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Congratulations You’ve Been Fired

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Re: Congratulations You’ve Been Fired

#211

Post by [deleted] »

ryandamm wrote: post #183
aleyan wrote: post #80

Issues raised in the article aside, I am here to argue semantics. The article used the word start-up 3 times, plus one more in the title of his book. The company he worked for however, HubSpot is 10 years old and public and thus by definition is not a startup. Other two companies mentioned, Amazon and Netflix are both over a decade old and public and thus are not start-ups by any stretch of the imagination. Startups…

I have a related quibble: a lot of companies are called 'tech companies' when, in fact, they're consumers of technology, not producers of them. If your primary innovation is business model, and all the interesting tech you end up working on is purely a result of your scale, well, you're not a tech company. You're a company. Those companies are probably great (or at least, so far as great == profitable/growing), but c…

[deleted]

Re: Congratulations You’ve Been Fired

#212

Post by amscanne »

emitstop wrote: post #131
aleyan wrote: post #80

Issues raised in the article aside, I am here to argue semantics. The article used the word start-up 3 times, plus one more in the title of his book. The company he worked for however, HubSpot is 10 years old and public and thus by definition is not a startup. Other two companies mentioned, Amazon and Netflix are both over a decade old and public and thus are not start-ups by any stretch of the imagination. Startups…

You're confused on the definition of startup. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup_company Generally newly created, but not necessarily. In 'The Lean Startup' by Eric Ries one of the primary examples is based around Intuit, which is a large publicly traded company.

I sure hope a company has a scalable business model before going public. Then again, Twitter?

Re: Congratulations You’ve Been Fired

#213

Post by andyidsinga »

bigiain wrote: post #175
andyidsinga wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had several managers and mentors at Intel that we're sincerely interested in helping me develop my career. I'm not saying its universal, but I've seen some.

It occurs to me looking at this and the other responses so far in this subthread - that it's quite likely more common in larger organizations (Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Intel) where career advancement is not quite so directly correlated to "leaving for a better position in a different company". If you can get your best employees promoted into roles where they are likely to become your reports again when you yourself ge…

I think your right - there definilty a different incentive dynamic. At intel, I once heard someone mention recruiting strategy that goes something like "Intel - you're next 5 software jobs" ..which i thought was a pretty interesting and powerful approach. I've certainly had 5 software jobs at Intel over my 16 years there, and the ability to move in a large company may have also allowed me to select for better managers/mentors.

Re: Congratulations You’ve Been Fired

#214

Post by ghaff »

bigiain wrote: post #186
ghaff wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a certain level of discomfort with embellished storytelling presented as journalism (think Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson though I don't put Dan at that level). And, in his book, Dan makes some cracks that are arguably reverse-ageist. That said, I find it's a cogent perspective even if it probably shouldn't be taken as literally accurate reportage.

While I get what you're objecting to, the world would have been a lesser place without HST's writing (in my opinion anyway). There's a broad grey line between "factual objective news reporting" and "storytelling" and the word journalism isn't specifically defined enough for it to be strictly towards the news reporting edges of that grey area. As Wikipedia puts it (with all the lack-of-credibility of quoting Wikipedia…

I don't really disagree. OTOH, the UVA story in Rolling Stone was supposed to be journalism as opposed to something supposedly "truthy" and heads rolled as a result. I'm not opposed to new journalism as it was called at one point but I think I can feel a bit of legitimate discomfort when the boundaries blur (even when they're net positive as in the case of HST).

Re: Congratulations You’ve Been Fired

#215

Post by manigandham »

free2rhyme214 wrote: post #201
chrisyeh wrote: post #125

For the record, I'm one of the co-authors of "The Alliance," which Dan Lyons refers to in his op ed. Dan refers to our book and quotes a single sentence fragment: "Your company is not your family." Everything else he writes in that section of the piece has nothing to do with the content of the book. 1) "You’re serving a “tour of duty” that might last a year or two" Actually, the book makes it clear that the duration…

Chris you're right Dan misconstrues your ideas and that's disappointing. The real issue with his article is that he was lying to himself before he even joined Hubspot. I'm really surprised how shocked people are when they join startups and aren't happy. What did you expect? Hubspot is not Salesforce. Uber is not Google. DoorDash is not Groupon. The maturity of companies at different stages varies significantly. I rea…

> I'm really surprised how shocked people are when they join startups and aren't happy. What did you expect?

The life-stage of a company rarely has much to do with the working conditions, cult/culture weirdness or how well the business is run.

There are plenty of great startups that are very solid companies that anyone would be happy to work for.

Blanket hate of "startups" doesn't make much sense. Also none of the companies you mentioned are "startups" anymore either, incorrectly applying that label to every company doesn't help.

Re: Congratulations You’ve Been Fired

#216

Post by xiaopingguo »

>"like-minded people"

This particularly obnoxious phrase seems to be coming up a lot more these days. Maybe it is just people admitting they really do not want diversity except in looks rather than substance. It seems to reflect a lack of ability or desire to deal with real world conflicts of opinion.

Re: Congratulations You’ve Been Fired

#217

Post by Alex3917 »

T2_t2 wrote: post #168
chrisyeh wrote: post #125

For the record, I'm one of the co-authors of "The Alliance," which Dan Lyons refers to in his op ed. Dan refers to our book and quotes a single sentence fragment: "Your company is not your family." Everything else he writes in that section of the piece has nothing to do with the content of the book. 1) "You’re serving a “tour of duty” that might last a year or two" Actually, the book makes it clear that the duration…

I don't think Dan Lyons misrepresents your ideas, but rather I think more fundamentally he doesn't share your vocabulary, worldview nor expectations. The reverse is also true, and your arguments in return don't use worldview or definitions he would understand nor recognise. The modern world seems to be a constant case of vocabulary misunderstanding, where we all say "widget", and I mean thing and you mean "an element…

> I don't think Dan Lyons misrepresents your ideas, but rather I think more fundamentally he doesn't share your vocabulary, worldview nor expectations.

Pretty much the #1 asshole behavior on the Internet is criticizing other people's books/studies without having read them. Chris is right, this reflects extremely poorly on Lyons.

Re: Congratulations You’ve Been Fired

#218

Post by duiker101 »

ryandamm wrote: post #183
aleyan wrote: post #80

Issues raised in the article aside, I am here to argue semantics. The article used the word start-up 3 times, plus one more in the title of his book. The company he worked for however, HubSpot is 10 years old and public and thus by definition is not a startup. Other two companies mentioned, Amazon and Netflix are both over a decade old and public and thus are not start-ups by any stretch of the imagination. Startups…

I have a related quibble: a lot of companies are called 'tech companies' when, in fact, they're consumers of technology, not producers of them. If your primary innovation is business model, and all the interesting tech you end up working on is purely a result of your scale, well, you're not a tech company. You're a company. Those companies are probably great (or at least, so far as great == profitable/growing), but c…

I recently started reading A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel and one of the first chapter is about the past and how learning from it we can avoid the same mistakes. One of the stories that he mentions is how in the early 60s anything that sound "electronic" was valued 10 times more just because of that, even if it had nothing to do with electronics. We are probably in a similar situation with "tech" and "startup", they are cool buzzwords that get thrown around from people that don't really know the meaning to add some special attributes to a company.

Re: Congratulations You’ve Been Fired

#219

Post by chrisyeh »

Alex3917 wrote: post #217
T2_t2 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Dan Lyons misrepresents your ideas, but rather I think more fundamentally he doesn't share your vocabulary, worldview nor expectations. The reverse is also true, and your arguments in return don't use worldview or definitions he would understand nor recognise. The modern world seems to be a constant case of vocabulary misunderstanding, where we all say "widget", and I mean thing and you mean "an element…

> I don't think Dan Lyons misrepresents your ideas, but rather I think more fundamentally he doesn't share your vocabulary, worldview nor expectations. Pretty much the #1 asshole behavior on the Internet is criticizing other people's books/studies without having read them. Chris is right, this reflects extremely poorly on Lyons.

I suspect the reason that Dan Lyons mentions "The Alliance" is that we cite some of HubSpot's programs in the book. Specifically, we mention HubSpot's "Learning Meals" program, which encourages employees to take smart people outside the company to lunch. HubSpot will pick up the tab as long as you share what you learn with the rest of the company on the intranet.

Re: Congratulations You’ve Been Fired

#220

Post by braythwayt »

free2rhyme214 wrote: post #201
chrisyeh wrote: post #125

For the record, I'm one of the co-authors of "The Alliance," which Dan Lyons refers to in his op ed. Dan refers to our book and quotes a single sentence fragment: "Your company is not your family." Everything else he writes in that section of the piece has nothing to do with the content of the book. 1) "You’re serving a “tour of duty” that might last a year or two" Actually, the book makes it clear that the duration…

Chris you're right Dan misconstrues your ideas and that's disappointing. The real issue with his article is that he was lying to himself before he even joined Hubspot. I'm really surprised how shocked people are when they join startups and aren't happy. What did you expect? Hubspot is not Salesforce. Uber is not Google. DoorDash is not Groupon. The maturity of companies at different stages varies significantly. I rea…

  > he was lying to himself
  > delude themselves about how awesome startups are
  > people continue to write articles about this nonsense every month
You seem to be unrelentingly "blaming the victims." Obviously, it is to people's benefit to have the most realistic expectations possible about companies they join.

But does that in any way absolve employers of making realistic representations of what employees can expect? Does that absolve people in management positions from behaving with decency and fairness?

When two cars collide, sometimes both parties are at fault, "blame" is often a positive-sum game. It would be fair to hand out as much opprobrium and vituperation for the employers in these situations as the employees.

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