[quadrifoliate]

I think everyone is hyper focused on the 220k number, which is not that unusual for a VC-backed Silicon Valley startup.

Admittedly the article is a bit rant-filled, but I have also heard other people say Pivotal is (was?) a bit weird, especially regarding taking pair programming a bit too far (another blog example: http://mwilden.blogspot.com/2009/11/why-i-dont-like-pair-pro...)

I am a bit surprised at all the criticism of the author and saying that "I wouldn't hire the guy because of this post". Consider the asymmetry of power between employer and employee. Companies often put up self-praising blog posts describing their perfect hiring process and how great they are, but often they are a big messy hairball inside. In the US, people very rarely work up the courage to criticize them, because they have mouths to feed, health insurance to pay, and can't afford the expensive lawyers to combat the large companies' legal teams. So we should encourage those who speak out, or at least not punish them more for doing so. In fact, I think the only reason this person is comfortable doing so is that they have probably enough left over from that 220k/year to be comfortable speaking out.

[hobofan]

I wouldn't want to encourage anyone else to write such a rambling "speaking out" blog post that you can't really take anything away from. There are good ways to write such blog posts, e.g these accounts from an ex-Apple employee[0], that nicely lay out what was going wrong. I tried to extract similar information from this blog post, but failed, as it was filled with so many detours, vagueness, and subjective name calling about the company in general rather than an actual retelling on how he personally was supposedly mistreated.

[0]: https://techreflect.net/2019/12/10/aperture-senior-qa-2004-2...