On a variety of fronts -- lack of diversity, broken management, work/life balance, etc -- the standard Valley tech startup communication strategy (both public a

On a variety of fronts -- lack of diversity, broken management, work/life balance, etc -- the standard Valley tech startup communication strategy (both public and internal) seems to be acknowledging the problem while doing little to solve it. It's a clever strategy, because it's quite different from what the Fortune 500s tend to do, which is pretend the problem doesn't exist. If you acknowledge that the problem does exist, you get points for being honest, and moreover, transparency about the existence of problems is often a strong heuristic for those problems being solved. In other words, a communications strategy of, "we know this is messed up and we're fixing it" inspires a lot more confidence than, "problem? what problem?". Tech companies get away with being shitty places to work (long hours, politics, misogyny deeply embedded in culture, etc) for one main reason -- they are growing quickly. Growth is the mission, and meeting growth goals is a kind of perpetual emergency, much in the same way that in totalitarian countries the revolution is always still in progress. Speaking firsthand from past experience at a privately held "unicorn", and secondhand from many friends' experiences at others, the tactic of using quarterly town halls in which the CEO gets up and says, "I know things are really messed up and you're all working too much and we don't have enough women or people of color and we need to refactor our management because most of you don't know how well we think you're doing or what your career options are if you stay here and .... " is pretty widespread. This strategy makes employees -- who are usually pretty smart people -- believe that everything is going to be better soon, because they want to believe it, just like they want to believe that their options are going to be really valuable one of these days. After all, their company just raised another private round at an 11 figure valuation. Nietzsche observed that madness in individuals is rare but in parties, groups, and eras it is the rule. I think a lot of this stuff is going to look pretty ridiculous in a decade or two (to the extent that it doesn't already).