The Mess at Meetup

I wouldn't say this is a bait and switch, but it is a betrayal. It sounds like a lot of people joined the company because of the work environment. An environment that placed importance of the people in it, and making it somewhere that they wanted to be and where they felt comfortable being who they were. To now turn around and imply that those same values are bad is a betrayal.

The slide deck is not surprising or positive to me either. For me, it is an example of the corporate neofeudalism that currently dominates the US workplace. Not only are you are cog in the machine, but you have to be passionate and optimistic cog too! It is not ok to simply do your job, you have to be outside your comfort zone!

From my perspective, it is dehumanizing. People have value beyond their economic potential.

This article is vague because something is being papered over.

My interpretation: “We focused our culture on creating a corporate safe space and hired a bunch of people more interested in safe spaces than actually growing the organization and competing, then we began to lose ground and had to reverse course and became so scared of our own employees we had to enact measures to prevent them from revolting on us when we asked them to work harder.”

I think the entire social justice tidal wave that hit tech is going to destroy many companies, these attitudes and building corporate cultures focused on entertaining then lead to profoundly uncompetitive behaviors. Imagine how hyper alert these people are to even the lightest pressure.

It works great when finance is plenty and times are good. Once the market turns, every company that chose diversity and inclusion for their culture is going to implode violently and face employee revolts.

Google is especially prone to this. Of the major tech companies, google have gone out of their way to hire as many blue haired safe spacers as humanly possible. These efforts are going to backfire when they need to get mean and lean.

Since when is yoga part of a “bro-centric culture “? All the yoga classes I attended were 90%+ women.

But what is "cultural excellence" in the general case? I'd argue that "a really fun place to go into work" and "a place where we are relentlessly focused on creating the best product" could both reflect cultural excellence while still optimizing for different outcomes.

[ADDED: I agree with your sibling comment. So long as a business can continue to operate in a manner satisfactory to the owners/management, a variety of different cultures and management styles are perhaps equally valid.]

Yeah, fair point - perhaps I miswrote, as 'cultural excellence' is too broad a term. For sure, a high-performing company producing a great product needs a great culture to support it.

My points are:

a) it seems that Meetup tried to optimise their culture for aspects that were not directly related to --and controversially, maybe even opposed to-- product excellence. i.e. their initial version of 'cultural excellence' was more about creating a pleasant inclusive place to work, rather than a productive or high-performing place to work.

b) further, if (as a result) your hiring decisions are more guided by prioritising people that will fit into and perpetuate that cultural vision, you're implicitly choosing to not prioritise hiring high-performers.

(As said before, it's not mutually exclusive - there may be some high-performers that do fit into your cultural vision... but on a macro scale, if you follow that particular cultural vision, the trend will be away from excellence and performance.)