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Fair point on PR, but re: >> I haven't seen many Stripe employees (other than executives) show up and say that these anecdotes are surprising. ... Do people n

Fair point on PR, but re: >> I haven't seen many Stripe employees (other than executives) show up and say that these anecdotes are surprising. ... Do people normally do that? With verifiable, named accounts? Personally, as an employee, I would feel profoundly uncomfortable to publicly comment on such matters of my company; and may well be explicitly and clearly forbidden from doing so. Plus, most people would only really have their own experience to relate, and I at least would be reluctant to share anecdata as useful evidence. (and then there's a matter of time and prioritization; heck, I work for IBM -- if I tried to counter every negative comment on IBM on Hacker News, that'd be my six new full time jobs, even though I've personally had brilliantly positive experience over two decades and deeply respect all of my colleagues :D )

ethbr0 5y ago
Can / should you be forbidden from talking about your hiring process, while still employed by that company? It seems pretty scummy to prohibit or penalize employees for talking about their initial hiring interactions with the company. Especially if they keep their remarks to the period prior to their officially being hired. At that point... you weren't an employee. And it's pretty odd for a company to assume they have a right to your silence, covering a period before you had entered into a contractual relationship with them and they were paying you.
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  This is FAR beyond my area of expertise; but I think a lot of companies have some sort of... "branding" clause I'll call it these days; what your expected behaviour on social media with respect to company brand is. Yes, I've read Snowcrash, yes we live in dystopian future; at the same time, if I try to be a devil's advocate and simplify it to very basics - if I'm running a two person shop, and one of them is saying bad things about my/our company... I wouldn't really be excited about working with them either, would I? I ran a photography side business for a while, and if my assistant had feedback to share with me, awesome; on the other hand, if they went on Tweeter and criticized our working, what's my motivation to call them up and work closely with them again? :-/ Things get far murkier at larger companies of course, and there's labour law etc, but I imagine there'd always be some tension in speaking negatively about your employer. (Edit: As for "talking about hiring process" specifically, that may get even trickier; unless you're an HR manager actually familiar and proficient and authorized to formally represent hiring process to prospective candidates, you may cause untold amount of ruckus even with best intentions in describing your limited perspective on the hiring process to people - setting up incorrect expectations or even accidentally prejudicing against the company in any potential latter lawsuit. Just because Person A has had specific experience in hiring, in no way guarantees that Person B will, but it can and has easily been interpreted that way when Person A says "Company A hiring practices are as such").
a-dub 5y ago
> (and then there's a matter of time and prioritization; heck, I work for IBM -- if I tried to counter every negative comment on IBM on Hacker News, that'd be my six new full time jobs, even though I've personally had brilliantly positive experience over two decades and deeply respect all of my colleagues :D ) i've always written ibm off as large, old and stodgy. curious to hear a counterpoint if you're willing to share.
- ygjb 5y ago
  I can't speak specifically to IBM as a whole, but in my experience, there are parts of IBM that are old and stodgy (professional services around finance and government that I interacted with when I worked in those industries). There are other parts (around security and research that I worked with in other roles) that are pretty cool and innovative that are much more approachable and fun to work with. IBM (and Microsoft, and Google, and others) are huge and it makes sense that there are pockets of awesome and awful distributed throughout them.
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  Let me start with general: Companies aren't people. We tend to ascribe... personalities to large companies; explain them in single sentences. IBM is old and stodgy, Oracle has awful licensing practices, Amazon has (great cloud | shoddy warehouse employment practices | too much counterfeit goods) depending on perspective, etc. Sometimes we mix up Musk and Tesla. Overall, we tend to put a simple descriptive sentence over companies, just like we do over politics and history etc. We must, it's how we make sense of the world :). But in a company of tens and hundreds of thousands of employees, cultures and perspectives and motivations can differ significantly. It'll be a complex landscape. Not all of IBM is stodgy anymore than all of Google is cool. And I've been amused there's a guy in Amazon who maintains PeopleSoft HR just like there's guy in Government of Canada who maintains PeopleSoft HR :-). The IBM guys designing hardware who test their work by putting radioactive material under the computer and seeing how CPUs behave? not so old and stodgy, in my mind :D . There's also some genuine good hard work on occasionally boring stuff like RDBMS engines & optimizers, compilers and OSs for obscure boxes, and I am pretty grateful to folks who write p-series firmware because watching a live production sync and migration is exciting stuff, as well as OS/390 / z/OS/VM guys who are probably chuckling at the "Virtualization" and "Cloudiness" things we all think are shiny and new and cool:). Don't know enough to speak about the quantum thing, I suspect there's a core of innovation wrapped in unfortunate marketing bollocks, as there was for "Watson" (which I find easier to think of "branding for semi-related suite of created and acquired products, some good some average some ugly" rather than "AI that won Jeopardy"). For myself, FWIW, people around me have much more immediate impact on my working satisfaction, than overall corporate average/stereotype. And I've worked with excited enthusiastic peers, been surrounded by experienced leaders who provided extensive mentorship, and done some personally exciting stuff (inasmuch as "pushing 1's and 0's around and making computers go bleep bloop" is exciting:). I've had times when I worked on personally technologically exciting things; and I've been in places and worked for clients where it's all molasses and quagmire and politics and procedures; I've tried to force myself to learn something about all, and I feel I've gained a certain perspective... but we each have our own perspective and priorities and where I've found satisfactions others would only find frustrations. But what it comes down to - I've been surrounded by sufficient percentage of people competent and motivated (even if in ways and fields that HN stereotypically would not always necessarily respect), to enjoy myself on average :).
seanmcdirmid 5y ago
Is IBM doing better these days? I've worked for them twice (albeit, both as an intern), and none of what I hear negative about IBM sounds very surprising. Well, I haven't really heard anyone talk about them for a decade (Oracle seems to be the new IBM). Ever since they shut down most of their software research division (e.g. Hawthorne) , I don't even know anyone who still works at IBM.

ethbr0 5y ago

Can / should you be forbidden from talking about your hiring process, while still employed by that company? It seems pretty scummy to prohibit or penalize employees for talking about their initial hiring interactions with the company. Especially if they keep their remarks to the period prior to their officially being hired. At that point... you weren't an employee. And it's pretty odd for a company to assume they have a right to your silence, covering a period before you had entered into a contractual relationship with them and they were paying you.

NikolaNovak 5y ago
This is FAR beyond my area of expertise; but I think a lot of companies have some sort of... "branding" clause I'll call it these days; what your expected behaviour on social media with respect to company brand is. Yes, I've read Snowcrash, yes we live in dystopian future; at the same time, if I try to be a devil's advocate and simplify it to very basics - if I'm running a two person shop, and one of them is saying bad things about my/our company... I wouldn't really be excited about working with them either, would I? I ran a photography side business for a while, and if my assistant had feedback to share with me, awesome; on the other hand, if they went on Tweeter and criticized our working, what's my motivation to call them up and work closely with them again? :-/ Things get far murkier at larger companies of course, and there's labour law etc, but I imagine there'd always be some tension in speaking negatively about your employer. (Edit: As for "talking about hiring process" specifically, that may get even trickier; unless you're an HR manager actually familiar and proficient and authorized to formally represent hiring process to prospective candidates, you may cause untold amount of ruckus even with best intentions in describing your limited perspective on the hiring process to people - setting up incorrect expectations or even accidentally prejudicing against the company in any potential latter lawsuit. Just because Person A has had specific experience in hiring, in no way guarantees that Person B will, but it can and has easily been interpreted that way when Person A says "Company A hiring practices are as such").

a-dub 5y ago

> (and then there's a matter of time and prioritization; heck, I work for IBM -- if I tried to counter every negative comment on IBM on Hacker News, that'd be my six new full time jobs, even though I've personally had brilliantly positive experience over two decades and deeply respect all of my colleagues :D ) i've always written ibm off as large, old and stodgy. curious to hear a counterpoint if you're willing to share.

ygjb 5y ago
I can't speak specifically to IBM as a whole, but in my experience, there are parts of IBM that are old and stodgy (professional services around finance and government that I interacted with when I worked in those industries). There are other parts (around security and research that I worked with in other roles) that are pretty cool and innovative that are much more approachable and fun to work with. IBM (and Microsoft, and Google, and others) are huge and it makes sense that there are pockets of awesome and awful distributed throughout them.
NikolaNovak 5y ago
Let me start with general: Companies aren't people. We tend to ascribe... personalities to large companies; explain them in single sentences. IBM is old and stodgy, Oracle has awful licensing practices, Amazon has (great cloud | shoddy warehouse employment practices | too much counterfeit goods) depending on perspective, etc. Sometimes we mix up Musk and Tesla. Overall, we tend to put a simple descriptive sentence over companies, just like we do over politics and history etc. We must, it's how we make sense of the world :). But in a company of tens and hundreds of thousands of employees, cultures and perspectives and motivations can differ significantly. It'll be a complex landscape. Not all of IBM is stodgy anymore than all of Google is cool. And I've been amused there's a guy in Amazon who maintains PeopleSoft HR just like there's guy in Government of Canada who maintains PeopleSoft HR :-). The IBM guys designing hardware who test their work by putting radioactive material under the computer and seeing how CPUs behave? not so old and stodgy, in my mind :D . There's also some genuine good hard work on occasionally boring stuff like RDBMS engines & optimizers, compilers and OSs for obscure boxes, and I am pretty grateful to folks who write p-series firmware because watching a live production sync and migration is exciting stuff, as well as OS/390 / z/OS/VM guys who are probably chuckling at the "Virtualization" and "Cloudiness" things we all think are shiny and new and cool:). Don't know enough to speak about the quantum thing, I suspect there's a core of innovation wrapped in unfortunate marketing bollocks, as there was for "Watson" (which I find easier to think of "branding for semi-related suite of created and acquired products, some good some average some ugly" rather than "AI that won Jeopardy"). For myself, FWIW, people around me have much more immediate impact on my working satisfaction, than overall corporate average/stereotype. And I've worked with excited enthusiastic peers, been surrounded by experienced leaders who provided extensive mentorship, and done some personally exciting stuff (inasmuch as "pushing 1's and 0's around and making computers go bleep bloop" is exciting:). I've had times when I worked on personally technologically exciting things; and I've been in places and worked for clients where it's all molasses and quagmire and politics and procedures; I've tried to force myself to learn something about all, and I feel I've gained a certain perspective... but we each have our own perspective and priorities and where I've found satisfactions others would only find frustrations. But what it comes down to - I've been surrounded by sufficient percentage of people competent and motivated (even if in ways and fields that HN stereotypically would not always necessarily respect), to enjoy myself on average :).

seanmcdirmid 5y ago

Is IBM doing better these days? I've worked for them twice (albeit, both as an intern), and none of what I hear negative about IBM sounds very surprising. Well, I haven't really heard anyone talk about them for a decade (Oracle seems to be the new IBM). Ever since they shut down most of their software research division (e.g. Hawthorne) , I don't even know anyone who still works at IBM.