Hacker News Reader

Comment by jim-greer | Hacker News Reader

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.

(The extortion charges: https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/03/23/documents-re...)

View on HN

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.

That sucks. It's absurdly short-sighted to skimp on giving feedback to employees.

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com