What Your Culture Really Says: The Toxic Lies Afoot in Silicon Valley

Ouch, but so true. The things that truly define a great place to work are not quantifiable. They're qualitative, and reporters can't objectively report on them, so they just don't report on it. They're left with random tangibles, like how shiny an office is, and that only further helps this bad status quo.

I wonder what were to happen if the company would tell people that there's a certain budget and they can anonymously vote on whether they want that money paid out in their paychecks or used on office perks, and if so, which perks.

Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5253880

(Flagged this one)

I worked for an ad agency in Florida and I can tell you that the meetings were an excuse for the account managers and owner to feel like they were being productive, all while the doers had to spend extra time before/after work in order to catch up. I've never had a meeting wherein we resolved an issue that couldn't have been resolved via a Skype chat or email.

I feel, personally, that the author is using a thesaurus too heavily.

I think she's too cynical, in the sense that she's assuming the worst 100% of the time, when she should be assuming the worst only about 80% of the time. Each of these cultural statements she is interpreting in the worst possible way.

My observation is that companies tend to regress to the mean with size. This is not unexpected or surprising. What gets left out of the equation is that, while the best companies are likely to be small, so are the worst companies.

The reality is that culture is complex and almost impossible to determine in the course of a single-day interview. It also changes. There are a lot of companies that "compete on culture" dishonestly, by misrepresenting their work environments, but it's not fair to assume that every company is corrupt and dishonest.

What would be more useful, but require the perspective of someone older and more experienced, is how to pick the good startups.

The one thing I would say is that any company that focuses on non-work perks is showing some serious warning signs. Work and compensation actually matter. "Free dinner" is a warning sign, not a perk. If the company seems to have more interest in talking about non-work than work, that's an obvious bad sign.