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Comment by lucidone | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised by the amount of salt (for lack of a better word in my vocabulary) in the comments. I've worked at a Canadian start up. It was not a unicorn, but you were expected to work long hours, be a "10xer", always be responsive, and put in hours on the weekend. Those expectations were never made explicit, but the company had a lot of churn for those who didn't "fit the culture" or acquiesce to the cult of personality.

I enjoyed the article - is this too strong a look in the mirror for most folks? My ideal job now is one where I can live in the bush, have boring but steady work, and otherwise not care about programming after 5pm and feel OK with myself for it.

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I enjoyed the article; I find the description entirely plausible and totally depressing. It definitely reminds me of Dan Lyons' book "Disrupted", which was also perfectly believable.

I've been around since Bubble 1.0; I started working in San Francisco in 1997. The thing I find horrifying about this article is the way Vision Critical apparently takes the worst aspects of startups and amplifies them, while taking the best aspects and perverting them.

As example, I was an early Agile person; I went to the main US Agile conferences 2001 to 2008 or so. The whole point of things like sprints and standups was to control schedule pressure and keep our work lives sane. The point of agility was not to increase risk and fear, but to make it safe to take risks so that we could be both bold and serene. If you had focused on "maximizing productivity", you would have received stern talkings-to about "outcome, not output." The point was not to put on a show of working hard; it was to radically increase effectiveness.

The sales-bro culture of competition and aggression is also nightmarish to me. It's inevitably short-sighted. I'm sure it works to generate rapid growth, but at what cost to the people and the long-term prospects of the company? It's a sign to me that they definitely aren't changing the world, but instead are likely pushing a mediocre-or-worse product on the world. As if that's new.

For what it's worth, I have the impression that this sort of awfulness is is more common in tech startups that aren't in SF/SV. I take it as classic cargo culting: instead of adopting the important parts, they adopt the visible parts. So maybe some of the saltiness here is just where people are working.

> classic cargo culting: instead of adopting the important parts, they adopt the visible parts.

This is the most succinct description of cargo cutting I have come across. Thanks, will use it :)

I will think of this every time I see a getter/setter pair on a class. The illusion of modularity and encapsulation with net negative in code quality.

Let's not forget about one Interface for one Class, because that adds flexibility in the future :)

I never understood this objection. The interface adds flexibility in the present - it allows other classes to depend on an abstraction instead of a concrete class. The future is absolutely irrelevant here, since YAGNI.

> it allows other classes to depend on an abstraction instead of a concrete class.

... which has exactly zero concrete advantages if there's only one implementation of the class.

A good programmer plans ahead.

Edit: of course it is up to individual judgement on a case by case basis, and there are instances were it is obvious that no other concrete implementation of an interface will be required. But otherwise, writing an interface is good practice because it helps safeguard against time consuming future refactoring.

This is exactly what YAGNI is meant to counter: the constant tendency of programmers to add speculative extension capabilities that are never used. These add complexity and cognitive overhead. It's a net loss.

Also, people pretend like refactoring is hard. My experience is that refactoring is only hard on the ends of the spectrum, where someone has added all the wrong abstractions, or no abstractions at all. Of the two, I'd prefer the latter, but obviously anything in the middle is usually better.

> A good programmer plans ahead

The comment above said the opposite, that the future was irrelevant.

These days there are tools that can help in a lot of languages; it's not a time consuming operation to press the Resharper "extract into abstract interface" button.

No. I get why you think this way, as I also used to. Good programmers may think ahead, but they don't build ahead.

Show me a guy who says YAGNI and I’ll show you a guy who has coded their way into a corner that the only way out is a total rewrite. Why do you think webdevs throw everything away every couple of years?

>Why do you think webdevs throw everything away every couple of years?

Because their bosses tell them to and because it looks better on their resume, not because the code they have suddenly stops working.

Chances are you're not gonna need it. Chances are you don't even need most what you do have.

From what I've seen, web devs throw everything away every couple of years due to high technology volatility, high requirements volatility, management idiocy, and outright business failure. As well at lack of automated testing that is exacerbated by the many technologies that make that hard.

And in environments like that, YAGNI makes even more sense. Overbuilding now in hopes it will pay off later is never a great idea. But it can only ever pay off if you correctly predict your business and technological future accurately. When you guess wrong, it's just waste.

I can understand one or the other, and I can understand a setter that does some logic first, but to me, you might as well just make those members public if you're going to do both.

From outside San Francisco, it looks like SV is a giant circle jerk of these exact problems you're talking about. I'm actually much more likely to believe that a startup elsewhere in the US is focusing on the important things because they're less likely to be influenced by that culture.

From the outside, sure. From the inside, that's not my impression. And given that so many places are trying to follow their perception of what SV/SF is doing, it seems very plausible to me that they will pick up and amplify those visible traits.

I think the sales-bro culture is much more prevalent outside of SF. I can only speak for Chicago, but having interacted with a number of 'startup' companies here, there is an obvious lack of engineering talent and an abundance of sales people ready to hit the phones. The sales guys all come from massive companies and want to work at a startup, and are sold on a pseudo startup culture; for them, its a dream come true.

I agree. Interestingly as a sales recruiter, I've noticed that while the sales bro culture is well and alive in NYC / SF etc, a lot of the major aspects of it are especially magnified when you talk to candidates outside of the major tech markets.

The sales-bro culture is tightly coupled with the standard sales compensation model. You generally have to give salespeople large commissions, both because they expect it and because the best salespeople are too expensive to justify as a fixed cost. And it's only natural that people want a bell to ring and drinks to chug when they're regularly earning five-figure bonuses.

I doubt it's actually "natural". And if it is, that something is natural doesn't mean it's right. Tuberculosis comes to mind, for example.

Did the company also pay 10x the market rates?

Of course not, because they aren't really hiring 10x programmers (whatever that is), they are just hiring low self-esteem people, slap the 10xer label on them, strap them on the hamster wheel and work them to death.

It's a bit like the series "The Good Place" -- "heeeyyyy we only hire 10xers, you're a 10xer, aren't you proud? Right, now go prove you're a 10xer by working your butt off".

“My boss bet me I couldn’t work 100 hours this week and I proved him wrong!” is how I look at things like this. People actually brag about how exploited they are, it’s bizarre.

I may be a shitty person because of this.....but I exploit people like this sometimes, especially 'bros'. This works well when surrounded by a group of people. All you gotta say is...man there is no way anyone would do this, you would have to be a bad ass....smarter people usually ignore it but there is often one dude seeking attention that will do something stupid because he wants to be that bad ass.

I found this to be a really eye opening article: https://hbr.org/2018/02/if-youre-so-successful-why-are-you-s... on what the author calls "insecure overachievers".

Working for a big company/megacorp without valuable good stock options/bonuses on weekends and off-hours is dumb and abusive.

On the other hand these startups are voluntary organizations. You choose to work there or not. I don't see anything wrong with a company deciding on a culture/work enviornment which attracts people who are very dedicated to the company (and hope to be rewarded in the long term as such) and are willing to sacrifice personal time more than typically expected at a usual company.

Some people love working and solving hard problems (and having tens/hundreds of thousands of people use their software) more than going to restaurants or night clubs or having family - at that point in their lives.

It's one thing to work obsessively and to the detriment of your health. But that doesn't mean a small team of "10xers" is necessarily a toxic/abusive arrangement that people are forced to engage with.

There will always be plenty of 9-5, no nighttime/weekend type jobs for software developers. You just won't find them as often at high-growth/high-risk+high-reward type startups.

That said, not all high risk/reward agencies require an obsessive/super hard worker type either. But that type of commitment isn't necessarily a bad thing either (unless they do it to the point of hurting their own health, which hurts the intellectual/physical ability and ultimately their contribution to the company).

I know for a fact it's possible to put above average commitment into a company, while still being entirely health. But it's certainly not for everyone, nor should it be. That also doesn't mean you should feel bad for getting fired or pushed out of such a company because it's not for you.

"it's possible to put above average commitment into a company, while still being entirely health. "

Healthy or not, if the employee does not get above average renumeration for their above average efforts they are being ripped off. That's what the financial pathology here is - if everyone is working with an above average output, but thei pay is average, from the point of view of the company the cost of labour for above average output is less than the market rate, and it's harder to get fair compensation.

I don't think there is anything wrong in working ones ass off, but if the worker is just an employee they should make sure their compensation is fair, versus the market rate.

People often imagine that they will get a fair compensation for their work, while generally actually they get only the compensation which they ask for.

That's why this 'work hard party hard' culture can be detrimental IMO - it easily blinds people to the financial realities of their situation.

That's not to say that professional 10x operations would not exist where labour is rewarded faiy, but that the employee must be aware of what the unspoken gameplan actually is. Is it cultish razzle dazzle to get cheap labour or actual 'entrepreneurial spec ops' type activity.

I don't see anything wrong with a company deciding on a culture/work enviornment which attracts people who are very dedicated to the company (and hope to be rewarded in the long term as such)

That’s OK in theory but in practice it’s almost always a bait-and-switch relying on the marks not knowing the difference between preferred and common stock, or what dilution is.

Easy test: do they say “10,000” shares but don’t tell you how many shares there are?

Or pitching Series A stock to prospective employees by pointing to IPO valuations of a select group of successful startups with similar products, without mentioning that those startups experienced 4-5x dilution from Series A to IPO...

> On the other hand these startups are voluntary organizations. You choose to work there or not.

In the absence of a basic income guarantee, the decision to take a job is a long way from truly voluntary. As long as people are obliged to take jobs, these exploitative jobs have to be illegal (in the same way that e.g. conventionally unsafe working conditions are illegal, even if the employee might "voluntarily" agree to them).

> On the other hand these startups are voluntary organizations. You choose to work there or not.

I think this sounds good in theory and is very shaky in practice.

For example, look at indentured servitude [1], where people can sell themselves into time-limited slavery. Once common, it has been banned. You will find people suggesting we bring it back while waving the banner of "freedom".

It's especially erroneous here. This whole article is about how he thought he was getting into one thing based on the hype, but that the reality was deeply different. He talks about it as cult-like, cults being organizations that take advantage of flaws in human cognition to manipulate people.

If free choice is to mean anything, it must be a choice that was honestly informed and unmanipulated. To use it as an excuse in a situation like this is just victim-blaming.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servitude

He talks about it as "cult-like" because they had standup meetings and used industry-standard acronyms. It certainly does feel weird to transfer into a new industry where there's a huge set of conventional wisdom you don't know, but that's not exactly manipulative.

Whether or not those are industry standard, they can be used in cult-like ways. E.g., I love stand-ups myself and have promoted them vigorously. But as with many Agile terms, a lot of the use I see and hear about is definitely cargo-culted: ritualistic, dogmatic, and not very effective compared with people who use them as tools to improve their work.

Here in particular he makes clear it's a veneer: "Six months in, I started to see through the acronyms and the carefully maintained optimism of my teammates. For all the talk of agility and disruption and 10X, there was a deep fear of fucking up."

Real cults regularly use reasonable-sounding religious jargon and performative optimism to paper over deep flaws. So I think he correctly describes this as cultish. And that's before we even get into the other cult-ish signs. You can do your own scoring here: http://www.neopagan.net/ABCDEF.html

indentured servitude may be banned, but similar dynamics still exist today. in the abstract, the college loan system in the US is not so different: you receive something valuable upfront (an education) and then you have to pay it back before you are really free to enjoy the fruits of your labor. while on the one hand you are not bound to a particular employer, the length of "servitude" is not set at the beginning and is likely to be much longer if you don't land a high-paying job.

I am personally opposed to the student loan system, but I don't think it's particularly akin to indentured servitude. The latter means not just one employer, but one owner who commands 100% of your time, feeds and houses you, controls where you live, can sell you at any time to somebody else, and a host of other things. Student loans just require you to pay back the loan out of your earnings. It's much more akin to a mortgage than slavery.

>>I think this sounds good in theory and is very shaky in practice.

If it were shaky, a court of law somewhere would find a comparable employment arrangement fraudulent and ultimately non-voluntary.

Social activists appealing to the court of public opinion, where under-informed people can be swayed with appeals to emotion, to change how interactions are governed, instead of a court of law, where a jury of one's peers have the opportunity to deliberate on the evidence presented, reveals them as disingenuous.

You seem to be confusing the moral discussion we were having with some sort of legal question. Legality sometimes correlates with morality, but often diverges. As an example, slavery was legal.

I'm questioning the truth of your statement. A court of law is a highly effective tool for ascertaining the truth of an argument, and the laws as set up will invalidate a contract that finds truthful the argument that it is non-voluntary. Yet no such working arrangements have been nullified on the basis that a court found them non-voluntary.

If a position has never been corroborated by court rulings, despite incentives existing to argue that position, then it's almost certainly not factually sound.

This is true only if the law interpreted by the court has a definition of "voluntary" that is 100% congruent with what other people mean. Given that even today people mean different things by that, your point makes no sense. And as I said, it's manifestly untrue that historical laws forbid contracts that match any modern definition of voluntary.

The law interpreted by the court that governs contracts is common law, which is society's best approximation of the truth as it relates to justice, that has been arrived at through deliberations by trained legal experts and juries over hundreds of years.

If you're going to make outrageous claims of the courts using an alternate definition of "voluntary", that is inconsistent with the correct or generally accepted definition, you need to provide evidence of that, and no, your own sweeping generalizations about a vast array of complex interactions is not evidence of anything except your own opinion.

Given that you are a frequent and tendentious commenter on my posts here, I do not in fact need to provide that. If you need that for your own purposes, you can ask nicely. But I am comfortable with the fact that you will not like whatever I have to say, and that there's no point in explaining more than one or two replies' worth.

All I do is 9-5. I get recruiters reaching out all the time about some bs start up in the city. One company tried to excite by saying they have happy hour DAILY where they drink vodka/beer because their customer sells alcohol. IMO that is fking crazy, my uncle died to alcoholism at 48 and I know others that struggle with addiction. I don't want to be around alcohol and I can only imagine the culture at that company.

Another time I interviewed at a company that I found cool and I was interested in their product. I asked, "How is work life balance here" and they answered "we have many projects in the pipeline". I told them their salary was too low. I left and my recruiter called me upset that I changed my salary expectations during the interview.

Some companies are shitty.

> I enjoyed the article - is this too strong a look in the mirror for most folks?

I enjoyed the article but I do think it's very wrong as a general claim. I like my job (is that so wrong?) and don't want to see it smeared by association with two badly-behaved companies that happen to be in the same broad category.

Plenty of startups won't expect you to work after 5pm - I never did, across several companies. Plenty of staid non-tech companies expect unreasonable hours.

There is a thread of a story in the article that is interesting but leaves a lot of 'what if?' questions - could this author have found something that fit between the bro-culture-10x sales targets and a magazine editor-change-isnt-always-good?

How come when he interviewed at a dozen more start ups at the end of the story, he didn't find himself in an interview where he could discuss the 10x-start-up culture downfalls?

Or maybe that middle road is extremely rare.

> could this author have found something that fit between the bro-culture-10x sales targets and a magazine editor-change-isnt-always-good?

Maybe they didn’t want to? They tried a few tech startups and didn’t like the experience; it seems natural to then say “I think I’ll do something else instead”.

For me, it's a frustration with the writer and people like him because they project their problems onto everyone else. Not everyone agrees with what your ideal job is, why are you making sweeping statements about how bad the company is, when in reality there are plenty of people who do enjoy this "10xer" culture?

It's classic, "I know more than you" mentality, where the author believes the people who buy into the culture are being duped, and he's the only one who can see clearly.

I'm so sick of being told to be less optimistic and positive about the company I work for, because my optimism is just me subscribing to the "cult". It reeks of that classic teenage "it's cool to hate/dislike/criticize stuff" attitude that I'd expect my colleagues to have grown out of by now.

Keep drinking the KoolAid and you'll never be thirsty for common sense again.

> I enjoyed the article - is this too strong a look in the mirror for most folks? My ideal job now is one where I can live in the bush, have boring but steady work, and otherwise not care about programming after 5pm and feel OK with myself for it.

Would love to find such a job, but sadly they don't seem to exist. It's either startups like described in the article, or major companies cheating the system and building startups within so they can hire contractors instead of employees and pay start-up rates. Every company in Toronto does it, even the large ones (hello banks, telcos)

I can only speak for Germany but there are tons of such jobs here. Americans regularly mock German IT wages but I can go home around 4pm consistently without anybody looking at me weirdly. I might not have a snooker table or free soft drinks in the office but I don't need to live there because my free time is actually my free time.

In Canada now, but it isn't much better. As the article says, we get the worst of both worlds: lower wages and shitty work conditions. Seriously considering Europe in the near future. Not sure every EU country is equal on that front though, the UK (although not technically EU anymore) seems to have the same unhealthy relationship to work as North America does.

> the UK (although not technically EU anymore) seems to have the same unhealthy relationship to work as North America does.

We're still in the EU and I've no idea why you think we are anything like the US in terms of overworking. I've never had a job that required me to work overtime really, sometimes I've stayed behind in my latest job as I got lost in the moment and lost track of time, but usually someone will ask me "Why are you still here?". My manager even told me not to work overtime, as it often hid problems more than anything else.

In fact I don't know anyone in Web Development in the UK that does work overtime. Maybe it's different in London though...

The UK has about the weakest implementation of EU labour laws available (in particular its implementation of the working time directive is terribly watered down). The legal situation is still a good bit more employee friendly than the US, though.

In my (startup) office people go home whenever they want. It's in Seattle but our SF office is similar. It's not impossible to find reasonable situations.

I think there is a well deserved backlash against startups for exploiting (tell me if there’s a better word that describes this) their employees, to the extent that this is acceptable behavior.

If companies instead genuinely tried to care for their employees, I think the sentiment would be very different.

Sounds like we've had similar Canadian startup experiences.

Expectations quickly rose to time on weekends, responsiveness to emails and requests at all hours of the day, and job duties ranging from DevOps and app development, to customer and client support for all issues after they let go of their customer support team.

I'm about ready for a bush somewhere.

To be fair, the original article was very salty as well.

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