Fuck You Startup World
medium.com
medium.com
> Fuck your crazy work hours
In my opinion, if you're working crazy hours, you've already failed, likely due to poor management of the project. The only exception I see is if you don't really have a life outside work and are working on a project that you're really passionate about, but even then it should be a temporary thing.
> Fuck your open space floor plans, You really think Zucks builds a Facebook’s 2017 roadmap while a nerf war is ranging outside
I want to get work done and move on with life, not play silly office games. Open space floor plans kill my focus.
> Fuck you startups with your extravagant parties and crazy off-site events that cost way too much money
I've never understood this. I want to work for your company. If I want to go on vacation, I'll do it with my family, not my coworkers. I have no desire to be best friends with all my coworkers.
I always found the people against cubicles but for open floor plans strange. In reality, it's pretty much impossible to build offices for every employee. Cubicles were supposed to be the fix for that. You have a open office with space and partitions to separate you from other people. Then someone said that open offices offer substantial collaboration for employees. The people who were drones in a cubicle farm bought into it, because I supposed it was a change from the Office Space type scenery.
But now all we get are interruptions with no recourse. We have desks that are fixed to other desks or desks that are clustered together where the only thing that separates you from your neighbor is your monitor. Everything is open, so now the collaboration areas (they're meeting areas, but calling it collaboration areas make it agile or some crap like that) aren't fully enclosed. Everyone in a 30 foot radius gets to sit in on the meeting as well!
From the other side, I get management types telling me to keep my voice down, because I'm disturbing the collaborators. Never mind that I'm trying to get work done by hammering out details with other devs and testers - their meeting that encroaches on my space in always more important. So much more important that their jokes, their laughs, their applause, their voices, and any other other form of noise have no upper noise limit. No sweat though, it's not like I'm working or anything.
Heaven forbid I do anything like open personal email, bank account info, etc. The person to my left, to my right, behind me, and that small cluster of 5 people in that collaboration area can see my screen as plain as day.
But cubicles are somehow terrible.
> From the other side, I get management types telling me to keep my voice down, because I'm disturbing the collaborators.
> But cubicles are somehow terrible.
As someone who grew up in the Eastern Bloc, I find this kind of Doublethink almost... nostalgic? Ahhh, the good old days, when we were all following Dear Leader's flawless directives!
Standing desks? Actually pretty great for those who want them! If your back hurts after a day of sitting, go find some option you like better - why should the rest of us be upset by it? Yeah, they're not an option at a lot of jobs, but demanding that everyone standardize on a bad experience because "you're not special" is a great way to make every job awful.
A book a week? Not so bad, especially if it's something light! There are plenty of books you can read in <10 hours, even content-rich ones.
Understanding complexity? Interviewing is a mess, that's a standard belief, but constant time versus exponential time isn't meaningless yet. Start by getting rid of tree reversal questions, not declaring Big-O a useless concept.
And yet there's something pretty good buried under all the impractical complaints. Putting together a "user story" shouldn't be necessary when the task is "our login page is broke, let's fix it". Adding layers of media references and cultural touchstones to every possible concept just creates useless barriers to entry. A/B testing a hundred different features in isolation isn't a viable way to build a product.
So yes: there are a lot of things to criticize, and I know this is hyperbole. It's still a weird mix of justified and left-field attacks.
No, fuck you for making everything run so slow on our pocket and desktop supercomputers.
One thing that I'm only now (and stupidly late) realising is that tech journalism almost never critiques new trends.
Sure there are some gut "this fucking sucks" but there is never a real effort to provide some critical thinking about the PR emanating from whichever source.
For example, soylent is the brain child of someone who has possibly crippling [OCD](http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1331) (Having been blighted by it for most of my teenage and childhood.) It looks like one of his coping mechanisms.
I'm sure its a great product, but I wouldn't want to emulate someone's OCD lifestyle. Yet we are asked to "emulate the habits of these successful XXX" without stopping to ask, are they happy?
Yet no one seems to ask the question: "is this good?" or "whats the logical outcome?" They just seem to be keen to breathlessly relay the PR line, possible with a pithy snap reaction.
I'm not suggesting a flame war for every press release, just a health helping of critical thinking, and some research.
Finally someone has the courage to tell the truth. I mean, I get the part about the necessary skimming one has to to do not just get through school, but be a practical, working academic (as described in the HBR article). Or the way that techies need to skim lots of tech books to stay ahead in one's career.
But that's not reading (in the sense of works meant to be read and not just "understood" -- that is, fiction, or high-quality non-fiction). Which means getting in the author's head; making their language your own (to the point of it sometimes actually does become the language you use, in ordinary speech and writing); getting to know their characters to the point where they have at least a partial feeling of tangible reality to them (like people you actually do know from the physical word); and their stomping grounds, to a point where they feel like places you've actually live in.
That's why it often takes me weeks, sometimes months (and multiple readings) to "read" a book. Very part-time, mind you -- I suppose I could make it go faster, if I made a "system" about it. Yeah, I suppose if I put my mind to it, I could get through a good-sized book in a week or so.
But then I would probably just end up "understanding" the book. Not reading it.
I hate reading books. It's the worst advice anyone can give me.
What kinds of books are you reading? I assure you, there's something out there for everyone.
I think your statement is a cop out. There's no better way to get a greater understanding of the world out thereb
Well I read a lot of articles, listens to a lot of podcasts and watch a lot of documentaries so I disagree. Books in general only has one point of view and doesn't reflect the real world.
Now this is talking about novels. If I'm reading to learn then you have to I must interact with the book, stop and think, go back and make connections, try something out etc.
This is where I like the statement in the book "How to read a book" about reading as fast as is necessary to complete the task you want to accomplish - fast for a quick read through maybe, then slower on another read through for making notes.
So I can read a novel a night, or a pop Sci book in a day, but I've been going through a math book for the last 2 months, and of course, I've been reading the first chapter of TAOCP for about 15 years (hence the math books now :)
I mean, I listen to 3 books on audible (pretty easy to do). Light entertaining books like Predictable Irrational, Toyota Kata, etc.
At the same time the whole month I'm working / doing exercises of a difficult math or programming book.
Therefore 4 books in a month an average of 1 a week.
Yeah!
> Fuck you drinking culture too.
Yeah!
> Fuck your open space floor plans
Yeah!
> Fuck the transparency trend, the post mortem and the 5 whys.
Yea---wait, what? Those other things are reasonable complaints, but wondering why things go wrong and trying to stop them from going wrong for the same reason tomorrow is, you know, good.
Postmortems in general are fantastic, though. "Here is what (not who, what) went wrong, here is the list of things that made it go wrong, and here are the steps we're taking to make sure that this can't happen again or will not be as bad when it happens again."
Although a funny essay, there's a great deal of truth here, and should make us ask some hard questions about how, why, and when the technology world and its culture should infiltrate the everyday.
;).
Seriously guys, just because we're making 10x the salary of a miner doesn't mean we're not also generating 100x the money for our employers without being allowed to take part in decisions that effect our lives.
[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=mine+sallaries&oq=mine+salla...
> And what the fuck all those parties after raising money. Don’t you get it? You just dug your grave a little bit deeper. You should celebrate any day that you don’t have to sell off another part of your company.
Yes, but not much.
Every single one of these "benefits" are very well thought out and calculated shams meant to deceive and manipulate impressionable kids into working insane hours for less than a realistic living wage. That's the whole point.
It's just like that circus in the Pinocchio movie.
Sure, you're not churning through War & Peace every week, but for regular books, it's really not that hard.
As someone whose greatest pleasure is a day off with a good book, it's hard to balance reading with all the grownup responsibilities we have, and as a leisure item, it's usually the first thing cut from a busy day's schedule. Reading a book a week isn't as much about the number, but by gamifying the outcome, you prioritize it above things you might otherwise not.
And from me: also fuck your third extreme, of eating fucking hipster fruit salads all day every day, because everything has to be healthy and natural and organic and stuff. And fuck the way you force it on the industry events, so that I can't get a goddamn pizza on a programming conference because everything now has a catering company providing various kinds of weird-ass vegetarian food. I can eat healthy at home; I come to industry events for the fucking pizza.
There, I said it. I feel a little bit better.
--
As for the rest of the essay, it's a little heavy on the expletive side, but pretty much spot-on if you look at the media side of things. I'd say things aren't so bad in individual startups, but the overall culture - the blogosphere, the professional publications, etc. all feel like encouraging and glorifying this kind of nonsense.
That's an odd reason to attend an event/conference.
Really? In most realms outside IT, that's the food you buy when you consider the people eating it not worthy of actual catering. I can understand wanting pizza if the alternative is salad and water, but still.
On the other hand, I last read a book in a week last week. It was a novel, not very long or very complex; but it was a book and it took less than a week.
Now UI stuff, that's where the real fun is!! ;-)
> But more than all, start-up world, fuck you for making me one of you.
I'm on your lawn, aren't I?
I should get off, shouldn't I...
Doesn't say anything for people against things that legitimately suck though.
:(
I JUST WANTED TO GO INTO SPAACE!
Cookie for anybody who gets that semi-obscure reference.
What the hell are you even talking about? Can't read one book a week?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgL_5QcZCMo
I was hearing Ed Norton say "fuck you!" as I read this.
Living in the bay area and working for a startup it's easy to relate and it's funny, i'll five the author that.
After the second paragraph it starts getting pretty old though...
Startup or not, I wouldn't hire that guy.
So he can continue wasting CPU cycles out of pure ignorance ;)
it's one of the automatic deals and has presets and --
i don't even eat doritos
Now the rest of the complaints are... well at least reasonable to rant about (well, the technical ones are kinda crap, but culture ones are apt).
But this? This is just silly.
Reading a single book shouldn't take someone a week. A good sized book can be read in weekend afternoon if you're really into it. But 3 days of occasional reading should get most writing that isn't incredibly dry polished off.
All that complaint is is the author saying "I don't want to, and I won't make the time to."
It just seems like they wish everyone was the same so they wouldn't be compared to the tons of people who've found success in the 'startup world'.
2/10, barely entertaining.
Fuck you HN, and your overly critical and serious comments complaining about how the article isn't new, isn't cool, isn't specific enough.
Fuck you HN for feeling the need to comment just to get your voice out there, just to put something down, just so you can add your snide remark at the end to prove your own intelligence to your peers.
And fuck me, for doing all of the above in pointing that out.