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Comment by benzible | Hacker News Reader

A straightforward recounting of a negative experience doesn't constitute "lashing out" and I don't see any hyperbolic language or other signs that he's exaggerating. Also - Facebook's offer allowed him to get Google from their original $450M offer to the $1.15B he ultimately accepted. I doubt he's upset over this.

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Sadly, in contemporary corporate culture, the truth is considered rude if it's at all negative. You're supposed to imply it, and if that fails you can speak it but it must be sugar-coated heavily to avoid people taking personal offense at it.

And to be clear I'm not talking about rudely blunt truth (which can indeed be pretty rude), I'm simply talking about inconvenient facts that people don't want to hear and try not to acknowledge. Things like "the Facebook engineers belittled our product" should instead become "there were personal chemistry challenges between us and the Facebook engineers." Instead of "the Facebook engineers were young" it should be "we had a culture mismatch" or something like that.

Isn't that mostly corporate US and Asia? I love this type of directness; no sugarcoating inconvenient facts. If someone's ego gets damage because of that, that sounds more like a them problem, in my eyes. Then again I am Dutch so we live and breathe directness...

I think it's primarily West Coast US, and it's the culture of the area to be passive aggressive versus direct. It's unfortunately had a huge impact on current tech corporate culture as a result of where the industry is located.

> it's the culture of the area to be passive aggressive versus direct.

Absolutely nailed it. This is exactly what it is.

It definitely does feel a lot more common on the west coast than the east coast (I'm in the west). I love a lot of people on the west coast, but it can be refreshing sometimes working with east coast people :-)

Yea to me what the prior commentor suggests is nothing more than deception/lying through a form of omission...

If the message isn't clear then they don't hear it, with the only reason you don't so that you can say you said something when shtf all while ignoring that your indirect statement effectively ensured the continuation of the problems...

Blunt honesty is the only way to effectively and efficiently run an enterprise.

We really need to address this culture of Feeling Over Facts...

Israelis also tend to be very direct in my experience working with them. I'm not Israeli (in fact, I hold a passport for a country that doesn't even recognize Israel), but it's something I've always admired about working with people from the region. I think the Israeli culture is really good at cutting through fluff and focusing on getting things done.

The corporate culture is slowly becoming mainstream culture. Look around you, it’s happening everywhere. Our culture isnt driven by musicians or athletes or writers or movies any more. It’s driven by the values of HR and advertising departments, and what content advertisers will pay to associate with

Did someone say toxic positivity?? :)

Yeah, the writer was vague about exactly who said what and never quoted or dropped names, they were very polite about it, never saying anything more negative than he felt some junior engineers were impolite and personalities clashed. Great writeup.

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