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Just some red flags. No big deal. Just ignore them (2020)

• petee 5y ago
  [2020] The update with response to all the previous negative HN reaction -- https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/05/23/nope/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/05/23/nope/
  • politician 5y ago
    Wow, that update is required reading. After everything that has happened in the intervening two years, I bet folks would react way differently to this story had it been posted today. That place was clown town. Are they still operating?
    • na85 5y ago
      Do we know what company it was?
      • JonathanMerklin 5y ago
        IIRC from when I first read this back in 2020, it's Lyft. The hint is at the end (emphasis mine): "In retrospect, there were many red flags. *Well, pink flags.* Whatever."
        • na85 5y ago
          Does Lyft have pink flags or something? I don't get the significance. (I've never used Lyft or Uber in my life though, so maybe that's why)
          • JonathanMerklin 5y ago
            Give "Lyft color scheme" a quick search :) EDIT: Okay, I see you added an edit where you say you've never used it - so to remove any semblance of snark I'll clarify that you will in fact find pink if you do that.
            • na85 5y ago
              I see, thanks!
    • kristjansson 5y ago
      Pretty easy to deduce if you read a few of her posts. They’re still operating.
  • Aachen 5y ago
    This one surprised me the most: > 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!
    • protomyth 5y ago
      Sadly, that didn't surprise me at all. Only keeping the positive feedback is a time honored tradition with some groups in corporations. It is amazing how useful it is to control your own feedback for people wanting to look good.
      • Volundr 5y ago
        To be honest, I've kind of lost all faith in user generated feedback. The first employee I ever had to fire was an internal help desk style person. After firing them for unrelated reasons I started getting all sorts of feedback about how it was time, and people were glad someone finally dealt with the issue. I start digging in and it turns out this person had just been closing tickets they didn't feel like dealing with, with no response. I also heard stories of some pretty hostile interactions with out users. The thing is, we sent out a short little survey to the user after every ticket closed. A little two question thing, "Did we solve your problem?" and "Are you satisfied with the service your received?". This person had a 99% satisfied rating. Getting accurate feedback from employees is hard, and I can only imagine new employees feel even more pressure to say positive things.
        • hobs 5y ago
          I read this as your company culture is really bad if no one can complain about the negative person everybody hates - there's almost always someone who either is too honest or too talkative who lets on what's up - if you dont have those characters the company might have punished them already as well. There's always an in-group/out-group in any group and if you're not aware who the current "least favored" person is in a social circle, its probably you.
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  • jchw 5y ago
    I don’t get why this got such a negative response. Seems like the exact kind of bullshit I would walk out on, too.
  • soneca 5y ago
    This is a great example for something that I always advocate: Don’t react to early responses on a HN thread. Wait a few hours (a day?) to really have a feeling of what people are saying as a community. In this follow up she is answering a lot of negative comments about her first post. Trashing HN while doing it. But then you take a look at that thread today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280610 I did a quick review of the top root comments (i.e. the most upvoted ones, the ones the HN, as a community, mostly thinks represents their opinion). The first 6 or 7 are fully supportive of her take, empathizing with horrible onboarding processes, saying they would do the same as her. Then comes a couple of comments mentioning how she is getting flak and referring to a lot of top-level negative comments. This shows that (obviously) she wasn’t delusional addressing negative comments, they were there at the top a few hours after the post was published. But, again, these comments were supportive of her, saying the negative comments were unfair. Then it comes more 5 or 6 posts still supportive or neutral or orthogonal to the point. Then, only the 14th root level comment is a truly negative one (one that she addressed in her follow up). And, for me, 14th is too far down to matter. Or to represent what HN is as a community. This shows to me that HN, as a community, was fully supportive of her text, her tone, her take, and her actions. This is the reaction that was overwhelmingly more upvoted by all. Only temporarily felt like the opposite. That’s why I always wait a day to really grasp what’s the overall reaction of HN as a community to any particular post (if I happen to care about such opinion).
    • bibabaloo 5y ago
      In this case, IIRC, the upvoted comments changed _because_ she called out the negative comments in her response.
      • soneca 5y ago
        I don’t think that causality is correct. I find hard to imagine that people read her other post several hours later, went back to the thread about her original post, and upvoted the positive comments.
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  • aahortwwy 5y ago
    > There are plenty of people who see my writing for what it's supposed to be: a series of cautionary tales on how things can go wrong, and what to do to avoid them. I rarely see the "what to do to avoid them" in Rachel's posts, and I think that's why I find them so frustrating.
    • fastball 5y ago
      Yeah, I get why HN likes them, but for me they usually just come across as "this thing is stupid and I hate it". Which I also get – a lot of stuff in the world is stupid. But I also understand that if that is the attitude you go in with, you will almost certainly find what you are looking for (things to be annoyed at). Probably more useful as catharsis than an actual guide.
    • Aeolun 5y ago
      Generally there is little you can do to avoid them. The incentives are just not there.
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• Overtonwindow 5y ago
  I had a similar experience at a technology company in 2015. Onboarding had no training, no desks, nothing. Thrown into a Cubicle farm, with terrible chairs, and they put my desk right next to the kitchen that had a pool table. So while I’m trying to take calls from clients, there’s people literally playing pool behind me. Took forever to get a decent office chair, then they started moving us around, a few months go by, and then we had to move to another cubicle. Then another building. Logins wouldn’t work. Benefits, pay, nothing was up-to-date, and it got even worse when they instituted a clocking in system. People would just clock in, and then clock in all their friends at the same time. It was ridiculous. I left about the time one of my coworkers had a heart attack and died at his desk. All that to say, the on boarding sucked, and all of the problems that came after that were compounded upon that very bad on-boarding.
  • dvtrn 5y ago
    You guys are getting onboarding? I swear I kind of miss onboarding. My last two roles as a Senior were “fill out these HR forms, here’s the payroll portal, just sign up. Trust me bro. It’ll work. Ok here’s your laptop. Here’s some tickets. Standups are at time:thirty”. ]no one actually said “bro” that’s just to illustrate the level of confidence it seemed the HR person had in the payroll SaaS: none.
    • kayodelycaon 5y ago
      I got onboarding, but I didn’t get my laptop until the next week. Being remote, this was just a bit of an issue because I was suppose to start work immediately. Fortunately, macOS happily runs off an external disk and the installer supports restoring from another macOS install. So I spent my first week booting my personal machine from an external SSD.
  • odonnellryan 5y ago
    Is there a startup that helps companies onboard users?
    • mutagen 5y ago
• messe 5y ago
  > Here's a situation: you're in a conference room with about a dozen other new people. You're handed a touch bar Macbook Pro in a backpack. It's the first such model you've ever used, and you're discovering that your natural typing position overhangs the top row of numbers, and is triggering the "meta" functions which typically live there: brightness up/down, volume up/down, and whatever else might be there from the context of the program you're in. As much as I hate the touchbar, I've never had this problem. My hands sit on the home row, and my fingers rarely hit anything higher than the midsection of the number keys. I'm genuinely curious as to what natural hand position results in accidentally hitting the touchbar / function keys.
  • ghostpepper 5y ago
    Happens to me on a semi regular basis. You can learn to tour around it but that’s clearly the sign of a poorly designed input device imho
    • willcipriano 5y ago
      I've been using it for about a year and a half and I activate the touchbar at least twice a day. I've never used it intentionally.
    • messe 5y ago
      Thanks. Do you mind me asking if your resting position is above/on the home row? I'm a heavy VIM user with Caps-lock mapped to Control (and using Ctrl-[ for ESC), so I'm well aware that I'm an oddity in how I use a computer. In any case, the fact that I found it surprising while you're (and others are) running into it on a regular basis, doesn't speak highly of Apple's UX testing.
      • ghostpepper 5y ago
        Yes, I rest my fingers on the home row. Usually what happens is I press one of the number keys and the tip of my finger extends past the top the key I am aiming for. I am also a heavy vim user with caps mapped to ctrl, so perhaps you're not as odd as you think :-)
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• stevebmark 5y ago
  This person was going to ghost their job because they had to go through an onboarding script? I’m surprised they passed an interview to get the job.
  • Aachen 5y ago
    I've never heard of any onboarding script like this, though. I'd personally also take this badly and be wondering how the company made it through my interview. Have you seen this sort of thing before, is this normal where you're from / in companies or branches you've worked?
• TameAntelope 5y ago
  Honestly? Onboarding is hard. How are you supposed to do it? Everyone who has to go through it isn’t going to fix it, because they’re new and have their actual job to get to. It also doesn’t give the customer any value, so how do you justify losing out making stuff better for the people who pay your company money? I just kind of assume on boarding will suck, and it’s not a reflection of the rest of your time there. Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s been true for me. What are folks’ tips for making onboarding smoother?
  • fragmede 5y ago
    Among other things, single sign on (SSO) so new employees aren't creating a half dozen new accounts at the same time and/or a corporate-blessed password manager.
  • civilized 5y ago
    Well first, let's dispense with the pretense that every moment of time should be devoted to churning out customer value. The way an organization treats new people shapes its culture and thus its productivity. The biggest thing is to have comprehensive written documentation of the process and keep it updated. I agree with the other suggestion to have SSO or official password manager practices. And steer clear of the shitty MacBook Pros Apple made from 2016-2020. The hellish butterfly keyboard and Touch Bar era.
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  • forbiddenvoid 5y ago
    > It also doesn’t give the customer any value, so how do you justify losing out making stuff better for the people who pay your company money? You are going to generate more value for your customers long term by having employees who feel like their time and contributions are valued. Solving these types of problems (onboarding, knowledge management, communications, internal tooling) are literal force multipliers for companies. But they are often ignored by leadership because they don't show immediate revenue value.
• dmitrygr 5y ago
  > You have to install a bunch of apps on your (personal!) phone My personal phone is a Nokia 3310. If the company wants apps on my phone they can provide a phone and a plan. It is a work phone and it will live at work. If you want to reach me outside of work hours, (555) 867 5309
  • rcakebread 5y ago
    Jenny?!
• Pxtl 5y ago
  It's one day. Often not even a whole day. If that's the worst process in your office then we're golden. If the actual product or developer workflow is that much of a mess? Yes, that's a real problem. But if it's the day-one-never again onboarding? Who gives a crap. The only real pita that carries on is the not-actually-single-sign-on. I'm so goddamned sick of Duo pop-ups, especially my work that has a 20 second timeout on that and sometimes it stalls.
  • Aachen 5y ago
    > It's one day. Often not even a whole day. If that's the worst process in your office... I agree that it's a win if you only ever have one bad day in the office and it's only downhill from here. But if you could, say, not have this bad experience, wouldn't that be even better? Isn't it good to share this experience so that, even if their own employer doesn't take the hint, others might?
  • hinkley 5y ago
    If I can compile the code by sometime after lunch, I consider that a not bad onboarding process. Maybe not great, but not bad. Plenty of places take days to get to this point, often with many false starts. You should be working now. No? Oh, we forgot about this thing. How about now? Still no? Dang. Let me ask David... no wait David is on vacation this week.
    • tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      Even when I was contracting people would take a long time to setup an account and PC on my desk, sometimes weeks.
  • Nextgrid 5y ago
    Modern SSO is shit and doesn’t deserve to be called SSO. True SSO is what Kerberos and/or Active Directory has where all the auth is handled out of band and you never ever see a login pop up. SAML/OIDC is a kluge that offers a worse experience than a password manager and in practice means you’ll be interacting with login forms a lot more frequently. Password manager flow: - Open website’s login page, manually, from bookmarks or even the password manager to begin with - login form has username & password field on the same page which the password manager fills and submits - you are logged in “SSO” flow: - Open website’s login page - login form has only email/username, can’t really use a password manager because there’s no password and you don’t want to interfere with the flow (by using a dummy password) because you’ll need your PW manager for the next step and you don’t want the manager stuck on waiting for a password field to appear to fill in that dummy password - wait for (at least one, but typically several) redirects which take a couple seconds (and much worse on flaky mobile connections) - now you fill in your actual SSO credentials - this is where you use your PW manager. - now click through whatever upsells your SSO provider has such as nagging you to use their proprietary 2FA app (another one!) instead of your standard TOTP client - finally go through a few more redirects and end up back on the original site Since the SSO-integrated website has no way to actively tell when your SSO session has expired, it usually defaults to a conservative value which means you need to go through this crap every 12 hours or so. The password manager flow is much much faster. IMO unless you’re able to do proper, real (Kerberos/AD) SSO, just give your employees a good password manager. I understand the technical reasons behind why things are the way they are, but IMO as an industry we should do better and not expose implementation details to the user in such an annoying way. Security shouldn’t be at the detriment of user experience.
• chucklenorris 5y ago
  A few years ago I was onboarding at a pretty large antivirus company. My manager told me to "get a laptop from that pile over there, put some more ram in it, you're gonna need it. Oh, and here's a stick with linux. have fun :)" It was a pretty cool place, I learned a lot about reverse engineering. Too bad the pay was meh
• cfcf14 5y ago
  One of the things that endeared me most to my current big tech employer was the understanding that it would be weeks before I could do anything. Yeah. I sat through the sessions and followed along. But the internal docs were sorta out of date, and basic stuff seemed to just... not work. And SREs do what they do- ask a ton of intimidating questions and make you feel on the defensive. But I wasn't expected to get set up. Part of onboarding was slogging through the tech. The k8 madness, the permissions and salts and accesses and everything else. And although it fueled my imposter syndrome at times, I appreciated knowing everybody else went through it too. I wasn't expected to just get it. We expect people to take a few weeks to settle in. I value that - because onboarding is intimidating as hell. A company that doesn't see that - red flag, for sure.
  • hinkley 5y ago
    Companies that don't are selecting for masochists. Masochists have no instinct to make things simpler over time, because their reaction to pain is to simply get better at it rather than getting rid of it entirely. It's the masochists who think 20 copies of the same code for 18 customers is an okay thing. Who think an 8 hour manual process you need to run once a month is just fine (hey, they can't fire me because nobody else will do it). It's the averse who decide to get that down to 3, and then the next set of averse people get it back down to 1.
• Aachen 5y ago
  > the water^H^H^H^H^Honboarding classes For anyone legitimately doing this, you might be delighted to learn of ^W. (Or Ctrl+Backspace sometimes, but that's a different mechanism.)
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• yongjik 5y ago
  I don't know if it's the author or if the HN crowd selects for these kinds of stories, but every time, the "Oh my god I'm stuck with these idiots" vibe is just too strong for me to enjoy anything. And without that the story itself is... just mildly interesting? Sure they are cool stories from someone's personal blog but there are thousands of similar blogs out there. Honestly I'm not sure why the site comes up in HN so often.
  • throwaway2474 5y ago
    It’s the author, and I also find it tiring. There seems to be a slightly sarcastic undertone of superiority and entitlement in every post. I would not choose to employ such a person.
    • ckaygusu 5y ago
      You almost took words right out of my mouth and wrote it here. Except the part I'm not a business owner, though nevertheless I would not want to be teammates with a person of this attitude.
  • gtowey 5y ago
    I really relate to the author's story and I don't see it as them claiming to be superior to their coworkers. I read it instead as a story about silicon valley companies tend to focus a lot on image over substance. They crate these overwrought hype machines made to market to investors and customers, but then use the same techniques to sell to their employees as well. Every silicon valley startup has a story about how they're saving the world with their product, when in reality it's just another business that's trying to extract value out of some market. As an employee I appreciate when a company doesn't demand that I drink thier cooperate kool-aid just to work there. A company that understands that I am there to do a job and exchange my time and knowledge for money. Maybe I've just gotten as cynical as the author over time, but as someone who has been in this industry for 20 years, I don't want to spend extra time at work doing non-work things. I want to get something useful done and go home. I bring value in my skills and experience, and if you work with a company that can't recognize that and wants to put all employees through the same junior exercise of corporate orientation then as the author said, that's a red flag.
• jelling 5y ago
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  • vba616 5y ago
    It's ok to find fault. It's ok to be angry. It's ok to want things to be better. It's ok to be concerned about something that isn't literally the top global priority. However, I think being angry about how poorly something is done is not logically compatible with total contempt for the job itself. If I am angry at how a job is done, I must believe it is important. But if the job is truly important to me, I should (not in a normative sense, but as a logical consequence) be willing to devote my life to doing it and improving it. You can't tell someone else what their priorities in life should be and I wouldn't. But anger signals pain over internal contradictions to me. Again, it's ok to be angry at HR or anyone. It's ok to not solve the problems, which are probably hard problems! But if you don't want to devote your life to improving the situation, then maybe you can introspect and realize you don't care very much, and lose your reason for being angry. And accepting how hard the problems are, assuming they are too hard for you, should enable respect for the people that do them now.
• not2b 5y ago
  I love Rachel's update, in which she comprehensively addresses every point raised in the comments. It is linked to at the end of the article.
• cosmiccatnap 5y ago
• codr7 5y ago
  Oh dear, that's way too close for comfort :) I don't think I'm capable of doing that dance again...
• pyuser583 5y ago
  I’ve reached the point where my attitude is “onboard myself.” I find out what I need to do my job, and get the company to give it to me. Usually means making the same request again and again and again. Which is good practice for the actual work of coding in big orgs. Then there are the pro forma classes that are a necessary evil: No, I will not give bribes to foreign officials in violation of the American Corrupt Foreign Practices Act. No, I will not engage in a romantic relationship with a direct report. No, I will not make stock trades based off insider knowledge. Yes, I support will support the company’s effort to promote diversity, even though 80% of the people I work with are contractors and therefore not included in diversity statements (and all fall into predictable ethnic categories). These classes aren’t bad, but they feel like moral potty training. The worst part is making all the freaking accounts. Every employer contracts out every possible function. Paystubs in one web site. 401ks in another. New insurance cards. And make sure you give Expensify your banking info. And then there’s the mandatory security training for certification. Then you have the weird way we auth into AWS, which is totally different at every single place. Oh yeah, and don’t forget about the next Sprint ceremony. And BTW, every company has its own Sprint liturgical calendar. I’m married to a lovely woman who happens to be an Orthodox Christian, so our family celebrates Christmas and Easter on two different dates in two very different ways. During Advent my wife is fasting while I’m feasting. It’s like that but with Retros and Planning sessions. Just similar enough to be confusing. Maybe I should just stop switching jobs so often.
  • fivea 5y ago
    > I find out what I need to do my job, and get the company to give it to me. Usually means making the same request again and again and again. Which is good practice for the actual work of coding in big orgs. Onboarding processes are done to get most/all those questions answered immediately out of the bat, and in the process spare your team members from time sinks of being repeatedly pestered with having to answer the same question over and over again. Onboarding is really not about you. It's for everyone which will have to be around you. More importantly, it's to avoid everyone around you wasting their time and energy with unnecessary hand-holding. If you make onboarding about yourself, you're missing the whole point.
• mise_en_place 5y ago
  Every endearing startup eventually becomes an ugly toxic bigco.
• darepublic 5y ago
  Since covid started I have moved jobs twice. Both times it has taken company ages to ask for their laptop back. I mean most recent job approaching four months with their laptop still hanging around my house. Maybe someone will chime in and say that this makes sense for some odd reason, that they don't want to reclaim their brand new macbook. But anyway another stupid red flag in the rearview mirror. Maybe this is why the whole VC software industry is a big speculative bunch of bullcrap, in my heretical opinion.
  • newaccount74 5y ago
    Why are you waiting for the company to ask for the laptop back? Why not just mail it to them?
    • SpaghettiX 5y ago
      To avoid putting the responsibility on you. The package can get lost or stolen during courier. Also, you have to select the quality of courier (speed, delivery, insurance). That should be the companies decision to make. The companies I've worked for have told me they will manage pick up for the computer and older parts.
    • daurnimator 5y ago
      I would guess because you want the company to pay for postage.
  • Melatonic 5y ago
    That is a huge security threat in general - and especially considering many here work in IT and have access to varying levels of privileged information - a REALLY big security problem.
    • Nextgrid 5y ago
      Presumably their ongoing access was revoked, so they’d only have access to past information from when they were still employed, and if they wanted to be malicious they would’ve made a copy then. The only risk I can see is loss/theft of the machine but I wouldn’t call it a massive issue assuming ongoing access was indeed revoked.
• jackblemming 5y ago
  I love a lot of Rachel's blogs. Great and relatable stuff.
  • ozim 5y ago
    I don't like Rachel's blogs. Mostly they feel self entitled and not getting bigger picture. Just like this one on on-boarding - oh great you are "sooo smart" it could be done better. But have you ever run a company with at least 100 of employees? Right to point out shortcomings is always there as with movies when, movie critiques never made a movie themselves. But there is a fine line ...
• cycomanic 5y ago
  In my experience these onboarding session would be completely unnecessary if processes would be well documented. In reality often the only way at many places how you can find out about "how I do this specific thing?" is to ask a person who somehow knows (good look finding out who knows). So instead of having good documentation of how to do stuff or whom to ask, they have an onboarding session so that there is a chance that at least one person in the new group remembers this minor fact out of this huge amount of information that put in front of you that you thought you'd never need. It's quite literally the equivalent of throwing s*t at the wall.
  • brtkdotse 5y ago
    I agree and would add that the first assignment as a new employee should be to follow the onboarding docs and update and fix any mistakes they might have
    • lifeplusplus 5y ago
      Fix?
• wildmanx 5y ago
  Wow. This blog post is unbelievably condescending and arrogant. Everything is beneath them, they already know it all. I agree that many things mentioned about this particular onboarding process are not great. But do you really talk down everybody to that extent? You just joined, some things may not be clear yet, but you still just judge everybody? It's _your_ company now, go help improve it! Help streamlining onboarding! Ask your manager about your desk! Maybe they just forgot, that's human. How is it better to humiliate them in front of the CEO? Is that your approach to deal with criticism? Putting people on the spot and humiliate them? Ranting about some keyboard and touch bar? Really? The whole second paragraph of this blog post? And _you_ complain about _others_ not being professional? Of course it takes a bit to get used to new devices. Do you really need to start complaining about things the first minute you've tried them? If it turns out it doesn't work for you, request a different laptop a few weeks later. Big deal. > Now, when I run into a thing like this, I start getting snarky and bitchy and start thinking laterally. You are making everybody else's life miserable without contributing anything positive or helping to improve anything. > It gets better, too: they had claimed (and lied) that "your manager will be able to see the results of this". What? The manager likely _was_ able to see the results. Whether they actually looked is a different question. But it was not a _lie_ that they were able to. This makes me question the accuracy of your whole account. > wound up leaving anyway a year later. Probably for the best of everybody involved. If that's your attitude on your first day, why did you even start working there. If anything, the person's behavior is the reddest flag here. I'd start feeling miserable the moment anybody with those attitudes joins my team. P.S.: No, I don't associate "onboarding" with "waterboarding". Never occurred to me. After reading this blog post, this could be a nice question to remove candidates with terrible attitudes out of the pool.
  • CTmystery 5y ago
    It's a cynical, immature post. Genuinely surprised that it has obviously resonated so well.
    • fivea 5y ago
      > It's a cynical, immature post. Genuinely surprised that it has obviously resonated so well. It's also highly unprofessional and demonstrates a high level of disdain for everyone around the author, which is particularly worrying given the author started expressing that at a moment in time when had barely got through the door. To me it's particularly cringeworthy how the author decided to skip onboarding to afterwards force team members to waste their time onboarding her, and that's depicted as a win. No, it isn't. Onboarding processes are there to avoid wasting everyone's time getting yourself up to speed, and the author forced everyone around to waste their time with an unnecessary do-over. and even that was slammed.
• kyriakos 5y ago
  Damn that sounds like onboarding made in heaven compared to one's I've experienced. Don't get it why this guy is complaining. Onboarding optimization is not exactly high on the priorities of companies and if you lose a few days setting up and getting accustomed to the company's ways is not the end of the world, it's part of the job.
• hutrdvnj 5y ago
  The first thing that I would do in such a situation is to connect my mechanical keyboard.
• chris_wot 5y ago
  I am a huge fan of rachelbythebay.com I'm also sorry she had to put up with a lot of bullshit from companies. I only wish her the best. She seems to get stuff done, and fix bad problems. It seems most companies would be very lucky to have her join.
• switch007 5y ago
  • bitcharmer 5y ago
• aenis 5y ago
  Can totally relate. I, too, run from boring stuff instead of trying to fix it. 20 years in corporate structures told me its a war of attrition. The departments and people who like stupid, boring games introduced into the workplace have orders of magnitude more time, resources and - yes - perseverance to cultuvate those things. I run and for most of the time get away with it. Re: not recognizing CEO. Having worked as a senior technical person at board-2 levels in large companies I often failed to recognize the faces board members when meeting them in person. Some people are not good at face recognition, I am one of them. No harm ever came my way for not recognizing some dignitary or other. They truly dont care.
  • rendall 5y ago
    > board-2 levels What does board-2 levels mean?
    • aenis 5y ago
      Reporting to a guy who reports to (a member of) the executive board of a company.
• rendall 5y ago
  FWIW, I'd be absolutely psyched to work with anyone like this who is so clear-eyed and vocal about what's wrong. Work with, hire, listen to, whatever.
• Marciplan 5y ago
  “Wound up like some refugee in a communal space” — you really didn’t need to write that.
• blindmute 5y ago
  The only real red flags I see in this post are the author's attitude and behavior. I can only hope that those were exaggerated for effect. He sounds like one of those middling developers who is secretly angry to not be working at FAGMAN
• valbaca 5y ago
  The onboarding/waterboarding joke wasn't funny the first time and yet tries it twice. Author doesn't bother learning what the CEO looks like or his name? > You HAVE to type it in correctly Yes. That's how names work. Words as well. But I guess author cannot touch type on one of the most ubiquitous keyboards in the world.