In the end he gets bored with his actual work and lets himself be hijacked by some line function to develop internal tools for them, outside of the purview of any manager. Unsurprisingly he ends up an organizational orphan. Which means no one goes to bat for him to squeeze in several weeks of remote work, which sounds like a pretty outlandish demand to my ears. To think that the fact that some random person once 'approved' it makes any difference just goes to show the naïvety. Obviously he didn't get it in writing from someone able to make that decision, and that's the only thing that matters.
In what world is it a good idea for an engineering director to take a deep interest in technical details of a project? Suppose that the director was right and author was wrong in ~all of their disagreements, but just that the author was simply telling the truth about two things: the director spending two weeks doing design mockups, and intervening to specify the type of a database column. This makes the director somebody who is (a) not doing their actual job, and (b) probably nightmarish to work for no matter whether you are a "low performer" or a superstar.
You cannot be an effective manager and simultaneously maintain enough engineering context to make good technical decisions. If you want to be involved in detailed technical design, you need to switch your career track back to IC. And if you are running a company and you want either good technical decisions or high morale among your engineers, you can't tolerate managers playing at being engineers instead of doing their actual jobs. (With something like a manager maintaining a small low-priority internal tool, or doing a rotation onto an engineering team for a week to refresh their intuitive handle on the state of the codebase & tooling but no expectation of being a net-positive contributor, being the exceptions that prove the rule.)
That being said, in what world does the Eng director look good? Insisting on using SMALLINT (and thus necessitating a change away from SQLite in development) is just terrible, and an Eng director who is halfway competent should realize that such a requirement is patently ridiculous, or at the very least know not to stick their neck out if they know so little about the subject at hand. I'd be furious if my Director of Engineering did stuff like that.
The guy was perfectly willing to stay for the long-haul.
> weeks of remote work without formal agreement
Taking people at their word is "entitled"?
> a quick cash out over adding value to the company
The guy was faithfully performing all the duties assigned to him. Is he drinking the company kool-aid and devoting his life to his company? Thankfully no. Your employer is not your family, nor is it a cult.
Is the author naive? Maybe. Opinionated? Definitely but with good reason - the director was later fired, how often does that happen. Entitled? I see nothing of the sort.
If this is the intention of any of my candidates coming in and they call this "real commitment" to work for my company they would not pass the phone interview. Seriously?
There is a very easy way to filter out candidates who want to leave in 1-2 years. Structure your equity vesting so that there's minimal vesting for the first 2-3 years, with a sizable severance package to protect against involuntary termination. I don't understand why you would give someone 30% equity after 2 years, if you're then going to begrudge them leaving.
That said, the short stories might have worked in an unreliable-narrator way.
To me, there was something vaguely Dostoevskyan about this piece. There's the dithering nature of the conversations described (never addressing the point, always going in circles), the incessant references to people by their acts of intrigue and rank (is the "associate director" today's "titular councilor"?), the general absence of content describing the "real" work the characters are nominally paid for, except as an accessory to some greater plot point that circles back into the previous two themes.
I guess that medium-to-large-sizd tech orgs are good on the path towards becoming a labyrinthine, 19th Century, Russian bureaucracy! I hope that some comparable literature emerges from such fertile soil .
Things that happen in Silicon Valley and also the Soviet Union: https://twitter.com/atroyn/status/1014974099930714115
He joined the company despite being aware of many red flags, just because he hoped to endure the shit until he could cash out. These are considerations, but not really what I'd call "serious" in a professional context.
I'm pretty sure there may have been lots of broken pieces at Snap (the stuff about condos as offices can't just be made up, and is insane), but what I can read between the lines is that he brought a few new ones along himself.
The remote work thing is something you either get signed by the company, or is a personal agreement with another person (and nobody else is bound by it). It's fine to be naive and make that mistake at the time, but to then insist on it in a post like this? That's not naivete, that's a massive disconnect, and you can expect other parts of his story to be similarly out of sync with reality, either by omission or by distortion.
It's really not hard to imagine that a gentlemant's agreement is not upheld when said gentleman is not around to push your agenda anymore.