Comment by throwaway10018 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway10018 | Hacker News Reader

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Throwaway account because duh. Note that I am not a current Glitch employee, but am well-connected to Glitch née Fog Creek.

Management was basically incredibly incompetent, for a long time, and were so unfair to employees at the company that they felt this was the only option. There is a Tweet stream a couple months ago from someone who left the company who highlighted the amazing degree to which they were unfairly reviewed and unfairly criticized, alongside how much work product they were expected to produce (which was unreasonable). I have enough corroboration to say that the tweet stream as written is fairly unbiased, and that their experience was common. My understanding is the employees felt backed into a corner.

I think unions can be very, very valuable, but I think needing one at a small company that took a series A round quite recently speaks more to management failure than anything else. I'm happy that they unionized, because it sounds like they needed to, but I am so fucking disappointed that it was necessary.

Thanks for the report, exactly what I was looking for!

This is something I wish had been in the article. Even something vague, like "Employees reported they were unhappy with management and the performance evaluation system. The union with CWA will work with management to blah blah blah".

Agree that it sounds like a management failure.

Thanks!

https://glitch.com/glimmer/post/the-year-in-glitches/ > But as we rapidly grew our team, we failed to commensurately grow the processes and infrastructure necessary to support everyone properly. The result has been a lot of needless stress and tension and frustration. On its own, this is a significant problem, but when we’ve talked a lot about wanting to build a company that does these things better, a failure here is twice as painful for the people on our team who are affected. As the person who most often talks publicly about the positive ambitions we have here at Glitch, I’m also the person ultimately responsible for the times we haven’t delivered on those promises.

Thanks for the context.

"Management was basically incredibly incompetent, for a long time, and were so unfair to employees at the company that they felt this was the only option"

Why not just quit and get a new role? I don't really understand how being unionized under terrible management is desirable.

Perhaps because the employees actually care about the company they work for and want to continue working there, but also want to feel like they're producing value. A company is more than its management.

I remember Fog Creek used to be a well liked company years back...

>Management was basically incredibly incompetent, for a long time

seems to be a correlation - back then like 10 years ago HN had various FG blogposts/articles appear on the front page relatively frequently while in recent years i don't remember any.

I mean, I don't know what Glitch's story is, but it was really easy for us to get posts on the front page of HN back in 2010; I wrote Kiln blog posts in particular practically for this audience at times. I appreciate my personal blog's not the same cachet, but it's definitely a lot harder to break that threshold these days.

That said, I have no idea if that's why Glitch has fewer articles or not. It could also be different culture; the FogBugz, Kiln, and Trello teams have all gone away. I don't think I even know anyone who works at Glitch these days. They may just emphasize blogging less.

Can you link to the tweet stream?

I knew people would ask and I'm trying to find it. I promise to edit this comment or post under it once I do.

EDIT: Medium, not Twitter; sorry. https://medium.com/@scientiffic/on-the-aftermath-of-quitting...

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