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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

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.
  - chris_wot 5y ago
    That's your opinion, but everything about this process screams useless busy work. You also could have read the update to know that she didn't waste anyone's time. You make a lot of assumptions.
    - fivea 5y ago
      > That's your opinion, but everything about this process screams useless busy work. It really isn't. It's a statement of fact. The whole point of getting everyone in the same room and showing them how to go through a SSO userflow and install basic software is precisely to not force everyone on your team to endure that each and every single time there's a new hire. The majority of questions are always the same predictable set of questions, the struggles are the same, the process is the same, the goals are the same. Thus instead of bringing down each and every team's productivity to go through exactly the same thing over and over again, you just get everyone on the same room, get a pair of dedicated employees to do the handholding, and you're done.
      - mirchibajji 5y ago
        A lot of this synchronous process can be avoided - especially for techies - if there is good documentation. If your new tech hire cannot figure out the documentation: a) fix the docs, preferably by the new hires themselves after they figure it out, b) Chances are they're not a great hire. Most of jobs involve reading docs, after all.
the_gipsy 5y ago
> You are making everybody else's life miserable without contributing anything positive or helping to improve anything. It's just not their duty. Everything has a limit, and this onboarding/whole company is just humiliating and unhuman.
- wildmanx 5y ago
  "Unhuman"? Bombing maternity wards in Ukraine is "unhuman". Putting African refugees on too small boats to cross the Mediterranean with too little fuel and no water is "unhuman". Exploitation of construction workers in Dubai to the point of being coined modern-day slavery is "unhuman". Playing a little onboarding game for a few minutes where people click through a corporate directory is not "unhuman".
  - chris_wot 5y ago
    Playing a little onboarding game for a few minutes where people click through a corporate directory is not "unhuman". No, it's infantilizing your workforce. Don't do that.
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      Training someone how to use a tool to look up information is empowering. Making them use that tool to prove they know what you trained them is common sense. Making it about dogs is an attempt (clumsy in my mind) to make the process less painful and more enjoyable. Learning your new hire refuses to read documentation and instead asks for the answer from someone else is valuable. Remember, that 10 second ask later can break a developer out of flow and impose a huge cost on them. If the author wanted to avoid the work, they could have: - written Fido and trust that the answer was never checked - assumed it was checked client side and found the array of acceptable names Those would be ways to move around the problem. Interrupting your coworkers for something you're supposed to do on your own isn't.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    Wait until you realize that all of these situations are produced by the same system/structures, the same the same mindset/culture and often the same people/institutions. Though i agree with you that there's a few orders of magnitude of difference in violence, corporations do not care about your well-being and will suck all they can out of you, often leading to burnout or outright suicide. If an institution is not capable to be human and empathic even in something as basic as an "onboarding" (which is supposed to make you feel welcome and capable), run for your life or burn the whole thing down. Fuck industrial capitalism.
ivan_gammel 5y ago
> Ask your manager about your desk! Maybe they just forgot, that's human. Hiring someone but forgetting to prepare a workplace for this person seems very unprofessional to me. There could be valid reasons for it, but they must be exceptions, and just forgetting is not a valid reason. > How is it better to humiliate them in front of the CEO? Author just provided an honest answer when asked by an unknown person. If manager had a valid excuse, this should not be a problem. If manager feels „humiliated“ because their mistake was exposed, but behaves professionally, also fine - we should feel sorry for our mistakes and should not expect, that everybody will avoid saying truth just to protect your feelings. Shit happens, lesson learned, move on. Our loyalty is defined by our contract and it is to the company and to shareholders, after all, and every manager in the hierarchy deserves the truth - any conspiracies to hide it are counter-productive politics.
- fivea 5y ago
  > Hiring someone but forgetting to prepare a workplace for this person seems very unprofessional to me. The blog post mentions that the author decided to skip steps of the onboarding process and decided to occupy a desk in a moment in time new arrivals were expected to occupy none. Also, it seems the onboarding process the author decided to skip was a multi-day event, so it seems the need for a desk popped up a few days before schedule. How many teams have free desks around waiting for unexpected developers to show up?
  - hinoki 5y ago
    > How many teams have free desks around waiting for unexpected developers to show up? It’s not like desk moves happen very often. Unless there’s an intern about to leave, there’s always some free desks on teams that are hiring. At least at every company I’ve worked.
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      And the author sat down at an open desk. But it wasn't the desk the author was assigned. And then they insisted they weren't going to move and insisted on getting the desk assignment changed.
grujicd 5y ago
Truth to be told, that touchbar thing on the Mac made many people mad. If you're in tech for some time, you most probably care a lot about tools you work with, especially keyboard, mouse and display. It doesn't mean that these should be super expensive. Just that they offer base functionality. For instance, physical ESC and F keys. Not having that for me is equal to be forced to write with left hand while I'm right handed. Possible, but is it productive?
sverhagen 5y ago
Like you say, they left after a year. Maybe they really tried to make it work, and now, in retrospect, can see the red flags. And yeah, they're being blunt about it now. But in the moment they may have done a decent enough effort. Myself, I am very "getting my hands dirty"-oriented, and the corporate onboarding goes over very poorly with me too. Sit through multiple days of material that is dumbed down to the company's lowest common denominator. Having to be giddy with other new hires in departments that you will never have any interaction with anymore. Kill me now. So, if the trainers just go through the motions, why wouldn't the original poster and I just put in the mere minimum to get through it, and start my real job...? Oh, my real job... in the cafetaria with no desk? So, sure, the manager can forget to put the request in. But would a manager not know that you start, schedule a welcome meeting with you on the first day, touch base a few times in your first week? Plenty of chances, still no desk! It's ridiculous, but I am not surprised. If you don't think that is ridiculous, then, I don't know, maybe you've been conditioned to that sort of environment. With no snark I wish you much joy in your employment there, but then please let the original poster and myself move on^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hrun for the hills. Here's what onboarding should look like for an Engineering role: you come in at 9:00, do the bare minimum with HR, meet your team, set up your computer, and before the end of your first day, you have your first code changes in production. Then you go home with a feeling of accomplishment. Then, during the rest of the week, some onboarding meetings will happen, but at least you have started with the most important place: your team.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  > Here's what onboarding should look like for an Engineering role: you come in at 9:00, do the bare minimum with HR, meet your team, set up your computer, and before the end of your first day, you have your first code changes in production. Then you go home with a feeling of accomplishment. Then, during the rest of the week, some onboarding meetings will happen, but at least you have started with the most important place: your team. That pretty much describes my department, for the 25 years I ran it. Of course, it was a fairly small team of experienced, high-functioning, engineers, so I doubt it represented the “industry standard” shop. We hired people with many years of experience, and I found it productive to let each one have a great deal of agency and control of their development environment.
300bps 5y ago
Years ago I worked with someone who I instantly thought of when reading this article. He would put comments in code making fun of other people’s code, refused to participate in any company training or onboarding, he put nasty voicemail greetings on his voicemail, was just an overall disagreeable person and had disdain for everyone and everything around him. I saw his obituary years later - “passed away unexpectedly at home” at the age of 53. I can’t imagine how stressful and sad it must be to look at the world so negatively.
KronisLV 5y ago
> Wow. This blog post is unbelievably condescending and arrogant. Everything is beneath them, they already know it all. I feel like this is a sign of one's tolerance for inefficiencies going down with age. When i started out development, i'd tolerate things like having to manually restart services that went down every few days, or applications without proper logging so debugging errors would be guesswork, or shared access credentials (which are frankly a risk). But as time went on, i stopped thinking that "that's just the way things are" and instead fixed all of it: systemd services (or containers), proper logging and log shipping, separate credentials for each person and so on. I fail to see why social issues should be treated any differently, with the caveat that you actually need to present yourself as professional, any criticisms as constructive and just generally need to work towards making the job environment not miserable for anyone. That said, there's no reason not to be able to vent about your frustrations freely. I disagree that you're supposed to stay silent about dysfunctional aspects of environments, since they can be a learning experience for others. > 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? If answering a simple question truthfully is humiliating, i doubt that that's necessarily a failing on your part. Though it's nice that the author was able to find and set up a desk for themselves - a few years ago i myself would have just been miserable in those circumstances... and would have probably cried. I don't think that not even having a place to work at is adequate, unless that's just the culture in the company (e.g. no assigned seating), otherwise it's maybe a tad awkward/humiliating and singles the person out. > If anything, the person's behavior is the reddest flag here. I somewhat agree, but i also don't seek to vilify the person because the way they handled the situation differs from how i would. It is perfectly normal to feel frustration as a human being. I still do that when i find blatant N+1 problems in the codebase due to someone wanting to use nested service calls instead of just writing a single longer SQL query to load all of the data for a particular section of the site in one go. Or when i find situations where a lack of indices slows down the data fetching 112 times. And yet, i bite my lip, decide not to be an ass about it, fix what i can without breaking anything, even if that reflects more poorly upon my own performance (e.g. more time taken per issue, less interesting issues solved on my own) whilst still making the product better. I then proceed to reframe those issues as a win for improving performance and add a few helpful suggestions for the next meeting, to illustrate the potential benefits, fully knowing that none of them will be taken to heart and that the system will slowly rot over the years to come. That's just how things are - sometimes things are out of your control and you just have to deal with them, other times you can fix things yourself. It is fine to vent about either, though i hope that the author was less snarky in person.
danjac 5y ago
Maybe lots of snark (comparisons to "refugee" and "waterboarding" are somewhat tasteless and very much a privileged Silicon Valley person take). However having been through enough onboardings the overall tone does resonate, and shows that companies don't spend enough time streamlining and revising their processes. Maybe it might help for them to do trial runs on new machines once a year or spend time removing tech debt out of their dev environments. If a new hire, especially one experienced in your stack, has difficulty onboarding, then something is wrong and it's probably not them.
kkfx 5y ago
IMVHO she do not really complain about "a craptop" but about a whole push all that are in IT have seen: - first, pushing ignorant (and proud to be, saying that they only need obscure laws of economy to rule the world) managers => we see in decades that NOTHING really new is born and anything is more and more crappy and unsustainable; - second, pushing a dumb and dysfunctional false sociability mediated by ridiculous rituals some call them "team building" some other less crazy call them nazi voodoo in modern western sauce; - third, pushing bad tech and bad tech habit because for some of the above ignorant that's not bad, craptops and certain "mobility" push is one of the face of such push: to work we all need for a reason or another DESKTOPS, large screens, sometimes more than one, good large and rich of keys keyboards, a damn desk large enough, a room etc the management push toward "take a craptop and crapphone and you are ready to work", things like https://arstechnica.com/?p=1831722 https://arstechnica.com/?p=1831722 clearly depict what we are heading: giving cheaper and cheaper crap hoping to keep revenues up lowering costs, shifting them to third parties. My own personal response to that is simple: managers MUST be pushed toward they role, beancounters, restoring the concept of entrepreneurship. Managerial driven modern nazi society (that's is, modern management techniques are born in the nazi era) is something we can't sustain.
southerntofu 5y ago
Wow. You are just unbelievably condescending and arrogant. > It's _your_ company now, go help improve it! Yeah just like companies care about user/employee feedback! Why are they working so hard against unionization then? (which would be a major improvement for all people involved) Companies work as a top-down structure operated by psychopaths and couldn't care less how people feel at the bottom. > How is it better to humiliate them in front of the CEO? So what's your advice? Lie to an honest question to cover generalized incompetence/malice? Sure that's what most companies and administration expect of you (producing false reports and/or avoiding to answer questions faithfully so some other team can take the blame), but that's definitely not how to operate a healthy workplace. I mean, as much as i despise CEOs, if the guy was asking the question in the first place, it certainly means he was aware of the very bad onboarding process and the difficulty to get to your desk, and was either: attempting to measure whether the situation "on the ground" is getting better, or measuring your own capacity to produce honest answers... In both cases, honesty was what the CEO was looking for so the author acted well. > If it turns out it doesn't work for you, request a different laptop a few weeks later. Big deal. Or a big company like this one could have a number of supported models from which you can choose. Why impose a single UX on every employee? I'm not asking to let me use my laptop, but please let me choose the best keyboard (for me) among at least 2 options. Everyone has different needs, and trying to fit everyone in a single box is a good way to break more than a few individuals. > 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. If anything, your behavior is the reddest flag here. You are representative of everything that's wrong in Silicon Valley, refusing to hear legit complaint about painful processes preventing people from doing their work. I assume you're a manager type with 5 figure salary. I strongly recommend you get connected with reality (the one experienced by the other 7 billions of us who are not in your privileged position of exploiter) and start to develop empathy towards other people. This would make you a better human being and would significantly improve the lives of everyone around you: blaming the victims of unjust systems may help you get closer to the top of the structure, but will certainly not help you be happy and/or produce meaningful change in the world.
- bitcharmer 5y ago
  > So what's your advice? Oh, I have a good one. Be less toxic. Works 100% of the time.
trollied 5y ago
You should probably read the follow-up that was written after this was last posted on HN. https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/05/23/nope/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/05/23/nope/
- bitcharmer 5y ago
  - pdimitar 5y ago
    Who is "everyone"? I do agree with her points, and I'm seeing a fair amount of people here agreeing with her as well. Don't try and convert your subjective disagreement into an universal fact. It's bad discussion form. Accept that your opinion isn't a fact and move on.
    - bitcharmer 5y ago
      > Accept that your opinion isn't a fact and move on She seems to be struggling with this as well.
      - pdimitar 5y ago
        She's not "struggling" with anything. She shared her take publicly. Where do you get the "struggling" part from?
- wiredfool 5y ago
  Looks around. The more things change...
wanda 5y ago
> Wow. This blog post is unbelievably condescending and arrogant. I really don't think it is. The author simply seems to have very little tolerance for that onboarding process, and do you know what, that process actually does sound pretty familiar. I've worked for two companies that give you their hardware, install a ton of trash on it, have a total mess of SSO logins that kind of work or require the use of multiple different accounts for certain services that "were set up with SSO but didn't work..." And one also had a series of daft orientation tasks that were supposed to promote team work and establish the company's culture, but in fact are just a waste of time that no one wants to do -- with the sole exception of the suspiciously hyper lunatic running the team building session. Look at the article title. Red flags. Stuff like this might very well indicate that maybe, maybe this company's culture is not a good fit if you have low tolerance for amateurs. > Putting people on the spot and humiliate them The author was put on the spot, brought into a whatever meeting, and asked a question, to which they responded honestly and without embellishment of the truth. So... should the author have lied? They simply replied they did not have a desk. I sure as shit wouldn't lie to cover my manager's ass because, frankly, I'd want a desk. If the manager felt humiliated, it will have come from within, because you know what, they should feel embarrassed if they've taken on a new worker and not gotten them somewhere to work. > It's _your_ company now, go help improve it! No. It's the shareholders' company, they can make sure their employees are properly equipped and appropriately paid to do their jobs, then the good work will follow. As for suggesting that their onboarding process could use improvement, 9/10 managers who receive that feedback will smile, say what a good idea that is, say they'll take it on board, and then never think about it again. I've been a manager, and I've been a developer. Most managers don't give a toss. The article, at least the way I'm seeing it, seems to be a satirical (i.e. intended for an audience that has a common frame of reference and, more importantly, a sense of humour) account of an onboarding process at a company that later turned out to be a bad fit. And in hindsight, the author is saying that they probably indeed should have seen the red flags from the start as being indicative of whatever would cause their departure. > You are making everybody else's life miserable without contributing anything positive or helping to improve anything. That's a stretch. The only person the author has made miserable is you, but why this has stirred such an awkwardly emotive response from you, I don't know.
- 5y ago
zbentley 5y ago
> It's _your_ company now, go help improve it! If it were me, my answer would be: On my first day? Before my first paycheck? Before I know what I'll be doing, who I'll be working for, whether any of that is going to be remotely humane or professional? No. I will not start looking for independent process tweaks and improvements on hour 1, while being onboarding-hazed. Give me a reason to care about this gig, first. There's a huge distance between "I accepted the offer and will do my best as a professional to earn my paycheck" and "This is my company, my community, and I have a personal interest in improving it in ways outside of my role". Meeting the bar for the first one is on me. Making me want to meet the bar for the second is on the company; good workplaces will give me reasons to get there, mediocre or bad ones won't.
- wildmanx 5y ago
  Straw man alarm. Nobody is talking about doing that on day 1 or hour 1. She took the time months later to rant. Could invest time months later to instead improve things. Which of course won't happen if you already made up your mind on day 1 that this all sucks because you got a laptop with a touchbar that you keep fat-fingering and thus can't stand, had to learn how the corp directory works and a desk assignment was forgotten. Really sounds like a horrible place, who would ever want to work there. /s
Aeolun 5y ago
> Help streamlining onboarding! Ask your manager about your desk! Maybe they just forgot! If you are joining an organization of this size. There are zero people interested in learning about your feelings on onboarding. Your manager should have a process they follow when hiring people, and assigning someone a desk is part of that. If the company doesn’t have such a process, that’s a red flag.

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.
- chris_wot 5y ago
  That's your opinion, but everything about this process screams useless busy work. You also could have read the update to know that she didn't waste anyone's time. You make a lot of assumptions.
  - fivea 5y ago
    > That's your opinion, but everything about this process screams useless busy work. It really isn't. It's a statement of fact. The whole point of getting everyone in the same room and showing them how to go through a SSO userflow and install basic software is precisely to not force everyone on your team to endure that each and every single time there's a new hire. The majority of questions are always the same predictable set of questions, the struggles are the same, the process is the same, the goals are the same. Thus instead of bringing down each and every team's productivity to go through exactly the same thing over and over again, you just get everyone on the same room, get a pair of dedicated employees to do the handholding, and you're done.
    - mirchibajji 5y ago
      A lot of this synchronous process can be avoided - especially for techies - if there is good documentation. If your new tech hire cannot figure out the documentation: a) fix the docs, preferably by the new hires themselves after they figure it out, b) Chances are they're not a great hire. Most of jobs involve reading docs, after all.

the_gipsy 5y ago

> You are making everybody else's life miserable without contributing anything positive or helping to improve anything. It's just not their duty. Everything has a limit, and this onboarding/whole company is just humiliating and unhuman.

wildmanx 5y ago
"Unhuman"? Bombing maternity wards in Ukraine is "unhuman". Putting African refugees on too small boats to cross the Mediterranean with too little fuel and no water is "unhuman". Exploitation of construction workers in Dubai to the point of being coined modern-day slavery is "unhuman". Playing a little onboarding game for a few minutes where people click through a corporate directory is not "unhuman".
- chris_wot 5y ago
  Playing a little onboarding game for a few minutes where people click through a corporate directory is not "unhuman". No, it's infantilizing your workforce. Don't do that.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    Training someone how to use a tool to look up information is empowering. Making them use that tool to prove they know what you trained them is common sense. Making it about dogs is an attempt (clumsy in my mind) to make the process less painful and more enjoyable. Learning your new hire refuses to read documentation and instead asks for the answer from someone else is valuable. Remember, that 10 second ask later can break a developer out of flow and impose a huge cost on them. If the author wanted to avoid the work, they could have: - written Fido and trust that the answer was never checked - assumed it was checked client side and found the array of acceptable names Those would be ways to move around the problem. Interrupting your coworkers for something you're supposed to do on your own isn't.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  Wait until you realize that all of these situations are produced by the same system/structures, the same the same mindset/culture and often the same people/institutions. Though i agree with you that there's a few orders of magnitude of difference in violence, corporations do not care about your well-being and will suck all they can out of you, often leading to burnout or outright suicide. If an institution is not capable to be human and empathic even in something as basic as an "onboarding" (which is supposed to make you feel welcome and capable), run for your life or burn the whole thing down. Fuck industrial capitalism.

ivan_gammel 5y ago

> Ask your manager about your desk! Maybe they just forgot, that's human. Hiring someone but forgetting to prepare a workplace for this person seems very unprofessional to me. There could be valid reasons for it, but they must be exceptions, and just forgetting is not a valid reason. > How is it better to humiliate them in front of the CEO? Author just provided an honest answer when asked by an unknown person. If manager had a valid excuse, this should not be a problem. If manager feels „humiliated“ because their mistake was exposed, but behaves professionally, also fine - we should feel sorry for our mistakes and should not expect, that everybody will avoid saying truth just to protect your feelings. Shit happens, lesson learned, move on. Our loyalty is defined by our contract and it is to the company and to shareholders, after all, and every manager in the hierarchy deserves the truth - any conspiracies to hide it are counter-productive politics.

fivea 5y ago
> Hiring someone but forgetting to prepare a workplace for this person seems very unprofessional to me. The blog post mentions that the author decided to skip steps of the onboarding process and decided to occupy a desk in a moment in time new arrivals were expected to occupy none. Also, it seems the onboarding process the author decided to skip was a multi-day event, so it seems the need for a desk popped up a few days before schedule. How many teams have free desks around waiting for unexpected developers to show up?
- hinoki 5y ago
  > How many teams have free desks around waiting for unexpected developers to show up? It’s not like desk moves happen very often. Unless there’s an intern about to leave, there’s always some free desks on teams that are hiring. At least at every company I’ve worked.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    And the author sat down at an open desk. But it wasn't the desk the author was assigned. And then they insisted they weren't going to move and insisted on getting the desk assignment changed.

grujicd 5y ago

Truth to be told, that touchbar thing on the Mac made many people mad. If you're in tech for some time, you most probably care a lot about tools you work with, especially keyboard, mouse and display. It doesn't mean that these should be super expensive. Just that they offer base functionality. For instance, physical ESC and F keys. Not having that for me is equal to be forced to write with left hand while I'm right handed. Possible, but is it productive?

sverhagen 5y ago

Like you say, they left after a year. Maybe they really tried to make it work, and now, in retrospect, can see the red flags. And yeah, they're being blunt about it now. But in the moment they may have done a decent enough effort. Myself, I am very "getting my hands dirty"-oriented, and the corporate onboarding goes over very poorly with me too. Sit through multiple days of material that is dumbed down to the company's lowest common denominator. Having to be giddy with other new hires in departments that you will never have any interaction with anymore. Kill me now. So, if the trainers just go through the motions, why wouldn't the original poster and I just put in the mere minimum to get through it, and start my real job...? Oh, my real job... in the cafetaria with no desk? So, sure, the manager can forget to put the request in. But would a manager not know that you start, schedule a welcome meeting with you on the first day, touch base a few times in your first week? Plenty of chances, still no desk! It's ridiculous, but I am not surprised. If you don't think that is ridiculous, then, I don't know, maybe you've been conditioned to that sort of environment. With no snark I wish you much joy in your employment there, but then please let the original poster and myself move on^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hrun for the hills. Here's what onboarding should look like for an Engineering role: you come in at 9:00, do the bare minimum with HR, meet your team, set up your computer, and before the end of your first day, you have your first code changes in production. Then you go home with a feeling of accomplishment. Then, during the rest of the week, some onboarding meetings will happen, but at least you have started with the most important place: your team.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
> Here's what onboarding should look like for an Engineering role: you come in at 9:00, do the bare minimum with HR, meet your team, set up your computer, and before the end of your first day, you have your first code changes in production. Then you go home with a feeling of accomplishment. Then, during the rest of the week, some onboarding meetings will happen, but at least you have started with the most important place: your team. That pretty much describes my department, for the 25 years I ran it. Of course, it was a fairly small team of experienced, high-functioning, engineers, so I doubt it represented the “industry standard” shop. We hired people with many years of experience, and I found it productive to let each one have a great deal of agency and control of their development environment.

300bps 5y ago

Years ago I worked with someone who I instantly thought of when reading this article. He would put comments in code making fun of other people’s code, refused to participate in any company training or onboarding, he put nasty voicemail greetings on his voicemail, was just an overall disagreeable person and had disdain for everyone and everything around him. I saw his obituary years later - “passed away unexpectedly at home” at the age of 53. I can’t imagine how stressful and sad it must be to look at the world so negatively.

KronisLV 5y ago

> Wow. This blog post is unbelievably condescending and arrogant. Everything is beneath them, they already know it all. I feel like this is a sign of one's tolerance for inefficiencies going down with age. When i started out development, i'd tolerate things like having to manually restart services that went down every few days, or applications without proper logging so debugging errors would be guesswork, or shared access credentials (which are frankly a risk). But as time went on, i stopped thinking that "that's just the way things are" and instead fixed all of it: systemd services (or containers), proper logging and log shipping, separate credentials for each person and so on. I fail to see why social issues should be treated any differently, with the caveat that you actually need to present yourself as professional, any criticisms as constructive and just generally need to work towards making the job environment not miserable for anyone. That said, there's no reason not to be able to vent about your frustrations freely. I disagree that you're supposed to stay silent about dysfunctional aspects of environments, since they can be a learning experience for others. > 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? If answering a simple question truthfully is humiliating, i doubt that that's necessarily a failing on your part. Though it's nice that the author was able to find and set up a desk for themselves - a few years ago i myself would have just been miserable in those circumstances... and would have probably cried. I don't think that not even having a place to work at is adequate, unless that's just the culture in the company (e.g. no assigned seating), otherwise it's maybe a tad awkward/humiliating and singles the person out. > If anything, the person's behavior is the reddest flag here. I somewhat agree, but i also don't seek to vilify the person because the way they handled the situation differs from how i would. It is perfectly normal to feel frustration as a human being. I still do that when i find blatant N+1 problems in the codebase due to someone wanting to use nested service calls instead of just writing a single longer SQL query to load all of the data for a particular section of the site in one go. Or when i find situations where a lack of indices slows down the data fetching 112 times. And yet, i bite my lip, decide not to be an ass about it, fix what i can without breaking anything, even if that reflects more poorly upon my own performance (e.g. more time taken per issue, less interesting issues solved on my own) whilst still making the product better. I then proceed to reframe those issues as a win for improving performance and add a few helpful suggestions for the next meeting, to illustrate the potential benefits, fully knowing that none of them will be taken to heart and that the system will slowly rot over the years to come. That's just how things are - sometimes things are out of your control and you just have to deal with them, other times you can fix things yourself. It is fine to vent about either, though i hope that the author was less snarky in person.

danjac 5y ago

Maybe lots of snark (comparisons to "refugee" and "waterboarding" are somewhat tasteless and very much a privileged Silicon Valley person take). However having been through enough onboardings the overall tone does resonate, and shows that companies don't spend enough time streamlining and revising their processes. Maybe it might help for them to do trial runs on new machines once a year or spend time removing tech debt out of their dev environments. If a new hire, especially one experienced in your stack, has difficulty onboarding, then something is wrong and it's probably not them.

kkfx 5y ago

IMVHO she do not really complain about "a craptop" but about a whole push all that are in IT have seen: - first, pushing ignorant (and proud to be, saying that they only need obscure laws of economy to rule the world) managers => we see in decades that NOTHING really new is born and anything is more and more crappy and unsustainable; - second, pushing a dumb and dysfunctional false sociability mediated by ridiculous rituals some call them "team building" some other less crazy call them nazi voodoo in modern western sauce; - third, pushing bad tech and bad tech habit because for some of the above ignorant that's not bad, craptops and certain "mobility" push is one of the face of such push: to work we all need for a reason or another DESKTOPS, large screens, sometimes more than one, good large and rich of keys keyboards, a damn desk large enough, a room etc the management push toward "take a craptop and crapphone and you are ready to work", things like https://arstechnica.com/?p=1831722 https://arstechnica.com/?p=1831722 clearly depict what we are heading: giving cheaper and cheaper crap hoping to keep revenues up lowering costs, shifting them to third parties. My own personal response to that is simple: managers MUST be pushed toward they role, beancounters, restoring the concept of entrepreneurship. Managerial driven modern nazi society (that's is, modern management techniques are born in the nazi era) is something we can't sustain.

southerntofu 5y ago

Wow. You are just unbelievably condescending and arrogant. > It's _your_ company now, go help improve it! Yeah just like companies care about user/employee feedback! Why are they working so hard against unionization then? (which would be a major improvement for all people involved) Companies work as a top-down structure operated by psychopaths and couldn't care less how people feel at the bottom. > How is it better to humiliate them in front of the CEO? So what's your advice? Lie to an honest question to cover generalized incompetence/malice? Sure that's what most companies and administration expect of you (producing false reports and/or avoiding to answer questions faithfully so some other team can take the blame), but that's definitely not how to operate a healthy workplace. I mean, as much as i despise CEOs, if the guy was asking the question in the first place, it certainly means he was aware of the very bad onboarding process and the difficulty to get to your desk, and was either: attempting to measure whether the situation "on the ground" is getting better, or measuring your own capacity to produce honest answers... In both cases, honesty was what the CEO was looking for so the author acted well. > If it turns out it doesn't work for you, request a different laptop a few weeks later. Big deal. Or a big company like this one could have a number of supported models from which you can choose. Why impose a single UX on every employee? I'm not asking to let me use my laptop, but please let me choose the best keyboard (for me) among at least 2 options. Everyone has different needs, and trying to fit everyone in a single box is a good way to break more than a few individuals. > 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. If anything, your behavior is the reddest flag here. You are representative of everything that's wrong in Silicon Valley, refusing to hear legit complaint about painful processes preventing people from doing their work. I assume you're a manager type with 5 figure salary. I strongly recommend you get connected with reality (the one experienced by the other 7 billions of us who are not in your privileged position of exploiter) and start to develop empathy towards other people. This would make you a better human being and would significantly improve the lives of everyone around you: blaming the victims of unjust systems may help you get closer to the top of the structure, but will certainly not help you be happy and/or produce meaningful change in the world.

bitcharmer 5y ago
> So what's your advice? Oh, I have a good one. Be less toxic. Works 100% of the time.

trollied 5y ago

You should probably read the follow-up that was written after this was last posted on HN. https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/05/23/nope/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/05/23/nope/

bitcharmer 5y ago
- pdimitar 5y ago
  Who is "everyone"? I do agree with her points, and I'm seeing a fair amount of people here agreeing with her as well. Don't try and convert your subjective disagreement into an universal fact. It's bad discussion form. Accept that your opinion isn't a fact and move on.
  - bitcharmer 5y ago
    > Accept that your opinion isn't a fact and move on She seems to be struggling with this as well.
    - pdimitar 5y ago
      She's not "struggling" with anything. She shared her take publicly. Where do you get the "struggling" part from?
wiredfool 5y ago
Looks around. The more things change...

wanda 5y ago

> Wow. This blog post is unbelievably condescending and arrogant. I really don't think it is. The author simply seems to have very little tolerance for that onboarding process, and do you know what, that process actually does sound pretty familiar. I've worked for two companies that give you their hardware, install a ton of trash on it, have a total mess of SSO logins that kind of work or require the use of multiple different accounts for certain services that "were set up with SSO but didn't work..." And one also had a series of daft orientation tasks that were supposed to promote team work and establish the company's culture, but in fact are just a waste of time that no one wants to do -- with the sole exception of the suspiciously hyper lunatic running the team building session. Look at the article title. Red flags. Stuff like this might very well indicate that maybe, maybe this company's culture is not a good fit if you have low tolerance for amateurs. > Putting people on the spot and humiliate them The author was put on the spot, brought into a whatever meeting, and asked a question, to which they responded honestly and without embellishment of the truth. So... should the author have lied? They simply replied they did not have a desk. I sure as shit wouldn't lie to cover my manager's ass because, frankly, I'd want a desk. If the manager felt humiliated, it will have come from within, because you know what, they should feel embarrassed if they've taken on a new worker and not gotten them somewhere to work. > It's _your_ company now, go help improve it! No. It's the shareholders' company, they can make sure their employees are properly equipped and appropriately paid to do their jobs, then the good work will follow. As for suggesting that their onboarding process could use improvement, 9/10 managers who receive that feedback will smile, say what a good idea that is, say they'll take it on board, and then never think about it again. I've been a manager, and I've been a developer. Most managers don't give a toss. The article, at least the way I'm seeing it, seems to be a satirical (i.e. intended for an audience that has a common frame of reference and, more importantly, a sense of humour) account of an onboarding process at a company that later turned out to be a bad fit. And in hindsight, the author is saying that they probably indeed should have seen the red flags from the start as being indicative of whatever would cause their departure. > You are making everybody else's life miserable without contributing anything positive or helping to improve anything. That's a stretch. The only person the author has made miserable is you, but why this has stirred such an awkwardly emotive response from you, I don't know.

5y ago

zbentley 5y ago

> It's _your_ company now, go help improve it! If it were me, my answer would be: On my first day? Before my first paycheck? Before I know what I'll be doing, who I'll be working for, whether any of that is going to be remotely humane or professional? No. I will not start looking for independent process tweaks and improvements on hour 1, while being onboarding-hazed. Give me a reason to care about this gig, first. There's a huge distance between "I accepted the offer and will do my best as a professional to earn my paycheck" and "This is my company, my community, and I have a personal interest in improving it in ways outside of my role". Meeting the bar for the first one is on me. Making me want to meet the bar for the second is on the company; good workplaces will give me reasons to get there, mediocre or bad ones won't.

wildmanx 5y ago
Straw man alarm. Nobody is talking about doing that on day 1 or hour 1. She took the time months later to rant. Could invest time months later to instead improve things. Which of course won't happen if you already made up your mind on day 1 that this all sucks because you got a laptop with a touchbar that you keep fat-fingering and thus can't stand, had to learn how the corp directory works and a desk assignment was forgotten. Really sounds like a horrible place, who would ever want to work there. /s

Aeolun 5y ago

> Help streamlining onboarding! Ask your manager about your desk! Maybe they just forgot! If you are joining an organization of this size. There are zero people interested in learning about your feelings on onboarding. Your manager should have a process they follow when hiring people, and assigning someone a desk is part of that. If the company doesn’t have such a process, that’s a red flag.