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Tech CEO applauds an employee selling their dog to accommodate return-to-office
- kylecazar 3y agoThey say the CEO role is a top contender for the most psychopaths. This makes me believe it more.
- dpflan 3y agoThe narcissism pyramid concentrates its effects at the top. We live in world now where narcissism and destructive personalities can be reinforced, especially so via social media. There have always been these issues with humans interacting and behaving badly, but now they can do so in their own corporate fiefdoms.
- jollyllama 3y agoWell, strictly speaking, it's more responsible than neglecting the dog. So in that sense, I applaud it too. But it was basically forced on the employee, unfortunately.
- midoridensha 3y agoIt wasn't really forced. The employee chose to get an ultra-high-maintenance pet that required the employee to be home all day long, because the employee assumed they'd never have to go back to office work for the dog's lifetime. That was a really bad assumption, and a bad bet to make. The employee could also have chosen to keep the dog, and just hire dog sitters M-F to keep it company. Apparently they didn't want to do that, or they couldn't afford it, in which case it's questionable why they thought they could afford such a pet in the first place. IMO, people really need to re-think their ideas about dogs as pets. Dogs are pets for rich people, full stop. They're pets for showing off how much money you have, because you can afford silly luxuries like working from home (most of the working population can't do this), or hiring a dog walker, stuff that used to be normal only for rich celebrities. Nowadays, it seems like all Americans think they're entitled to having such a pet, no matter how much it inconveniences their life, their employment, their family, etc. How Americans ever got this idea, I'm not sure, because it wasn't like this 25 years ago at all. Back then, people who had dogs lived in more rural places and kept them in the (large) back yard in a doghouse; they sure as hell didn't plan their day around a dog.
- jollyllama 3y agoI don't disagree
- tedivm 3y agoThis title doesn't do it justice- I hope his rant about how working moms aren't fair to the company gets him sued.
- oofta-boofta 3y ago[flagged]
- fear_and_coffee 3y ago[dead]
- hammyhavoc 3y agoWhilst I'm an atheist myself, religious hate speech goes against https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- oofta-boofta 3y ago[flagged]
- hammyhavoc 3y agoNow that Twitter has removed protection for trans individuals in their hate speech policy, are people who use Twitter thus transphobic? It's a stretch and a broad stroke. Whilst I understand the sentiment, it's making a lot of assumptions. A lot of people simply follow x religion because that's what they were brought up with, but they aren't a religious extremist or bigot. Look at the number of Muslims who drink alcohol for a solid example, despite it being forbidden. Personal ideology is exactly that—personal. If someone commits an atrocity in the name of god, is everybody who practices that religion also a violent extremist who hates anyone gay or female?
- neilv 3y agoNo need to attack someone's religion in this context.
- unionpivo 3y agoHad to shorten the title, since it wouldn't fit. Full Title: Tech CEO Applauds an Employee Selling Off Their Pet Dog to Accommodate Return-to-Office Push
- kshacker 3y agoHasn't RTO become a legit short hand for Return to Office? Maybe I live in a bubble
- sct202 3y agoI was wondering what kind of business this company was in because the guy sounded so serious and they run blog and review spammy type websites that act as sales funnels for personal finance, high speed internet and moving companies. Like I am not going above and beyond in personal sacrifice for that.
- sharemywin 3y agoa jobs a jobs. but I would be looking for a new one in the process...I'm coming to get you fluffy.
- absrd 3y agoIt's also precisely the kind of thing that no one needs to be in an office to do
- unstatusthequo 3y agoGood for that CEO showing everyone who is boss! Like a toddler. I hope customers consider this attitude and sentiment before writing checks to this organization. I wish the employee quit though. Not like crappy digital marketing companies aren’t a dime a dozen. Greta chance to escape a toxic leadership environment.
- tristor 3y ago> I hope customers consider this attitude and sentiment before writing checks to this organization. Upon further investigation, it seems most of their customers are scammers and spammers, so I doubt any of them much care. The more psychopathic the guy is, the more likely they will be to buy more services, since most of his customers are probably connected (either directly or indirectly) to cybercriminal gangs.
- theGnuMe 3y agoHow to identify if you have a toxic boss.
- dpkirchner 3y ago> “I challenge any one of you to outwork me, but you won’t,” he told his staff Wonder if this challenge comes with a big reward -- say his TC for a year?
- vthallam 3y agoThis is despicable, but titling "Tech CEO" for a digital marketing company is a stretch. FWIW, no one(very few?) actually in tech company would make fun of working mom's or applaud someone for selling their dog.
- jen20 3y agoWhat makes you think there are fewer sociopaths in tech than marketing?
- jonas21 3y agoBecause marketers don't make a product. They're just locked in a zero-sum game for attention. Most tech companies at least start with the goal of improving the world in some way.
- jen20 3y agoMost tech companies post 2000 are marketing companies in disguise, whose only goal is to enshitify products in service of recurring revenue and spy on users to harvest data. They might have a public statement of “improving the world”, but this is usually a brazen attempt to hide their actual goals.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoMarketing is all about manipulation
- brvsft 3y agoI tend to view marketing as an industry where it is easier to 'fake it til you make it' versus tech or software engineering. But I definitely can see some arguments otherwise. I just view being able to sustain oneself purely on "bullshitting" other people as a bit harder to do in tech only because, typically, tech businesses have to output an actual software product. But I realize there are a handful of counterexamples, I still view those as anecdotal data. I'll admit, I don't think their is scientific proof one way or the other, I just view "marketing" as an easier industry for "bullshitters" to climb their way to the top.
- exhibitapp 3y agoWon't comment directly on the strange rant. But it highlights the reality that something has seriously changed since the pandemic. I have multiple employees that insist on staying home due to their dogs. The amount of discussion around employees' dogs is on another level now, partially due to the anxiety these dogs have when their owners go into the office. It's all very different than prepandemic, I for one never heard "i need to work from home to stay with my dog" as something people used to say
- tedivm 3y agoBefore the pandemic most of the startups I worked at allowed people to just bring their dogs in. I got bit by one of my coworkers dogs when I worked at Vicarious (that job really tried to kill me- while there I got electrocuted, bit by a dog, and food poisoning).
- jkaplowitz 3y agoDogs that grew up during the pandemic likely have a lot more separation anxiety than dogs which grew up pre-pandemic, and therefore so do their owners because the dogs aren't used to it. Also, before the pandemic, workers probably didn't feel comfortable asking for or insisting on work from home, whereas it's been somewhat normalized now.
- pavon 3y agoAnd dogs that had previously been used to their owners going into work got accustomed to them being home all day and needed time to adjust. Before I was approved for permanent WFH, I was gradually increasing the amount of time I went into the office, in case I wasn't approved. It was clear after a few weeks that the one-month deadline we were given wasn't going to be enough time for the dogs to re-adjust. I think two months would have been enough if I kept it gradual, but then one day I got held up much longer than expected and my older dog had a freak-out and ripped the doggy door out of the door and then proceeded to rip off about 3 inches of (fiberglass shell, foam core) door surrounding the hole. It was almost a month after that incident until I could leave to do errands without her having anxiety. I'm glad I didn't have to re-adjust her since she doesn't have much longer to live. I don't know what I'm going to do about the dog we adopted as a puppy during covid, who has never known anything else. I personally think hybrid is the worst of both worlds, but will start increasing my time in office once the older dog has passed so he can get used to me being gone for longer time stretches.
- snapcaster 3y agoThis guy seems really unhinged, and i HATE when people with more skin in the game and potential upside act like they're somehow more virtuous for working harder
- sharemywin 3y agoI agree 1000%.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ryandrake 3y agoAnd they always confuse upside with "risk". Dude probably has multi-generational wealth. His little "skin in the game" doesn't amount to risk: He's not risking his and his family's livelihood on the company.
- simonbarker87 3y agoTo work at a provincial digital marketing agency no less - CEO clearly thinks he is gods gift to something, just not his employees.
- d23 3y agoDon't you understand? They "build, acquire, and grow digital brands." What higher calling could there be?
- teeray 3y agoIn everything you do in life, ask yourself: “Is this good for the company?”
- sybercecurity 3y ago"In the video, Clarke levies some big accusations at his staff. Among them: that 30 remote employees had entirely stopped logging on in a “quiet quitting” coup. He expressed suspicions that some of Clearlink’s developers had been holding down positions at other companies without Clearlink’s knowledge. He told content writers they should be using AI to increase output “30-50 times our normal production.” This sounds like the CEO just read a bunch of tech/life blog articles and assumes that all of these trends are happening at his company too. Not a great sign when your boss believes everything he reads. Feel bad for employees who feel like they they need to continue working there and can't risk quitting.
- willcipriano 3y agoA thought follower.
- mathieuh 3y agoI've always thought it was very ironic that the main prerequisite for being a "thought leader" is not having any thoughts yourself
- Turing_Machine 3y agoI also have antipathy toward the term "thought leader". It has Nazi/Stalinist/Maoist overtones to me.
- dboreham 3y agoaka Psychopath.
- lopkeny12ko 3y agoRegardless of the tone and attitude of the rant, is it not concerning that 30 employees, all of whom are remote and not on PTO, have not even opened their laptops in a month? If I were in leadership, I'd be concerned too. Hell, my company MDM will automatically revoke many permissions if it doesn't get an automated device check-in at least once every two weeks or so.
- boomboomsubban 3y agoYou can sell dogs? Even with desirable breeds, I assumed their value was basically nil after they were a puppy, unless you sold for breeding. Is there a large used pet market?
- brianbreslin 3y agoPeople often put the dogs up for adoption/re-homing, but i had never heard of someone buying a purebred adult dog. I volunteer with the Labrador Retriever rescue group here in florida and we get a ton of people suddenly deciding they no longer have time for the dog and giving it up, or realizing the dog isn't as cute as it was when it was a puppy/got too big as an adult (duh), so they give them up.
- Clubber 3y agoI've never heard of it. If I ever needed to get rid of a pet belonging to a sick parent or whatnot, I'd take it to the humane society.
- hijinks 3y agoi mean you might get a pure breed puppy for $1500-2k but if its an adult you'd be lucky to get $200 My guess is its just some made up story by the CEO to try to get his employees to work harder because some anonymous employee had to sell their dog
- thih9 3y ago> On April 3, Clarke notified employees via email that anyone living within 50 miles of his company’s Draper, Utah headquarters would need to start showing up at the Clearlink office four days a week beginning April 17. I’d love to know more. How many people were affected, did they protest or resign, how long was the company remote, what about people unwilling to return to the office, etc.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- foul 3y agoSome of his employees may as well accept the challenge, quit his firm and take 3 WFH jobs at once, aha!
- plim8481 3y ago> “I challenge any of you to outwork me, but you won’t,” If people had as much equity and comp as he has in the company, maybe they would - he made that tradeoff to make this company his life, and he probably has a wife/family/paid helpers to take care of everything for him. His employees clearly have other priorities other than to work for a company that doesn't care for them and never will.
- koromak 3y agoSeriously, are any of you "increasing output" with AI? I get like 10 good lines of code a day from Copilot. I don't even try ChatGPT anymore, as its only useful if you're writing boilerplate. Everything thats actually hard about my job requires the full context of the rest of the codebase, within repo and without, and architectural knowledge of the problems we're trying to solve. I read another post here yesterday that said "90% of my skillset just became useless" in regards to AI. I don't understand how? Do people spend 90% of their time writing blank HTML templates or empty react components? Maybe people are just extrapolating. "90% of my skillset will become useless soon". I don't know.
- peoplearepeople 3y agoThere must be some people out there with skillsets so low/shallow that these AI tools really do seem like a productivity boost
- sandspar 3y agoWhat a titillating thought, how much more skillful and deep we are than all those people!
- bobobob420 3y agoYes for unit tests lol
- mnky9800n 3y agoyes, this is my experience as well. but any time i mention it, it seems like people don't want to hear that the AI revolution is really just "slightly better intellisense some of the time."
- bmelton 3y agoI'm not a content creator, but while I would never rely solely on AI to write content that I expected to be useful, I do use it for drumming up ideas and have found that (at least for me) its most effective utility is in generating outlines. When I'm writing things informally (like HN posts) rarely allows me to do so clearly and linearly, and I am constantly either leaving out entire paragraphs that I just assumed I'd already written or am over-responding to things because I keep seeing blanks and just keep filling them. ChatGPT (and presumably all the copywriting tools that rely on it) is much better than I am at giving me a checklist of touchpoints to hit.
- vitorsr 3y ago> He told content writers they should be using AI to increase output “30-50 times our normal production.” Take it easy on the Kool-Aid.
- knodi123 3y agoThat's actually reasonable, if you consider that these employees are literally paid to mindlessly churn out blogspam. That's at least something that AI can do flawlessly and efficiently.
- jcutrell 3y agoSomeone should show this complete stain how much his average worker is working per dollar compared to him, and then take away his toys and put him in time out.
- jk_i_am_a_robot 3y ago> “I challenge any one of you to outwork me, but you won’t,” Maybe he has to work so much because he's incredibly inefficient.
- throwaway2729 3y agoI work at a tech company that purports to build the metaverse. Initially they allowed people to go remote. Now they are walking back on it and asking people that don't want to return to take a package. A quite sad story of someone who has a few months old baby at home. They moved to a different city since their manager approved it. Now they have to be back in the Bay Area 3 days a week (in the middle of the week) since their remote application got denied. Literally forcing a parent to be away from their baby (or be jobless).
- nathanaldensr 3y agoName and shame.
- Dave3of5 3y agoI watched some of that video and the guy seems burnt out. He was in the same sentence saying one thing and then the complete opposite. He also seemed far too emotional about things to be a CEO. People questioning his education is because his degree is in Geography. He could have a reasoned response to that for example that he's a business man and the reason he is CEO is because of his business experience not his education but he totally whiffed and just started getting upset about the personal attacks. Some of his points were salient and others where unhinged rambling nonsense. He's a serious danger to the company and the exec board have a fuditary responsibility to stop him doing anything reckless (like this). If the board was sensible they would get rid of this guy, he's a major liability.
- taylodl 3y agoI'd rather unload trucks at Walmart than work for this asshole. Of course then we'd hear him whine "nobody wants to work", and the iron is he's right once you complete the thought "nobody wants to work for an asshole like you."
- joeman1000 3y agoI bet this guys ‘work’ consists of non-stop meetings and nothing else. Anecdotally, in offices I’ve worked at, the people there are constantly yakking, in pointless meetings, discussing nonsense… all day. This is about 80% of the people in the office. The hardest workers I know are the ones that come in a day or two a week but are mostly at home without the distractions of the office.
- someonehere 3y agoThat’s the problem. I was working somewhere they signed a seven year lease before the pandemic. The push for RTO was from the board and the CEO because they want ROI on their lease. This sounds eerily familiar to that workplace I was at.