I'm actually quite surprised how offended some people are getting over this. It seems like a pretty reasonable article trying to bring awareness to how some of the things we laud thoughtlessly can be used as tools against us or others and actually not further our ideals. I had assumed HN was more open minded and deep enough to accept a critique and learn from it. Instead I see it getting flagged, and people dismissing it and being offended.
For a culture that's supposed to love disruption, have anarchistic tendencies and be counter culture, it seems everyone's pretty easy to hurt, easily offended, a little close minded, and not at all open to anything questioning them.
A little disappointed in the HN culture. We should always be reevaulutating and in a state on constant flux. Status Quo is death because then we become the old and some new group who isn't us will out innovate, out manoeuvre us. Being status quo by definition means you aren't disrupting or innovating any more. Why should we only focus on technology and not culture? It seems a big weakness.
Though these generalizations are certainly dripping with bitterness, I have definitely seen bits and pieces of these phenomena in the startups I've worked at and the startups I've been around/interacted with through my work.
I've definitely seen cases where lack of defined roles leads to not a flat culture but in fact a culture where unspoken dynamics rule. I've seen "cultural fit" used to basically exclude a few introverts who aren't able to hit it off on a personal level with the founders (in this case, this meant liking to party and drink and talk superficially), which meant passing over some extraordinarily brilliant people. I've seen a lack of meetings lead not to collaboration, but to siloing of different activities. This is often not necessarily intentional, and the founders actually mean well, but it happens more often than you think.
This reads like someone didn't get the offer they wanted, and the reason given was that they were not a good fit for the company's culture.
First, if this was the motivation for this post then I'd recommend you take a deep breath and relax. Its not about you, its about them. And trust me when I say if someone doesn't hire you because they don't think you would fit into their culture, thank them. Nothing is worse for your own self esteem and sanity than trying to get stuff done in a company trying to reject you culturally.
Second, understand that culture rejections are like date rejections, sometimes its the real reason, sometimes its a more polite way of saying 'no thank you' but in either case move on.
That said, you spend a lot of time at the office, and you interact with these people in a day to day way, startups are by their nature small and like families small issues can be big problems (do you squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom or the middle?). Unlike families, you get the opportunity to pick a new startup when one doesn't fit. Avail yourself of that opportunity.
I would be interested in what gave you the impression I was being
dismissive, I was shooting for compassionate.
Tell you what, now that I have a bit of time, allow me to share with
you my reasoning on why I responded the way I did, and perhaps you can
share what you got out of our author's post.
I have always held that 'snark' is a unit of emotional hurt, and this
particular posting appeared to be quite snarky. When I read
provocative prose with words like 'lies' and 'nuevo-social' and '1%
poster children' I see snark. And in this case 'I got no pony!'[1] level
of snark. Thus I read the posting with the impression that the author
had suffered a strong emotional blow and was venting. With that much
hurt (perceived) I gave them slack for their otherwise very sloppy
reasoning.
Our author asserts, "Culture is about power dynamics, unspoken
priorities and beliefs, mythologies, conflicts, enforcement of social
norms, creation of in/out groups and distribution of wealth and
control inside companies." which is a highly arguable statement. I
would posit that culture is about creating a structure to both set
expectations and define success in an environment. Nothing about power
over you or creating "in" or "out" groups or wealth or any of the
things our author asserts. Our author further asserts that "Culture
is exceedingly difficult to talk about honestly." which is also
not true, they are attempting to be "honest" here in spite of their
own declaration.
As the topical 'setup' for what is an emotional rant, the entire
position statement in the first five paragraphs says exactly one thing
"I (the author) am mad that I am unable to understand (or possibly to
accept) what people are asking of me with regards to my behavior
around others."
What follows then are a series of "sound bytes" pulled out as
sub-heads with the author's flawed understanding of what they mean.
The author has gone out of their way at times to attribute a level of
deceit and malice to others that borders on paranoid but let's stick
with what they wrote and go over it shall we?
On the sound bite "We make sure to hire people who are a cultural fit"
the author claims the intent is " ... We have implemented a loosely
coordinated social policy to ensure homogeneity in our workforce. We
are able to reject qualified, diverse candidates on the grounds that
they aren't a culture fit. while not having to examine what that
means ..."
That reads very much like they (or someone they knew) considered
themselves "qualified" and yet their application for employment
was "rejected as a poor cultural fit." It seems they have taken
the path that it is simpler to blame this on some malicious prep
school like club when, on closer inspection it never is. The fact is
that startups are desperate for qualified talent, that is what makes
them go, however if the way in which a candidate comports themselves
suggests they will cause friction with people who are already hired
then, even if they are qualified, hiring them would be a bad decision
if it increased problems at work.
Let's used a contrived example, lets say that three guys decide to
start a company and they have always had a rich tradition of
commenting their code. In fact they often exchange ideas in comments
as they check things into a source repository. They find that this
transparency in the thought process allows them to evolve the code
based faster in a compatible way. Now, when interviewing to employee
#1 (or #10 doesn't really matter) they ask about writing comments in
code and the candidate replies : "Writing comments in code
just slows me down, anyone to stupid to not be able to see what the
code does shouldn't be reading my code." They may stop right there and
say, "Thanks, but your not a cultural fit for company."
Nothing about power, nothing about secret societies, just a knowledge
that working with this candidate won't "flow" because they depend on
that dialog in comments and this candidate is unwilling to write
comments. It's the founder's company, and this is a classic case of
find people who are "a cultural fit."
Sound byte number two is "Meetings are evil and we have them as little
as possible." which our author conveniently translates to "We have a
collective post-traumatic stress reaction to previous workplaces that
had hostile, unnecessary, unproductive and authoritarian meetings."
One asks (and I did) "Where did that come from?" And I answered myself
with "I wonder if this person doesn't have any tools for keeping in touch
with what is going on, and so a lack of meetings threatens them."
Because keeping in touch as a developer is as straight forward as
reading the commit log and talking to people. Now from a strategy,
vision, mission perspective? Sure you want someone to let you know
where you are heading, but most engineers hate a weekly status
meetings that don't provide any value. So it seems our author has
again projected their own mis-understanding into some malicious
deceit.
One which stuck right out was the response to "We don't have a
vacation policy." The authors interpretation of this is "We fool
ourselves into thinking we have a better work/life balance when really
people take even less vacation than they would when they had a
vacation policy."
It would have helped had the author suggested what they interpret that
to imply (wow that is a lot of indefinits!) but they chose not to so
we have to speculate. Immature individuals will interpret a 'no
vacation policy' to mean they can take vacation whenever, and for as
long as, they want. A more reasoned interpretation is that folks can
count on taking some time off to rest and recover once their product
ships. A 'no explicit policy' does not mean that folks don't care
how much you produce, rather it has always meant that you take time
off to keep your productivity high when you are at work. Some people
cannot handle that level of responsibility, either through lack of
maturity or through mixed expectations. It isn't the culture that is
evil though. Its like teachers who don't grade the homework, they
still expect you to do it so that you have satisfied yourself that
you understand the material. It doesn't mean "woo hoo we don't have to
do the homework!"
Every single 'culture' point our author attacks they do so in a way
the imputes some amazing ill will on the person espousing the point.
The most charitable interpretation I could come up with was that this
person was feeling hurt, I accept that it is possible they are simply
quite immature, or unable to internalize the concept of a culture
model based on peer respect rather than explicit rules. I don't know
if they read HN but on the off chance they did, I was trying to
express, compassionately, that people aren't trying to deceive you
with this discussion of culture, they are trying to communicate. Once
you understand what they are saying you will understand better whether
or not you want to work with them. I guess I failed at that.
There is much that I disagree with in this comment. And that's ok! Disagreement about this sort of thing is good! It's how we can have real discussions about what works and what doesn't about the cultures we create. I'm going to attempt to respond in depth in a followup comment but I wanted to go ahead and start by saying this this comment is FAR FAR better than your first because it actually addresses the issues that Shanley brought up.
In your original comment you ascribed motivations that are simply not true. Rather than discussing the merits of her essay you simply assumed that she didn't get a job so her thoughts could be dismissed without serious engagement. This was pretty patronizing. But anyways thanks for following up with a much more substantive explanation of your thoughts. I will attempt to do the same.
Let's say a couple of guys start a company to make it easy for people to send money back and forth to each other over email. They, like all startups, are desperate for talent so they recruit like mad. But it's important to them not only to get folks with engineering chops, but that they get folks who will fit in with their culture. In fact, one time they reject someone because he said that he liked to play hoops and they thought that was a funny way to say basketball.[1]
Fast forward to another tech boom. We've got another company, vaguely similar to the first, but this time they want to make it easier for websites to accept credit card based payments. They also recruit like mad and care a lot about culture. In fact they have something called a Sunday Test: "if this person were alone in the office on a Sunday would that make you more likely to come in and want to work with them?" It's a bit less clear what that means in this case, but it certainly sounds like they are optimizing for homogeneity.[2]
Those two stories are both about culture. They're both about companies working hard to define their own internal culture in a way that they think will make them more successful. Further I think that, in many ways, that they are right about this guess! Monocultures are very very useful in small early stage startups!
But aren't the effects of this kind of fucked up? Shouldn't we at least acknowledge the fact that not making a job offer to a guy because he used the word "hoops" is a little weird? And this doesn't even get into related issues of race or gender or class backgrounds.
Much of Shanley's post is about this sort of thing. She's not saying that meetings are great, or flat hierarchies are bad or that free lunches are bullshit. But she is saying that these things aren't 100% good. They come with some significant downsides that are rarely acknowledge inside of the "everything we do is awesome" startup bubble.
I don't think she is imputing ill will (well mostly, she is a bit). Rather she's just trying to throw some water in the face of a very self satisfied startup culture. She's saying "look around you guys! Some of these values that you think are 100% awesome have some big downsides!" And I think that is very laudable.
Apparently some of her rhetoric was a bit off the mark as some people are dismissing her post as bitter. That's too bad, because I think that she brings up some very real and very important issues.
The most bitter possible interpretations of these ideas, but still possible interpretations.
That said, the merging of work and hobby is at a very advanced state in SV, which is a good and a bad thing. It's not so odd that they should overlap policy-wise.
Blanket statements wouldn't be fair, but she's caveating it with "might" every paragraph. But I think these dysfunctional patterns are more the norm than the exception today.
While I'm sure these are completely valid truths in some startups, I can't help but feel that the author doesn't really know what it's like to be successful in that sort of environment. You can paint things a hundred different ways depending on your perspective, but if this sort of "culture" works for so many people and they're happy with it, I don't really see an issue. OP was simply not a good fit for the startup scene's culture, and that isn't a BS statement meant to bar out anyone who doesn't fit the mold.
Your response seems to suggest that the OP has not been successful and is no longer a member of the "startup scene". I don't see why you would assume any of that to be true or to be the motivation for this post.
I found it to be a useful reminder that practices I am often excited to see are not necessarily indicators of a healthy culture I would want to be a part of. I enjoy stoping for a minute to think "wait, could that apply to us?". I think it is important to consider if the culture behind a given practice is positive and empowering or how much it has shifted toward being dysfunctional or harmful.
For a culture that's supposed to love disruption, have anarchistic tendencies and be counter culture, it seems everyone's pretty easy to hurt, easily offended, a little close minded, and not at all open to anything questioning them.
A little disappointed in the HN culture. We should always be reevaulutating and in a state on constant flux. Status Quo is death because then we become the old and some new group who isn't us will out innovate, out manoeuvre us. Being status quo by definition means you aren't disrupting or innovating any more. Why should we only focus on technology and not culture? It seems a big weakness.