Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnlmorg | Hacker News Reader

You have to bare in mind this appears to be an Indian site and a lot of companies in India have a very different culture to that of the Silicon Valley (or even London).

View on HN

A few years back I worked for a company who had a UK branch. The boss at the UK office was generally nice enough, but very strict about what was allowed at the office. We managed all IT from the Danish office, and would notice that a certain hours in-bound traffic would increase a lot.

When we look into why we figured out that it was a few guys, working insane hours, who where streaming Champions League while working. Technically not allowed at the UK office, but the decision from the Danish IT Manager: "Fuck it! If they're still at work they should at least be allowed to watch a game".

Wisel*!

This is mostly true for services companies (TCS, Infosys, etc). A lot of restrictions are there because clients demand it. It is borne out of fear of data breach. So these companies goes few steps ahead and impose blanket ban of lot of things e.g can't plug USB devices to company provided laptops, No permissions to install anything (except whitelisted software).

On the other hand, new age product companies/startups are similar to Silicon Valley.

This is correct. It's generally the big consultancy firms that are ... unfun workplaces.

I worked for Microsoft about 10 years back. Unfun workplace. I thought it would be so fun to work there. I fought and got through three interviews. The team seemed cool initially. By week three I knew I had made a mistake. These people seemed so stodgy, so incapable of having a bit of fun. So utterly by the book. They almost seemed unable to deviate from the script. There was a sense of fear in the air that took a month or two to sense. I swore then I'd never work for another massive IT company and left after 6 months. I now focus on non-profits and I couldn't be happier. I get to work on cool projects that I often come up with. If I think I can build or code something better than what we have, I'm given the green light to do a working prototype. What more could I ask for? Sure, the pay is lower. But I work 8 hours and go home. There are no laborious crunch days trying to get something out the door. No meticulous, nasty meetings where everyone is playing one-upmanship, or buzzword bingo with gems like "synergistic" or using stupid phrases like "we tuned x and boom goes the dynamite", no talk of cross-functional team spearheading, no sharing an office with people who won't stop farting despite the nasty looks and obvious can of Glade. Give me a task, a deadline, a budget, and get out of the way. I have rarely asked for a software license. I can do most things with FOSS/Linux. I may ask for a Raspberry Pi to prototype something or a slice of a VM for Ubuntu Server. These things cost almost nothing. I truly enjoy getting things done with minimal resources. It's fun working within contraints like RAM, hardware specs. I could see how embedded work would be fun in this regard.

With everything in life--it depends on the team you work with. I work for a Fortune 50 company and in my first role the team was a lot of fun. We had Slack and the memes were borderline for a work environment but it was a high trust team. I switched to a new department and I feel like I work for the federal government. It's like there's a fear around expressing any emotion. There are pros and cons to each situation.

I used to work for a startup and that culture was a lot of fun at first but the "blow investor money on catered lunches every day but you can't hire more engineers" mentality seemed very childish to me. I learned that I like the middle ground.

Never had that as an issue in India as well for me. No one has questioned what I do in my desk or my computer, even in some of the large consulting companies.

Some entrepreneurs running their own companies find the idea of even a minute of employee's time they are paying for being spent on anything other than their actual tasks infuriating.

I’d agree with them if I was selling minutes of my time. I’m selling my ability to use computers to create business outcomes.

I agree to you but they often think they are paying for an entire work day of focused working. As to me, I actually find the idea of 8 hours (or even 6) of uninterrupted (even if we don't count bathroom and lunch breaks) focused working absurd. It would require taking meth or enormous will effort. To me it seems all the time of pure focused work (unless it requires almost no mental processing) per day can only add up to 4 hours or so. IIRC there even is a scientific paper supporting this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com