The ethics of digital disruption (why top tech companies are the most TOXIC)
squareweave.com.au
squareweave.com.au
But given that the Amazon that I worked at for a year and a half (in the AWS tree) emphasized work-life balance, and among the dozens of workers I knew personally, none had complaints anything like the one in the article (or the many in the previous Amazon-is-evil article) I do wonder about the other examples given.
Bezos sent out an email company-wide after the story about the stillborn child broke and said that is not something that should ever happen at Amazon, and to email him personally if anything like that ever happens again.
I also have reports from an Apple employee who has worked there for years that he's not particularly overworked, and that he has plenty of time to spend with his family.
All of the referenced companies are big. In any big company you'll have pockets of crappy management. It's no more fair to describe the company culture based on the experience of an individual than it is to describe a human culture based on the actions of an individual.
That said, I'm sure there are companies where the culture is cutthroat all the way down. But I'm also sure that trait is not confined to tech start-ups -- and I would hope that the trait isn't highly correlated with company success.
Ethics should be a higher priority than profit. Companies should focus on having sustainable business models that support their employees while helping their customers, rather than taking advantage of both groups to drive the bottom line. The tech industry seems to think some kind of positivist exceptionalism frees them from worrying about sustainability, and I think venture capital is a significant negative influence there.
Why can't we take the mechanisms that work for groups of small companies and apply them to divisions of a corporation? It's a recursive structure either way, regardless how you name it, so maybe we could just copy parts of what works from the small world to the big world?
> Ethics should be a higher priority than profit. Companies should focus on having sustainable business models that support their employees while helping their customers, rather than taking advantage of both groups to drive the bottom line.
We'd have to figure out how to run the economy on ethics. So far the term everything is optimized for is measured in dollars. Being nice doesn't pay the rent, doesn't pay for food and doesn't let you send your kids to college. Morality doesn't buy widget parts, doesn't tool factories and doesn't help CEOs get their private jets.
I used to have this sentiment that "money shouldn't be above people, wake up CEOs and managers, be human beings!" but I don't believe anymore that it reflects the true state of the world. The incentive structures are too strong, you can shout in the wind all they want, CEOs and managers and politicians will agree, and things won't change anyway, because we're all in too deep serving Moloch[0]. It's not that people don't care - they just don't have as much agency as they think they do.
That's the reason I think concepts like automation of industry while switching to something UBI-like are important, because relieving the pressure in the system, letting everyone chill the fuck out, seems to be a good way to reduce the amount of suffering we inflict on each other in pursuit of money.
[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
I've worked at places where <some other things that some people would consider inappropriate and are definitely contrary to the written ethical standards of the company> occurred, and if they received enough publicity then certainly an email like that would go out. But until then, the same people (whose responsibility it would be to have their name put at the bottom of such an email) are happy to continue to personally engage in the inappropriate behavior if it serves their career.
I guess what I'm saying is, I wouldn't personally put a lot of faith in such correspondence.
I don't know how you get any semblance of a team with that kind of turnover.
After one year as a full employee I was deluged with job offers from just about every other major company. I'm sure many of them would have offered to increase my compensation. I said no to all of them because I wanted to go back to consulting. I assume that after your second year, you probably get a similar set of offers.
A typical employee in AWS sticks around for about 2 years. But at the same time, tenure at tech companies is getting short just about everywhere these days -- and I knew people in my group who had been at Amazon for 4-5 years. My own personal tenure at companies rarely exceeds two years, with one exception where I stayed for nearly six. So again, I don't see how Amazon is terribly different on this axis.
One of the most annoying things at Amazon is the "on call" policy where all developers need to put in time "on call", which includes answering a pager in the middle of the night, sometimes for poorly designed alarms that are poorly documented. I knew one developer who quit, with no notice, right after the first week he'd been on call. The frustrating thing about it was that my team did client work: Android, iOS, and Windows clients for an AWS service, so none of us knew the first thing about how to fix anything on the server side, so it was particularly painful to be put on call.
So no, not everything is perfect, and I'm sure that some managers are downright awful. But not everything is "Work harder! Damn your family!" and "We'll be watching your performance after having a personal tragedy strike!" either, which is what the articles imply. I did really feel that if I'd seen something like that I could have taken it to HR and it would have been addressed.
Which is what the articles are doing.
There are unions in creative fields. One of the relevant ones for tech is The Animation Guild, Local 839, I.A.T.S.E., which represents artists and technicians in Hollywood animation. Here's their standard contract.[1] It's not spectacular, but it has time and a half after 8 hours in a day or 40 hours in a week, plus double time after 6 days. This discourages crunches. There are also clauses which prevent jerking around employees too much, including a formal grievance procedure with teeth.
As I've pointed out before, unionization is why film scheduling and budgeting is a serious discipline. Film projects which overrun their budget cost the producer, not the employees.
[1] http://animationguild.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/2012-20...
The way to push back is to quit. Any half competent developer should be able to pick up a new job quickly. There are plenty of companies that don't require as many hours.
What about the consequences on society at large of (a) letting these companies accumulate power and influence and (b) lionizing their leaders' pursuit of results at all cost?
The alternative is, put kindly, nepotism, put badly Machiavellian political games. You climb up by marrying the spoiled brat daughter of some senior exec and keeping her happy.
I've worked in the middle east, where nearly all companies are government controlled (not "directly" but through family ties) and the whole society falls into the "non-toxic" category according to this article. Nobody will be working 1 minute longer than they strictly have to (except the personal servants - God help those guys). There is absolutely nothing whatsoever you can do to advance (other than the spoiled brat marrying thing). Everyone who doesn't report to you is against you in every social relation you have and people are constantly laying traps for each other, just to gain a leg up in meetings where the higher ups are present. Truly simple projects get denied necessary firewall access just so the security boss could tell your manager that you're over time. You learn to avoid HR and only ever ask them to "make a contract for THIS guy", because if you ask them to find someone only family members will be allowed to interview. Things like that.
Given the choices, I think I'll be taking the "TOXIC" company, thank you. A lot of people tell me I'll change my mind when I turn 50 or so (used to be 40 but that's getting close and (I like to think) I'm still very sure I want to be in the competitive environment.
If you want to spend a bunch of time with your family and work 35 hours a week, guess what man, you can't drive a nice car, own a big house in Los Altos, or send your kids to private school. Pick a lifestyle and accept the drawbacks that come with it.
There's seriously nothing wrong with moving to a second tier city and making 60k/yr. Let the people who love stress and success do their thing in the Bay Area
I'm sorry but if you're GIVING away your life for a company that you don't hold SIGNIFICANT stake in for a regular salary (even at 200k/yr) then you're the chump. Guess what, your time isn't endless. Your 20s-30s (hell, even 40s) will pass away. All you've done is provide free labor so some executive can cash in on his/her 7+ figure income.
This is not even considering the romantic and naive assumption that working 12-hour days will give you success. Or that "stress and success" are in any way correlated. Oh well. This is how tech companies lure naive people into such hours.
This is speaking from someone that's had 9-6 with lunch "lazy man's" jobs that paid 200+k/yr.
Plenty of rich people don't work 100 hrs/week. Many rich people "let [their] money work for [them]" so to speak.
We don't live to work, we work to live, companies exist to make life easier, it's not the other way around.
You are basically saying that your apartment does not get vacuumed because Roomba is doing the job.
And the amount of effort being exerted by the company is not the same thing as the amount of effort being exerted by the employees. All these companies have huge profit margins and owners can easily make their employees' lives more decent instead of treating them this way, like sociopaths they are.
Often what happens when a company becomes less inviting to its workers is that talent and experience start evaporating (since such folks tend to be the most sensitive to bad work environments and have the easiest times finding work elsewhere). And then it takes months or years for that loss to be felt in the form of increased difficulty executing on projects. But by then so much else will have changed that most people will find convenient other excuses to blame. Especially in a big company where you can't say "oh, yeah, we lost Jim, and it's been obvious ever since that we just aren't as good as an organization without him". Usually it's not so obvious, but it's also rather "politically" problematic for people to bring up such things. Imagine saying "yeah, our top management screwed up by fostering a horrid work environment, and that's why we lost Alice, Bob, and Charlie who have been replaced with substandard substitutes, this organization is a shadow of its former self". Anyone with the power and seniority to say such a thing probably won't, because that battle is a long and bloody one compared to the much simpler choice of just working somewhere else. Thus the evaporation of talent and expertise continues.
This alone is a big factor behind startups being so "disruptive", because at startups people feel their voice has more weight and they have more flexibility to do what they want. So startups often attract the talent that has evaporated out of big corporations.
Pardon the military metaphor I am going to make, but it's the closest thing that I know of that can compare.
In the U.S. and most first world nations, you have two distinct groups within the military: The line military which makes up 95-99% of the force and special operations which is somewhere between 1-5%.
The line military generally works 7-4, has most weekends off and generally you can have a normal family life. There isn't much of a selection process for the troops and you only need to put in a huge effort for a small portion of the time. They mostly do low intensity training and in a really big conflict a subsection might see combat twice or three times.
Special Operations has a long selection and initial training process that can last years. This group is at the top of their game 90% of the time and is constantly in high intensity training. They see combat constantly regardless of if there is a big war going and a good portion have significant trouble maintaining a stable home or family life without significant effort from the spouse. If they start to fail, they get removed from the unit and sent to the line (fired). You've never seen "eat your own" like there is in Tier-1 Special Operations units - because you have to, to stay that good.
In my opinion, high tech, "disruptive" high growth companies by definition are the Special Operations groups of the business world. It's a tiny percent, but you have to be at the top of your game 90-99% of the time. That means dedicating your life to the job. That means hiring "killers" who are intensely driven.
The rest of the business world is the line and cannot, or do not want to be in that kind of "always on" 24/7 environment.
I think the disconnect is that there is a large group of people who aren't special operators, they are line soldiers, but they joined special operations companies. This is partly the fault of the company for not making it clear to them before hiring what they would be getting into, and partly their fault for not seeing the company for what it was.
This metaphor seems to apply to companies like SpaceX, Amazon, etc...
You can have a well run company with empathetic staff that crushes spirits constantly because they have such a high bar and a subset of their people were just not up to the task. "Your best isn't good enough" is a constant mantra during Special Operations selection and I don't see why such a bar would be any lower in an elite business organization.
This quote was great: "Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.”
This same quote has been applied to Harvard, Stanford, the US Military Academies, Goldman Sachs, EXXON etc...so it's not unique to tech by any means.
Any relation to Objectivism may only apply to that first group I mentioned before, but is certainly not a prerequisite for a company which has insanely high standards.
Hire smart people, treat them like human beings. If you're constantly working 12 hour days in a tech company, either you or your manager are doing something wrong.
Disagree. We have 4 people. We have the money for 4 people. We have the workload of probably 8 people. If I don't put those hours in, things don't get done that need to for us to stay alive.
I'm wasting my time right now responding to this because I think it's an important discussion. That just means I'll get 4 instead of 5 hours of sleep tonight.
I have two 15-20 slide decks to finish tonight: 1 for our board meeting tomorrow and another due tomorrow morning for an Angel pitch on Wednesday. I also just hung up from a technical call, cause we are trying to push a new release to the app store tonight. I still have to review some cards in leankit and respond to a handful of emails from today.
The problem comes when the bottom of the barrel people are working those same hours. Working 80 hour weeks doesn't really help them unless they really like doing it. Some people legitimately like work. That's great. They shouldn't set the bar, though.
They should be working someplace where they can comfortably be marginally talented.
The corollary of this, in a startup, would be don't expect great employees to work 10+ hours a day for 0.5%.
If you expect people to put in that same level of effort, compensate them to the same degree.
Meanwhile those of us who've already been through that meat grinder will be enjoying our 9-5 and large salary, regardless your baseless slight about being "marginally talented."
Can't agree with this enough - it's the same reason Special Operators get a shitload of incentive/hazard duty pay and signing bonuses.
Meanwhile those of us who've already been through that meat grinder will be enjoying our 9-5 and large salary, regardless your baseless slight about being "marginally talented."
I was simply responding to the OP's "Bottom of the barrel" comment.
3rd Bn. 75th Ranger Rgt. was where "winners go to feel bad about themselves". Jesus talk about eat your own toxic. You had to hate yourself to succeed there.
However the 10th SF Group guys I worked with, and all the guys I knew who subsequently joined talked about about how great the culture was. Obviously there were exceptions to the rule but overall the feedback I got was positive, which added to my anecdotal evidence.
It is possible to do hard things and maintain camaraderie. Frankly camaraderie is the different between toxic and non-toxic when trying to do "hard things". Either you have unit cohesion and strong leadership that understands how to truly "take care of soldiers and their families" or those that simply pay lip service and grind you down until you wash out. We're either all "in this together", or it's "don't get caught on the edge of the herd when the hyenas come".
This culture most certainly comes from leadership. It takes a special skill to put the troops first and still drive them beyond what they even thought they were capable of. Boy, when it happens, it's beautiful and it builds strong friendships that last a lifetime.
The kicker is, camaraderie is a force multiplier. Cohesive units absolutely out perform toxic ones.
Agreed also on variability between Tier-1 units morale also. Hell, it's variable between teams, which is really where my distinction between having a high speed culture vs. having a terrible commander/boss would be made.
If I were able, I'd like to work at one of them. But, since I'm not at the top of my game, I won't end up working at one of them. Instead, I'll continue working at my B.S. company. Here's what happens there: many of the leaders completely suck. They make decisions like the smart, driven, type-A leaders at <top tech company here>. The difference is that those decisions are often idiotic and/or ill informed. Their IT will buy software and hardware that is just wrong. Their architecture will be completely scattered and unthought. They will hire college grads, because no one with experience will work for them. Some days, I'd almost rather cry coming out of a meeting if I were challenged, at least. At least my career wouldn't be in the toilet. The grass is always greener on the other side, I guess.
As for writing a SAAS app and making money- that's not some kind of magic recipe. I'm much older now with a family. It has been my dream of "making it big" for years and partially chasing dreams that has been holding me back from getting things done that I should be doing. It's fine to offer that as a possible solution, but too many believe it is the option for them and leave that as a lingering dream that only serves as a time trap. I've had dreams before that could have been made reality if I only had the people and resources to make it happen, but that opening didn't happen and I got distracted quickly. Sure, I didn't make it happen, but I have limits. Sometimes the resources just aren't there, personally or externally. If you talk to a number of people that make it big, I think some chance opportunity will have come into play in their history 100% of the time. Sure, they gave it their all, or had a lot to give. But when trying to get started, sometimes the spark doesn't ignite a fire. I'm a rusty piece of steel and worn flint- the actual process of writing a SAAS app doesn't excite me anymore. I'm still sitting on top of a domain waiting to get inspired, but getting into iOS and Android development is really not as easy as it would seem I've found, and even just writing a web-based app to do what I want is a struggle since I suck at JS.