The way I read it he used the age and gender info in his comment to illustrate that it would be harder for the person to get a job. Hence it being extra cruel to use the weird lingo and act like it wouldn't be hard for her.
However, it's the matter of how strong that causation is and how hard are you going to rely on it. Because if you think that someone in their 30s is likely to be be significantly more experienced and wise, it also means that you should think that someone in their 50s is likely to be significantly burned out and slow.
My point is: the correlation (and underlying causation) is there, but it's not strong enough, compared to differences between individuals.
>> "Just replace age descriptions with race descriptions to see how weird and out of place that is."
How is that in any way a sound analogy? Your age likely has an impact on your experience. More experience doesn't necessarily mean you're better at your job but it's a decent possibility. Race has no impact on performance at all.
Race does not impact perfomance, but there's a correlation between race and education, for example (because ages of institutial discrimination, of course). Do you think people should take this correlation into consideration when talking about others?
They're pointing out the flaws in the logic of biasing based on characteristics, of both race and age.
Obviously nobody is going to discount a manager because of their race, but on that same coin people shouldn't discount the same individual because of their age.
To provide an outside US perspective, it's not that easy to fire someone in Germany, the UK or Australia. Once you're past the probation period, you'd probably have to get one or multiple sorts of negative reviews and written warnings from HR or your superiors before being let go, otherwise you'd have ground to sue for unfair dismissal. That, or you'd be given a redundancy package.
In German law there is. In Australia unfair dismissal can only be claimed after 6 months of employment. Not really sure about the UK, but I am fairly sure it's not just cut throat firing like in the US, and you can claim unfair dismissal.
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.
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.
Yeah there's a balance. Everyone thinks a company has it all figured out until they work there and find out it's just like every other company struggling to figure stuff out.
Definitely, once you've been around the block a few times you realize that it's the same everywhere.
Eventually, you just find the biggest pay cheque you can, and do the routine of putting on your coconut headphones, sit down at your tiki desk and chair and sip your mochas in peace as you wait for the morning calisthenics meeting to begin, wondering what exactly the difference between waterfall, agile, tdd, etc actually is because all you've ever seen anywhere is tiki driven development.
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."
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.
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.
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 for average people, such as myself, age is definitely an advantage in being a manager. I tried it at 24 and hated it, felt totally out of my depth.
Having been through and been humbled by many life experiences means I can show more empathy and understanding. On the other hand there are many very switched on young people, so like always we should ignore age and judge people on their merits.
Just about the worst handicap a manager can have is insecurity. And unfortunately this is something I've seen in most of the people I've seen promoted to management when young. The best managers don't assume they need to be "better" than the people they manage.
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 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.
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.
While I get what you're objecting to, the world would have been a lesser place without HST's writing (in my opinion anyway).
There's a broad grey line between "factual objective news reporting" and "storytelling" and the word journalism isn't specifically defined enough for it to be strictly towards the news reporting edges of that grey area. As Wikipedia puts it (with all the lack-of-credibility of quoting Wikipedia as a source, I'll admit): "Journalism, however, is not always confined to the news media or to news itself, as journalistic communication may find its way into broader forms of expression, including literature and cinema."
To me, journalism as commissioned by The Rolling Stone is _supposed_ to be "embellished storytelling". The front page of the NY Times? Sure, that's supposed to be "news" not story telling. But a long-ish form article in the "Sunday Review" section of the Times? At least my expectations lean closer to a Rolling Stone story than a hard hitting fact checked piece of investigative journalism...
I don't really disagree. OTOH, the UVA story in Rolling Stone was supposed to be journalism as opposed to something supposedly "truthy" and heads rolled as a result. I'm not opposed to new journalism as it was called at one point but I think I can feel a bit of legitimate discomfort when the boundaries blur (even when they're net positive as in the case of HST).
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.
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
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.
I read it that way, too. Why does it matter that the guy is writing a book? Why does it matter that the article is marketing for the book? Is it true? Sounds like it is.
I read your comment after the edits were applied, and I still thought it was one of those sneaky sorts of "homeopathic ad hominem" attacks where you don't make the attack directly, but instead allude to the "questions" that invoke the attack when considered by the reader.
> Why does it matter that the guy is writing a book? Why does it matter that the article is marketing for the book? Is it true? Sounds like it is.
Are you asking me: why does it matter what existing motivations a person has when trying to uncover which parts of their account is truthful? Seems pretty obvious why that information is important...
Going solely off of "Is it true? Sounds like it is." sounds like an easy way to end up just confirming your own biases all of the time.
Sorry you took my comment that way, that's not how I intended it. I was honestly curious because I knew nothing about him, and the few articles I found seemed suspect, so I wanted to know if others felt the same, or if he was legit. And with people's replies with more information, I can now say for myself that it seems like he's more legit than not.
> It turned out I’d joined a digital sweatshop, where people were packed into huge rooms, side by side, at long tables. Instead of hunching over sewing machines, they stared into laptops or barked into headsets, selling software.
> Tech workers have no job security.
> The free snacks are nice, but you also must tolerate having your head stuffed with silly jargon and ideology about being on a mission to change the world.
> 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.
> Dogs roam HubSpot’s hallways, because like the kindergarten decor, dogs have become de rigueur for tech startups.
> On the second floor there are shower rooms, which are intended for bike commuters and people who jog at lunchtime, but also have been used as sex cabins when the Friday happy hour gets out of hand.
> Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language—even, to some extent, inventing their own reality.
> Inside the company he is always referred to simply by his first name, Dharmesh, and some people seem to view him as a kind of spiritual leader.
---
I'm not saying there isn't truth to what he's saying, and with others chiming in as to his credibility, it seems like there's more truth than I assumed. I was simply asking for context, because a lot of these things do seem slightly blown out of proportion to make the articles sound more interesting, and thus to sell more copies of his book.
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.
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.
That was my read too after listening to the fresh air interview. He said he thought it could be fun working with a bunch of out of college kids doing something exciting in a growing company. He had that experience before, afterall.
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.
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.
I'm an older tech worker (sounded weird when I just read it out :-p ) and I've found there are two gross classes of startups. The ones that have a fire fast mentality, burn workers to the ground, etc. mentality and others which take it like a marathon as opposed to a sprint. I wish we had names for these two kinds of startups because they would save everyone some time when it comes to figuring out who to work for. Both are good in certain situations and for certain clases of people IMHO.
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.
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.
This is crab-bucket thinking, though. "You don't have it that bad!" Maybe labor, period, kind of has it bad, and that the tug-of-war between labor and capital is in a bad spot right now?
Being a little bit less screwed doesn't make you not screwed, it makes you less screwed.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
I've interviewed at a couple like that, but never worked at one. They are present, but there isn't enough of any 'one kind of place' for any description to be representative.
No, Lyons is drastically exaggerating and overstating. Perhaps that's what it was like at HubSpot, but I've worked for four different tech startups and only one of them has exhibited even an inkling of Lyons' description. Even there, I would never compare it to a frat house, kindergarten, or Scientology. More like management makes kool-aid and a handful of people think it's wine.
It's like claiming that all large companies are uniformly Dilbert-like hellholes full of pointy-haired bosses and despair. The elements are there, a handful of examples are that bad, but it's broadly exaggerated to push a specific point or to signal.
It varies. Some years back, I interviewed at a San Diego startup that was flying in a dozen people a week, with a $300 reward just for showing up, to go through a five-day interview process, at the end of which perhaps one or two would be offered the chance to work for them...for $50k a year. In San Diego.
Most of their employees lived together, 2-4 to an apartment, because they couldn't afford solo housing.
The CEO gave a speech on the first day where he explained that they paid poorly on purpose, because they wanted people who cared more about striving for excellence (or some such buzzword) than petty concerns like money or stability. And people ate it up.
So, yeah, some startups are totally run like ridiculous cults that prey on starry-eyed young tech grads. I'm sure there's many that are sane and reasonable, too. None of them have paid me to vacation in California, though.
I interned at HubSpot while Lyons was there. Theres some truth to this, but it's greatly exaggerated.
"Frat house": Like many companies, HubSpot often provided alcohol and would host parties for big events. As for personality types, the engineers I worked with were pretty typical engineer types.
"Kindergarden": HubSpot has a big intern/co-op program, and likes to hire former interns as full-time. I can imagine Lyons might feel a bit out of place with so many young people.
"Scientology": The company didn't feel much more cult-y than other young software companies. I'd describe the culture as "We work hard, build products customers love, and treat our employees well".
For what it's worth, I really enjoyed my time at HubSpot and have only good things to say about the people I worked with. However, I was an engineer, and can't speak to the marketing team that Lyons was a part of.
There is glassdoor review for my last company about how they are saving money by hiring only from colleges. Any number of my colleagues could have written it. Or for any number of companies. :)
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.
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.
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.
Zizek has written a lot of really fun and interesting books. I'd definitely encourage you to check him out, but just a word of warning: if he's the only living philosopher you can name, then you probably don't know enough philosophy to really understand everything he's saying. He assumes a pretty thorough knowledge of a number of past thinkers, like Marx, Hegel, Lacan, etc.
Do check him out anyway though, and also check out some general introductions to philosophy if you find yourself intrigued and wanting to learn more.
The interesting thing about this is that Lyons quotes Jeff Bezos's letter to shareholders, which some places described as ‘a very late response’ (http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/5/11373438/amazon-corporate-c...) to the NYT's own story from earlier this year… Lyons quotes it to demonstrate how Amazon is totally down for this exploitative culture he's trying to describe. But while I was pretty horrified reading the NYT's original story, Bezos responded—admittedly internally—shortly after the original article came out. He basically dismissed the idea of the type of culture Lyons is describing (‘I strongly believe that anyone working in a company that really is like the one described in the NYT would be crazy to stay. I know I would leave such a company.’), and that response was fairly widely circulated.
To me, while I recognize some of the anecdotes that Lyons is describing as indeed representative of things that happen at startups, this is the kind of cherry picking that rapidly turns a potentially interesting book (or article) into total nonsense. If you can't choose your supporting arguments well, your main argument falls over.
(Worth noting: Pretty sure these sundry* articles all just possibly-adapted excerpts from the book.)
Look startups aren't perfect. You will most certainly work harder than at a large established firm. Your life balance will be no where near as good as at a large firm.
But why are you electing to work at a startup?
1) You are getting some options and have the possibility of a big upside which does not exist at a large firm.
2) You want more responsibility and you will certainly get it in the form of wearing many hats, but you will work harder.
3) If things are working out you will be promoted faster and move your career forward much quicker than most established firms.
4) There are many other points I could make here but arguably the most IMPORTANT reason to work at a startup is to LEARN, and learn you will.
There are tradeoffs with working at a startup, startups aren't perfect. To say that they are much worse than large corps who are scared of key man risk and keep you at an arms length so they can fire and lay off thousands at a time is disingenuous.
Corporations are generally only after profits big or small. You as an employee have a responsibility to make the right decisions for you.
That's very fair. I can't speak about Amazon, because I've never worked there. You're right that some companies are hanging not on to that startup canon, at least from the outside it seems that way, even after they are large and it's not just Amazon but Amazon is probably the biggest.
My comment generally holds true though that startups have tradeoffs to large corporations. If large corps are trying to take advantage of that then we, as top talent, need to stay away from them so they fail and this trend can go away.
Agreed, a startup has many tradeoffs. For instance, we want to attract key players/talent that we can barely afford. I've been a large contributor to my startup culture over the past 3 years, and while we created an envious work environment, we can only keep the right people that fit the need of the moment. Work hard + play hard really applies to our company and yes it creates some hard times. We live with a constant executive + management pressure to run a lean company and generate profits in our niche market. To me, this is only a mark of respect to the investors that were crazy enough in the first place to believe in our project.
I think that it's hard to understand that chaos unless you've been part of an early startup yourself. I can also understand that 25 years in journalism is a hard fit, it totally goes against the entrepreneurship skills you might need to survive and appreciate the ride in a startup.
To generalise in the same manner as the article, they also have no loyalty - job-hopping is more common in tech than any other industry I've seen, excluding perhaps hospitality. It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.
Let's back off with the Amazon hate. Right below it on the same list is Google with an average tenure at 1.1 years. Nobody tries to use that as an argument that Google burns through workers who quit in dissatisfaction.
I think part of the reason is working class employees traditionally have comparatively poor employment conditions[1] and Amazon has many more working class employees than Google does, because Amazon operates warehouses and call centres.
Nobody's getting heatstroke in Google's fulfilment centres, because they don't exist.
They're up to 1.1 years now? Wow! They were at six months for developers for most of the time I was working there (2006-2010). At three years, I was in the top 25% of seniority ("old farts").
By comparison, Overstock.com averaged five years for developers between 2010-2013.
I find that incredibly hard to believe, given Google's reputation. Also, if the average was six months, that suggests that a significant number of exits were happening even sooner than six months. Did you personally observe that to be occurring frequently?
The retention rate was widely discussed in the groups I was in. It was especially low in Retail Customer Experience (RCX).
In my teams, representing less than 20 people in total, firings were far more common that people leaving. Two business people (marketing focused) left, two developers transferred to other areas (early AWS), while four developers and one business person were fired over the four years (fulfilling the "making hard choices" performance review requirement).
Some of this is related to the way the internal tool reports your seniority. It tells you that that X% of all current employees were hired more recently than you. So during this particular time frame, when Google was really booming in total head count, that number doesn't really reflect the average time-to-find-other-opportunity very well. Its reporting on the wrong side of the tenure timeline to give you that information. Even worse, depending on how you use the tool, it can include contractors as well.
There is a separate tool that tells you the seniority of the people that are leaving. And while there is definitely a statistical bump right after the 1 year vesting cliff, even a cursory glance shows that the average and median final tenure is quite a bit longer than 1 year.
> Companies sell shares to the public while still losing money. Wealth is generated, but most of the loot goes to a handful of people at the top, the founders and venture capital investors.
Then become a founder if it's such an easy way to generate wealth.
Wealth is generated by the employees. The founders channel that wealth to them.
The challenge with being a founder is to find the right business plan at the moment then hire and maintain the right team to achieve it. It's a challenge indeed but this challenge does not deserve nor does it morally justify taking most of the wealth generated by the employees away from them.
I don't know much about Hubspot, but Lyons should know that sudden firings without an explanation are not common. The norm is quarterly reviews, and firing only after you've had several negative ones.
Extortion is obviously not common either...
Content farms are also not common at solid companies - more typical of fly-by-night marketing-driven places without much real tech.
The claim that there's a lot of pressure to perform is more valid, but that's not unique to tech at all. The bias problems are also there at many companies (though I think racial bias is less common than age or gender).
Overall he seems to be generalizing from a company with an unusually bad culture.
I've worked at several tech startups with sudden firing. The "norm" from my perspective tends to be a one month Performance Improvement Plan, usually just serving as a paper trail with very little hope of getting off of it, though I've seen people just suddenly walked out as well.
I appreciate Dan Lyons cutting through the bullshit on tech startups and I recognize a lot of what he's talking about from my own experience. The thing that bothers me the most is the disingenuity of it all, the "we're a family" and "we're changing the world" when it really is all standard capitalism business practice, not so different from Wall St or Walmart.
It's funny Netflix and Reed Fisher got brought up, because I at least respect Reed's honesty about the whole arrangement. The "we're a family" companies frighten me a lot more.
These companies are also masters of PR and marketing. Many of these companies that are Kafkaesque places to work for are frequently cited on #1 best place to work etc, and you seem crazy to complain when you work at one. People don't realize that the ping-pong table doesn't make up for the uncompesated 24/7 PagerDuty rotations, how little job-security you have long term, how anxiety inducing a lot of the performance-driven culture and open-office plans can be, etc. So it's refreshing to see a different take.
So people get 1 month performance plans after positive or neutral reviews? Or are these places that don't do regular reviews? I've honestly never heard of that. Want to name names?
Out of four full-time jobs I've had in my career, I have had a performance review (three, actually--every six months!) at one of them. That was the one with a NASDAQ ticker. The gong-show "unicorn" startup, the technically impressive startup that was acquired to bolster a bigco's portfolio, and the medical startup where I managed three people and reported to the CEO. No performance reviews. Couldn't even pin down a manager to have a status update sometimes. (At one in particular my manager basically avoided talking to me until it was time to try to rip me a new one. Fun times.)
This happens a lot--and it being gross and a real bad way to manage doesn't really change that it happens a lot.
I agree, as it happens! Even at the company where I was managing people, I had regular sit-downs with my guys (and I was intentionally not really "a manager", I was primus inter pares and I made sure that showed). Never had one going upwards, even when we got reorg'd under the guy who thought Six Sigma was a good idea. ;)
It should be noted that he was in a sales role - even outside of tech companies, if you miss your numbers you don't stick around. Could be the culture was the same in engineering but I don't know if ou can compare the two roles.
As an aside: how long until you leave "startup" territory? Five years? Eight years? Ten years? Revenue number? Staff number?
"Treating workers as if they are widgets to be used up and discarded is a central part of the revised relationship between employers and employees that techies proclaim is an innovation as important as chips and software."
Really? I've never heard that and never met a single person who thinks this. I guess pieces like this just like to pull things out of thin air. It makes zero sense for any non-executive to think this way and most techies are not executives.
I have to wonder how many anti-Lyons comments in this thread are HubSpot employees in stealth mode. Doesn't HubSpot do 'Sentiment Analysis' and that sort of stuff?
I wonder the same thing. Last time there was a post about him here a couple weeks ago there were current and former HubSpot employees all over it.
Apart from that, it is a shady company for sure though. It was less than a year ago that top executives were implicated by the fbi in trying to hack and extort Lyons during the lead up to the book. I think only one or two of the implicated executives ended up leaving the company as a result. Was their departures enough to fix the culture there?
There may well be plenty. There are probably also a lot of people, like myself, with no connection to HubSpot who dislike Lyons's latest writing.
Having read a few of the promotional articles for the book, I'm certainly not a fan. He seems like he went looking for the worst and is generalizing as broadly as possible to create a sensation. A publicly traded email marketing company founded by a couple of MBAs in Boston 10 years ago doesn't really represent all of Silicon Valley startup culture.
Lyons does touch on some genuine problems. But he doesn't seem to approach ageism or problematic work cultures with much thoughtfulness, and he isn't contributing much to the conversation.
At the same time, HubSpot doesn't seem like a great place to work. In fact it seems like they have (or have recently had) some serious issues they need to sort out.
It's against HN's rules to accuse other users of astroturfing or shilling without evidence. If you're worried about it, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look at the data and investigate (which we always do). But it's not ok to turn threads in that direction based on nothing more than opposing views. Few things are more destructive of civil discourse, and it's nearly always the case that opposing views are honestly held.
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 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.
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.
I'm approaching 35 years old, and HubSpot is a publicly traded company, ergo, a grown-ass company. If they need to cut labor costs, they do a layoff.
When I was 17 years old, I got fired without any warning from a mom-and-pop computer repair shop ($10 an hour, I think?) because I "talked too much" at the bench. Coincidentally, they had just hired a 15 year old to do the same job. I had also recently asked how i might go about getting a pay raise.
This is the kind of thing that a small business (which is constantly in crisis) does all the time. It's legal in "at will" states, but it isn't particularly fair.
Larger, publicly traded companies that aren't in crisis have no business acting like high school lunch tables.
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.
> 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.
"She was 35, had been with the company for four years, and was told without explanation by her 28-year-old manager that she had two weeks to get out. On her last day, that manager organized a farewell party for her."
I'm sure they don't announce "hey, Bev just got fired for incompetence, lets all eat cake".
It is probably more like Bev announces she is leaving, and then they gather around to say goodbye because even though it didn't work out, she is still a person and worthy of being treated with respect and telling her peers that she decided to move on rather than the truth.
Oh, I get it, like when you go to a funeral and people try to focus on the the memories that make them happy, or find comfort in religious fairy tales about 'living forever'.
Or when people who are fired are allowed to 'resign' to save face.
I think this isn't as nefarious as the internet hive mind seems to think:
Imagine that someone quits to go onto better things, more money, etc. Of course you throw them a going away party. Then someone else is fired, but you want to let them save face. Do you throw them a party? You've established that people leaving on their own get a party already...
You guys seem to think that the answer is obvious, you tell everyone "so and so was just fired for poor performance, they are bad at their job and that is why they are unemployed now." and have the person do a walk of shame out the door and never feel like they can put it behind them or face any of their former coworkers again without overcoming a massive amount of shame.
Firing is rejection, it does not necessarily mean that the person being fired has anything to do with it. Whole unit moving to a different city, moving to a different tech stack. Brining in pals of the New Director, etc. etc. There are 1000 reasons, but Firing is REJECTION. At a human level, only the vexed are relieved that they are fired, most even after understanding the big picture are not in a rejoicing state of mind, because they have to find some other way to find lost Pay. So, no celebrating loss of Income is only fitting for few and in most cases a Sadistic ritual. Its a different thing that co-workers take initiative to send off a good bye, but the company doing it looks dubious and the whole "Graduate" ritual is sadistic.
Just to clarify, I was saying 'like these other rituals' sarcastically, my point was to say 'look, humans often have ritualization around difficult events, and that is ok, people find comfort in it'.
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.
> I joined the company in 2013 after spending 25 years in journalism and getting laid off from a top position at Newsweek. I thought working at a start-up would be great. The perks! The cool offices!
> It turned out I’d joined a digital sweatshop, where people were packed into huge rooms, side by side, at long tables.
It sounds like this journalist failed to investigate their new job before Day 1...
Yeah it's like those people who have been working with J2EE for 25 years at Big Company X that is now bankrupt, and constantly complain about the lack of GANNT charts, or whatever the hammer and chisel tools they use to make J2EE apps.
The format is pretty unfriendly to the user though and rigid time planning is pretty pointless for problem solving exercises, IMO. What do you think makes gantt charts great?
Looks like they were able to coordinate with multiple teams using gantt charts. Probably taking into account fuzzy nature of time planning. So I would not think about gannt charts as rigid time planning it is just a tool so it depends on how you use it.
I think it's a lot more plausible that he knew exactly what he was getting into, and wanted exactly that, possibly so that he could write a book expounding his preexisting notions about the "digital sweatshop".
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
It's not, because it's being applied outside of its defining group. It's a circular definition if the term is only applied to "start-ups", because of course those have "start-up culture" by definition. But one can apply the term to companies that are not "start-ups" -- even if they once were -- but yet carry the same "start-up culture".
There's also the idea at this point of a stereotypical "start-up culture" that lives beyond the idea of whatever a "start-up" is. This also breaks the circular definition, because from that perspective "start-ups" no longer define "start-up culture".
>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
I find companies that do the whole "we're a family, we're changing the world!" thing to be worse than your standard corporate gig that is more up front about you just being a cog in the machine. At least those companies are more honest about it, the other kind come off as fake and insincere.
Companies do not care about you. At all. You are nothing but a business asset to them. They may value your work, but they do not act in your best interest - they're going to try and pay you the least amount they can to have you work there.
This isn't actually a bad thing. Chances are, you don't really care about your company either, so it's kind of fair.
It's good to keep in mind - you are your own business, and you need to make decisions that are best for you.
It seems to me that the author was generalizing from one specific experience he had, plus some anecdotal experiences he has gathered from others, to impugn the entire start-up community.
There may be some validity to what he says; I'm inclined to agree that there's disproportionate age-ism and sexism and probably several other kinds of -ism's in the start-up community, perhaps because their founders tend to be younger and less well versed in mainstream corporate behavior which in recent decades has been moving away from discrimination.
I don't see how a "glorified telemarketer" working on a desktop that watches him is a typical start-up tech worker, though. It sounds like tough and thankless work and I hope people get the message in the VC funding community that the way to build a high value company is not to treat people really badly and thus create this kind of bad press. At least, I hope it's not the way you create a good return on investment! Otherwise we're all in trouble.
I'm curious as to whether the comments about Amazon are broadly valid. Have not worked there myself, but have interviewed over the phone in the past (very negative experience). Yet, as a customer, I admire Amazon and consider them one of America's great companies. Could they really have gotten to this point by treating their rank-and-file like a disposable commodity? Could Apple?
Really I have to say, are you that naive? Apple and Amazon absolutely treat their employees like crap. Actually the employees behave with each other like crap because these companies are publicly traded and everyone is a stakeholder. The good work comes out of the employees being in competition with one another. You might like this approach, but at this rate we will be left with an Earth full of impressive monuments but no people to view them.
Can someone tell me why in the first paragraph age was brought up? The author initiates the argument by bringing up the age of the manager, as if there was an age requirement. If you are going to make a compelling argument, it's probably best that you don't begin by belittling others.
I have a hard time thinking of people making 6 figure salaries as being an instance of capital exploiting labor. Part of why the average length of employment is only around a year is probably that employees are choosing to go elsewhere for higher pay because the demand for good engineers is so high.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 314 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11430596
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.
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.
Age implies obsoleteness and poor health. (I can stereotype too!)
However, it's the matter of how strong that causation is and how hard are you going to rely on it. Because if you think that someone in their 30s is likely to be be significantly more experienced and wise, it also means that you should think that someone in their 50s is likely to be significantly burned out and slow.
My point is: the correlation (and underlying causation) is there, but it's not strong enough, compared to differences between individuals.
How is that in any way a sound analogy? Your age likely has an impact on your experience. More experience doesn't necessarily mean you're better at your job but it's a decent possibility. Race has no impact on performance at all.
Obviously nobody is going to discount a manager because of their race, but on that same coin people shouldn't discount the same individual because of their age.
[Edit] Don't know about other states.
Or alternatively, what does it say about people who have seen this culture for 4 years and are still there?
Eventually, you just find the biggest pay cheque you can, and do the routine of putting on your coconut headphones, sit down at your tiki desk and chair and sip your mochas in peace as you wait for the morning calisthenics meeting to begin, wondering what exactly the difference between waterfall, agile, tdd, etc actually is because all you've ever seen anywhere is tiki driven development.
>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.
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 been through and been humbled by many life experiences means I can show more empathy and understanding. On the other hand there are many very switched on young people, so like always we should ignore age and judge people on their merits.
Having some life experience (kids, marriage, taking care of older parents, etc.) helps to empathize with people - which makes you a better manager.
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.
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.
There's a broad grey line between "factual objective news reporting" and "storytelling" and the word journalism isn't specifically defined enough for it to be strictly towards the news reporting edges of that grey area. As Wikipedia puts it (with all the lack-of-credibility of quoting Wikipedia as a source, I'll admit): "Journalism, however, is not always confined to the news media or to news itself, as journalistic communication may find its way into broader forms of expression, including literature and cinema."
To me, journalism as commissioned by The Rolling Stone is _supposed_ to be "embellished storytelling". The front page of the NY Times? Sure, that's supposed to be "news" not story telling. But a long-ish form article in the "Sunday Review" section of the Times? At least my expectations lean closer to a Rolling Stone story than a hard hitting fact checked piece of investigative journalism...
[1] http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyo...
[2] HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11369632
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.)
I read your comment after the edits were applied, and I still thought it was one of those sneaky sorts of "homeopathic ad hominem" attacks where you don't make the attack directly, but instead allude to the "questions" that invoke the attack when considered by the reader.
Are you asking me: why does it matter what existing motivations a person has when trying to uncover which parts of their account is truthful? Seems pretty obvious why that information is important...
Going solely off of "Is it true? Sounds like it is." sounds like an easy way to end up just confirming your own biases all of the time.
Sorry you took my comment that way, that's not how I intended it. I was honestly curious because I knew nothing about him, and the few articles I found seemed suspect, so I wanted to know if others felt the same, or if he was legit. And with people's replies with more information, I can now say for myself that it seems like he's more legit than not.
> Tech workers have no job security.
> The free snacks are nice, but you also must tolerate having your head stuffed with silly jargon and ideology about being on a mission to change the world.
> 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.
> Dogs roam HubSpot’s hallways, because like the kindergarten decor, dogs have become de rigueur for tech startups.
> On the second floor there are shower rooms, which are intended for bike commuters and people who jog at lunchtime, but also have been used as sex cabins when the Friday happy hour gets out of hand.
> Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language—even, to some extent, inventing their own reality.
> Inside the company he is always referred to simply by his first name, Dharmesh, and some people seem to view him as a kind of spiritual leader.
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I'm not saying there isn't truth to what he's saying, and with others chiming in as to his credibility, it seems like there's more truth than I assumed. I was simply asking for context, because a lot of these things do seem slightly blown out of proportion to make the articles sound more interesting, and thus to sell more copies of his book.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
Being a little bit less screwed doesn't make you not screwed, it makes you less screwed.
Wow, that must take a whole lot of careful coordination.
See this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocking_directorate
Also play with this http://www.theyrule.net/
Nope, there will just be another round of new faces, new tech, and new fundings.
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.
This sounds like a great place to work. Outside of the phony hyper-positive posturing by management.
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.
Is this an accurate description? I feel this might be more of the well funded ones but would not know.
Most of their employees lived together, 2-4 to an apartment, because they couldn't afford solo housing.
The CEO gave a speech on the first day where he explained that they paid poorly on purpose, because they wanted people who cared more about striving for excellence (or some such buzzword) than petty concerns like money or stability. And people ate it up.
So, yeah, some startups are totally run like ridiculous cults that prey on starry-eyed young tech grads. I'm sure there's many that are sane and reasonable, too. None of them have paid me to vacation in California, though.
I'm open to the possibility that this is true, but you've only presented one example, though certainly an egregious one. Got any more?
"Frat house": Like many companies, HubSpot often provided alcohol and would host parties for big events. As for personality types, the engineers I worked with were pretty typical engineer types.
"Kindergarden": HubSpot has a big intern/co-op program, and likes to hire former interns as full-time. I can imagine Lyons might feel a bit out of place with so many young people.
"Scientology": The company didn't feel much more cult-y than other young software companies. I'd describe the culture as "We work hard, build products customers love, and treat our employees well".
For what it's worth, I really enjoyed my time at HubSpot and have only good things to say about the people I worked with. However, I was an engineer, and can't speak to the marketing team that Lyons was a part of.
>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.
Do check him out anyway though, and also check out some general introductions to philosophy if you find yourself intrigued and wanting to learn more.
To me, while I recognize some of the anecdotes that Lyons is describing as indeed representative of things that happen at startups, this is the kind of cherry picking that rapidly turns a potentially interesting book (or article) into total nonsense. If you can't choose your supporting arguments well, your main argument falls over.
(Worth noting: Pretty sure these sundry* articles all just possibly-adapted excerpts from the book.)
But why are you electing to work at a startup?
1) You are getting some options and have the possibility of a big upside which does not exist at a large firm.
2) You want more responsibility and you will certainly get it in the form of wearing many hats, but you will work harder.
3) If things are working out you will be promoted faster and move your career forward much quicker than most established firms.
4) There are many other points I could make here but arguably the most IMPORTANT reason to work at a startup is to LEARN, and learn you will.
There are tradeoffs with working at a startup, startups aren't perfect. To say that they are much worse than large corps who are scared of key man risk and keep you at an arms length so they can fire and lay off thousands at a time is disingenuous.
Corporations are generally only after profits big or small. You as an employee have a responsibility to make the right decisions for you.
Edit: some spelling mistakes.
To me they are large tech companies that have kept some sort of startup canon in place, and not in a good way.
My comment generally holds true though that startups have tradeoffs to large corporations. If large corps are trying to take advantage of that then we, as top talent, need to stay away from them so they fail and this trend can go away.
> Corporations are generally only after profits big or small.
Startups are generally only after growth, but only big.
To generalise in the same manner as the article, they also have no loyalty - job-hopping is more common in tech than any other industry I've seen, excluding perhaps hospitality. It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.
They don't care that you don't like their work environment.They have money; you need money and have little options.
I think instead of being interested in recycling talent; Amazon is interested in those who will take the most abuse.
Nobody's getting heatstroke in Google's fulfilment centres, because they don't exist.
[1] http://www.collegehumor.com/post/7035742/office-job-vs-retai...
By comparison, Overstock.com averaged five years for developers between 2010-2013.
In my teams, representing less than 20 people in total, firings were far more common that people leaving. Two business people (marketing focused) left, two developers transferred to other areas (early AWS), while four developers and one business person were fired over the four years (fulfilling the "making hard choices" performance review requirement).
There is a separate tool that tells you the seniority of the people that are leaving. And while there is definitely a statistical bump right after the 1 year vesting cliff, even a cursory glance shows that the average and median final tenure is quite a bit longer than 1 year.
So go start making furniture.
> Companies sell shares to the public while still losing money. Wealth is generated, but most of the loot goes to a handful of people at the top, the founders and venture capital investors.
Then become a founder if it's such an easy way to generate wealth.
The challenge with being a founder is to find the right business plan at the moment then hire and maintain the right team to achieve it. It's a challenge indeed but this challenge does not deserve nor does it morally justify taking most of the wealth generated by the employees away from them.
Extortion is obviously not common either...
Content farms are also not common at solid companies - more typical of fly-by-night marketing-driven places without much real tech.
The claim that there's a lot of pressure to perform is more valid, but that's not unique to tech at all. The bias problems are also there at many companies (though I think racial bias is less common than age or gender).
Overall he seems to be generalizing from a company with an unusually bad culture.
(The extortion charges: https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/03/23/documents-re...)
I appreciate Dan Lyons cutting through the bullshit on tech startups and I recognize a lot of what he's talking about from my own experience. The thing that bothers me the most is the disingenuity of it all, the "we're a family" and "we're changing the world" when it really is all standard capitalism business practice, not so different from Wall St or Walmart.
It's funny Netflix and Reed Fisher got brought up, because I at least respect Reed's honesty about the whole arrangement. The "we're a family" companies frighten me a lot more.
These companies are also masters of PR and marketing. Many of these companies that are Kafkaesque places to work for are frequently cited on #1 best place to work etc, and you seem crazy to complain when you work at one. People don't realize that the ping-pong table doesn't make up for the uncompesated 24/7 PagerDuty rotations, how little job-security you have long term, how anxiety inducing a lot of the performance-driven culture and open-office plans can be, etc. So it's refreshing to see a different take.
This happens a lot--and it being gross and a real bad way to manage doesn't really change that it happens a lot.
As an aside: how long until you leave "startup" territory? Five years? Eight years? Ten years? Revenue number? Staff number?
Really? I've never heard that and never met a single person who thinks this. I guess pieces like this just like to pull things out of thin air. It makes zero sense for any non-executive to think this way and most techies are not executives.
Apart from that, it is a shady company for sure though. It was less than a year ago that top executives were implicated by the fbi in trying to hack and extort Lyons during the lead up to the book. I think only one or two of the implicated executives ended up leaving the company as a result. Was their departures enough to fix the culture there?
Having read a few of the promotional articles for the book, I'm certainly not a fan. He seems like he went looking for the worst and is generalizing as broadly as possible to create a sensation. A publicly traded email marketing company founded by a couple of MBAs in Boston 10 years ago doesn't really represent all of Silicon Valley startup culture.
Lyons does touch on some genuine problems. But he doesn't seem to approach ageism or problematic work cultures with much thoughtfulness, and he isn't contributing much to the conversation.
At the same time, HubSpot doesn't seem like a great place to work. In fact it seems like they have (or have recently had) some serious issues they need to sort out.
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.
We can't? Why not?
Being stupid does not exempt you from responsibility for your actions.
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.
When I was 17 years old, I got fired without any warning from a mom-and-pop computer repair shop ($10 an hour, I think?) because I "talked too much" at the bench. Coincidentally, they had just hired a 15 year old to do the same job. I had also recently asked how i might go about getting a pay raise.
This is the kind of thing that a small business (which is constantly in crisis) does all the time. It's legal in "at will" states, but it isn't particularly fair.
Larger, publicly traded companies that aren't in crisis have no business acting like high school lunch tables.
Replacing 36 yr old women with 23 year old men requires no such disclosure
It does.
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.
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.
"She was 35, had been with the company for four years, and was told without explanation by her 28-year-old manager that she had two weeks to get out. On her last day, that manager organized a farewell party for her."
It is probably more like Bev announces she is leaving, and then they gather around to say goodbye because even though it didn't work out, she is still a person and worthy of being treated with respect and telling her peers that she decided to move on rather than the truth.
Be an adult and make a tough decision without masking it as a great "thing" (aka: graduation)?
Or when people who are fired are allowed to 'resign' to save face.
I think this isn't as nefarious as the internet hive mind seems to think:
Imagine that someone quits to go onto better things, more money, etc. Of course you throw them a going away party. Then someone else is fired, but you want to let them save face. Do you throw them a party? You've established that people leaving on their own get a party already...
You guys seem to think that the answer is obvious, you tell everyone "so and so was just fired for poor performance, they are bad at their job and that is why they are unemployed now." and have the person do a walk of shame out the door and never feel like they can put it behind them or face any of their former coworkers again without overcoming a massive amount of shame.
Again, the practice is sadistic at least at the emotional level to me. May be it is Graduating as a Rock Star.
ps. Please stop moving the goal posts.
"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.
> It turned out I’d joined a digital sweatshop, where people were packed into huge rooms, side by side, at long tables.
It sounds like this journalist failed to investigate their new job before Day 1...
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.
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.
The part in the fresh air interview that talks about jargon is especially interesting.
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.
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.
There's also the idea at this point of a stereotypical "start-up culture" that lives beyond the idea of whatever a "start-up" is. This also breaks the circular definition, because from that perspective "start-ups" no longer define "start-up culture".
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
Companies do not care about you. At all. You are nothing but a business asset to them. They may value your work, but they do not act in your best interest - they're going to try and pay you the least amount they can to have you work there.
This isn't actually a bad thing. Chances are, you don't really care about your company either, so it's kind of fair.
It's good to keep in mind - you are your own business, and you need to make decisions that are best for you.
There may be some validity to what he says; I'm inclined to agree that there's disproportionate age-ism and sexism and probably several other kinds of -ism's in the start-up community, perhaps because their founders tend to be younger and less well versed in mainstream corporate behavior which in recent decades has been moving away from discrimination.
I don't see how a "glorified telemarketer" working on a desktop that watches him is a typical start-up tech worker, though. It sounds like tough and thankless work and I hope people get the message in the VC funding community that the way to build a high value company is not to treat people really badly and thus create this kind of bad press. At least, I hope it's not the way you create a good return on investment! Otherwise we're all in trouble.
I'm curious as to whether the comments about Amazon are broadly valid. Have not worked there myself, but have interviewed over the phone in the past (very negative experience). Yet, as a customer, I admire Amazon and consider them one of America's great companies. Could they really have gotten to this point by treating their rank-and-file like a disposable commodity? Could Apple?