 6y ago
  I can relate, I'm in my late thirties and I hate tech. I love technology, mind you, I hate "tech", the SV culture of "we're changing the world" (when it's very often for the worse) and all the patronizing stuff Rachel describes in the article. Sure, it's not like that in every company, but I don't really care enough to try and find one that's fun. I'd rather hang out with my family, and make outlandish devices and services I'd like to use.
  - mikorym 6y ago
    I think the only thing saving me at this point is that I am obsessed with mathematics, not with tech. I have a lot of other hobbies that save me, but the math vs. tech mindset is very real to me in the workplace context. I am not saying all mathematicians are good, or good people, but it helps to have something more real to hold onto. I think the same holds for hacker culture. If you are a hacker more than a "techy" (Edit: I think there should be a better word here.), sometimes that distinction is what saves you.
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      I'm much more of a hacker, but that's the problem for me, I'm not doing anything interesting. It's all the same things I've done a billion times before, again and again. I guess my problem is that nobody wants to promote a remote developer who lives in Greece to anything other than code monkey, so eh, these are my choices.
davidmurdoch 6y ago
As a manager/lead who has personally fielded similar concerns from new hires, I understand where Rachel's frustrations come from, specifically with painful onboarding processes. I'm not commenting on Rachel's specific experience, but just in general for those that might feel empowered by her response; I just don't think it's generally appropriate. The process was surely designed with good intentions, perhaps by committee. And it's been designed to help those that need help. For those that don't need help, these things suck. Providing an out for new hires who don't need this handholding is problematic. You can't just make this stuff optional. You don't know what you don't know, and junior devs often think they know more than they do. Too many people would miss information they actually need. I think a senior-level engineer needs to understand this, and be able to cope with the anguish. Sometimes there are actually useful processes in place, but only useful for a select few, but because it's impossible to know who those few are, everyone must go through it. There are usually ways for anyone to affect change in an organization, but unless you've been specifically hired to make changes, you're going to have to wait a while, and even then, you may never be able to make the changes you really want. But such is life. Figure out what truly matters to you, in the long term, and you'll likely find you'll become much more influential amongst your peers, and even upper management. If you can't change the things that matter to you, don't torture yourself further; it's probably time to move on. On the flip side: if you just want to work for a smooth-running, well-oiled machine that aligns with your ideals already, good luck on your search!
- munchbunny 6y ago
  While I definitely agree with the "you don't know what you don't know" point, I also think there should be a healthy dose of judgement for what should be considered "mandatory up front" as opposed to "you can learn it when you need it." My last on-boarding, for example, I thought was approximately the right balance. Bootstrap the most basic credentials, set up MFA that covers 90% of your needs, get your access badge, take care of HR stuff, get walked through the HR stuff you will need to set up in the next month or so (health insurance, etc.), get handed a list of resources you will probably find useful, sit through a talk about company principles, and then you're off to meet your team where the remaining 80% of your on-boarding that is more specific to your division/team/role will happen. Your laptop will be waiting for you at your desk. I think, for example, being made to walk through exercises querying the company org chart app is superfluous, but handing you a cheat sheet that includes the URL to get to the org chart app is a great idea.
mola 6y ago
Who is rachel? I keep seeing her on the front page here, and I mostly find the blog entries boring or just weird. Is she famouse somehow that she gets to HN frontpage? It can't be because of writing quality, it's pretty mundane.
- mola 6y ago
  May I ask why the down votes?
  - probably_wrong 6y ago
    As someone who did not downvote you: both points (well, one and a half) are addressed in the post itself. I bet that's why. Quick, incomplete, and mostly wrong version: she's simply an engineer whose writing tends to resonate with the HN crowd.
ken 6y ago
> What's odd is that at some point, I managed to stumble onto the Google spreadsheet (yep) they were using to track feedback for the process. There were dozens of entries, and they were all gushing about it, like oh it was so good, and so fun! Please do more! > Part of me wonders if this is genuine, like these people actually enjoyed being gaslit 100%, yes. I once took a class from someone who was, let's say, not my favorite professor. He was one of those young "fun" types. Despite being a science/engineering class in a department with a reputation for being rather tough (with the previous instructor, just retired), it was not particularly deep or rigorous. All the other students loved him because he was "cool". At one point, we had to do a standardized Scantron survey about the course and the professor. I looked at each question and answered truthfully: "Did the professor provide a syllabus?" Easy: no. "Did the professor make it clear how you would be graded?" Haha, definite no. And so on. Normally that's the end of it, but the next week, he was chatting with some students before class about the survey. "I think someone answered all the questions backwards just to mess with me or something. Funny!" "Yeah, that's weird, dude!" Apparently when you're giving feedback on a popular leader, the correct response is to ignore the questions and simply give them the maximum score in every category. And when you're a popular leader reading feedback, if there's any responses that don't match this, you can safely ignore them.
- amiantos 6y ago
  People forget to address power dynamics. New hires at a company are often grateful to have a job and nervous to make a good first impression. If you immediately ask for feedback from these people they are going to do everything they can to show that they’re (insert all the positive adjectives you can here) so that they get to keep their job and impress anyone who may be watching. On top of that, this effect continues indefinitely for some people, who never stop feeling so grateful for having a job at all (or they’re just that type of person, or they’re playing a game) that they have to be super effusive indefinitely over every little thing. Some people also just like to be butt kissers. People like Rachel (and myself) who speak up from the very start and never stop speaking up are unfortunately very rare. Employers who can recognize how valuable we are, are luckily not that rare, so long as the truth-teller can maintain their composure.
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
I think it's kind of weird how a lot of commenters feel a need to take one side or the other in these stories. IMO both of the following were true: 1. The onboarding process at this company was absurd. 2. The author's response was to show contempt and derision to everyone else involved. The "everyone responsible for this is an idiot" vibe was so strong throughout both posts. Running large, complex organizations is extremely difficult. I wouldn't want to work at that company, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to work on a team with the author, either.
jondubois 6y ago
Most corporations are inefficient to the point that nothing about them makes sense so there is no need to complain about minutia. It's like being on a sinking ship and remarking to other passengers about how bad the interior design is.
kailswhales 6y ago
The original article is clearly talking about Lyft, and having started at there at the same time, I thought the onboarding process was much better than at other companies that I have worked at (others are either too broad/corporate or just a README). Not having a desk to work at is inexcusable, and definitely seems like a fluke rather than the norm. What’s wild to me is the amount of people who are berating the author for an opinion post. She is describing what sounds like a garbage experience, and it shouldn’t be that hard to understand/empathize with
frompdx 6y ago
I can relate to the author 100%. The on-boarding process just sounds absurd. I have been there. It was awful. I hated it. The worst that I experienced was a requirement that all new hires complete a training course for Splunk, the log aggregator. Why? Apparently, Splunk was a shared resource for this massive company. As a result, careless queries or logging could result in degraded performance for other teams needing to query their logs in Splunk. Ok, no big deal, right? That's what I thought too. I dutifully started working on my training to get it out of the way. I took detailed and copious notes like my job depended on it. After an entire week of eight hour days doing nothing but taking Splunk trainings I was finally done...with section 1. What the hell? There is another section? As it turned out, it took most new hires 2-3 weeks to complete the trainings. If a new hire did not complete the training they could not access Splunk, and apparently this meant they could not do their job. Absurd on many levels. To add insult to injury, this was a new requirement and many on my team were given access and were never required to complete the training. Those very same people kept telling me "oh, just do it, we don't expect you to be productive right away". Well, I didn't do it. I refused. I told anyone that asked that I thought the requirement was unnecessary and a waste of time. Eventually, my manager got very pushy about it. I continued to stand my ground. In particular, I told my manager he needed to go to bat for me and get me access if he wanted me to do my job. LO AND BEHOLD, I was given access. The author is right for not wanting to be forced to do stupid things and have their time wasted. I don't know where some commenters get off calling the author "entitled" or "not a team player". Why are they so invested in this?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

I do still hate JWZ for that. I hardly ever comment, and I'm punished for it. He's like those teenaged IRC admins who only let you on their server so they can choose your nick for you. The web's not a dumb pipe, it's a pipe I can beat people up with, apparently.

lonelappde 6y ago
JWZ is a lot of things, but he's never claimed to be a nice person.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mjw1007 6y ago

« I don't send out e-mails that are like this: Please get on your phone, turn off your wifi, and then navigate to HN, then to new, then find the post, THEN upvote it. Don't upvote it from the post itself. The company, however, does. A LOT. (Explains a few things, doesn't it?) »

swiley 6y ago
Yikes!!! I’d like to know which company this is.
- KKKKkkkk1 6y ago
  Rachel's most recent job was at Lyft.

troughway 6y ago

>It's because of the unseemly element that comes out of the sewers on there sometimes. Not only sometimes. It's very prevalent. It's in both the attitudes of the commentators and the moderators. The commentary is very smug and given by people who have zero domain knowledge of the thing they are discussing, trotting it like they are experts on the thing. The moderation and the downvoting brigade is something else entirely. I often come across posts that are in the oblivion that had very good but highly contrarian points in somewhat dicey threads to begin with (of the political or personally puncturing nature). Warning people about breaking flimsy guidelines because they said something to upset the status quo? Honestly dang, you can do better than that. This has been going on for almost a decade now. It has caused HN to lose a lot of interesting people and interesting discussions. You don't see any more "Goodbye HN" posts - these people have long since left. Not sure what happened to MichaelOChurch. I guess he was finally banned because the establishment didn't like what he was discussing and the dirty laundry he was airing. And don't get me started on the person who would post the graph of people joining/leaving HN every time this kind of a thread came up. So now you know why JWZ did what he did.

frereubu 6y ago

Original article: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/05/22/boarded/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/05/22/boarded/ HN comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280610

renewiltord 6y ago

Haha, the original story is straight out of The Daily WTF. I'm cracking up. I'm not really going to read the HN responses or the responses to the HN responses since the whole thing seems like Internet Drama™ but the original post is condensed comedy. 2 minute timers to finish tasks like naming a dog! Love it.

JabavuAdams 6y ago

To OP: I wish you all the best. I didn't read or comment on the original article. One thing to consider is to not engage with the critics. It's hard, I know -- really I know. An engineering mind set might make you not want to "flip the bozo bit", and to learn as much from your detractors as possible. There may be strategic reasons to get your story out -- e.g. if your co-workers or potential clients are getting a distorted story, but the personal cost in time, annoyance, and loss of peace of mind is high. So maybe, if possible, take a usefully arrogant / narcissistic view as a form of sanity-protection. Why do you need to respond to a bunch of internet nobodies? Why waste your time dealing with HN's mental illness? Anyway, hope this doesn't poison your day. EDIT> Everyone even moderately notable eventually learns that you don't read the comments.

floatingatoll 6y ago
Ignoring the critics allows them to swell in self-importance and gather a crowd around them. Why did you choose to pressure someone else here to ignore “HN’s mental illness” and let it fester, rather than to pressure HN’s commenters here to stop being poisonous to others?
- akiselev 6y ago
  Focusing on personal behavior is a bit more productive than trying to shape an internet community that's open to the public to some arbitrary standard of toxicity.
- JabavuAdams 6y ago
  Because I've been in similar situations. There's a saying: "Don't wrestle with pigs because you both end up covered in shit, but they enjoy it." Also, Admiral Ackbar: "It's a traaaap.". > Ignoring the critics allows them to swell in self-importance and gather a crowd around them. Strongly disagree. Making your case and setting the story straight is of course reasonable, but in a way it gives power to your critics. Often it can establish power/dominance better to just be like "Who the fuck cares what you think? Replying to you is beneath me." But to do that without even saying it. You don't come off as an ass, and they are just howling on the internets. So ... ghosting. EDIT> By all means call out the bad behaviour, but like a comedian would, not like an engineer. An engineer answers point by point and tries to make a rational case -- too much effort and it won't stop the hate. A comedian says "So, these morons said X, look how stupid they are ... and that's why I don't read comments anymore." applause. <- low effort and deliciously dismissive.

AdmiralAsshat 6y ago

It's weird how what I consider the same kind of story can seemingly trigger universal empathy or universal derision. If the story is of the oft-posted, "My nightmare dealing with a legacy codebase" or "My nightmare delivering a project for an inept client" flavor, there's no shortage of people jumping in the comments to echo the sentiment and reinforce with their own stories. You change a few details, however, to the "My nightmare onboarding with a new company", and suddenly the comments dogpile on "Wow, this person must be incompetent!" sentiment. What's the secret sauce here? Age? Reputation? Subject matter?

luckylion 6y ago
> What's the secret sauce here? Age? Reputation? Subject matter? I suspect tone to be the secret sauce. You can rewrite most things in ways that at least some people will dislike without changing the facts. You can also rewrite them in a way that will solicit sympathy from those same people. Tone can change a lot.
- AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
  Except the tone in all of the stories is overwhelmingly the same: I'm not stupid, what I'm being asked to do is stupid. And as I said, usually the commenters will give you the benefit of the doubt: yes, that legacy code sounds like it probably sucked, or yes, the client's requirements were nonsensical and contradictory. Except here.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    I have a different understanding of tone. I'm not stupid, what I'm being asked to do is stupid is the content, the tone is how it's written. You can sound arrogant, you can call people names, you can sound like you're about to ask to speak to the manager, you can add some self-deprecating jokes, you can show empathy for whoever created the mess while describing the problems you had with said mess etc, that's the tone. The content stays the same, but people will react very differently to it based on the tone. Some styles work for nearly all audiences, some don't.

swiley 6y ago

The team player thing was a huge lesson I learned recently. If you just defer to what other people say you’re likely to get things wrong, people hire you as a software engineer because they expect you to share your thoughts and that sometimes means disagreeing with the team.

kiawe_fire 6y ago
"Team player" is one of those things that seems to go along with other, almost contradictory things like "self-starter" and "takes ownership". In theory, they can be good things. In practice, it feels like they're often just used to justify poor decisions while "blaming the victim". If someone wasn't willing to work long hours for free to build better tooling to support the project, then she's "not a self-starter". If someone feels strongly about using a certain tech stack or architecture on a project and doesn't just go along with the old PHP 5.x or Python 2.x stack the company has always used, then she's "not a team player". To some extent, caring enough about your projects that you're willing to work the occasional weekend means ALSO caring enough about your project to have a say in the choices that are being made, or being unwilling to accept something as it is when you think it could be much better. It means getting frustrated when the feedback you are presumably being paid to provide goes unacknowledged. You can just not care, and show up, do the minimum amount of work and go home, but presumably managers don't want that out of their top tech talent. I'm not saying traits like "team player" and "self-starter" are mutually exclusive traits, but they also have consequences. They shouldn't be code for "just do what we ask of you". What I find a bit annoying from this article's feedback, though, is how many engineers seem happy to ALSO take these terms and weaponize them against their colleagues' opinions.

draw_down 6y ago

Oh boy. I don’t think this is a good idea, writing it nor taking such comments too seriously in the first place.

steve_adams_86 6y ago

I've left new jobs over things much less annoying than this. That she stuck it out is incredible. If you start at a company and they can't have a computer/desk/whatever you need ready without a good reason, that's a terrible start. I've worked with people with very little money or resources who still manage to create a quick, sane, respectful onboarding process. There's no excuse for anything else, and in my experience it's a great indicator of things to come.

KKKKkkkk1 6y ago

Reading this made me think why there are so few middle-aged engineers in tech. There have been several theories for this, such as ageism and the field's rapid expansion. Reading this made me wonder if they just get sick of it and leave. Friends had reached out to me. "We need a director for our reliability software engineering stuff". They asked for my help. They wanted to build something good, like the early days of a few former places I had worked at. I was willing to help out, but honestly, only as a contractor. I had enough of the full time tech thing for one lifetime already. Tech has an image of itself as a magical place where we're changing the world while getting to indulge our inner geeks. And yet a director title for an individual contributor and top 1% pay is not enough to close a hire. The top people are essentially taking early retirement. People in other fields (doctors for example) continue working long after retirement age. Maybe tech is not such a magical place?

StavrosK 6y ago
I can relate, I'm in my late thirties and I hate tech. I love technology, mind you, I hate "tech", the SV culture of "we're changing the world" (when it's very often for the worse) and all the patronizing stuff Rachel describes in the article. Sure, it's not like that in every company, but I don't really care enough to try and find one that's fun. I'd rather hang out with my family, and make outlandish devices and services I'd like to use.
- mikorym 6y ago
  I think the only thing saving me at this point is that I am obsessed with mathematics, not with tech. I have a lot of other hobbies that save me, but the math vs. tech mindset is very real to me in the workplace context. I am not saying all mathematicians are good, or good people, but it helps to have something more real to hold onto. I think the same holds for hacker culture. If you are a hacker more than a "techy" (Edit: I think there should be a better word here.), sometimes that distinction is what saves you.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    I'm much more of a hacker, but that's the problem for me, I'm not doing anything interesting. It's all the same things I've done a billion times before, again and again. I guess my problem is that nobody wants to promote a remote developer who lives in Greece to anything other than code monkey, so eh, these are my choices.

davidmurdoch 6y ago

As a manager/lead who has personally fielded similar concerns from new hires, I understand where Rachel's frustrations come from, specifically with painful onboarding processes. I'm not commenting on Rachel's specific experience, but just in general for those that might feel empowered by her response; I just don't think it's generally appropriate. The process was surely designed with good intentions, perhaps by committee. And it's been designed to help those that need help. For those that don't need help, these things suck. Providing an out for new hires who don't need this handholding is problematic. You can't just make this stuff optional. You don't know what you don't know, and junior devs often think they know more than they do. Too many people would miss information they actually need. I think a senior-level engineer needs to understand this, and be able to cope with the anguish. Sometimes there are actually useful processes in place, but only useful for a select few, but because it's impossible to know who those few are, everyone must go through it. There are usually ways for anyone to affect change in an organization, but unless you've been specifically hired to make changes, you're going to have to wait a while, and even then, you may never be able to make the changes you really want. But such is life. Figure out what truly matters to you, in the long term, and you'll likely find you'll become much more influential amongst your peers, and even upper management. If you can't change the things that matter to you, don't torture yourself further; it's probably time to move on. On the flip side: if you just want to work for a smooth-running, well-oiled machine that aligns with your ideals already, good luck on your search!

munchbunny 6y ago
While I definitely agree with the "you don't know what you don't know" point, I also think there should be a healthy dose of judgement for what should be considered "mandatory up front" as opposed to "you can learn it when you need it." My last on-boarding, for example, I thought was approximately the right balance. Bootstrap the most basic credentials, set up MFA that covers 90% of your needs, get your access badge, take care of HR stuff, get walked through the HR stuff you will need to set up in the next month or so (health insurance, etc.), get handed a list of resources you will probably find useful, sit through a talk about company principles, and then you're off to meet your team where the remaining 80% of your on-boarding that is more specific to your division/team/role will happen. Your laptop will be waiting for you at your desk. I think, for example, being made to walk through exercises querying the company org chart app is superfluous, but handing you a cheat sheet that includes the URL to get to the org chart app is a great idea.

mola 6y ago

Who is rachel? I keep seeing her on the front page here, and I mostly find the blog entries boring or just weird. Is she famouse somehow that she gets to HN frontpage? It can't be because of writing quality, it's pretty mundane.

mola 6y ago
May I ask why the down votes?
- probably_wrong 6y ago
  As someone who did not downvote you: both points (well, one and a half) are addressed in the post itself. I bet that's why. Quick, incomplete, and mostly wrong version: she's simply an engineer whose writing tends to resonate with the HN crowd.

ken 6y ago

> What's odd is that at some point, I managed to stumble onto the Google spreadsheet (yep) they were using to track feedback for the process. There were dozens of entries, and they were all gushing about it, like oh it was so good, and so fun! Please do more! > Part of me wonders if this is genuine, like these people actually enjoyed being gaslit 100%, yes. I once took a class from someone who was, let's say, not my favorite professor. He was one of those young "fun" types. Despite being a science/engineering class in a department with a reputation for being rather tough (with the previous instructor, just retired), it was not particularly deep or rigorous. All the other students loved him because he was "cool". At one point, we had to do a standardized Scantron survey about the course and the professor. I looked at each question and answered truthfully: "Did the professor provide a syllabus?" Easy: no. "Did the professor make it clear how you would be graded?" Haha, definite no. And so on. Normally that's the end of it, but the next week, he was chatting with some students before class about the survey. "I think someone answered all the questions backwards just to mess with me or something. Funny!" "Yeah, that's weird, dude!" Apparently when you're giving feedback on a popular leader, the correct response is to ignore the questions and simply give them the maximum score in every category. And when you're a popular leader reading feedback, if there's any responses that don't match this, you can safely ignore them.

amiantos 6y ago
People forget to address power dynamics. New hires at a company are often grateful to have a job and nervous to make a good first impression. If you immediately ask for feedback from these people they are going to do everything they can to show that they’re (insert all the positive adjectives you can here) so that they get to keep their job and impress anyone who may be watching. On top of that, this effect continues indefinitely for some people, who never stop feeling so grateful for having a job at all (or they’re just that type of person, or they’re playing a game) that they have to be super effusive indefinitely over every little thing. Some people also just like to be butt kissers. People like Rachel (and myself) who speak up from the very start and never stop speaking up are unfortunately very rare. Employers who can recognize how valuable we are, are luckily not that rare, so long as the truth-teller can maintain their composure.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

I think it's kind of weird how a lot of commenters feel a need to take one side or the other in these stories. IMO both of the following were true: 1. The onboarding process at this company was absurd. 2. The author's response was to show contempt and derision to everyone else involved. The "everyone responsible for this is an idiot" vibe was so strong throughout both posts. Running large, complex organizations is extremely difficult. I wouldn't want to work at that company, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to work on a team with the author, either.

jondubois 6y ago

Most corporations are inefficient to the point that nothing about them makes sense so there is no need to complain about minutia. It's like being on a sinking ship and remarking to other passengers about how bad the interior design is.

kailswhales 6y ago

The original article is clearly talking about Lyft, and having started at there at the same time, I thought the onboarding process was much better than at other companies that I have worked at (others are either too broad/corporate or just a README). Not having a desk to work at is inexcusable, and definitely seems like a fluke rather than the norm. What’s wild to me is the amount of people who are berating the author for an opinion post. She is describing what sounds like a garbage experience, and it shouldn’t be that hard to understand/empathize with

frompdx 6y ago

I can relate to the author 100%. The on-boarding process just sounds absurd. I have been there. It was awful. I hated it. The worst that I experienced was a requirement that all new hires complete a training course for Splunk, the log aggregator. Why? Apparently, Splunk was a shared resource for this massive company. As a result, careless queries or logging could result in degraded performance for other teams needing to query their logs in Splunk. Ok, no big deal, right? That's what I thought too. I dutifully started working on my training to get it out of the way. I took detailed and copious notes like my job depended on it. After an entire week of eight hour days doing nothing but taking Splunk trainings I was finally done...with section 1. What the hell? There is another section? As it turned out, it took most new hires 2-3 weeks to complete the trainings. If a new hire did not complete the training they could not access Splunk, and apparently this meant they could not do their job. Absurd on many levels. To add insult to injury, this was a new requirement and many on my team were given access and were never required to complete the training. Those very same people kept telling me "oh, just do it, we don't expect you to be productive right away". Well, I didn't do it. I refused. I told anyone that asked that I thought the requirement was unnecessary and a waste of time. Eventually, my manager got very pushy about it. I continued to stand my ground. In particular, I told my manager he needed to go to bat for me and get me access if he wanted me to do my job. LO AND BEHOLD, I was given access. The author is right for not wanting to be forced to do stupid things and have their time wasted. I don't know where some commenters get off calling the author "entitled" or "not a team player". Why are they so invested in this?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]