Congratulations You’ve Been Fired

Out of four full-time jobs I've had in my career, I have had a performance review (three, actually--every six months!) at one of them. That was the one with a NASDAQ ticker. The gong-show "unicorn" startup, the technically impressive startup that was acquired to bolster a bigco's portfolio, and the medical startup where I managed three people and reported to the CEO. No performance reviews. Couldn't even pin down a manager to have a status update sometimes. (At one in particular my manager basically avoided talking to me until it was time to try to rip me a new one. Fun times.)

This happens a lot--and it being gross and a real bad way to manage doesn't really change that it happens a lot.

In the book "States of Crisis and Post-Capitalist Scenarios".

I'm not much older than that, but the average maturity of 28 year olds is not great. Putting lives in the hands of people that should still be learning the ropes is reckless and cruel.

Young managers (and I used to be one too) are the worst part of the startup culture, people with no training, inclination or predisposition for people management making others unproductive and ruining careers.

As a sector we should think hard about how we're handling ourselves because there will be nothing left a few years from now if we don't start working for the long run.

I wonder the same thing. Last time there was a post about him here a couple weeks ago there were current and former HubSpot employees all over it.

Apart from that, it is a shady company for sure though. It was less than a year ago that top executives were implicated by the fbi in trying to hack and extort Lyons during the lead up to the book. I think only one or two of the implicated executives ended up leaving the company as a result. Was their departures enough to fix the culture there?

It seems to me that the author was generalizing from one specific experience he had, plus some anecdotal experiences he has gathered from others, to impugn the entire start-up community.

There may be some validity to what he says; I'm inclined to agree that there's disproportionate age-ism and sexism and probably several other kinds of -ism's in the start-up community, perhaps because their founders tend to be younger and less well versed in mainstream corporate behavior which in recent decades has been moving away from discrimination.

I don't see how a "glorified telemarketer" working on a desktop that watches him is a typical start-up tech worker, though. It sounds like tough and thankless work and I hope people get the message in the VC funding community that the way to build a high value company is not to treat people really badly and thus create this kind of bad press. At least, I hope it's not the way you create a good return on investment! Otherwise we're all in trouble.

I'm curious as to whether the comments about Amazon are broadly valid. Have not worked there myself, but have interviewed over the phone in the past (very negative experience). Yet, as a customer, I admire Amazon and consider them one of America's great companies. Could they really have gotten to this point by treating their rank-and-file like a disposable commodity? Could Apple?