How to Deal With Brilliant Jerks You Work With

Jesus Christ, is that top picture of a hellish working environment typical? I have a panic attack just looking at it.

Does anyone happen to know what company that is so I know to avoid them like the plague?

EDIT: OK, figured it out, it is Pivotal[0]. I have absolutely no idea what they actually _do_ based on their website, exactly as I would expect for the kind of company that would have that sort of office.

[0]: http://www.gopivotal.com/

That's what I thought. Makes the j-word seem rather appropriate for the author, ironically.

    The first question you might ask is, “Why do I need senior people at all? Won’t they just ruin the culture with their fancy clothes, political ambitions and need to go home to see their families?”

Whaaaat the fuck does any of those have to do with anything, or each other? The last one in particular kind of pisses me off.

Ignoring the out of place second half of the article...

Whats most troublesome to me about this article is in the first example.

> On his third day, we gave him a project that was scheduled to take one month. Arthur completed the project in three days with nearly flawless quality. More specifically, he completed the project in seventy-two hours: No stops, no sleep, nothing but coding. In his first quarter on the job, he was the best employee we had and we immediately promoted him.

This is the monkey getting his hand caught in the jar. This is Chewbacca thinking with his stomach and getting hung upside down by Ewoks.

Behavior like Arthur's is unsustainable. The human energy to stay up for 72 hours writing code has to come from somewhere. Burnout in these sort of cases is inevitable.

Why oh why would you promote someone like this before waiting for them to display an ability to be consistent? We should see these sort of things as red flags. Instead, the dream of having a programmer that can get month-long projects done in three days is too sweet too ignore. It's ironic that his downfall was giving in to drugs, which provide short term gains at long term costs -- the company was guilty of the same, with Arthur as their drug

Because I demand more respect than that from my employer. It is a layout designed to cram the max number of people into the cheapest space. These people are shoulder to shoulder. You have zero privacy and anything you do on your screen 2 other people are going to inevitably see it. In that way it is also your employer enforcing their will on you- you will feel embarrassed to take a perfectly normal break to look at Facebook or Twitter or whatever.

I also dislike that a lot of the spaces there are for people with laptops. I personally would never accept a company laptop. It implies that your employer wants you to work at home or on travel. Fuck that. I want a desktop, and I will work for you when I am in the office. If you want me to work at any other time, pay me to come in.

Stand up for yourself. Start-up culture is increasingly bullshit and toxic, luckily I am getting out in a few weeks and do not intend to return.