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Comment by jowiar | Hacker News Reader

I interviewed with a bank recently, and was blown away by the level of professionalism I experienced compared to everywhere else in tech I've been.

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).

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Reading these threads as an European tech worker is weird. Or maybe I've missed all the pogo-sticking companies. The most I've seen was some people wearing inoffensive t-shirts and jeans, and a couple of companies which had a foosball table in the break room.

VC Money is a helluva drug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWccN_uu0gY

Here I thought at first "well that looks relatively reasonable even though it's a big space." and then the go carts....

Same here. I was prepared to say "Okay, that's silly, but they still work", but the zip line was a tad too much. Why would you have that in your office?

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.

Yeah I caught that, too. Also had nothing against Scribd because I came onto them later and liked the platform. I wouldn't have guessed that's what the place was like. Though I'm not sure I'd personally like it. But I understand @jowiar's point a bit.

How familiar are you with the early history of Scribd?

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?

This culture is firmly entrenched in the West coast of the US, and possibly some East coast finance. I worked in the tech industry for decades in a large US city and only came across that type of culture once, and that company folded within a year.

It exists in Chicago, too.

American tech workers also make double to triple the total compensation...

Yes, I realize that. Not sure how it's relevant, but okay.

I've been in offices where the ping pong table was square in the middle of the open office, and games ran during the workday.

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.

I work in tech. The company I sell for is a big well established company that sells services to other big companies across many industries.

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.

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