Comment by firefoxd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by firefoxd | Hacker News Reader

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I think the cult of personality always backfires, pun intended. Our company biggest product was a celebrity making fun commercials for the actual product. Works wonders. Personally I don't have a problem with him, I enjoyed his movies in the past. But not everybody does. Internally, the company tried to push this cult so deeply that it was part of the hiring process, part of the onboarding, even obscured some of the CEOs messaging. And you wonder, what happens when you hire someone who doesn't like this celebrity?

Many of us are mature enough to follow the principle of, "if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything." But not so when you have young developers flowing in and out of the company. In one of the town halls, a 24 year old dev, was put on a mic, and simply said, "I don't like X, he is super annoying, why do we keep plastering his face everywhere."

I've never seen an entire company freeze before. There was no way forward, no way backwards. The script had been broken. The dev, thinking he wasn't heard properly, sent the same message in our townhall slack channel. I did what I believe 90% of other people did. I screenshoted it.

The kid got another job a few months after. For once we saw the emperor wore no clothes.

Edit: million typos

Edit 2: in case it wasn't clear, no was not fired, he just found another job.

I've been that 20-something myself.

I was working as a programmer at some high flying merchant bank in London in the 90's and at the pub with my workmates one night I started tearing strips off of the IT director because he was comically incompetent. Everyone was kicking me under the table because unbeknownst to me his close friend was at the table taking in my rant. Everyone agreed that I was toast and bought me drinks.

In the morning, at about 10am, security went into his office and marched him out of the building, right past my desk. I turned around and said to my team and said "See! Don't fuck with me!"

It was hilarious.

Was his close friend the MD or something? I’m curious how this wound up playing out exactly backward from how everyone expected it would.

It was a coincidence. A few weeks earlier there was a fault at the bank's data center. The very expensive backup data center failed to go online. Management was not amused.

Another memory from that time: a stressed sounding trading desk assistant rang me asking after a trade confirmation that went missing and the client was demanding. I determined that the system I worked on didn't handle those kinds of trades. Out of curiosity I looked up the trade. It was for 2 billion GBP of UK Gilts (government bonds), thats about $5 billion USD in today's money.

I don’t often literally LOL here.

Bravo.

The interview for the next job must have been interesting.

Anyway, good for him. Too many agree to too much because they fear they'll lose their job.

> Many of us are mature enough to follow the principle of, "if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything."

This isn't maturity, this is selfishness. A group often benefits from someone challenging the status quo, but the individual doing that gets punished. In your view, Germans during WW2 were "mature" by not saying anything that wasn't nice about nazism, and nowadays Russians are "mature" when they don't want to discuss a war that left a million people either dead or wounded - both cases are individuals acting out of self-preservation, not "maturity".

If you're American, then maybe a good example is Martin Luther King Jr. - do you really think that he should've had the maturity to shut up and not say anything that wasn't nice about racism? Well, he got killed, just like your junior employee got fired, so I guess he was indeed a loser in a sense.

In general this is a very common pattern in corporations where everyone is "just doing their job" and "being mature" but the end result is atrocities - for example Nestle literally killing babies.

I might generalize this as “push against actions, not personalities”. Don’t like someone because you just don’t mesh? Keep your mouth shut. You have a different outlook than they do, and yours is as wrong from their POV as theirs is from yours. Someone you think is interesting and fun to be around does something bad? Resist it.

It happens very rarely that there's someone I don't like as a person but I know they're competent in their domain. Sure, it does happen, but it's very rare.

For real? I’ve known all sorts of brilliant bastards. Or even people who weren’t actually jerks, just incompatible with me in an oil and water sort of way, like they were exceedingly uptight, or so happy-go-lucky that they thought I was the uptight one. We just didn’t get along at all, but they weren’t bad people, and certainly not incompetent, just not a good pairing with me.

There's a difference between criticism and personal insults, and honestly if you can't tell the difference you might be a liability for your employer.

In a perfect world yes. In reality, people often take offense in being criticized. Or ignore the feedback until the situation becomes disastrously bad.

I am guessing this is Salesforce and the celebrity is Matthew McConaughey who’s real chummy with Benioff.

Brave of the developer to bring it up. This cult of personality is pervasive throughout the tech industry.

I was thinking of Mint Mobile. I guess there are many examples, not even counting the cases where the CEO becomes a celebrity (like Steve Jobs).

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