Good read. The sooner that society comes to grips with the concept that sociopathic behavior in a t-shirt and jeans is exactly the same as sociopathic behavior in a Prada suit the better.
And second, what about this story reads you as sociopathic? Sure, there's alot of shuffling in this business, but how much worse is that than any other? Restaurants and bars close down all the time, and no one accuses restaurant and bar managers of being sociopaths.
Every single successful business has the problem of "we have this large amount of money in bonuses that we would like to distribute out to our employees and we want to figure out equitable way to do it". Invariably they end up having the rank and group the employees to do that.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-l...
Now, sure management science has advanced since then, and a lot of the ways that Microsoft implemented stack ranking at the beginning we’ve realized are counterproductive.
But that doesn’t really change the core principle that they end up ranking employees at some point in time
The shocker to me is that such a huge player in our industry applied it to a collaborative task like software development.
Additionally firing the bottom 10% is something that should happen naturally as you discover hiring mistakes. Of course just firing the bottom 10% when they are close to average performers is counter productive.
2.) Go read the comments on the article itself. It’s littered with antecdotes about training your own replacement, being fired before a stock vest, etc.
3.) I would argue that bars and restaurants are a different story all together. The article mentions being a contractor in charge of six-figure decisions which to me reads as a could treat people appropriately chooses not to.
Not saying it does; I'm just saying you should learn some more about suits.
> 2.) Go read the comments on the article itself. It’s littered with antecdotes about training your own replacement, being fired before a stock vest, etc.
I did. The major anecdotes are:
* layed off from a job with one month severance, three months healthcare, because the company realized it needed a different direction
* multiple difficulties with interviewing and attempting to find a new job
* another layoff when a company is acquired and his position is eliminated, where even the author says he considered his severence "more than fair"
* one experience as a contractor where his contract was cancelled with no severence
Sure, it's crappy to have all of those events happen to you, but other than the one contracting gig, I'd consider those layoffs extremely empathic and generous.
Does tech have problems? Sure. But in order for the criticism of it to be effective, we shouldn’t mix it in with general compliants about our current economic system.
Especially since you won't get severance.
My mental image of finance was "bros a'broing", but the reality of the experience was professionals who were fully attuned to the reality of dealing with billions of dollars, and no delusions about how a few lines of javascript will change the world.
Whereas when I went to Google, I was met with a mix of "you're changing the world, selling eyeballs to advertisers" and "It's so great, we get to dress like we're 12 and play like we're 12".
Or the long since pivoted startup I interviewed who was doing their best to break the internet through awful PDF readers while in the office, everyone was ziplining and pogo-sticking around. (I await the mod slap for speaking ill of a YC company).
Edit: They did a follow-up some years later (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v7v51le0lc) and somewhat surprisingly they were still pretty similar! I guess they really know how to balance themselves, since they do seem to be putting out a good product.
They were a darling of HN(YC financed the early rounds) here at first in the late 200Xs following the classic Youtube/Kim Dotcom growth strategy of allowing pretty much any content on Scribd.
The "any content is good content" strategy seemed to work and Scribd grew in popularity but profits remained elusive.
Then Scribd went all dark-patterns on users locking content behind paywalls. This was content that users had submitted themselves.
Finally the inevitable pivot to ebook subscription services happened.
Scribd seems somewhat respectable now although how profitable?
I've heard of other offices where they didn't have the pingpong table, so they just threw the ping pong balls at each other all day.
This is in the midwest, at lower-tier tech companies that you probably haven't heard of but you probably have used some of their work.
The closes we get to "bros a 'boring" is the occasional free beer on a Friday.
Outside of SV it seems like that culture is a minority.