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Perestroika posted:
In the startup world, the thought is "if this product is wildly successful and we get bought out/turn into the next Google, I will be rich". This almost never happens. In other sectors (like fintech), it's just that the pay is staggeringly good compared to what you'd make doing a similar job elsewhere. If the deal is "We're going to pay you three times as much as you'd make elsewhere, but you're going to end up working 2-2.5x the hours", some people will do that. In other sectors (games), it's a prestige thing. "I worked 90 hours a week to ship a game. It's called Red Dead Redemption 2. You may have heard of it.  ".Other companies just expect that people are going to work themselves to death for no reason. This sounds like one of those situations. Young people are easier to fool into doing it. New Yorp New Yorp fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Nov 27, 2018 |
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Nov 27, 2018 20:35
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Honestly, I'm staggered that people wouldn't look at those hours and just go "gently caress right off with this poo poo". I could see that maybe, maybe being appropriate during a massive crisis like "all the servers imploded and nobody knows what the gently caress", but as regular planned hours that is just insane. As in, this would be literally illegal where I live.
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And Remember: The term burnout was coined at first for people who burned out from doing volunteer stuff at a drug-rehab clinic and I got really close to one while working in a public library. There’s a ton of not obvious jobs that have the same level of stress and demands and NONE of the benefits like fin-tech.
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Nov 28, 2018 13:43
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DONT TOUCH THE PC posted:And Remember: The term burnout was coined at first for people who burned out from doing volunteer stuff at a drug-rehab clinic and I got really close to one while working in a public library. There’s a ton of not obvious jobs that have the same level of stress and demands and NONE of the benefits like fin-tech. Yeah, like a Non-Profit for instance. poo poo pay, most employees are bottom-tier or else they'd be working someplace that paid well, lovely facilities, and a Director who makes big bucks but is constantly talking about "giving back" while constantly taking advantage of said employees.
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Nov 28, 2018 15:41
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This is a bit of a change of pace from the thread but I hope it's not inappropriate. A few years ago I got a job at a 'tech' startup that told the investors it was developing a super streamlined tech platform for connecting clients to suppliers in a particular industry that would minimise the middleman (us) overhead and thus be a print-your-own-money commission machine. The founders then took the tens of millions of euros through multiple funding rounds and spent it all on advertising and then subsequent growth-related overhead, since the streamlined platform didn't exist and they didn't really have anybody working on it. Nobody had any clue what they were doing, the founders were the typical 21 year old business college kids "hey, why don't we become the Uber for [new industry we have no knowledge of]?", and staff should have scaled proportionate to client load but they obviously couldn't sell this to the investors so they compromised by making everyone work super hard and dramatically reducing the quality of service. At 27 I was one of the older ones in the company and within half a year had become a 'Head of' loser who hated every minute of it. My direct boss, and head of the country division, was a 20ish year old workaholic who didn't understand work-life balance. You can imagine that working conditions weren't great and nobody was super impressed, but things were such a mess that you could nonetheless have a bit of fun, and people need work so there you go. This all leads up to a morale-raising initiative: the magic cure-all team event! Everybody just wants to take a half-day off work to go to a park and have free beer and sausages. The boss decides this isn't happening, we're all going to an indoor water park on a Sunday, where they'll pay for our entrance but no food/drinks or attractions. Whatever, enough people go, and I'm obliged to go because I'm head of a team and one of the 4-ish people running that country. But everybody is so loving shitted off at the company by this point that nobody gives a poo poo about their job anymore. So 30-40 people in their mid-20s are wandering around a water park surrounded by overweight families wondering what the gently caress we did to deserve this but trying to make the most of it. Between my team (10 people) we pull out a bunch of mdma, ketamine, mushrooms, and I can't remember what else because by that point it doesn't matter anymore, and we spend the day hosed off our faces while our fresh out of uni boss becomes increasingly ashen faced. At one point I go on a giant waterslide while tripping balls (bad idea) and someone steals my flip flops because the girl I'd asked to watch them was also high as gently caress, so I wind up getting athlete's foot because this place is filthy. When it comes time to catch the last train home (some people on my team decided to redose and stay, because they are not clever) the boss is trying pointedly to ignore how messed up everyone is. I should point out that it's not my just my team, everybody there had brought their own poo poo rather than pay for overpriced beers. When we're at the two-platform train station I'm looking for somewhere to smoke a joint so we go off the platform, down the tunnel, up to the other platform, and then say gently caress it and share the joint on the platform directly opposite the boss, who is less than 10 metres away by this point. None of this was ever mentioned again and nobody got punished or censured to any extent whatsoever because the company was such a loving mess. A few months later the investors find out that the founders have been falsifying financial data in reports and they had to fire half the company (our country included, which netted me a nice payout so I could party the whole summer) and the founders got tossed. Company's still around, which I find hilarious.
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Nov 30, 2018 12:17
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At the next tech startup company I worked for I went from 'assistant data entry dude' (after the previous manager role I just wanted a mindless job that wouldn't suck up all my energy, so I could work on stuff in my spare time) to 'product manager' in less than a year because the higher ups were so incompetent, to the extent where I got my final promotion for helping the lead dev troubleshoot and resolve massive data importing issues that formed the entirety of our tech service and were telling our clients they were making 2-5x what they actually were due to duplication bugs caused by horrifyingly poor code review processes*. Incredible. To underline this, I've worked in IT a bit (also as a web developer) but my degree is in history. For a brief time I was keeping chat logs of people defending their usage of the n-word before I remembered that the company was set up like a petty fiefdom and there was nobody to take it to. For a while a few of us stoners are all smoking weed on the balcony every day after work until the boss gets annoyed at people from other companies within the same group and building teasing her for it (even though they would also smoke weed with us when she wasn't there), so she prints out and makes my mate sign an official, company letterhead document saying that she has told him multiple times not to smoke marijuana on office premises and if anything happens to him as a result of this, the company is not liable. He still has it somewhere, although we've all long since moved on from that hellhole. e: * just in case the lead dev is a goon, I would say that this wasn't his fault -- the boss specifically hired the cheapest possible people, despite making money hand over fist, and had no concept of what goes into in-house development, especially when the IT team grew from 1 full stack dev to 6 people with him in charge. she wanted everything yesterday, no reviews, no standards, yadda yadda. when I took the payrise and the role of product manager, my daily nightmare was trying to get the tech team to adhere to proper standards of workflow and review, and trying to get the non-tech teams to understand why this was important. no thank you Sulla Faex fucked around with this message at 12:45 on Nov 30, 2018 |
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Nov 30, 2018 12:34
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:A few years ago I got a job at a 'tech' startup that told the investors it was developing a super streamlined tech platform for connecting clients to suppliers in a particular industry that would minimise the middleman (us) overhead and thus be a print-your-own-money commission machine. The founders then took the tens of millions of euros through multiple funding rounds and spent it all on advertising and then subsequent growth-related overhead, since the streamlined platform didn't exist and they didn't really have anybody working on it. I'm close to a few startups and this is still a real pattern: Found company. Spend all your time running around networking, forming 'links' and alliances, giving talks, talking yourself up. Regard the development of an actual product as something you can do "later". Conversely, companies at a later stage can get acquisition-crazy, just buying any and every other company that might be useful or a competitor, thus hastening their own doom. I experienced one company buy out a young startup (6-7 figures for each of the founders) because "their product will synergise so well with ours". Their product appeared to have been written by people with no software engineering skills and only hobbyist-level programming experience: backups and versioning were done by copying code into named folders. Collaboration and teamwork was done by mailing source code around. The code was spaghetti, filled with variables names of more than 30 characters ("if_the_port_is_open_and_we_have_authentication_and_are_ready_for_data"). It took a team of programmers 6 months to make their code fit for use. Would have been easier to write it from scratch.
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Nov 30, 2018 12:54
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I've never been to business school but from looking at some of the results of successful alumni, I'd imagine that half the curriculum is learning magic words that will get investors leaking from the nipples, and the other half is slowly stripping away any residual capacity for shame or human empathy.
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Nov 30, 2018 12:57
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:This is a bit of a change of pace from the thread but I hope it's not inappropriate. Okay, that didn't go the way I was expecting the story to go.
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Nov 30, 2018 13:08
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spog posted:Okay, that didn't go the way I was expecting the story to go. Every startup interview I've been to loves to underline the startup "culture" - the pay isn't great but it's "laid back and flexible, there's room for rapid advancement and personal input, the atmosphere is chill and you can meet some great people!" But it turns out what they mean is that the pay is poo poo, they trade worthless titles for a disproportionate share of an unmanaged workload, and you'll be working with a lot of other people similarly disinclined to find a serious job. So, naturally, you party - because what's the point of taking the downsides and none of the upsides?
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Nov 30, 2018 13:16
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:Every startup interview I've been to loves to underline the startup "culture" - the pay isn't great but it's "laid back and flexible, there's room for rapid advancement and personal input, the atmosphere is chill and you can meet some great people!" But it turns out what they mean is that the pay is poo poo, they trade worthless titles for a disproportionate share of an unmanaged workload, and you'll be working with a lot of other people similarly disinclined to find a serious job. So, naturally, you party - because what's the point of taking the downsides and none of the upsides? Every time I hear the phrase "startup" I picture that episode of The Simpsons where they had a roll of toilet paper on the wall underneath a sigh that said "Stock Options." MightyJoe36 fucked around with this message at 13:37 on Nov 30, 2018 |
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Nov 30, 2018 13:33
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:I've never been to business school but from looking at some of the results of successful alumni, I'd imagine that half the curriculum is learning magic words that will get investors leaking from the nipples, and the other half is slowly stripping away any residual capacity for shame or human empathy. From what I've gathered when you go to get an MBA they teach you to just spreadsheet really hard to make a few specific numbers better at all cost. They ignore things like "retaining institutional knowledge" or "human rights." All that matters is making the bottom line better right now. Anything long term is completely irrelevant. There's a semi-sentient blob of investor capital completely desperate to get any kind of return on anything with a bunch of rich pricks looking at Google, Facebook, and Amazon while drooling. They desperately want to build something just as big and valuable but they don't want to deal with the periods of time those companies took to build. Amazon started in 1994. Google started in 1998. Facebook is the youngest but is still from 2004. That poo poo doesn't happen overnight and it takes a lot of infrastructure along the way but all they see is "how do I get a bunch of nerds to make a company worth billions?" So you get these companies starting with fresh faced college grads willing to work long hours for cheap salaries and cases of booze being expected to do something that's ultimately impossible. Then you end up with a company burning through investor money desperately trying to corner a market basically overnight (hello, Uber!) while completely failing to be profitable. Or, you know, Theranos which was literally fraudulent. It's all smoke and mirrors because some rich jerks want new things to squeeze money out of because they already have all the rest of it.
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Nov 30, 2018 14:25
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:I've never been to business school but from looking at some of the results of successful alumni, I'd imagine that half the curriculum is learning magic words that will get investors leaking from the nipples, and the other half is slowly stripping away any residual capacity for shame or human empathy. This, and getting connections with other MBAs.
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Nov 30, 2018 15:01
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When I was working for a software startup, the CEO hired a guy for tech support because he felt he had gumption. The kid had just cold emailed him out of the blue. Using an AOL email address in 2003. When I got to read the email, it was just a long, mostly incoherent screed that seemed to be nothing but red flags for mental health issues. But the CEO liked that the kid cold emailed him looking for a job. So we hire him. Dude was a little flighty and had the level of tech skills you might expect of someone whose resume was Radio Shack in the 2000s. The other support guys start teaching him to get him up to speed and he's doing okay. Until it's time for him to go help out the CEO's buddy with some basic PC set up stuff. This requires the guy to drive 45 minutes out of Houston. Another hour to do the work, and the guy should be back after lunch. He doesn't come back in that day. Doesn't respond to calls checking in on him in the after noon. CEO's buddy says he left at 11:30 in the morning. So people are a little worried, but the guy comes in the next day. His boss asks him where he was all day. And the kid starts in on this long rambling story about the CEO's buddy wanting the kid to date his daughter and how they went out. Very early on it becomes clear none of us believe him. So the dude starts doubling down on lies until the story ends with him passed out in a field, wearing a pair of assless chaps and getting a major sunburn. At this point we figure he just took the day off and was being young and stupid about it. Then the CEO decides to send him to a trade show to set up the booth. The guy leaves for the airport. Calls us a couple hours after his plane was supposed to land. He said he had an anxiety attack about his sister's wedding and instead of taking the exit for the airport, he just drove around the 610 loop in Houston for a few hours. Thus setting off a panic rush to get someone to the airport and get them a flight to so we'd have someone to set up the booth. The guy is transferred from tech support to sales. Not fired as we expected. So now this guy is in sales. And he's doing okay there. A bit better fit than support and some of us are thinking maybe he might not get fired. And one day he gets this amazing order from Africa. Lots of software and hardware. Customer sends a check but it turns out the customer made an error and made the amount payable more than the amount owed. But the customer is perfectly fine with a wire transfer sent to them for the difference. Accounting caught this scheme before the company was defrauded but it was the straw that broke the camel's back. And thus he was fired. We had another new sales hire who got fired in his first week. On day three he went to lunch, got loaded and picked a fight with the security guard at the building entrance. On a lark the CEO checked the recording of the guys calls and discovered he had spent a decent chunk of his first two days calling phone sex lines.
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Nov 30, 2018 21:16
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A buddy of mine just got an offer from a cryptocurrency startup that offered to partially pay him in...you guessed it. Fortunately he knew this was a bad idea even before everyone around him went 'bro, no!' I don't have that many more horror stories from the startup where I worked (at least, nothing that doesn't necessarily contain identifying information), but I'll see what I can dredge up. It's been a while since we got acquired and I've definitely tried to only retain the good memories. Since this isn't the 'awesome poo poo that can only happen at startups' thread, I'll keep those to myself. The company I worked at was a very odd mix of people. We had the aforementioned crazy founder Lucy, who had worked at another big semiconductor company with the other founders (where, we found out later, he was so universally disliked that they made him work in a basement room by himself), the CEO who was this pretty cool foreign dude who seemed perfectly normal until you got him talking about how taxation is theft - every time he visited his home country he would get stuck there while they tried to force him to pay back taxes - and a host of various other colorful characters. Our entire data analysis department was a one-man operation who was an absolutely brilliant, vegan, possibly autistic Naruto cosplayer who would get in occasional screaming matches with Lucy during the all-day data meetings we had once a week. Nobody would try to say, 'Hey, let's take this discussion offline', they'd just let them go at it until they were done. I think everyone was hoping they would tire themselves out so nobody had to deal with them (this did not work). The building we were in when I got hired on was an incubator full of tiny biotech companies, with some infrastructure left over from some sort of animal laboratory complex (showers in back, darkest darkroom I have ever been in, massive autoclave you could fit a cow in), a circular hallway with no identifying features where we would lose visitors, and tiny rooms where you could definitely get murdered and your body would never be found. Every so often the generator in the back would go out and we had to send a sacrifice into the pitch black industrial room to turn it back on in the wee murderous hours of the morning. When it rained we got some waterfalls coming down from the ceiling that trashed our electronics. Building management for some reason hated us and would screen our calls, so when the air conditioning got stuck in a positive feedback loop of blowing hot air and the lab got into the 90s we had to track down someone from a company the management actually liked to get them to complain for us. Building management probably disliked us because our only office admin was a batshit crazy eastern European lady who was the petty tyrant of our non-scientific affairs, and I can only imagine how she was on the phone with them. As far as I know, the building still stands there in Mountain View today relatively unchanged. Since that area is pretty gentrified now there aren't as many campers with homeless people in the parking lot, but I figure the syringes remain.
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Dec 1, 2018 19:15
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Keep this poo poo coming, folks - it's great.
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Dec 1, 2018 21:01
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You're telling me that their outside image of being the promised land of casual workplaces isn't entirely accurate?!
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Feb 7, 2019 16:10
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Once a long while ago I worked for a startup mobile healthcare/nusing/pharma. It was a mile from home, I had a nice office. They let me do almost all I wanted. It was a great job building out their entire IT from top up. I did so well there that Microsoft selected this company as one of the best deployments of Windows/Exchange etc for the 2003 product lineup that they flew me out to TechEd in San Diego that year to talk about how I did what I did and why. We beat out some MUCH larger companies like Korean Airlines, NTT and a few others. We came in 2nd overall behind I THINK GE. Not 100% sure who was 1st, but I know I got to fly out for free, stay in the hotel on MS's dime, got myself an Xbox, a box literally full of Server 2003 media and keys (that I was allowed to resell if I wanted to) and a bunch of other Microsoft Swag. All in this little start up was good. Apparently too good. Because we got bought out. By a Scientology based company. I poo poo you not. Things were OK the first few days, but then I noticed that our email bounced a lot to various companies. LIke a LOT. Come to find out that some other companies have blacklisted our new parent company and thus us, because Scientology. A few weeks later new management rolls into set up shop. I'm in my office working when then new CIO walks in, puts a small potted plant on my desk and walks behind me puts both hands on my shoulders and says "This is a plant". He gives my shoulders a bit of a squeeze and walks away. OK WTF. The next day, around the same time, he walks into my office. Again, walks behind me, squeezes my shoulders and says "That is a plant". And walks off. Then I remember back to SERE a long time ago. This fucker was using the basics of brainwashing on me. Or rather was trying to. Yep, sure enough these Scientology motherfuckers were trying to brainwash the entire staff and get people to join the Church and continue running the company as good Scientologist toolbags would. Needless to say, I quit that day. The company is still being run by Scientology today...
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Feb 7, 2019 17:26
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EvilMerlin posted:I'm in my office working when then new CIO walks in, puts a small potted plant on my desk and walks behind me puts both hands on my shoulders and says "This is a plant". He gives my shoulders a bit of a squeeze and walks away. I don't get it. What does this have to do with brainwashing? Also, what's SERE in this context? Edit: I mean it's weird and creepy as poo poo, I just don't get the brainwashing bit. Prism fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Feb 7, 2019 |
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Feb 7, 2019 17:40
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EvilMerlin posted:Needless to say, I quit that day. Trust you tried at least some sort of legal action against your employer. Yes I know Legal Action + Scientology generally results in more trouble than it's worth, regardless of that worth.
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Feb 7, 2019 17:51
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Prism posted:I don't get it. What does this have to do with brainwashing? Also, what's SERE in this context? I'm curious as well, I tried looking it up and the best I could find was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival,_Evasion,_Resistance_and_Escape which doesn't have so much to do with brainwashing. Maybe it's a Day of the Triffids type scenario?
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Feb 7, 2019 19:35
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Sulla Faex posted:I'm curious as well, I tried looking it up and the best I could find was that is what SERE is and if I am not mistaken it's a modified interrogation technique that mixes a pavlovian response of associating the gesture (the hand on the shoulder) with objective truth.
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Feb 8, 2019 03:32
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LunarShadow posted:that is what SERE is and if I am not mistaken it's a modified interrogation technique that mixes a pavlovian response of associating the gesture (the hand on the shoulder) with objective truth. So the reverse of the four lights?
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Feb 8, 2019 09:08
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LunarShadow posted:that is what SERE is and if I am not mistaken it's a modified interrogation technique that mixes a pavlovian response of associating the gesture (the hand on the shoulder) with objective truth. This.
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Feb 8, 2019 18:03
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ToxicSlurpee posted:From what I've gathered when you go to get an MBA they teach you to just spreadsheet really hard to make a few specific numbers better at all cost. They ignore things like "retaining institutional knowledge" or "human rights." All that matters is making the bottom line better right now. Anything long term is completely irrelevant. lol, so they just learn how to do really lovely accounting and give the auditors a heart attack?
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Feb 22, 2019 00:11
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Man, this is all fascinating. From the outside the whole tech-startup world seemed kinda culty, and lo and behold there are literal cults involved. Good poo poo.
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Feb 25, 2019 00:56
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Something happened this week that made me think of this thread. Hopefully this isn't too blog-y. I have of course changed some details, etc etc. The department I'm working in has an open position for someone senior, and is headed by someone who used to work pretty high up at Theranos. Boss-man received a resume from someone who he'd met when he left the company (before things got bad, in 2014) who was just starting out and had continued to work there for a number of years even after the whole thing blew the gently caress up. The candidate had relevant experience and had seemed nice over beers back in the day, so he called him in for an interview earlier this week where the guy would present his work to the group then follow up with some one on one interviews. Red flag number one: resume shows that dude received one major promotion every evaluation cycle (every single year) from normal scientist to a group lead and finally ending up as a director. Okay, maybe he's really good, maybe so many people left that they promoted internally, this could still be okay. He started presenting and it became immediately obvious that the guy had not only drunk the kool-aid but had gone in for seconds and thirds. With a giant, poo poo-eating grin, he constantly name dropped Elizabeth like we should be impressed they're on first name terms, he showed promotional material and tried to sell us on Theranos' product, and he referred to everything he did as the sole product of his own individual contribution and never mentioned a team (which honestly would have on its own disqualified him from working with us). Fifteen minutes in, we started texting each other that this isn't going to loving work out and maybe we should try to excuse some people from the one on ones. We couldn't exactly send him home though. Some notable exchanges during the interviews: What do you feel was Theranos' greatest problem? What would you do differently? I would have better people in charge of the FDA audits. Our product was so fantastic and everyone really liked it, the product was flawless but the FDA are just so nitpicky, we should have had better people handling the documentation. If the documentation had been better then we would have been fine. (Please refer to the FDA findings at Theranos to really get the full understanding of why this is loving hilarious) How many direct reports did you have? Eighty. No wait, eight. I had eight people under me. I worked with eighty people, though. Management needed someone trustworthy to disseminate information to the lab, so I was in charge of keeping all eighty people informed, so it's like they reported to me directly. We took him out to lunch and he could not small talk like a regular human being. We tried to include him in talking about commuting, kids, etc and he stood back from us and stared silently at us with the same unfaltering poo poo-eating grin. He did not get the job.
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Mar 2, 2019 18:55
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He sounds like an incredibly bad Xerox copy of Saul Goodman. You should have made up some sort of entertainment from the experience.
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Mar 2, 2019 19:35
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Not gonna lie, was expecting this to end with "And now he's my manager."
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Mar 2, 2019 20:26
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Did you have any confirmation those promotions actually happened and that he wasn't just some nobody bottom-tier grunt shepherd who wandered around hobnobbing and called it "disseminating information"?
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Mar 3, 2019 15:49
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Blue Footed Booby posted:Did you have any confirmation those promotions actually happened and that he wasn't just some nobody bottom-tier grunt shepherd who wandered around hobnobbing and called it "disseminating information"? What, you think he'd lie?
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Mar 3, 2019 18:26
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