Direct link
https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/rkk9qg/im_a_new_s...
for everyone else having a hard time figuring out how to find the actual comment.
Really worth a read and absolutely puts OPs story into perspective.
https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/rkk9qg/im_a_new_s...
for everyone else having a hard time figuring out how to find the actual comment.
Really worth a read and absolutely puts OPs story into perspective.
Probably someone will cross link for you (I thought about doing that when I saw the headline). If not, a sock puppet can point out the link, and the book, again.
TBH these two stories have the exaggerated perfection that characterizes fake stories. And the fact that they arrived so close together makes me very suspicious.
Now I'd suggest to just read the state of Devops reports by Google, they are excellent.
It blows my mind that someone could write a novel about work and NOT have it be a satire or dark comedy. This book is used in project management courses, by the way.
Great bosses like this exist
This is honestly basic management technique. It is called the "Auntie/Uncle" problem.
That being said my current employer is exactly like the one mentioned by OP here. You basically need to build credibility internally to deliver.
While I can't prove a negative, this story is highly plausible in Europe where legal/HR will be on your ass and even fire the CEO if it turns out they had knowledge.
In 2020 I was in a similar situation with an IoT "startup" (70 people) in Austria where some of the original founding team worked their employees in a brutal manner (made fun of the engineering providers that invented the product in a "low-cost" neighboring country, and being total f-heads all around).
My superior even made fun of one intern for "stuttering" in front of the whole team, scolding him for "sloppy thinking" and being "too slow in his head" (fact was he wasn't used to speaking English, was a bit insecure because he was still very young). People regularly cried.
That was just the internal stuff. In my first weekend in this firm I was given new tasks on Friday 16:00 to finish until Monday 08:00 (tasks so complex that it would normally take a whole week to finish and required multiple rounds of input). I had no free weekend in my first month and 12/hrs per day was the norm. In my first client meeting 2 days into the job I learned that my company lost all their data 3 months before ... genuinely curious I started probing the client to get a better picture of how we were perceived. The client talked himself into such a rage that he ended up screaming at me (and a day later apologizing for doing so).
2 weeks after I joined, I wrote a long letter to HR with a list of all the communication that happened, e.g. who said what to me when, and even smtp headers of communication received in an appendix. After the CEO asked me to lie on a revenue forecast that served as input to the business plan (and where I was told "to make up numbers" !!) I looped in the Holding company into my ongoing conversation with HR (the holding was where my employer got all their funding and who would be the audience for that pitch in the presentation/Excel I was asked to make).
It was the first time that I ended up (literally) screaming with my own superior in a meeting for abusing his own team, and spelling out immediately why his behavior was abuse. 2/3 of my team left that very month since they were fed up and I like to think it was me that spelled out for everyone what they already knew but hadn't ever thought to verbalize themselves.
I also handed in my resignation a week afterwards since it looked like some people would be able to get away with it. The Holding Company brought in an external consulting / auditing team and fired the CEO and 2 others. Alas ... not for mistreating or overworking employees but for lying on the business plan. This October (2 quarters later) the same company filed for bankruptcy.
I don't know if I would be able to bring down an equally rotten place in a different jurisdiction. YMMV sadly and I am sure many people try in other places but all they ever achieve is that those responsible get a "stern warning". But I totally believe the linked article to be plausible
EDIT: rediability
Business plan can be easily marked a “mistake out of sloppiness” if you don’t want to fire people.
Abuse is bad for the image and evidence collection takes ages (and hence is expensive).
Lying to the board works much better to get rid of people fast. I would bet you weren’t the first startup to do a bisserl of Zahlen frisieren.
Its such a strange, depressing way to approach content imo. Did the story happen? Maybe, maybe not, we can’t know for sure. Do I want to believe it happened? Yes. Are there valuable aspects in the story that I can learn from and potentially use in future? Yes, absolutely. Is there any harm in me choosing to believe his anecdote is real and it’s actually made up? No, I don’t think so.
There’s actually a whole subreddit on this topic https://reddit.com/r/nothingeverhappens
Also, don’t get me wrong — there is plenty of fake content, or implausible content, that is worthy of skepticism because it has a nefarious agenda, fosters misinformation, etc. But sometimes people just need to chill out.
I'm not sure if I believe this, and I certainly don't think it has much to do with the existence of r/thathappened (which does indeed seem much more rooted in people's fear of having been a sucker). But it's interesting to think that the basic intuition of "true stories are more common than fake ones" might be misleading with respect to Reddit in particular, because of the specifics of how Reddit works.
(The point about it being harmless is unpersuasive to me; I want to believe that a given story is true if and only if it is actually true.)