Just some red flags. No big deal. Just ignore them
rachelbythebay.com
rachelbythebay.com
Their onboarding processes all sucked.
Please stop with the cute HR nonsense. I'm not a kid. I don't need your cute program. We don't need someone reading 10 pages from your legally unenforceable handbook from a projector. Keep your gift bag; the squeeze ball is stupid and you didn't pick the pen. (Have you ever given a gift?) If you're going to lean into the sterile corporate decor, then at least hand me a clipboard and let me fill out paperwork just like I'm at the doctor's office.
If it sounds salty; it's supposed to. I hope a C-level, or business owner, takes it to heart. I'm not trying to beat you down. This first-impression is important--I took 10 minutes on a Saturday at 2:50AM to let you know. I've seen your "all-hands", your quarterlies, your launches, and your totally-not-Christmas parties.
You already know how to do better.
The most egregious one was a startup that I worked for. There was a weekly all hands where anyone could ask anything either by raising their hand or by using a home made tool to ask questions. They would then get selected (we were 30 people, selection was not because we lacked time to answer questions) and the hardest questions would rarely get answered. People could also vote on which questions they wanted answered most. It was guaranteed to be anonymous but we were encouraged to sign our questions so that they could “ask clarifications.”
Questions that were not signed that were selected were always answered with “I wish I knew who asked that so I could answer them directly” from the cofounders.
But they didn’t really need that anyway. They knew exactly who asked what and who upvoted what because it was all in the database for the service.
I asked why we were not paying interns at all (it’s illegal and unfair) and signed my question. I was promptly shown the door and everyone was discouraged do good to ever use this tool to ask meaningful questions ever again.
So, yes, unfortunately the workplace is not a democracy. It’s a dictatorship in which you have no right to free speech. No one is interested in fixing anything because it puts their job or power in jeopardy. They know it sucks, but that’s why they pay you to bite your tongue and sit there 40h a week. But if you want to keep getting a salary regularly, stay quiet, do your own thing so that you meet the performance expectations, and suck it up or look for a new job while enjoying life outside work. But spoiler: your next job won’t be better, just different. Oh, and sont say anything bad on the exit form/interview: it won’t change anything about the workplace you’re never working at again, but it will bite you in the ass through references and gossip.
Really, it’s lose lose to try and provide “constructive criticism” about the process or idiotic things that are in your manager or superiors hands.
If a company, manager, exec, or leader can't exercise that kind of humility, then quite frankly they don't deserve the position.
Google does this, but then changes only things that are not against its current politics.
This is the best opportunity you have to set your people up for success, bar none. Plus, many of the things your company should do to build a great onboarding experience can also be leveraged to make it easy to do things like "move people between teams", "expand into a new office", and "hire great people".
Done properly, this is cheap as hell.
I had one HR drone complain about developers being bad at logging time. We told her that the system sucked and made it to hard to correctly enter your hours. She the proceede to demo how easy it was by entering her hours for the week. Basically: HR stuff = 37 hours. She had no clue that the average developer had more tasks during one day, each requirering it’s code, that she had during a full month. HR, especially in large companies, are clueless about the actual work being done.
Personally I no longer participate in personality test. If one is required during the interview process I decline and leave. It always HR that require the test, never the people you’d actually work for.
For onboard: The people I’ve onboarded for different companies all get the first day to settle in, setup their computer, find the coffeemaker and just look around. Day two you get a real assignment, ideally something you can fix and have in production before four o’clock. After that it’s just progressively harder tasks until you can manage on your own.
I do this as well. I've had companies send me online personality tests with seriously invasive questions. With no explanations as to the purpose, no guarantees regarding data protection. Just a quick "fill this out to see if you're a match". I'm sure it's designed to carefully skirt around anything that's overtly illegal, but fuck that. They go on my shitlist.
The company I work for has grown from 3 (founders included!) to over 30 in the time I've been there. When you're tiny, and someone new joins, there's no need for formal onboarding, osmosis sort of does its thing. This worked reasonably well until we reached ~10 butts in seats. Unfortunately, this 10 people mark was also where pressure started to ramp up. More customers, tighter deadlines, bigger workloads, and a struggle to survive -- because at this point the first round of financing was spent, and we needed to prove our worth to future investors. Everyone was stressed and overworked. Basically, there was no time for onboarding. Which is stupid, because it's an activity that pays dividends in the sort-of-short term.
Once we reached the 30 people mark, we were able to breathe a little easier in regards to workload. We're still growing. Onboarding is starting to become a thing. Where things aren't automated, they're being documented. We at least try to make time for introductions. It's far from perfect. It needs to improve. But it's hard. And I should probably take a moment to apologize to hire ten through thirty for what must have been a shitty first few months for them.
For the most part, my employer has treated people pretty well. Workload has been high, but flexibility has always been high as well. Along with $$$. Working here has definitely given me an appreciation for the hard work it takes to get a company off the ground.
As someone trying to figure out how to turn my diploma into a job despite intense impostor syndrome, this tale is absolutely harrowing.
I left my old company for the same reasons. I didn't know who my boss was or who I should report to for months.
Everyone was clueless. You asked for help or directions by pinging some guy you didn't know on Slack and the best you'd get was "yeeeeeah I worked on this project long ago, I forgot, sorry, nice to meet you though wanna go grab a coffee sometime?"
Clients left hanging because somewhere in the sales process someone forgot about them in the pipeline. When some work actually got through nobody did anything for weeks until someone would promote himself to project manager out of good will (which you could do by putting your name in the project charter bullshit and on the Trello board of course) and assigned some teams (uiux, dev, qa ecc) to it. When you needed e.g. design files for something your best guess was to look in the Gdrive folder, find who has shared access, and ask them who worked on the design if by any chance they know something about it.
The result of this was the worst time to market I've seen. Like 2-3 year delays were the norm. I have no idea how companies like this manage to survive. They weren't doing that bad economically either (they won lots of government funding mostly)
Before I finally landed at a decent company, I used to have this concept of the "Dilbert coefficient." Basically, if there were too many Dilbert cartoons on display, it was a red flag, and if there were none, it was a potential red flag, because I thought it implied people might be afraid to put them up.
I'm happy to say office I'll be going back to when it's safe to do so has zero Dilbert cartoons, but several memes and semi-permanent pieces of whiteboard art.
In practice the first day or two doesn't matter that much, you're getting your laptop - meeting some people, signing into some accounts.
I don't think this is really that big of a deal in the scheme of things.
So yeah you would have been good. Probably worth keeping the lesson in mind though of if you're stuck between doing something the standard company way or listening to some grey beard saying "hey kid, do this instead", probably stick to the company way. It has built in training wheels the grey beard either just doesn't need or considers a hinderance.
That's the only real benefit of those onboarding few days. I usually roll my eyes through most of the high level presentations that are full of Koolaid, politically correctness or even straight up made up as you typically discover after a couple weeks/months.
The theory of specialization and collaboration increasing productivity is fine, but look at all of the time lost for this nonsense. Imagine paying the salaries of these disaffected employees as they Svejk their way through the workday.
Think of the overhead for the office space, medical and paid leave for all of these people. I also wonder about the value of those who are compliant and obedient. Not sure that those qualities go hand in hand with innovation and critical thinking.
Solo-entrepreneurship limits the kinds of problems you can solve, but the ones you do select can be low maintenance, passive income situations. After building up a portfolio like this, there is no need to build resumes, learn buzzwords or tolerate the nonsense described in this article. Your surplus of free time can be invested in creating more revenue streams.
I think there's a lot more in this post than you might get at first read. For example, a lot of people are interpreting it as bitter, and it seems to be, but it also communicates some level of unmet basic hopes for the new position. It seems to me like optimism carried her through this period, that only in retrospect were signs that it wasn't meant to be. Likewise, many people are missing the fact that this is a retrospective at all. Without knowing any further context, this story could have literally taken place at any point in her career, and I'm sure many developers on here have similar stories.
Regardless, would you say it's irrational or, to use some words from others: arrogant, techier-than-thou, entitled, autistic, to conclude in retrospect that there were early signs of the company and you not being a good fit? Seems pretty reasonable. It's implied and stated how she tends to react to the process she was tasked with.
I mean, I have little idea. I'm not claiming that the negative take is the right one, only that there is some oversight in the author here leading to this article.
I'm very sceptical about an HR on-boarding process, so-described, being a redflag for anyone. As she claims, it's an irrelevant/missable process anyway. The idea its some lens into the company, on this occasion, doesnt stack up.
However you interpret the motivation for writing, I dont buy the "redflag" one.
My sense is that this was something that subsequently stuck out to her, and maybe became a more significant pattern throughout her year at the company. It's what's not said that sort of brings a bit more significance to these particular things, because why else would these things stick out upon reflection?
I've had worse onboarding experiences, that upon getting fired, I looked back on and thought "Wow, maybe next time I'm handed a HP laptop and told that Macs are only for designers, I'll just walk out", because they were significant of events that would later cause me undue turmoil and stress that affected my performance.
But that doesn't matter if there is noone from the other side (manager, other team members), that help to bring the newcomers into the fold.
How come someone was just given an MBP and let loose on her first days without literal supervison?
There was no desk. Okay, great, how long does that take to solve? Just call someone and grab a chair and sit next to someone on the team.
This whole thing is a parable about the lack of sincere human interaction.
And as such I will defend to the death an employee's right to moan and bitch about working conditions.
I had a somewhat similar experience of being at a consultancy that is great for people right out of college.
Made me feel a trifle old and ready to get to a place that was more work-horse and less show-horse.
I hear you calling me.
And oh, the ringing gladness of your voice!
And on my career’s grave the mossy grass is green:
At the stand-up, do you behold me? Standing here,
Hearing your voice through all the corporate hell between.
It’s amazing how small a keyboard difference can throw you way off.
I had an Apple Magic Keyboard and could type on it high speed with high accuracy. I wanted a numeric keypad and bigger arrow keys so got an Apple Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad.
The latter is pretty much the former with extra space on the right for the keypad. The letters and punctuation keys are the same in size, location, and feel. If you are just banging out text or code, there should be virtually no difference between the two.
In reality, I could barely type on the keypad version. It took a couple days to get decent on it. Even after a couple weeks I was having trouble with punctuation, making coding slow.
I sent that bad boy back in under a week and settled on the MS Ergo Sculpt. It has a standard layout that works great for me, and I credit it with keeping me in the industry for the past 3 years, and, hopefully, far beyond.
Now when I see people hammering their crappy keyboards, my fingers hurt for them and I wonder why more people who need their hands to work don’t invest in protecting them, but I get it, because I held off buying my kinesis for years due to the cost...
The Kinesis would actually have been fine, if I could have figured out how to get the programming-related characters to map properly to my brain. Typing on it was such a WTF experience for me that I couldn't continue, and it turned me off even trying to reprogram it.
But, the Ergo Sculpt was just like "plug it in. Go." The only weirdness I've experienced with it is that some of them work fine with the Macbook Pro, and some of them don't. It seems to have to do with what model the USB transmitter is, but I don't have a big enough sample to know for sure. I was lucky the first one I bought just worked, because otherwise I probably would have sent it back and gotten a different one. I did have to do a return / swap on the second one I ordered (one for home, and one for the office). When either of them die, they will get replaced with something similar, if not the exact model.
I’m not sure what problems you had “barely typing letters on it”, because I personally got used the that part extremely quickly and found it comfortable.. but I agree that some of the characters are placed in rather unfamiliar place, however, you can remap them. Better yet, I use a foot pedal (the three pedal one, I use one pedal as shift, a second as Fn and still haven’t mapped the third to anything) and just mapped the symbols to foot oedal (fn) + home row keys for super easy typing (although over the years I got used to their default positions more and stopped using the Fn+home row mappings, I should revisit them)
I started using the (external) Apple keyboard but it really threw me off.
Got a regular sized keyboard to plug on the Mac, works fine for me (with the added bonus of real PgUp/PgDown and Home/End keys).
That goes both ways, of course. When I'm hiring I sometimes dimiss red flags because I think "they're just nervous, they're not really this dumb". But sometimes they are.
This looks like people from random other teams in the company. Not the team she was hired for. Totally doing her own thing because she had some connections.
Not taking responsibility, but stewing, playing the fake victim, then writing a self righteous blog post to complain, when you could have just asked and got a desk.
I'm not surprised your experience is not a great one, when you don't communicate then blame others for not knowing what you're missing, and have that entitled and privileged, "Bring me a desk," attitude.
Disagreeable people, however, often cannot really tell the difference.
If I witnessed your type of response (seemingly defensive) within the first hours/days of starting, I would begin to wonder what kind of change I could impress even if I did take the "approved channels". Ideally, we would pick up on all of this during interviews and go our own ways. It doesn't always work that way though. There is /something/ we have to offer each other.
You put up your defenses, I put up mine. And in a short time you're looking for a new hire, and I'm looking for a new place.
I've seen multiple posts by the author of this piece and I wouldn't want to work with that person. I've worked with people who have similar personalities, and it's just not worth it. You can find competent people who are easier to get along with.
John Hancock didn't sign "Concerned Former British Citizen"
Not the parent, not having a strong opinion on the author, but have felt similar about some people in the past. "Difficult to work with" is an issue, and I too prefer to avoid people that sort into that category. They'd have to be actually brilliant to make up for it, just being really, really good doesn't cut it.
Why? Because they add friction to things, and they poison the team's ability to get work done. Difficult people are not fun to work with, so everyone avoids them. And then they avoid using things the difficult person built because using it would mean you'd have to work with them if you run into issues, or want to improve it etc.
It's just much easier to find people that are easy to work with, and working with them is much more enjoyable. Even if they were not as good, my personal experience is that replacing one difficult person with two others is well worth it. A happy team is way more productive and makes up for it easily, so accepting someone that's difficult to work with is generally "not worth it" to me.
In Japan it was a duty of samurai to bring a sword to the service. For last 10 years I'm bringing my own keyboard and mouse to every new job.
In particular, Duo for 2 factor and LastPass, and the curl command to start downloading a bunch of stuff.
FWIW I thought it was pretty streamlined, better than what I'd had in the past.
It's such a great solution to make 2FA as seamless as possible.
> As for why I didn't recognize the CEO: I had just started, and it's not like I memorize names and faces of these people. Hello, stalker-ville or ass-kisser-ville, and I am neither.
That's just great. I'll just be over here, being a "stalker" and "ass kisser" because I want to know who I'm working for before I join a company. But that's just me, I'm sure I'm being overly cautious. It's not like a bunch of developers have joined horrible companies helmed by horrible people that have instilled a horrible corporate culture before because they didn't pay attention to that... Right?
I don't follow her blog enough to fill in the details, but if I understand correctly this is from a job she hated and left recently-ish due to how bad everything was [1]. So she's not putting up with it, but rather giving retrospectives on a bad couple of years.
- stuff sucks here, but I fight the good fight, and do the right thing even though others don't always
- I say the truth, publish it even, but people don't want to hear it. Sometimes people people are so unappreciative they actually say mean things to me. Sometimes they even put it in writing!
- I have enough clout I can ignore some of the normal procedures and policies for the betterment of all. Some people aren't appreciative of this. Some of those people are managers, even my manager. Those are all the bad people though.
- they try to force me to change, but screw them. This is obviously their problem. I'll stand by my principles by walking out and into some other high position at another company, where they appreciate when I call the management bozos...
After a few posts like that, it starts to to feel like maybe a big chunk of the problem might be her.
At this point, I really hope someone will come out and point out how there were all these positive posts I missed over the last few years. That's entirely possible. The HN selection filter (which is how I see these) might be biased towards a certain type of article of hers, and I might have missed some/most that made it here. I would rather rather be wrong in any of numerous ways than actually have her be as miserable and miserable to be around as she sounds at this point.
I don't really blog, but I occasionally write lyrics. All of them are bitter and critical, so over a the years I accumulated a collection of that. That's not because I'm a bitter person, it's because I only ever write lyrics to complain. When I'm happy, I sing and dance, I code or call friends, I do a million things and not ever write lyrics. Similar with forums: I vote to agree, I respond to disagree or correct or add a link.
Anyone who tried to judge me, as a person, by that and other output without even having met me, because things "start to feel" or "sound" a certain way (for everyone, in their mind), can come up with all sorts of "assessments", many of them mutually exclusive. It's a fine waste of time and that's all it is.
But I don't think the fallacious extrapolation of web output to the whole person is the sole cause here. After all, if someone's blog is full of things they installed and described their first steps with, without any follow-up posts about their in-depth, day-to-day usage of the thing, people wouldn't pile on to point out that this person "seems like" they constantly change stacks, without getting to know any of them. And if someone had a blog with just the crazy retro hacks they do, we wouldn't assume they don't have a phone or have never seen a modern game. And so on. But when someone writes a lot about negative work experiences, without mentioning the good ones, they must be a terrible person and think they're better than everyone else, naturally. Except it's not ever put that bluntly, e.g.
> it starts to to feel like maybe a big chunk of the problem might be her
1. starts to 2. feel like 3. maybe 4. a big chunk 5. might be
out of 71 chars in that quote, 40 belong to weasel words.
That and other comments lead me to suspect it might be the confidence and the chutzpah to talk back publically and not sugar coat things. If people can't be snarky on their own blog without people who never met them, and don't even know the company they describe, much less worked for it, telling everybody what kind of person the author might be... how about a union at least?
edit: this sums this thread up perfectly: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/05/23/nope/
> But still, thanks for hyperbole to try to make me look bad! You have no idea what went on there, and you think you just HAVE to insert yourself into it.
Meanwhile HN wonders how a BBQ grill could ask to be the default browser, and I can tell you exactly how: a bunch of people went along to get along, and/or conditioned themselves to consider any inane crap awesome and a great growth opportunity.
Are your lyrics all about real life situations? Do they include references to all your coworkers on a regular basis? Do you always publish them on a forum for a global audience?
They decide to publish these thoughts, so they will get judged on them. If you published all those lyrics, and they got linked to a forum on a regular basis, I think there's a good chance someone might call them out as overly bitter. Presumably, if you are putting them out for everyone to see, you're trying to get something out of that, so perhaps considering what your goal is is worthwhile.
If it's for personal catharsis, possibly to be shared with friends, a local text document, shared text document, or group message achieves that fine. Why would you publish them globally? Why would she publish these stories unless she hopes that will achieve something? I'm not sure if that's to achieve change at her place of employment (it sounds like they've definitely caused change a few times, for better or worse), or purely to warn/inform others, but freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom of consequence. Maybe she should consider the consequences when she writes about the "broken ones" that are the managers she's working with and for.
> After all, if someone's blog is full of things they installed and described their first steps with, without any follow-up posts about their in-depth, day-to-day usage of the thing, people wouldn't pile on to point out that this person "seems like" they constantly change stacks
If the person is constantly trying a new thing, complaining about how they can't get anywhere with it, describing how broken it is and how they would do it better, and then stopping using it, while plenty of other people fine ways to work with that stack without too much of a problem, then yes, I think there might be a bunch of notes how maybe part of the problem expressed has to do with the person in question.
> But when someone writes a lot about negative work experiences, without mentioning the good ones, they must be a terrible person and think they're better than everyone else, naturally. Except it's not ever put that bluntly, e.g.
I draw a clear distinction between explaining poor work experiences, which we've all had, and clearly blaming the people around you for those poor experiences and for not listening to you since you have all the answers to fix them. The former is looking for sympathy, which I'm happy to help with. The latter is also looking for vindication without evidence, which I'm much less willing to take part in.
> out of 71 chars in that quote, 40 belong to weasel words.
It's called opinion. I was clearly expressing how I interpret her writing. I try not to use definitive statements when expressing things which are not fact. Feel free to call them weasel words if you like. It would be hypocritical of me to be too upset about that, given I'm critiquing something publicly.
>> But still, thanks for hyperbole to try to make me look bad! You have no idea what went on there, and you think you just HAVE to insert yourself into it.
As long as she continues to publish accounts the claim to be based on real situations and real people and represents those people and institutions as negatively as she does, she can expect responses. Those responses are doing the same thing she is, in critiquing a situation they are exposed to. They assume things about the situations she explains just as she assumes things about people in them ("my manager wouldn't give a rat's ass what the results of it would be.")
If you don't want people publicly critiquing your personal experiences, don't publish them. That's how the world works.
Now, given that she's responded to some of my critiques specifically in that link, and you've kindly linked to it and referenced it, I'll respond to some of those here, as if addressing her:
> I had an opportunity to land and support them through the IPO. Then if it worked out, maybe it would be worth something some day. ... What would you do? You'd take the damn job. Of course you would.
I don't think I would, given some of your experiences. When I said maybe find a different class of company, I meant it. Whether that be a company not looking to IPO, or a company with a mission that makes the work worthwhile even if it's not as lucrative and/or interesting, maybe a work-life balance change is something that should be given more consideration. Maybe that means considering a non-profit, maybe that means considering a company whose goal isn't the normal startup to IPO trajectory with stock options (maybe it means avoiding those like the plague). For what it's worth, I've actually based most of work life around that, so I probably wouldn't have taken the offer myself, either. I have no plans to work in SH or the south bay unless forced to, I've avoided it so far.
> Point: (anything about not recognizing the CEO on my third day there) ... Now, consider that I was supposedly there to deal with technical problems.
Unless you were hired as a consultant, I think this is extremely short-sighted. You were hired to be part of an organization. It sounds like you weren't really interesting in being part of that organization, from the very beginning. Really, it's fine that you didn't recognize the CEO. I really only took offense that you portrayed anyone that would know who the CEO was as problematic, when there are many reasons you might want to know ahead of time. The ones I mentioned in the previous post (making sure you're not working for an obvious scumbag), or just making sure you know who is who so you what you're saying to which people. You might consider "being unfiltered" and "speaking truth to power" important aspects of your personality, but I consider not caring who you're talking to when you say things inconsiderate at best, and more likely, just being an asshole. We might just disagree on this.
> Point: "why post this for the world to see?" ... Catharsis, and probably more than a little cabin fever.
Well, if you're looking for benefit from posting it publicly, you have to deal with the downsides when they occur. To your credit, you do. That said, if you don't want actual critique, you can publish to a smaller audience, such as friends. It's your choice. Perhaps the public agreement you get and feelings that brings outweighs the disagreement and those feelings. In that case, by all means, continue on.
I get it, the author is trying to vent frustration for a personal choice that now regrets. Yet, the ranting also sounds like a thinly veilled attempt to smear the company's image to those in the know by resorting to petty criticism. That speaks more about the author than it does about the company, the CEO, the direct manager, or those who designed the onboarding process.
Did she ask for a non-terrible laptop? Was she rejected? The article doesn't mention this.
Did she _ask_ for a desk? If they're onboarding many people at once, there's always a chance something can get missed.
I think a lack of communication was the main problem here.
Regardless, if there's a problem, it's the company's fault. If you don't try to fix the problem, it's your fault. It may or may not have been her fault that she wasn't assigned a desk on day 1. But it was definitely her fault that she didn't have a desk on day 3.
IMHO navigating bureaucracies and getting institutional stuff like this fixed is a really important skill that software developers tend to be awful at. My first "job" out of high school was in the air force- so navigating institutional garbage and persuading ineffectual people to do their damn job is something I'm pretty good at. But now I look around at frustrated young devs who don't know how to navigate the bullshit, and it drives them bananas. This article is a prime example. There are basically three kinds of problems:
1. Problems you fix yourself. 2. Problems other people fix, but only once you complain (loudly enough) about them. 3. Problems that are never gonna get fixed, no matter what.
Developers tend to be really good at the first kind, absolutely terrible at the second, and fixate (to their detriment) on the third. If you can't fix it, don't stress about it. And don't stew about something you can fix with an email.
So from that point of view not having a desk for first few days I'd feel lost and like a visitor, not employee.
I have no experience working for tech giants and large shops (100+ people per location), so I may be blind to usual practices.
This whole company sounds like a sitcom.
If the author decided unilaterally to skip the onboarding process and appear unexpectedly and unannounced at somewhere she assumed would be her workspace then she wasn't there when she was supposed to start.
Would it also make any sense if the author whined about the company not providing her with a computer if she happened to also skip that part of the onboarding process?
They’re probably upvoted because their writing resonates with a lot of people.
2. Sexism can happen even when everybody cautiously avoid talking about the author's gender.
I'm summarizing your assertion. If it sounds silly and a stretch that's because it is silly and a stretch.
> 2. Sexism can happen
Yes, I entirely agree. Yet, you're also fabricating sexism out of thin air.
Just because this blog post was not unanimously and enthusiastically well received that does not mean gender was a factor. It might surprise you but women are regular people too, and as regular people go they can also occasionally say or do silly things.
Summarizing done well does noy change the meaning, you just interpretated things some way.
In fact it looks like you are replying to claims nobody but you are fabricating.
They want you to name a dog, just go ahead and name an effing dog! How hard is that? Unless they are asking you to wear a toga on day two just go ahead with what is clearly a process trying hard to please everyone and not complain about simple things?
The way I read it, HR gave a "test" where you're supposed to find employees (and their dogs) in some internal company directory, with a time limit. And stated that the "results" from this test would be shared with the participants' respective managers.
Silly games at work can be OK at times, but what is the point of this, really? I don't think it's "lame" to "complain" about; venting is good, and IMO calling out some of the bullshit with your name attached to it is gutsy, not "lame".
In the last onboarding I endured, I was only assigned a desk after I finished after the process ended. Considering how the author claims that she unilaterally decided to skip the onboarding process and instead to present herself unannounced to what she assumed might be her workspace then it's better to take the accusations with a grain of salt.
I have a potentially lethal dog allergy, so that's a room, a floor, an office I could not be in at all. Maybe I couldn't even take the job, so that the pets could have my spot in the company directory. I realize I have almost all the other privileges but this really doesn't make me feel welcome in a workplace, and I don't understand how pets in the office isn't considered an anti-inclusive practice.
I guess it doesn't matter now. Previously: https://twitter.com/FiloSottile/status/1116418872519929859
I'm also not sure how that would interact with an employee who requires a service dog as a disability accommodation. I've asked about this as a hypothetical before, but never really gotten a good answer.
Last time we asked HR/legal about it, they said the service dog had more clearly defined protections, while asking for dogs to be removed isn't considered "reasonable" since the dog is legally allowed to be there while accommodations only needed to be "best effort".
Start throwing in state law, and you lose me, because I don't know enough to say anything reasonably intelligent.
> Allergies and fear of dogs are not valid reasons for denying access or refusing service to people using service animals. When a person who is allergic to dog dander and a person who uses a service animal must spend time in the same room or facility, for example, in a school classroom or at a homeless shelter, they both should be accommodated by assigning them, if possible, to different locations within the room or different rooms in the facility.
So the ADA gives priority to dogs as well.
This is extremely complicated, and you can go down some pretty deep rabbit holes trying to understand it all. Believe me, I've tried. I'm starting to suspect that truly understanding how all these laws interact requires a JD and 2 years practicing employment law.
Generally, I wouldn't expect pet dogs to be appearing at a company that already has a severely allergic employee, provided that's known information. The other way around (new employee with a service dog vs already present and highly allergic employee), I would guess comes down to the "undue hardship" test. If both cannot be accommodated, it probably is not considered reasonable to fire the existing employee in favor of the new person and their dog. Unless, of course, it is, because the company believes the new person will provide more value for the company than retaining the old person would.
That essentially means that the ambiguity is decided by private companies, which I find distasteful, but I would not be surprised if that's how it actually works out.
I really hope that this whole dog at the office madness stops sooner than later. Hopefully WFH is going to resolve this.
The dog could sense that so he got you.
Every employee was surveyed for allergies. Before bringing dogs in you had to talk with reception and register the dog. Reception would check if there were any employees with allergies before allowing dogs in. The severity of the allergy would determine the proximity dogs could be to the person with the allergy.
A mild allergy that lead to a small stuffy nose and itchy eyes would just be cause to notify the owner of the dog and tell them to keep it out of that person's space as much as possible. I hadn't heard of a potentially lethal dog allergy while I was there, but I imagine that would be grounds for not allowing dogs into that particular building.
So I disagree that it's inherently anti-inclusive. I think it all comes down to how it's administered.
Is there one scenario, where the allergic persons don't have to modify their behaviour.
- If they're allergic, then find them a seating arrangement that works for them (assuming they don't already have a seating arrangement).
- If no such seating arrangement is possible (for example, if they need to sit with their team and the team is on a floor with a dog), then notify the dog owners that due to an allergy they will no longer be able to bring their dog in.
- If the dog owner really likes bringing their dog in, help relocate the dog owner to a different space.
Maybe that's fine?
Not every place has to be a fit for everyone.
It’s not fine. Allergies are disabilities under the ADA. If you don’t provide a safe workplace for people with severe or potentially fatal allergies then you’re in violation and open to a lawsuit.
Sounds like there’s a lot of room there for reasonable policy.
Do they fire that person so the allergic new hire can come to work? Do they alternate weeks and deep-clean the office during the weekends?
You can find extreme examples — such as an allergy to sunlight — and sometimes the accommodation for those examples may be different to “banning carpet from the office”.
EDIT: And I'm not trying to advocate for whatever group there is. It's just reality. You make software that is used by people, you need to make it accessible. You make books, you need to make them readable and so on and so on.
And you know what I noticed? I noticed that when people make stuff accessible with least common denominator in mind, that stuff becomes easier and more comfortable to use for me as well even though I don't have any issues.
Maybe it's fine to exclude people with other health conditions as well?
In my imagination, if one of them had had an allergy the others would have been fine with not bringing their dogs in. That's how teams work.
It's approximately how all exclusive practices self-perpetuate and lead to limited diversity (although I realize allergy diversity is not something with broad value).
Dog friendly is a selling point here in Australia for some people but it's still very rare. I personally didn't like dogs much until we got our own a few years ago, and he's great, but I'm still largely indifferent to other people's dogs. Most of them have very poor manners.
It's not going to kill me though, and it doesn't contaminate the environment for days, so it's manageable. My colleague that work most closely with me know and take care to wash their hands after touching a dog, my friends with dogs change into clean clothes before coming to my apartment, etc.
Why did you initially (in the top level comment) characterize your allergy as a "potentially lethal dog allergy"?
Was this some attempt at a gotcha like I would lie about my allergies on HN for some reason? :/
Try asking people not to drink coffee near you...
The reason I mention this is that nearly every post I read by this author, who seems unaccountably popular on HN, stinks of some tech-fetishist with poor communication skills who insists on doing everything by the most difficult and convoluted means possible. This is not the sort of attitude we should be idolizing in an entrepreneurial culture. I would love to be a fly on the wall in the HR meetings and hear the other side of the story, because I would certainly not want someone like this on my team, however gifted or experienced they are.
That crosses into personal attack and that is not ok on HN. Please don't do this sort of name-calling here.
(Edit: looks like you did it here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280952. Please make your substantive points without stooping to this.)
The C++ appointment software is a trivial fun side project. The point is that she had to quit her terrible job to even get into the right headspace to do anything useful on this trivial fun side project.
Besides, have you never written anything for a side project that scratches a personal itch that hadn’t already been done dozens of times in better ways?
I find her stories illuminating and well written. Sometimes we spend lots of time on things that we realize could have been done in much simpler ways. Sometimes we make mistakes that we later realize are super dumb. It happens to everyone who writes software for a living. I’m happy that Rachel writes about the messy stuff. We need more “from the trenches” stories like hers.
> unaccountably popular
...Hacker news?
Not a criticism, I find it all pretty entertaining.
They seem to be quite happy doing that project, so why do you care if that’s their thing?
I can't tell if this part is hyperbole. RHEL 7 isn't a resource hog and a server from 2015 is probably a blazing fast multicore Xeon. The machine itself is almost certainly capable.
> To get away from it, I'd have to migrate to another box. That meant picking out new hardware at the hosting company.
If a hosting company won't allow a customer to install a new OS on their dedicated server, it's a shitty hosting company, particularly when that OS first released the year before they started renting. From the list of things that had to happen, maybe this was about not having downtime, but firstly a single host is not enough for HA and secondly it would be easy to just get a VPS for a month to use as a temporary host while upgrading.
I think you are right that this is a person who insists on doing it the hard way. I wonder if maybe these blog posts are a way for the author to process events and vent frustrations, and not intended for HN readers to dissect, but I would expect her to use her custom diary software for that sort of thing instead.
In a startup you want to actively screen for candidates like this. Someone who idolizes technological "purity" above all else and looks down on business will never be happy at a startup that needs to get shit done quickly. It's a lose-lose situation. They'll eventually grow resentful and quit, or you'll have to manage them out. Better to avoid the whole thing in the first place, no matter how great a programmer they are otherwise.
But people like the author who have the opposite attitude are also invaluable. There are parts of your code base at an organization that need to work, where doing the expedient thing is doing the wrong thing. People who went told to don't worry about that just ship the damn thing, fight back so your entire organizations infrastructure doesn't fall down on itself.
It's more about finding the right person for the job.
Stuff like "name a dog in our org"?
- What do you know about the company already? - What is it that excites you about this role?
When discussing previous projects, after covering the technical side, I will ask specific questions about how their work impacted the bottom line or what difference it made to the business as a whole; not necessarily looking for something financially quantifiable but for something that indicates they understand how dev fits into the bigger picture.
For graduates, I will actually take an interest in their extracurriculars and side projects, these can reveal a lot about whether they have any commercial nous as well as technical chops.
I will generally come up with some hypothetical on-the-job situation where there may be some perceived conflict between business needs and the ideal developer scenario, asking them to walk through how they might go about resolving the situation, how they would communicate, what questions they would ask and of whom, all the while looking for answers that suggest a leaning towards teamwork, collaborative problem-solving that encompasses more than just lines of code, and hopefully some kind of rudimentary understanding of what drives a business.
Also, I will generally look for the Spolsky dyad of "smart" and "gets things done" [0]
[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...
There is a good chance that after a couple of years they will be as passionate about the CRM market is you are but 99% of the companies out there are not Google or somewhere people lust to work at.
This is also a good meta-question. Even after I write to a candidate to say that they will be asked this, you'd be surprised how many are unprepared. I remember one guy who told me, when I asked him, that he's interviewing at so many places that it's unreasonable to expect him to know any specifics about this company. I wondered if he thought it reasonable, given how many people I was interviewing, that I try to know anything specific about him. Unsurprisingly, that answer is the only thing I remember about him.
Lets face it though, it is not that hard to jot down some notes for each company that you can review in a couple minutes in the car before the interview.
And while it's easy to jot down notes and review them (which is what I, as an interviewer had to do), the fact that some people didn't even do that despite being told in advance that they should, told me something about them. I didn't ask them for a take-home exercise or anything too time-consuming, just to know what it is that we're doing.
Would have an answer about what makes you unusual and distinctive compared to tens of other possible employers?
The goal is to know if the candidate knows what we're doing and is interested in the subject. And remember, we're talking about a high skill, high pay job.
If you don't like a company, you have 3 options: 1. Try to change it, if that doesn't work -> quit without complaining. It is not your company 2. If you don't wanna change it 2.1 quit 2.2 accept how it is
You should not complain and complain and complain. You only make it worse for people who either like their jobs (for whatever reasons you can't see or understand) or they have, in comparision to you, no other choice.
I'm not perfect in this, i'm more the 'i complain and start changing things'.
Really shitty old git hosting solution, 6 weeks later it was replaced by me with gitlab.
Onboarding procedures might be shit, but you should be smart enough to handle situations like this. Do i care if i have a desk at the first week? No, i will just work less efficient and if the sitatuion doesn't change i either ask around and take care of it or i quit. And with quitting i don't mean rage quit i mean 'hey so yeah super sry about this but i have the feeling that we are not a good match.' quit.
Different people have different brains.
>As for why I didn't recognize the CEO: I had just started, and it's not like I memorize names and faces of these people. Hello, stalker-ville or ass-kisser-ville, and I am neither.
I currently work for a moderately sized company, and its unusual because the CEO actually knows who I am, and knows my name - but before this role that was not a thing I would expect.
Edit: by dress I mean the older sense of the word: The older sense survives in military dress ranks "align columns of troops."
We've gone so anti-corporate that we don't even know who the leadership is any more it's a rotten proposition that serves the worst of both worlds
Those who rely only on simple installers are the one classified as red-flags
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/213401/is-curl-...