For the record, I'm one of the co-authors of "The Alliance," which Dan Lyons refers to in his op ed. Dan refers to our book and quotes a single sentence fragment: "Your company is not your family." Everything else he writes in that section of the piece has nothing to do with the content of the book.
1) "You’re serving a “tour of duty” that might last a year or two" Actually, the book makes it clear that the duration of a tour of duty depends on the mission the employee has agreed to tackle--tours of duty can be 6 months long, but then can also last for a decade (think of NASA scientists working on a deep space probe).
2) "Companies burn you out and churn you out when someone better, or cheaper, becomes available." This is purely Dan Lyons; the point we make in the book is that few employees expect or want lifetime employment at a single company; what people really want is lifetime employability and career progress. We would consider companies that behaved like Lyons described as "breaking the Alliance," which would harm their reputation as an employer.
3) "In this new model of work, employees are expected to feel complete devotion and loyalty to their companies, even while the boss feels no such obligation in return." Once again, this is the exact opposite of what our book says. We believe that employers and employees need to recognize that employment is a voluntary, mutually beneficial alliance, and that managers should be explicit about how an employee's job assignment is going to help develop his or her career.
Dan Lyons certainly has right to his opinions, but he shouldn't have a right to misrepresent our ideas.
> the point we make in the book is that few employees expect or want lifetime employment at a single company
Any citation about this claim? Because in my experience, it's completely incorrect.
Outside of the US, lifetime employment is a heavily coveted goal, because economies outside of the US are in a terrible shape overall with unemployment rate routinely above 10%.
Inside the US, except for white collar workers in major cities, long time employment remains the holy grail of most of the workforce, even though the US economy is in a pretty good shape overall.
Interestingly, even though Dan Lyons technically belongs to the white collar community that is probably not interested in lifetime employment, it's pretty obvious to me that when he joined that semi-startup, his goal was a lot more to write a book about it than embracing the party line and planning a long career there.
I mean... you're hiring Fake Steve Jobs and when he's out of the company, your executives try to illegally get a copy of the book with the futile hope that it won't get published... Seriously? What did you expect?
I think it's overwhelmingly a generational thing, not a "white collar" thing. Older white collar workers still want/expect lifetime employment, while young workers of all kinds are more comfortable with labor fluidity.
The vast majority of my young friends are uninterested in jobs which would provide lifetime employment. (As am I.)
Honestly, it was incredibly risky for HubSpot to hire Lyons and the outcome seems predestined. He came in with completely mismatched expectations and an ax to grind.
This is also a huge contributory factor to ageism in tech. Of course you won't hire older people when they expect lifetime employment at a startup which might not even exist in a few years.
There is no way not wanting lifetime employment is something unique to the US, it seems far more likely that it would be connected to status than nationality (and that has been my experience for what it's worth)
I don't think Dan Lyons misrepresents your ideas, but rather I think more fundamentally he doesn't share your vocabulary, worldview nor expectations. The reverse is also true, and your arguments in return don't use worldview or definitions he would understand nor recognise.
The modern world seems to be a constant case of vocabulary misunderstanding, where we all say "widget", and I mean thing and you mean "an element of a UX".
"Job security" is a specific example that can mean different things based on worldview. It can mean "the business will employ you no matter what you do or how bad you are" - the classic 1970s Union paradigm. "Job security" can mean "the creation of skills that will continue to have value in the market", i.e. "a law degree means you will always have job security. Or "Job security" can even mean something beyond the individual, to mean "working for a company that will survive" i.e. "working for the government provides great job security - they can never go out of business". Dan Lyons' sacking from Newsweek and the dying of traditional media shows how industry viability is in some ways more fundamental than the individual's talents to "job security".
Now, which of those definitions people understand - and which definition your worldview puts front and centre - will dictate how you view a new sort of life/work manifesto.
Dan Lyons idealises a world in which people worked their whole career for one company, had a slow progression of minor promotions and pay rises & retired to a gold watch they took to Florida. That reality makes me personally want to buy a chair, some rope and to Google how to tie a noose, but my view is certainly NOT universal, and I need to accept and recognise that.
I would hope people would go beyond seeing this as "misrepresent our ideas", and get to bottom of the misunderstanding - to the fundamental worldview misunderstanding at the core of the disagreement. Rather than defend against a perceived attack, I think a policy of agree and amplify makes sense. Dan Lyons is correct - the world has changed and in this new reality, 50 years of depressing work for one company is over. The new world may not have a gold watch at the end of the rainbow, but it should have a much brighter and happier journey, and the a world in which employment is for a specific period, the goal changes from work hard and hope, to maximise skill development. That is the heart of "The Alliance" - an acceptance the world has changed, and making it work for you.
I appreciate the thoughtful comment. And I wouldn't dispute that we believe that lifetime employment by a single company is unlikely to be offered or accepted in today's world.
But Dan Lyons is misrepresenting us when he implies that we believe that employees should be loyal to companies even though companies show no loyalty to employees. We're not pro-corporation or pro-employee; our point is that work is a voluntary relationship where both parties should benefit.
> I don't think Dan Lyons misrepresents your ideas, but rather I think more fundamentally he doesn't share your vocabulary, worldview nor expectations.
Then why did Lyons cite grandparent's book as though it supports his worldview? Why did he sandwich quotes from the book with paraphrasing that doesn't represent the book at all?
> That is the heart of "The Alliance" - an acceptance the world has changed, and making it work for you.
Are you preaching to grandparent about what his book is about? That strikes me as strange.
Your idea of "vocabulary misunderstanding" is similar to what the philosopher Wittgenstein calls "language games". He believes that it is the duty of the philosopher to help clear up the misunderstandings present when two people are trying to communicate with the same vocabulary but are actually playing different language games. It's been a long time since I studied him, but I think that I can at least recall this much correctly. :) You might be interested in reading more by him.
>Dan Lyons idealises a world in which people worked their whole career for one company, had a slow progression of minor promotions and pay rises & retired to a gold watch they took to Florida. That reality makes me personally want to buy a chair, some rope and to Google how to tie a noose, but my view is certainly NOT universal, and I need to accept and recognise that.
I think the angle you're missing on this sort of job is that it's perfect for someone for whom their job is not their self-identity. In the tech realm today, a lot of people really tie their identity to their work, and for them, this sort of job is really bad. However, there are lots of people for whom a job is just a paycheck, and their passion lies elsewhere. Often that passion is in an area where significant money just cannot be made (family is the most obvious one, but there are others.) I've worked in public service in the past, and you see lots of people that have been working the same job for 10, 20, or even 30 years. When you talk to them, it's clear that the job is fine, and they enjoy it, but what they really care about is their kids, or the dogs they walk at the local shelter, or whatever their passion is.
If “maximise skill development” were really so central, I would be much happier with the working environment.
I think that would involve some combination of:
* Choice over what kind of tasks you work on
* Freedom to spend some extra time on a task, both to get it to a level of quality you are happy with and to use the opportunity to learn the domain in question a little better
* Blocks of time to work on a maker's schedule; to read, concentrate, and work with minimal interruption from coworkers
These things benefit not only the happiness and well-being of a software engineer (which is where I'll focus since that's what I am and this is hacker news) but also his/her ability to learn and improve over time.
In the short term, these things might make you less valuable to the business by not being at the constant beck and call of others, and taking longer on tasks.
In the long term, I think they would more than pay for themselves for all concerned. If I were offered these sorts of improvements to the working arrangement in exchange for a pay cut, I'd be very very interested.
Do you have a cite for being the 70's paradigm:
"the business will employ you no matter what you do or how bad you are" - the classic 1970s Union paradigm
No Union protects employees no matter how bad they are.
> I don't think Dan Lyons misrepresents your ideas, but rather I think more fundamentally he doesn't share your vocabulary, worldview nor expectations.
Pretty much the #1 asshole behavior on the Internet is criticizing other people's books/studies without having read them. Chris is right, this reflects extremely poorly on Lyons.
> the point we make in the book is that few employees expect or want lifetime employment at a single company
This might be a function of broken promotion processes. Perhaps, in a world in which employees believed that they could advance their careers by either staying at one company or moving around, we would see a significant fraction of workers who would want to have long tenures.
One of the people I talked with when writing the book was a young woman who worked for a financial services firm. She loved her job, loved the culture, but told me that she was going to have to leave because the only way to get a promotion was to go to another firm, then return later.
In practice, it's highly inefficient to expect one company to handle all your promotions. Even if you're ready to take on a higher level of responsibility, there's absolutely no guarantee that they have a position open at that level.
That's why the alliance model makes sense: you might be going elsewhere to find an open promotion, but that shouldn't imply "disloyalty."
Chris you're right Dan misconstrues your ideas and that's disappointing.
The real issue with his article is that he was lying to himself before he even joined Hubspot. I'm really surprised how shocked people are when they join startups and aren't happy. What did you expect?
Hubspot is not Salesforce. Uber is not Google. DoorDash is not Groupon. The maturity of companies at different stages varies significantly.
I read articles on HN every month about people who are bamboozled about startups after they start working there. These same people delude themselves about how awesome startups are. Startups are the birth of companies.In the beginning and up until you reach a certain point of market dominance, it's always hard. It's been this way for years and yet people continue to write articles about this nonsense every month...I'm really tired of it.
> he was lying to himself
> delude themselves about how awesome startups are
> people continue to write articles about this nonsense every month
You seem to be unrelentingly "blaming the victims." Obviously, it is to people's benefit to have the most realistic expectations possible about companies they join.
But does that in any way absolve employers of making realistic representations of what employees can expect? Does that absolve people in management positions from behaving with decency and fairness?
When two cars collide, sometimes both parties are at fault, "blame" is often a positive-sum game. It would be fair to hand out as much opprobrium and vituperation for the employers in these situations as the employees.
> I'm really surprised how shocked people are when they join startups and aren't happy. What did you expect?
The life-stage of a company rarely has much to do with the working conditions, cult/culture weirdness or how well the business is run.
There are plenty of great startups that are very solid companies that anyone would be happy to work for.
Blanket hate of "startups" doesn't make much sense. Also none of the companies you mentioned are "startups" anymore either, incorrectly applying that label to every company doesn't help.
"the point we make in the book is that few employees expect or want lifetime employment at a single company;"
Expect? Of course not, anymore; you'd be a fool to expect that.
Want? Well, more complicated: if it's a matter of wanting lifetime employment in the presently existing field of options, as employment and firms are presently constituted (and as firms presently look at employees), maybe not. If it's a matter of wanting to be working in the kind of regime in which lifetime employment really was more common, the answer might change.
Your response to 3 is a non sequitur. And employment as a condition is certainly not a voluntary matter: think of what that would mean! (Hint: it would mean that anyone who wanted to could quit their job and not seek employment elsewhere and things would be fine. We don't live in that world.)
When I say "lifetime employment at a single company," I refer to spending one's entire career at a single firm.
When I say that employment is a voluntary relationship, I mean that the employer cannot compel an employee to accept a job offer, and that an employee cannot compel an employer to extend one.
managers should be explicit about how an employee's job assignment is going to help develop his or her career
That's interesting. I've had a number of managers in my career and never, not even once, has one of them espoused anything resembling such a position. It's always what can the employee do for the company, not what's mutually beneficial.
I felt like most of my managers at Google tried pretty hard at this. We certainly did have conversations about what I wanted long-term within my career and how that might best be accomplished within the organization.
Ultimately, I ended up deciding that what I wanted couldn't be achieved inside Google, but they certainly made the effort.
At Microsoft my managers were pretty consistent about doing this, and I tried to do it when I was a manager. Aside from the occasional conflict of interest when there isn't an available "step-up" position in someone's current team, it's a win-win.
I've had several managers and mentors at Intel that we're sincerely interested in helping me develop my career. I'm not saying its universal, but I've seen some.
Sadly, most managers don't talk with their employees about career development. There is an irrational fear that having these conversations gives an employee "permission" to leave, even though an employee certainly doesn't need his or her manager's permission to take another job!
I try to do it a lot. I often have conversations that go something like "Thisis me taking my $companyName hat off and speaking with my 'friend of $employeeName' hat on, but as much as this will cause me problems I realy suggest you consider $significantCareerEnhancement even though it will cause me $problemsIfYouMoveOrLeave as a result."
(I'm also surprised/disappointed at how rarely that advice is taken - there's a _very_ strong tendency for people to "stay put" in a sub optimal career position instead of taking the risk of jumping into the unknown and possiby scarey "next level up". So many devs tell me "I'm not ready for a mid level role yet" or equivalent, even when thay _clearly_ are...)
I am an engineering manager and I am explicit about telling my team that they should expect and pursue personal career growth during their employment at any company. My challenge is to figure out how keep this aligned with the company's needs.
The fluidity of employment argues strongly against it.
An employer doesn't train people, they hire those with the skill. If an employee is no longer valuable, the employee moves on. The employer has no particular interest in or control over the employee's career before or after their 'assignment'.
I'll have to give your book a read because it reflects some vague ideas I've been having. It feels like having "more liquidity" in the job market could benefit both employees and employers: it would make it easier for me to find a job that's a good fit and to adjust my role as my circumstances change; similarly, it lets companies be more flexible.
My theory is that this is the sort of thing that's only a problem relative to our expectations. If everybody expected people to move between jobs more often, it would have a significantly lower cost while conferring the benefits I mentioned above.
Then again, I'm the sort of person who can't imagine spending 40 years climbing a hierarchy at a big corporation, so I might just be fundamentally different from the people who actively want that...
I do think that greater liquidity is beneficial to employers and employees. But one of the interesting things about The Alliance is that we believe that being open and honest about what each side is getting from the relationship should lead to longer job tenures, rather than shorter ones.
i don't want to misrepresent the parent, but my take was:
Don't cite my work in a narrow, out of contex way, that entirely misrepresents the body of thought I put together which ia almost entirely at odds with your message.
sure, the people should be allowed to say whatever they want, but if you incorrectly attribute qoutes or ideology to someone, in my mind, you lose credibility. so sure you have a right to mistepresent others ideas but unless you have wholly original thought, if you do that, you call into question the validity of your process, all your sources, and ultimately all of your nessage that relies on non primary research/information
Opinions are not the same as representations of others' ideas.
If I say "I like capitalism," that is my opinion.
If I say "Karl Marx likes capitalism," that is a misrepresentation of someone else's ideas.
If I say "Karl Marx likes oppressive authoritarian regimes" because every country implementing communism has pretty much turned out that way, that's pretty much misrepresenting someone else's ideas too.
Consider the following situation: esbranson, in a post on HN, consoled the parent poster. "That's nonsense", he exclaimed, reinforcing the idea that Dan Lyons should not be misrepresenting other people's ideas.
I have misrepresented your post in the same way Dan Lyons misrepresented the parent poster. I took a quote out of context and used it to espouse exactly the opposite intent of your message.
I have to admit that I thought long and hard about even clicking on the article because I do not want to give Dan Lyons more credibility. His history for writing sensational stories which damage other people is rather legendary. Despite his famous apology, I have not seen him improve in any way what so ever. I honestly wish people would stop publishing his work. This is unfortunately unlikely given his talent for inciting outrage and convincing people to click on his articles (which I have once again done :-P ).
It's not a matter of Lyons having an opinion, it's a matter of him misrepresenting the opinions of Yeh.
You could sloppily quote a book to make the message seem like anything, and it feels like that could border on defamation. A malicious version of this would be lying about somebody to injure their reputation, which is not obviously something you have a right to do.
This case isn't grave or clear-cut so it's not going to go to court or anything like that, but it's still a bit of a jerk move by Lyons.
Fair enough to have ideas, but on 2 I'd love to know your evidence. Quite a lot of people I know fantasize about job security. Did you have any reason to believe 2 apart from personal perspectives?
That sounds 100% like my job, but I'm a self-employed contractor. I see my clients as peers and we can speak openly about whether they even need me anymore. Sure as hell my clients are not my family (I hate office social dynamics).
So is your book basically saying that regular employment will/should become more like self-employment?
Programmers are still operating under the delusion that they are so much better (or worse) than the guy working next to them. It is this kind of egotistical thinking that probably gets in the way of them unionizing. You want to give a large caliber a-hole like Bezos the finger while working in his own company? It takes balls to do that - stage a walk out and strike. It takes camaraderie, intimacy and loyalty to a cause (or a person) that supersedes the workplace, an all in support to that cause by engineers/programmers alike.
For as long as the pissing contests over languages, productivity, hubris, etc continues among intelligent people like programmers, their Jimmy Hoffa won't be born and their cause will lie with the company's objectives.
In a nutshell, programmers -deserve- the Bezos and Hastings of this world. Keep thinking you are God's gift to programming and insure the demise of your own fellow programmers.
I have zero sympathy toward programmers (having been one for 17+ years now) - not because I don't love the profession or the contribution we make, but because of the infinitely immature attitude and disunion that exists among engineers.
If there's one thing that has motivated me to think of doing something else, it's that...
There's abundant evidence that there are vast differences in the productivity of different programmers in the same company. Denying that doesn't make it untrue.
The best way to punish the Bezos of the world is not to work for them. Which it seems like more and more people are—most of my friends wouldn't even consider a job at Amazon.
I suspect that this is the case for any profession. I'd also wager that those productive individuals represent a small minority of the workforce. All things being equal I would like to see those individuals being paid "vastly" more than the average. I can assure you that a 10x more productive programmer is not paid 10x more.
Well the most productive programmers aren't paid as much as they are worth now. Do you think unionizing will further reduce their pay? I have a feeling not...
I wholeheartedly concur. Its been a source of great confusion to me why otherwise intelligent and open-minded people are so steadfastly opposed to the one thing that can improve their earnings potential dramatically. I have observed a strong shift to the "left" in the last few years though, so I won't be surprised if this happens soon. I also expect that given the resources and capability inherent in a "programmer's union", the capacity and ability of such a movement would be very significant very early on. We built the modern world with its social and communications infrastructure, and we aught be able to exploit it for our personal betterment easier than most. Doctors, dentists, lawyers all benefit greatly from their "protected" professions, why not us ?
Unions will not improve everyone's earnings. They will compress the differential, and as someone who likes getting paid more than the average programmer I absolutely would oppose that.
Doctors, dentists, and lawyers don't have unions. They have professional associations (which might be a good idea for programmers) but they still negotiate individually.
Now imagine software engineers at Amazon, Netflix or wherever they are being treated unfairly had the chutzpah to stage a massive walk out, where suddenly the collective objective of the union becomes more important than continued employment under the current conditions, whatever those may be?
Yes, this kind of collective bargaining can be abused selfishly, but if you don't even have this kind of unity as engineers, then I ask you - how will you find out what is possible if you don't put up a fight through the best means known to man - mass disobedience and non-cooperation?
Look in the mirror, dear colleagues, and ask yourselves tonight - what do these Verizon workers have that I do not? Whom do I have to be so I can inspire my peers to follow my example rather than have them only look out for #1? What sacrifice do I/we have to make individually to contribute to the betterment of the whole? How will I tighten my and my family's belt next week, month or a year down the road so that this kind of action becomes possible?
Yes, you may be fired for this, or worse, bribed or promoted to get you to back down. Hell, you may even be killed, Hoffa style.
The question then becomes - what is sacred and sancrosanct to me? What do I value more than my own life?
There is no heuristic, no algorithm to answer this for you. It's just the mirror and whatever higher cause you believe in.
I don't think it's just the wide observed variance in skill/ability that prevents unionization. It's also the individual differences and the fact that our jobs aren't obviously unsafe nor underpaid.
For me, I don't see the upside in unionizing. I'm very much libertarian and believe in the power of the individual. I'll bargain for myself and make my own choices long before I'll pay someone else to do that on my behalf collectively with a bunch of other people, many of whom I disagree with.
Individual bargaining works very well I think, and from what I saw of the family members in the coal, steel, and railroad unions growing up, those are not the situations that I'd like to spend any time, attention, or money on. It's hard for me to separate the union aspect from "way shittier than programming job" aspect, but seeing my grandpa forced to stay home to support a strike he didn't seem to believe in made an impression on me.
I see where you're coming from, but unionizing will lower wages for many many people. The great thing about being an engineer, designer, or developer is that you can negotiate far more than any other field or profession that I've seen. The difference in wages for a doctor (of the same training) might be 20-50k. The difference in pay between two SEs could literally be $200k (this is a real world example I've seen). Unionizing would help the guy making $65k, but would kill the negotiating power of the guy making $295k.
I hear this argument a lot, but I don't buy it. Professional athletes and Hollywood actors have some of the highest wage differences of any profession and yet both are fully unionized. Those fields have so much negotiation that people typically hire an agent just to handle negotiations for them. A union doesn't stop the best athletes and actors from getting paid millions, why would it stop the best engineers from getting a measly few hundred thousand?
Issues raised in the article aside, I am here to argue semantics.
The article used the word start-up 3 times, plus one more in the title of his book. The company he worked for however, HubSpot is 10 years old and public and thus by definition is not a startup. Other two companies mentioned, Amazon and Netflix are both over a decade old and public and thus are not start-ups by any stretch of the imagination. Startups and tech companies are not synonymous and using them interchangeably is harmful to our discourse. If we can't agree on what words mean, how can we agree on deeper issues?
PS. I also have issue with author's use of the word "tech worker" to describe telemarketers. I maybe wrong, but a "tech worker" to me is not someone who works for a tech company but rather is one who creating the tech.
I have a related quibble: a lot of companies are called 'tech companies' when, in fact, they're consumers of technology, not producers of them.
If your primary innovation is business model, and all the interesting tech you end up working on is purely a result of your scale, well, you're not a tech company. You're a company.
Those companies are probably great (or at least, so far as great == profitable/growing), but calling them 'tech' loses sight of what's interesting about tech to me. I'd argue that true 'tech' companies create technology as their primary or near-primary focus.
So... Uber? Not a tech company, I think. AirBnB? Not tech. Apple? Tech. Google? Tech.
(And yes, I'm aware these companies I call 'non-tech' are probably solving hard, tech-related problems; their developers contribute MLOC to open source projects, and they even release internal tools as open source. But to me, what you sell defines what you are as a company.)
I recently started reading A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel and one of the first chapter is about the past and how learning from it we can avoid the same mistakes. One of the stories that he mentions is how in the early 60s anything that sound "electronic" was valued 10 times more just because of that, even if it had nothing to do with electronics. We are probably in a similar situation with "tech" and "startup", they are cool buzzwords that get thrown around from people that don't really know the meaning to add some special attributes to a company.
I think it's even simpler: tech companies overwhelmingly create technology. So the majority of their employees should be developers or other people involved in actually creating technology. Uber and AirBnB are tech companies: they're primary innovation was creating technology and the majority of their business expenses are in creating technology.
I don't know how anyone gets away with calling call center employees "tech workers." It's a farcical trend and a way to make headlines ("Tech workers making only $30k a year"). They're not more tech workers than a developer at a news company is a journalist.
Indeed. I've also noticed that we (as engineers and designers) have a better lifestyle in terms of treatment, job security and pay at these startups/tech companies - compared to the marketing teams which consist of the people who typically write these negative articles.
Countless of these articles critiquing the tech work culture pop on HN and it's rarely ever written by devs/management. The tone always comes off as criticism from 'outsiders' who worked within the company, who treat the pride taken in creating eccentric workplaces as somewhat alien to them. Maybe because they aren't truly insiders to the culture... especially in the sense that they aren't ever the creators/leaders or long term members. Only temporarily working within the environment before going back to more typical corporate environments from where they write their analysis with a certain level of cynicism.
I'm a dev and I found the article to be spot on. HubSpot's impact on the world beyond is vanishingly small, to pretend otherwise is either naive or cynical. And anyone who calls being fired "graduating" is an ass.
While I agree that the author and others in the same role clearly do not feel apart of the culture, could you really expect them to? They don't have any equity, they don't make very much, they are monitored and evaluated like telemarketers, yet the management expects them to buy into the "change the world" mantra. I think you have to admit that it's demeaning. Why would they feel anything besides anger or jealousy?
It's just supply and demand. There's more demand than supply for engineers, and more supply and than demand for sales, marketing, support, etc. That doesn't excuse no job security, unreasonable work/life balance demands, etc. The most optimum strategy is to treat all your employees well.
You can only revel in your "culture" from the comfy bubble you inhabit where everyone values your input, you come and go almost as you please, and you know you will have secure income for as long as you want it. Step out of that bubble and see if the world looks the same now.
> using them interchangeably is harmful to our discourse. If we can't agree on what words mean, how can we agree on deeper issues?
Well, I agree this sorts of equivocation can completely confuse important issues. But worth noting that you will always be able to ignore an opposing viewpoint if they have to agree with you on the definition of every term. Better to simply say in this case that the terminology confusion invalidates parts of his argument, and then when replying to bend over backwards to state your thesis unambiguously (in both languages if necessary).
Generally newly created, but not necessarily. In 'The Lean Startup' by Eric Ries one of the primary examples is based around Intuit, which is a large publicly traded company.
>I maybe wrong, but a "tech worker" to me is not someone who works for a tech company but rather is one who creating the tech.
You're wrong, if you work at a tech company you're a tech worker. Programmers like to think they're special, but you're the help just like the sales people, support people etc
If you want to nitpick about this then fine, but I think it would be really great if the top comment in the discussion did not begin by explicitly disclaiming that it's off-topic.
After reading this article, and the one from Fortune[0], and his post on LinkedIn[1], it feels like he's out there scraping together blatant PR for his new book. And it makes me honestly wonder whether he went to work for HubSpot looking for a story to write in the first place... and being a writer for the "Silicon Valley" TV series doesn't really help his credibility in that sense.
Disclaimer: I really don't know anything about this story. Something just feels off. Maybe HubSpot really is that bad, who knows.
After listening to the interview from @CPLX's response[2] I have to agree, he doesn't seem outlandish or anything. And all of the points he makes about HubSpot's content model being complete spam I agree with. I've definitely never liked interacting with HubSpot as a consumer, that much I know.
I feel like in these scenarios he's incentivized to get outlandish PR for his book, so some of the things I'd take with a grain of salt--sentences like, "The offices bear a striking resemblance to the Montessori preschool that my kids attended: lots of bright basic colors, plenty of toys, and a nap room with a hammock and soothing palm tree murals on the wall." But there is probably a lot truth to his story as well.
@ghaff also summed it up well: "That said, I find it's a cogent perspective even if it probably shouldn't be taken as literally accurate reportage."
He comes across as quite lucid and nuanced in my opinion, and also credible, as he has been covering the tech industry for decades and has a sense of context (he was also fake Steve Jobs by the way) rather than a "look at these crazy start up kids" point of view.
I have a certain level of discomfort with embellished storytelling presented as journalism (think Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson though I don't put Dan at that level). And, in his book, Dan makes some cracks that are arguably reverse-ageist. That said, I find it's a cogent perspective even if it probably shouldn't be taken as literally accurate reportage.
There was another, longer excerpt featured on HN recently does anyone have the link? I think it was also on the NYT. Or maybe it was a profile about HubSpot written by another person. Not sure anymore.
I worked in tech for a while and nothing he says sounds implausible or strange. Most jobs in tech are bad, all the perks are there just to confuse young suckers about who's taking advantage of who, and the libertarian streak of tech worker is carefully cultivated to make us weaker as a category.
The only glimmer of hope is that personally I'm noticing my peers and friends working all over the Bay Area are starting to notice. Maybe in a few years we'll do something about it.
I'm not sure I can even understand how your arrive at this conclusion? Looking over the entire set of available jobs, tech is clearly one of the best fields to be in. From pay to autonomy to working conditions, etc etc. You want to see a bad job? Coal mining is a bad job.
Let me work in news industry for a while and write about how terrible the management is, how honest journalism is rejected and shitty PR articles are the way to go, the sheer amount of pointless meetings and asshole co-workers.
I am not sure if you would be happy to work in such a workplace and that describes most of the corporate culture. People are fond of bashing startups for what they are while conveniently ignoring how much more work they get done while keeping everyone happy. Don't like it? Get a job at IBM.
Dan Lyons was Fake Steve Jobs, then was a gadget writer where he was a frequent doomsayer of Apple and complained endlessly about the lack of access and review units Apple gave him. When he left that job and went to an advertising startup it was assumed that he'd just burned all of his tech writing bridges and had to resort to writing ad copy, but looking back I'd say it's a fair shot that he wanted an angle to write about startups so he took a job at one.
I don't know Lyons, but I do know HubSpot, and everything he's saying tracks with what I've heard from other people. And not just people with the temerity to be old, but just with the misfortune to be able to read a social group and make some conclusions about it. The company is a culture mob, there is aggressive practice of neuro-linguistic programming all over the place (never mind that it doesn't work, of course), and the whole thing is notably cultish and terrifying, in a startup world where "cultish and terrifying" is part of the standard playbook in the first place.
I do not much like them, if that is not obvious.
What makes me a little bit sad is when I meet somebody who works there--it's Boston, if you are in tech circles you are going to meet HubSpot people--and they're bought-in hard enough to not see that the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train. They hire a lot of good kids and try to kill them, or at least turn them into Dilbert-esque sodden gray rags, by the end of their second year. They're not the only company to do it, and not the only company to do it here in Boston, but they are a stand-out offender.
Ed, I like that you've kept that perspective without having to had experience it. TBF I don't think it's been like that forever, but it's definitely taken on the role of the primary Good Engineer Burnout machine in Boston.
Most of the positive things I read about company cultures, the "best places to work" lists, the glowing pieces on the founders, the TechCrunch articles, the phony Glassdoor reviews, are infinitely more self-aggrandizing fluff PR pieces than anything Lyons has written. No doubt about it, he's promoting his book and his show, but I'm glad some other sides of the story are being told.
It's maybe useful not to confuse specific criticisms of HubSpot with more general criticisms of the culty stage-managed hyper-enthusiasm that surrounds startup culture in general.
Just because someone is earning $150k doesn't mean they're not being sweated and exploited. To its owner, an expensive machine is still just a machine, and not an equal partner.
The tell is always the quality and genuineness of the relationships between employees and owners. It's completely possible for owners to take a genuine interest in the welfare of employees, and to see them as colleagues instead of productive units to be sweated.
But this may not happen as much as it should. And the boilerplate puppies-on-adderall always-crushing-it change-the-world so-very-excited incredible-journey rhetoric turns out to be an excellent smoke screen for owners who have no interest in anything except personal gain - and aren't even slightly concerned if they leave a trail of human wreckage behind them.
And even if you start off wanting to be a humane founder, there's no guarantee investors will let you run your company like that.
So it's easy to criticise Lyons for playing to the gallery with his book. But that doesn't mean that what he's playing is an improvised fiction.
Like the Silicon Valley TV show, the truthfulness of the specifics of this story aren't really the important part. If public perception of startups is as childish frat house like cults, that is a problem whether or not specific startups are in fact childish frat house like cults. I mean that is the exact reason why we use the phrase "frat house" as a pejorative regardless of the merits of specific fraternities.
Actually, what you are asking for is cumulative correct reporting of individual cases leading to a correct impression of the whole sector. I may just have downvoted you (fat finger error, and no way to reverse a vote on HN) but I agree.
No I'm not. I'm looking for more information, because I don't want to buy into outlandish-sounding PR articles on their basis alone. While you were writing this comment, I was editing my comment with insights from the interview that @CPLX linked to ;) and I agree with him.
He did start the book to sort of mock the company; from his NPR interview:
>when I first sold the book and start to write it, it was meant to be sort of a modern-day "Office Space ... I wanted to write just a funny story about being in a kooky company. It was just a comedy.
On one hand I think it's sort of disingenuous - the company culture was never a good fit for him and he shouldn't harm others because of his mistake (I know people who have had negative non-fiction stories written about them, and it can take a personal toll - I hope he left names and specifics out). It doesn't seem like HubSpot ever tries to hide their culture like Amazon has been known to do.
On the other hand, it really is an interesting story. I'm old enough that I'd never work at a place like HubSpot, so to me it's an interesting perspective on an interesting work environment that is common in the new millennial world. In other words, real journalism :)
> the company culture was never a good fit for him and he shouldn't harm others because of his mistake
How about the company shouldn't try to harm its workers? Because they do. Most startups do (it's practically part of the business plan, underpay your workers and dilute their equity 'til, if you are a mega-success, selling out might make up the delta between your underpaying salary and the one they could have gotten at a normal company), most tech companies do (though in other ways, hello collusion and managerial gaslighting). And shining a light on that is, if not noble, at least necessary.
I'm not informed enough to have an opinion on Dan as a person or on HubSpot, but this is the third article I've seen posted to HN that all pretty much say the same thing, and are all obvious attempts to sell his book. Why do these articles keep getting voted up?
It's good to poke fun at childishness and pretentiousness in the startup world (and there is plenty of it without the need to embellish), but yeah, this is wearing a bit thin.
> I feel like in these scenarios he's incentivized to get outlandish PR for his book, so some of the things I'd take with a grain of salt--sentences like, "The offices bear a striking resemblance to the Montessori preschool that my kids attended: lots of bright basic colors, plenty of toys, and a nap room with a hammock and soothing palm tree murals on the wall." But there is probably a lot truth to his story as well.
Surely this is clearly an observation? When I read this I read it as opinion, and a personal observation he had - after all, it speaks of his kids' preschool and it is a judgement he makes.
This sort of comment is done in long-form journalism all the time. The fact you spotted it as subjective commentary almost immediately means it is commentary!
The book he wrote is a commentary on his personal experiences with HubSpot, interspersed with his views. I honestly don't see where the issue is, it's still factual but as with any article or book like this the author is giving his considered view on the material he is writing about. It's perfectly reasonable to disagree, of course, but is it really to get PR for his book?
> I feel like in these scenarios he's incentivized to get outlandish PR for his book, so some of the things I'd take with a grain of salt--sentences like, "The offices bear a striking resemblance to the Montessori preschool that my kids attended: lots of bright basic colors, plenty of toys, and a nap room with a hammock and soothing palm tree murals on the wall." But there is probably a lot truth to his story as well.
Sounds like Google. It's famously decorated in preschool chic.
Not pathological, productive... productive damn it. And we won't hire you if you don't toe the party line and rhetoric. Ever. Enjoy being blacklisted for not behaving yourself. /s
A lot of tech offices do look like freaking playschools now. One I went to looked like a cat therapist's waiting room, with cartoons of fishes and cats on the walls.
So does the author think that everyone is great at their job? What do you do when you have an employee that can't do the work and you are confident that they won't improve?
Pointing out the age difference in the manager and the employee, and their sexes, is just baiting. Unless he wants to make the case that there was sexism or agism from the manager, or that the company engaged in sexism or agism, it is just a red herring. In fact, it's quite cowardly, since it implies something the author isn't willing to actually say.
Finally, the fact that the person who was fired was with the company for 4 years doesn't mean anything at all unless we also get the context. It may be that this person struggled from the beginning, and they hesitated and didn't fire her for four long years. Or it may be that they hired her to do some specific job, and that job went away, and despite repeated attempts she just could not manage to learn anything else.
The thesis that she was 'disposable' is just ludicrous. If she was good at her job, then the manager is just an idiot who is cutting his and the companies own throat, and we can't make a moral argument against stupidity. If she couldn't do the job then there is no reason to be discussing this. If she was borderline, we still can't make a moral case, since borderline situations are at worst slightly wrong.
So once you cut through the left handed implications, I don't think there is any argument left.
> If she couldn't do the job then there is no reason to be discussing this
The creepy thought processes that go into calling it "graduation" (and throwing a party...) don't rely on any judgement about that employee's performance.
I came away with the impression that HubSpot's management was purposely divorced from reality, and so it is hard to take them at face value that she was unable to perform her job. The issue appears that she was too costly to the company due to biological reasons(1. being old and 2. being a woman). The other issue from the article was that there didn't seem to be an objective way of measuring performance so "graduations" become rather arbitrary, and when they are arbitrary with the appearance of objective, there isn't any reason not to cut out the more "costly Employees"
This is the argument you seem to be missing in the article and
maybe just too young to understand.
I went through your comments and figured out who you are in real life, and I found that I basically agree with most of the things you say, so I won't give you a hard time. I think Kirkland Signature makes good stuff too!
Edit: That sounded really stalker-ish, I did it to see if you are actually even older than I am.
> If she was good at her job, then the manager is just an idiot who is cutting his and the companies own throat, and we can't make a moral argument against stupidity.
We can't? Why not?
Being stupid does not exempt you from responsibility for your actions.
When an investor puts money into a crappy company, and they lose their money, they have been held responsible. You can be responsible and face consequences without any moral failure.
The author is poking at several questions that are deeper than the simple question of whether or not someone is good at their job. Take this paragraph, for example:
"The Netflix code has been emulated by countless other companies, including HubSpot, which employed a metric called VORP, or value over replacement player. This brutal idea comes from the world of baseball, where it is used to set prices on players. At HubSpot we got a VORP score in our annual reviews. It was supposed to feel scientific, part of being a `data-driven organization,` as management called it."
There's at least two issues that I see raised immediately by this. We are no longer talking about whether someone is adequate or even good at their job. We are talking about a culture where there is the ongoing of question of whether or not someone can be replaced more affordably by someone who provides greater or equal value. This is not a surprise exactly, given that every business in a competitive market is going to have some degree of incentive to minimize costs. But it is a very distinct thing from the issue of whether an employee can do the work, and it lays bare a philosophy that looks a lot like people are entirely reduced to fungible inputs.
That has its own moral problems; trying to cover it with positive spin like “graduation” exacerbates them.
But on top of that, we have the question of whether HubSpot really has any idea how to make accurate VORP assessments... or whether they're lifting a model that probably is effective in a game context like Baseball where key performance metrics are in fact what you are trying to optimize and trying to import it into a setting where most metrics are often only indicators at best. You could reduce this to the problem of whether a given manager is "just an idiot" -- but it's not that simple, because we're talking about a management philosophy that is likely to be wielded by any number of managers.
Now, you might think the market will weed out such philosophies if they're not actually effective. But then we're up against the principal-agent problem. The philosophy doesn't have to be optimal, it just has to not be bad and have a good story to sell. If it wreaks havoc with employees who may be more adequate than the management philosophy along the way, that's not going to matter much.
There's plenty of argument and conversation left in this.
Yeah, I personally didn't really get the point of this article.
You could view it as a very good thing that the company isn't keeping around potentially low performers purely because of tenure. Also, I highly doubt the person that got fired didn't know why, even if it wasn't explicitly stated.
Having worked at a few startups I can relate to what the writer is saying (although I do agree the article is a bit slanted). It happens a lot in the tech world under the guise of "thinking differently" about management. I agree that age shouldn't matter, until you're 10-15 years older than your Manager who is completely out of their element, has no clue what they're doing, and you spend every day wondering how the fk they got the promotion in the first place.
I've felt the same only I was the one 5-10 years younger than my manager. I think your age bias in my case would be he "is too young to understand his manager's genius."
I'm not much older than that, but the average maturity of 28 year olds is not great. Putting lives in the hands of people that should still be learning the ropes is reckless and cruel.
Young managers (and I used to be one too) are the worst part of the startup culture, people with no training, inclination or predisposition for people management making others unproductive and ruining careers.
As a sector we should think hard about how we're handling ourselves because there will be nothing left a few years from now if we don't start working for the long run.
I didn't get that from the article. The author's friend was 31 when she joined the company, not much older than her 28 year old manager. To me it illustrates the churn at the company. The 28-year old manager will probably be fired - excuse me I mean "graduated" - by a 20-something manager after a few years.
You can but it's extremely, extremely rare for the very simple fact that your primary skills as a manager is people skills and the ability to relate to other peoples situation. Something you normally won't be as developed at that point.
At 28 you have more experience than a 18 year old, but not much and def not enough to be able to relate to a 35 year old person in most cases.
So not sure I find it ironic. Rather I can relate as I have seen my share of managers and been myself for the last 22 years.
I agree with everything you say. However, in my personal experience, the best manager I've had was 25 when I was 30. This manager realized he didn't really know much. So he stayed out of my way and let me make the technical decisions while he ran interference with the directors and VPs. Never had a more smooth working environment before or since.
I think they were trying to imply that the 28 year old was an "undertrained" manager:
>UNFORTUNATELY, working at a start-up all too often involves getting bossed around by undertrained (or untrained) managers and fired on a whim. Bias based on age, race and gender is rampant, as is sexual harassment.
I don't think he was trying to imply that at all. The culture of youth means you're going to have some weird things like an older worker being fired by a younger one.
it's not in the least bit funny and the author is not implying that a 28 year old can't be a good manager. The author is comparing 1980's, 1990's tech work and now, and is making a point that amongst other observations, its also a new phenomenon for a younger person now in the tech world to be a manager to older staffers.
The philosopher Slavoj Žižek explains this with the ‘postmodern’ boss:
>Not a master but just a coordinator of our joint creative efforts; the first among equals. There should be no formalities among us, we should address him by his nickname, he shares a dirty joke with us… but in all this, HE REMAINS OUR MASTER.
I seem to run to Žižek more and more often -- frankly he is the only currently alive philosopher I can name. I really should read something more from him.
Well if they are joint coordinators, they we should share equally in the fruits of our effort. It takes a lot of cognitive dissonance to swallow the empty rhetoric these sorts of people and corporations put out which is totally insincere. But you are in this relationship, you need the money and don't really have a choice in the matter of rejecting the culture or the values being pushed upon you without consideration for your needs.
Though I do understand most of the criticism this piece is getting in this thread, can we at least agree that all that bullshit about being a star and "graduating" is total bullshit? What a total slap in the face. Culture aside, crying at your desk aside, spare me the extra layer of fake, pointless language to disguise what is happening. I expect professionalism and respect from an employer, and that involves being straightforward, respectful, and to the point.
Over my lifetime I feel like computers have gone from nerdy thing that nerds do to trendy thing that popular kids hire nerds to do badly and treat like garbage. I guess it's not really surprising that people known for poor social skills get taken advantage of like that, but still it bugs me because I identify with them.
I get the sense that the reality is somewhere in between. It's definitely not everywhere, but I do see a significant amount of philosophy and meta-work happening in technology (and possibly other industries). People like to present their ideas of what makes a workplace "better" or what makes people work harder or stay happier, and many times they forget the simplicity and professionalism that has been working in workplaces for a long time now—simply treating people professionally!
I'll be honest, I'm on my first job out of college, and in the finance industry there's very little philosophy and novelty (mostly dinosaurs), but even I have seen, here and there, redefinitions of terms, like "they're not customers, they're guests" or "he's not an employee, he's a teammate" and, well, I'm not too impressed even with this simple stuff. I'd imagine a good amount of places take it too far.
Readit News
1) "You’re serving a “tour of duty” that might last a year or two" Actually, the book makes it clear that the duration of a tour of duty depends on the mission the employee has agreed to tackle--tours of duty can be 6 months long, but then can also last for a decade (think of NASA scientists working on a deep space probe).
2) "Companies burn you out and churn you out when someone better, or cheaper, becomes available." This is purely Dan Lyons; the point we make in the book is that few employees expect or want lifetime employment at a single company; what people really want is lifetime employability and career progress. We would consider companies that behaved like Lyons described as "breaking the Alliance," which would harm their reputation as an employer.
3) "In this new model of work, employees are expected to feel complete devotion and loyalty to their companies, even while the boss feels no such obligation in return." Once again, this is the exact opposite of what our book says. We believe that employers and employees need to recognize that employment is a voluntary, mutually beneficial alliance, and that managers should be explicit about how an employee's job assignment is going to help develop his or her career.
Dan Lyons certainly has right to his opinions, but he shouldn't have a right to misrepresent our ideas.
Any citation about this claim? Because in my experience, it's completely incorrect.
Outside of the US, lifetime employment is a heavily coveted goal, because economies outside of the US are in a terrible shape overall with unemployment rate routinely above 10%.
Inside the US, except for white collar workers in major cities, long time employment remains the holy grail of most of the workforce, even though the US economy is in a pretty good shape overall.
Interestingly, even though Dan Lyons technically belongs to the white collar community that is probably not interested in lifetime employment, it's pretty obvious to me that when he joined that semi-startup, his goal was a lot more to write a book about it than embracing the party line and planning a long career there.
I mean... you're hiring Fake Steve Jobs and when he's out of the company, your executives try to illegally get a copy of the book with the futile hope that it won't get published... Seriously? What did you expect?
The vast majority of my young friends are uninterested in jobs which would provide lifetime employment. (As am I.)
Honestly, it was incredibly risky for HubSpot to hire Lyons and the outcome seems predestined. He came in with completely mismatched expectations and an ax to grind.
This is also a huge contributory factor to ageism in tech. Of course you won't hire older people when they expect lifetime employment at a startup which might not even exist in a few years.
There is no way not wanting lifetime employment is something unique to the US, it seems far more likely that it would be connected to status than nationality (and that has been my experience for what it's worth)
Nice stats you just pulled out of your ass
The modern world seems to be a constant case of vocabulary misunderstanding, where we all say "widget", and I mean thing and you mean "an element of a UX".
"Job security" is a specific example that can mean different things based on worldview. It can mean "the business will employ you no matter what you do or how bad you are" - the classic 1970s Union paradigm. "Job security" can mean "the creation of skills that will continue to have value in the market", i.e. "a law degree means you will always have job security. Or "Job security" can even mean something beyond the individual, to mean "working for a company that will survive" i.e. "working for the government provides great job security - they can never go out of business". Dan Lyons' sacking from Newsweek and the dying of traditional media shows how industry viability is in some ways more fundamental than the individual's talents to "job security".
Now, which of those definitions people understand - and which definition your worldview puts front and centre - will dictate how you view a new sort of life/work manifesto.
Dan Lyons idealises a world in which people worked their whole career for one company, had a slow progression of minor promotions and pay rises & retired to a gold watch they took to Florida. That reality makes me personally want to buy a chair, some rope and to Google how to tie a noose, but my view is certainly NOT universal, and I need to accept and recognise that.
I would hope people would go beyond seeing this as "misrepresent our ideas", and get to bottom of the misunderstanding - to the fundamental worldview misunderstanding at the core of the disagreement. Rather than defend against a perceived attack, I think a policy of agree and amplify makes sense. Dan Lyons is correct - the world has changed and in this new reality, 50 years of depressing work for one company is over. The new world may not have a gold watch at the end of the rainbow, but it should have a much brighter and happier journey, and the a world in which employment is for a specific period, the goal changes from work hard and hope, to maximise skill development. That is the heart of "The Alliance" - an acceptance the world has changed, and making it work for you.
But Dan Lyons is misrepresenting us when he implies that we believe that employees should be loyal to companies even though companies show no loyalty to employees. We're not pro-corporation or pro-employee; our point is that work is a voluntary relationship where both parties should benefit.
Then why did Lyons cite grandparent's book as though it supports his worldview? Why did he sandwich quotes from the book with paraphrasing that doesn't represent the book at all?
> That is the heart of "The Alliance" - an acceptance the world has changed, and making it work for you.
Are you preaching to grandparent about what his book is about? That strikes me as strange.
I think the angle you're missing on this sort of job is that it's perfect for someone for whom their job is not their self-identity. In the tech realm today, a lot of people really tie their identity to their work, and for them, this sort of job is really bad. However, there are lots of people for whom a job is just a paycheck, and their passion lies elsewhere. Often that passion is in an area where significant money just cannot be made (family is the most obvious one, but there are others.) I've worked in public service in the past, and you see lots of people that have been working the same job for 10, 20, or even 30 years. When you talk to them, it's clear that the job is fine, and they enjoy it, but what they really care about is their kids, or the dogs they walk at the local shelter, or whatever their passion is.
I think that would involve some combination of:
* Choice over what kind of tasks you work on
* Freedom to spend some extra time on a task, both to get it to a level of quality you are happy with and to use the opportunity to learn the domain in question a little better
* Blocks of time to work on a maker's schedule; to read, concentrate, and work with minimal interruption from coworkers
These things benefit not only the happiness and well-being of a software engineer (which is where I'll focus since that's what I am and this is hacker news) but also his/her ability to learn and improve over time.
In the short term, these things might make you less valuable to the business by not being at the constant beck and call of others, and taking longer on tasks.
In the long term, I think they would more than pay for themselves for all concerned. If I were offered these sorts of improvements to the working arrangement in exchange for a pay cut, I'd be very very interested.
No Union protects employees no matter how bad they are.
Pretty much the #1 asshole behavior on the Internet is criticizing other people's books/studies without having read them. Chris is right, this reflects extremely poorly on Lyons.
This might be a function of broken promotion processes. Perhaps, in a world in which employees believed that they could advance their careers by either staying at one company or moving around, we would see a significant fraction of workers who would want to have long tenures.
One of the people I talked with when writing the book was a young woman who worked for a financial services firm. She loved her job, loved the culture, but told me that she was going to have to leave because the only way to get a promotion was to go to another firm, then return later.
That's why the alliance model makes sense: you might be going elsewhere to find an open promotion, but that shouldn't imply "disloyalty."
The real issue with his article is that he was lying to himself before he even joined Hubspot. I'm really surprised how shocked people are when they join startups and aren't happy. What did you expect?
Hubspot is not Salesforce. Uber is not Google. DoorDash is not Groupon. The maturity of companies at different stages varies significantly.
I read articles on HN every month about people who are bamboozled about startups after they start working there. These same people delude themselves about how awesome startups are. Startups are the birth of companies.In the beginning and up until you reach a certain point of market dominance, it's always hard. It's been this way for years and yet people continue to write articles about this nonsense every month...I'm really tired of it.
But does that in any way absolve employers of making realistic representations of what employees can expect? Does that absolve people in management positions from behaving with decency and fairness?
When two cars collide, sometimes both parties are at fault, "blame" is often a positive-sum game. It would be fair to hand out as much opprobrium and vituperation for the employers in these situations as the employees.
The life-stage of a company rarely has much to do with the working conditions, cult/culture weirdness or how well the business is run.
There are plenty of great startups that are very solid companies that anyone would be happy to work for.
Blanket hate of "startups" doesn't make much sense. Also none of the companies you mentioned are "startups" anymore either, incorrectly applying that label to every company doesn't help.
Expect? Of course not, anymore; you'd be a fool to expect that.
Want? Well, more complicated: if it's a matter of wanting lifetime employment in the presently existing field of options, as employment and firms are presently constituted (and as firms presently look at employees), maybe not. If it's a matter of wanting to be working in the kind of regime in which lifetime employment really was more common, the answer might change.
Your response to 3 is a non sequitur. And employment as a condition is certainly not a voluntary matter: think of what that would mean! (Hint: it would mean that anyone who wanted to could quit their job and not seek employment elsewhere and things would be fine. We don't live in that world.)
When I say "lifetime employment at a single company," I refer to spending one's entire career at a single firm.
When I say that employment is a voluntary relationship, I mean that the employer cannot compel an employee to accept a job offer, and that an employee cannot compel an employer to extend one.
That's interesting. I've had a number of managers in my career and never, not even once, has one of them espoused anything resembling such a position. It's always what can the employee do for the company, not what's mutually beneficial.
Ultimately, I ended up deciding that what I wanted couldn't be achieved inside Google, but they certainly made the effort.
(I'm also surprised/disappointed at how rarely that advice is taken - there's a _very_ strong tendency for people to "stay put" in a sub optimal career position instead of taking the risk of jumping into the unknown and possiby scarey "next level up". So many devs tell me "I'm not ready for a mid level role yet" or equivalent, even when thay _clearly_ are...)
An employer doesn't train people, they hire those with the skill. If an employee is no longer valuable, the employee moves on. The employer has no particular interest in or control over the employee's career before or after their 'assignment'.
I'll have to give your book a read because it reflects some vague ideas I've been having. It feels like having "more liquidity" in the job market could benefit both employees and employers: it would make it easier for me to find a job that's a good fit and to adjust my role as my circumstances change; similarly, it lets companies be more flexible.
My theory is that this is the sort of thing that's only a problem relative to our expectations. If everybody expected people to move between jobs more often, it would have a significantly lower cost while conferring the benefits I mentioned above.
Then again, I'm the sort of person who can't imagine spending 40 years climbing a hierarchy at a big corporation, so I might just be fundamentally different from the people who actively want that...
That's nonsense. A right to opinions that don't "misrepresent others' ideas" is essentially no right at all.
Don't cite my work in a narrow, out of contex way, that entirely misrepresents the body of thought I put together which ia almost entirely at odds with your message.
sure, the people should be allowed to say whatever they want, but if you incorrectly attribute qoutes or ideology to someone, in my mind, you lose credibility. so sure you have a right to mistepresent others ideas but unless you have wholly original thought, if you do that, you call into question the validity of your process, all your sources, and ultimately all of your nessage that relies on non primary research/information
If I say "I like capitalism," that is my opinion.
If I say "Karl Marx likes capitalism," that is a misrepresentation of someone else's ideas.
If I say "Karl Marx likes oppressive authoritarian regimes" because every country implementing communism has pretty much turned out that way, that's pretty much misrepresenting someone else's ideas too.
I have misrepresented your post in the same way Dan Lyons misrepresented the parent poster. I took a quote out of context and used it to espouse exactly the opposite intent of your message.
I have to admit that I thought long and hard about even clicking on the article because I do not want to give Dan Lyons more credibility. His history for writing sensational stories which damage other people is rather legendary. Despite his famous apology, I have not seen him improve in any way what so ever. I honestly wish people would stop publishing his work. This is unfortunately unlikely given his talent for inciting outrage and convincing people to click on his articles (which I have once again done :-P ).
You could sloppily quote a book to make the message seem like anything, and it feels like that could border on defamation. A malicious version of this would be lying about somebody to injure their reputation, which is not obviously something you have a right to do.
This case isn't grave or clear-cut so it's not going to go to court or anything like that, but it's still a bit of a jerk move by Lyons.
You'd be surprised.
Dead Comment
Then I started to think he might have planned the book before the job. At that point who cares about journalistic integrity?
For as long as the pissing contests over languages, productivity, hubris, etc continues among intelligent people like programmers, their Jimmy Hoffa won't be born and their cause will lie with the company's objectives.
In a nutshell, programmers -deserve- the Bezos and Hastings of this world. Keep thinking you are God's gift to programming and insure the demise of your own fellow programmers.
I have zero sympathy toward programmers (having been one for 17+ years now) - not because I don't love the profession or the contribution we make, but because of the infinitely immature attitude and disunion that exists among engineers.
If there's one thing that has motivated me to think of doing something else, it's that...
The best way to punish the Bezos of the world is not to work for them. Which it seems like more and more people are—most of my friends wouldn't even consider a job at Amazon.
That seems true for every type of job.
I wholeheartedly concur. Its been a source of great confusion to me why otherwise intelligent and open-minded people are so steadfastly opposed to the one thing that can improve their earnings potential dramatically. I have observed a strong shift to the "left" in the last few years though, so I won't be surprised if this happens soon. I also expect that given the resources and capability inherent in a "programmer's union", the capacity and ability of such a movement would be very significant very early on. We built the modern world with its social and communications infrastructure, and we aught be able to exploit it for our personal betterment easier than most. Doctors, dentists, lawyers all benefit greatly from their "protected" professions, why not us ?
Doctors, dentists, and lawyers don't have unions. They have professional associations (which might be a good idea for programmers) but they still negotiate individually.
Check this out.
Now imagine software engineers at Amazon, Netflix or wherever they are being treated unfairly had the chutzpah to stage a massive walk out, where suddenly the collective objective of the union becomes more important than continued employment under the current conditions, whatever those may be?
Yes, this kind of collective bargaining can be abused selfishly, but if you don't even have this kind of unity as engineers, then I ask you - how will you find out what is possible if you don't put up a fight through the best means known to man - mass disobedience and non-cooperation?
Look in the mirror, dear colleagues, and ask yourselves tonight - what do these Verizon workers have that I do not? Whom do I have to be so I can inspire my peers to follow my example rather than have them only look out for #1? What sacrifice do I/we have to make individually to contribute to the betterment of the whole? How will I tighten my and my family's belt next week, month or a year down the road so that this kind of action becomes possible?
Yes, you may be fired for this, or worse, bribed or promoted to get you to back down. Hell, you may even be killed, Hoffa style.
The question then becomes - what is sacred and sancrosanct to me? What do I value more than my own life?
There is no heuristic, no algorithm to answer this for you. It's just the mirror and whatever higher cause you believe in.
For me, I don't see the upside in unionizing. I'm very much libertarian and believe in the power of the individual. I'll bargain for myself and make my own choices long before I'll pay someone else to do that on my behalf collectively with a bunch of other people, many of whom I disagree with.
Individual bargaining works very well I think, and from what I saw of the family members in the coal, steel, and railroad unions growing up, those are not the situations that I'd like to spend any time, attention, or money on. It's hard for me to separate the union aspect from "way shittier than programming job" aspect, but seeing my grandpa forced to stay home to support a strike he didn't seem to believe in made an impression on me.
The article used the word start-up 3 times, plus one more in the title of his book. The company he worked for however, HubSpot is 10 years old and public and thus by definition is not a startup. Other two companies mentioned, Amazon and Netflix are both over a decade old and public and thus are not start-ups by any stretch of the imagination. Startups and tech companies are not synonymous and using them interchangeably is harmful to our discourse. If we can't agree on what words mean, how can we agree on deeper issues?
PS. I also have issue with author's use of the word "tech worker" to describe telemarketers. I maybe wrong, but a "tech worker" to me is not someone who works for a tech company but rather is one who creating the tech.
If your primary innovation is business model, and all the interesting tech you end up working on is purely a result of your scale, well, you're not a tech company. You're a company.
Those companies are probably great (or at least, so far as great == profitable/growing), but calling them 'tech' loses sight of what's interesting about tech to me. I'd argue that true 'tech' companies create technology as their primary or near-primary focus.
So... Uber? Not a tech company, I think. AirBnB? Not tech. Apple? Tech. Google? Tech.
(And yes, I'm aware these companies I call 'non-tech' are probably solving hard, tech-related problems; their developers contribute MLOC to open source projects, and they even release internal tools as open source. But to me, what you sell defines what you are as a company.)
I don't know how anyone gets away with calling call center employees "tech workers." It's a farcical trend and a way to make headlines ("Tech workers making only $30k a year"). They're not more tech workers than a developer at a news company is a journalist.
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Countless of these articles critiquing the tech work culture pop on HN and it's rarely ever written by devs/management. The tone always comes off as criticism from 'outsiders' who worked within the company, who treat the pride taken in creating eccentric workplaces as somewhat alien to them. Maybe because they aren't truly insiders to the culture... especially in the sense that they aren't ever the creators/leaders or long term members. Only temporarily working within the environment before going back to more typical corporate environments from where they write their analysis with a certain level of cynicism.
Well, I agree this sorts of equivocation can completely confuse important issues. But worth noting that you will always be able to ignore an opposing viewpoint if they have to agree with you on the definition of every term. Better to simply say in this case that the terminology confusion invalidates parts of his argument, and then when replying to bend over backwards to state your thesis unambiguously (in both languages if necessary).
Generally newly created, but not necessarily. In 'The Lean Startup' by Eric Ries one of the primary examples is based around Intuit, which is a large publicly traded company.
You're wrong, if you work at a tech company you're a tech worker. Programmers like to think they're special, but you're the help just like the sales people, support people etc
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After reading this article, and the one from Fortune[0], and his post on LinkedIn[1], it feels like he's out there scraping together blatant PR for his new book. And it makes me honestly wonder whether he went to work for HubSpot looking for a story to write in the first place... and being a writer for the "Silicon Valley" TV series doesn't really help his credibility in that sense.
Disclaimer: I really don't know anything about this story. Something just feels off. Maybe HubSpot really is that bad, who knows.
[0]: http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyo...
[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-comes-age-bias-tech-comp...
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Edit:
After listening to the interview from @CPLX's response[2] I have to agree, he doesn't seem outlandish or anything. And all of the points he makes about HubSpot's content model being complete spam I agree with. I've definitely never liked interacting with HubSpot as a consumer, that much I know.
I feel like in these scenarios he's incentivized to get outlandish PR for his book, so some of the things I'd take with a grain of salt--sentences like, "The offices bear a striking resemblance to the Montessori preschool that my kids attended: lots of bright basic colors, plenty of toys, and a nap room with a hammock and soothing palm tree murals on the wall." But there is probably a lot truth to his story as well.
@ghaff also summed it up well: "That said, I find it's a cogent perspective even if it probably shouldn't be taken as literally accurate reportage."
[2]: http://www.npr.org/2016/04/05/473097951/laid-off-tech-journa...
If you genuinely want to get a read on the guy listen to this long form interview on Fresh Air from a couple days ago:
http://www.npr.org/2016/04/05/473097951/laid-off-tech-journa...
He comes across as quite lucid and nuanced in my opinion, and also credible, as he has been covering the tech industry for decades and has a sense of context (he was also fake Steve Jobs by the way) rather than a "look at these crazy start up kids" point of view.
The only glimmer of hope is that personally I'm noticing my peers and friends working all over the Bay Area are starting to notice. Maybe in a few years we'll do something about it.
I'm not sure I can even understand how your arrive at this conclusion? Looking over the entire set of available jobs, tech is clearly one of the best fields to be in. From pay to autonomy to working conditions, etc etc. You want to see a bad job? Coal mining is a bad job.
I am not sure if you would be happy to work in such a workplace and that describes most of the corporate culture. People are fond of bashing startups for what they are while conveniently ignoring how much more work they get done while keeping everyone happy. Don't like it? Get a job at IBM.
Nope, there will just be another round of new faces, new tech, and new fundings.
Wow, that must take a whole lot of careful coordination.
I do not much like them, if that is not obvious.
What makes me a little bit sad is when I meet somebody who works there--it's Boston, if you are in tech circles you are going to meet HubSpot people--and they're bought-in hard enough to not see that the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train. They hire a lot of good kids and try to kill them, or at least turn them into Dilbert-esque sodden gray rags, by the end of their second year. They're not the only company to do it, and not the only company to do it here in Boston, but they are a stand-out offender.
Just because someone is earning $150k doesn't mean they're not being sweated and exploited. To its owner, an expensive machine is still just a machine, and not an equal partner.
The tell is always the quality and genuineness of the relationships between employees and owners. It's completely possible for owners to take a genuine interest in the welfare of employees, and to see them as colleagues instead of productive units to be sweated.
But this may not happen as much as it should. And the boilerplate puppies-on-adderall always-crushing-it change-the-world so-very-excited incredible-journey rhetoric turns out to be an excellent smoke screen for owners who have no interest in anything except personal gain - and aren't even slightly concerned if they leave a trail of human wreckage behind them.
And even if you start off wanting to be a humane founder, there's no guarantee investors will let you run your company like that.
So it's easy to criticise Lyons for playing to the gallery with his book. But that doesn't mean that what he's playing is an improvised fiction.
>when I first sold the book and start to write it, it was meant to be sort of a modern-day "Office Space ... I wanted to write just a funny story about being in a kooky company. It was just a comedy.
On one hand I think it's sort of disingenuous - the company culture was never a good fit for him and he shouldn't harm others because of his mistake (I know people who have had negative non-fiction stories written about them, and it can take a personal toll - I hope he left names and specifics out). It doesn't seem like HubSpot ever tries to hide their culture like Amazon has been known to do.
On the other hand, it really is an interesting story. I'm old enough that I'd never work at a place like HubSpot, so to me it's an interesting perspective on an interesting work environment that is common in the new millennial world. In other words, real journalism :)
How about the company shouldn't try to harm its workers? Because they do. Most startups do (it's practically part of the business plan, underpay your workers and dilute their equity 'til, if you are a mega-success, selling out might make up the delta between your underpaying salary and the one they could have gotten at a normal company), most tech companies do (though in other ways, hello collusion and managerial gaslighting). And shining a light on that is, if not noble, at least necessary.
It seems more like he found himself in a somewhat ludicrous situation and wrote a book about it.
Surely this is clearly an observation? When I read this I read it as opinion, and a personal observation he had - after all, it speaks of his kids' preschool and it is a judgement he makes.
This sort of comment is done in long-form journalism all the time. The fact you spotted it as subjective commentary almost immediately means it is commentary!
The book he wrote is a commentary on his personal experiences with HubSpot, interspersed with his views. I honestly don't see where the issue is, it's still factual but as with any article or book like this the author is giving his considered view on the material he is writing about. It's perfectly reasonable to disagree, of course, but is it really to get PR for his book?
Sounds like Google. It's famously decorated in preschool chic.
This sounds like a great place to work. Outside of the phony hyper-positive posturing by management.
Look up "Fake Steve Jobs", it was a great read back in its day. He stopped the blog when it became apparent that Jobs was mortally ill.
Pretty good insights into the "Silicon Valley" pathological culture.
(It has long since mutated astonishingly from the simple Fairchild seed that named it.)
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Pointing out the age difference in the manager and the employee, and their sexes, is just baiting. Unless he wants to make the case that there was sexism or agism from the manager, or that the company engaged in sexism or agism, it is just a red herring. In fact, it's quite cowardly, since it implies something the author isn't willing to actually say.
Finally, the fact that the person who was fired was with the company for 4 years doesn't mean anything at all unless we also get the context. It may be that this person struggled from the beginning, and they hesitated and didn't fire her for four long years. Or it may be that they hired her to do some specific job, and that job went away, and despite repeated attempts she just could not manage to learn anything else.
The thesis that she was 'disposable' is just ludicrous. If she was good at her job, then the manager is just an idiot who is cutting his and the companies own throat, and we can't make a moral argument against stupidity. If she couldn't do the job then there is no reason to be discussing this. If she was borderline, we still can't make a moral case, since borderline situations are at worst slightly wrong.
So once you cut through the left handed implications, I don't think there is any argument left.
Be an adult and make a tough decision without masking it as a great "thing" (aka: graduation)?
The creepy thought processes that go into calling it "graduation" (and throwing a party...) don't rely on any judgement about that employee's performance.
This is the argument you seem to be missing in the article and maybe just too young to understand.
I went through your comments and figured out who you are in real life, and I found that I basically agree with most of the things you say, so I won't give you a hard time. I think Kirkland Signature makes good stuff too!
Edit: That sounded really stalker-ish, I did it to see if you are actually even older than I am.
We can't? Why not?
Being stupid does not exempt you from responsibility for your actions.
"The Netflix code has been emulated by countless other companies, including HubSpot, which employed a metric called VORP, or value over replacement player. This brutal idea comes from the world of baseball, where it is used to set prices on players. At HubSpot we got a VORP score in our annual reviews. It was supposed to feel scientific, part of being a `data-driven organization,` as management called it."
There's at least two issues that I see raised immediately by this. We are no longer talking about whether someone is adequate or even good at their job. We are talking about a culture where there is the ongoing of question of whether or not someone can be replaced more affordably by someone who provides greater or equal value. This is not a surprise exactly, given that every business in a competitive market is going to have some degree of incentive to minimize costs. But it is a very distinct thing from the issue of whether an employee can do the work, and it lays bare a philosophy that looks a lot like people are entirely reduced to fungible inputs.
That has its own moral problems; trying to cover it with positive spin like “graduation” exacerbates them.
But on top of that, we have the question of whether HubSpot really has any idea how to make accurate VORP assessments... or whether they're lifting a model that probably is effective in a game context like Baseball where key performance metrics are in fact what you are trying to optimize and trying to import it into a setting where most metrics are often only indicators at best. You could reduce this to the problem of whether a given manager is "just an idiot" -- but it's not that simple, because we're talking about a management philosophy that is likely to be wielded by any number of managers.
Now, you might think the market will weed out such philosophies if they're not actually effective. But then we're up against the principal-agent problem. The philosophy doesn't have to be optimal, it just has to not be bad and have a good story to sell. If it wreaks havoc with employees who may be more adequate than the management philosophy along the way, that's not going to matter much.
There's plenty of argument and conversation left in this.
You could view it as a very good thing that the company isn't keeping around potentially low performers purely because of tenure. Also, I highly doubt the person that got fired didn't know why, even if it wasn't explicitly stated.
I think that's a bit funny that the author implies you can't be good as a manager at 28. Specially when you are writing an article about bias.
Young managers (and I used to be one too) are the worst part of the startup culture, people with no training, inclination or predisposition for people management making others unproductive and ruining careers.
As a sector we should think hard about how we're handling ourselves because there will be nothing left a few years from now if we don't start working for the long run.
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[Edit] Don't know about other states.
Just replace age descriptions with race descriptions to see how weird and out of place that is.
> She was white, had been with the company for four years, and was told without explanation by her latino manager that she had two weeks to get out.
At 28 you have more experience than a 18 year old, but not much and def not enough to be able to relate to a 35 year old person in most cases.
So not sure I find it ironic. Rather I can relate as I have seen my share of managers and been myself for the last 22 years.
And yes older managers have problems too :)
Having some life experience (kids, marriage, taking care of older parents, etc.) helps to empathize with people - which makes you a better manager.
>UNFORTUNATELY, working at a start-up all too often involves getting bossed around by undertrained (or untrained) managers and fired on a whim. Bias based on age, race and gender is rampant, as is sexual harassment.
>Not a master but just a coordinator of our joint creative efforts; the first among equals. There should be no formalities among us, we should address him by his nickname, he shares a dirty joke with us… but in all this, HE REMAINS OUR MASTER.
Completely agree. If the person is leaving on their own? Sure sounds great! But firing or laying someone off? Seems borderline psychopathic to me.
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Yes, but it's just a creepy thing practiced at one company. The author somehow wants to generalize their experience to all startups.
I'll be honest, I'm on my first job out of college, and in the finance industry there's very little philosophy and novelty (mostly dinosaurs), but even I have seen, here and there, redefinitions of terms, like "they're not customers, they're guests" or "he's not an employee, he's a teammate" and, well, I'm not too impressed even with this simple stuff. I'd imagine a good amount of places take it too far.