Inside the Mirrortocracy
carlos.bueno.org
Inside the Mirrortocracy
1–10 of 214 posts
Re: Inside the Mirrortocracy
#2Carlos sounds like a wanker who spends too much time reading trust fund assholes on gawker bitch (and lie! Hi Sam) about startups.
Way over here in reality: I've worked for 6 startups, some you've heard of, and some you haven't. At the smallest I was employee 6; at the largest ~60. Now, I'm not claiming I've never seen unprofessional behavior, but
1 - the interview process has been pretty obvious. Yes, I've grabbed dinner with founders at one company. What the hell do you think eating dinner with two people you just met to discuss their company is, exactly?
2 - In 6 startups, I've never gone drinking with the team before starting, nor do I know of anyone who has. None of my friends from those startups who are on im right now has either.
3 - At one startup, some engineers went to strip clubs. Not my thing. No known ill effects.
4 - I don't go drinking with coworkers except maybe once every three months. And drinking means 1-2 beers then out; it's been probably 3 years since I spent a whole night drinking with coworkers. No known ill effects.
5 - perhaps some people should leave sf and see the peninsula and valley. There's a whole world of startups here that have 30+ year old employees, some with kids. At many of these adult companies it's fine to come in around 9, bust ass, and walk out the door at 5:30. If you don't fuck around with pingpong and scooters all goddamn day, you'll find you don't have to spend 12 hours in the office to get your job done. Me personally: no fucking scooters, no ping pong. No known ill effects.
6 - I do wonder if Carlos would complain similarly if an employee came to an interview severely underdressed and the company held it against him or her. Probably not. So learning not to wear a 3-piece suit to a startup interview is just part of the gig. Do, oh, 60 minutes of reading on the internet and you'll probably be fine. Hell, email your damn recruiter and ask. He or she really wants you to get that job.
7 - For ultra-small startups, recruiting from social circles is just part of the deal. I imagine very few tiny companies really hire randoms off the internet, or whatever people did before craigslist and dice.
8 - whining about white and asian males is fine, but how on earth did he miss indian males? Has he ever seen the valley?
9 - on a serious note, it's really weird how startup demographics mirror cs degree demographics.
10 - and while I do strongly believe we should make the industry more inclusive -- holding tiny startups responsible for not creating a recruiting pipeline back to high school is ridiculous. I'm not sure where social responsibilities kick in; it's some gradient between the 1 person company and the $10B corp. But the small startups don't have the resources to do much about it.
Re: Inside the Mirrortocracy
#3That linked 42Floors blog post is terribly self-unaware.
> Most startups take the building of their culture very seriously, especially when the culture is still new and quite fragile.
If your culture is so fucking fragile that a guy wearing a suit (as opposed to a T-shirt and jeans) poses an existential threat to it, you need to re-evaluate whether you are actually building a company 'culture', or just some random agglomeration of the personality traits of the company's earliest employees.
> My friend Shawn just brought organic heirloom carrots and a 6-pack of Sightglass coffee to an interview as a gift. That’s awesome.
If I were a founder and you were a candidate who tried to bribe me like this, I'd politely show you the door. Why does the gift need to come before the interview? If it's a token of appreciation, why not after the acceptance or rejection? Are you hiring candidates based on their technical credentials, or their hipster credentials?
Re: Inside the Mirrortocracy
#4Carlos sounds like a wanker who spends too much time reading trust fund assholes on gawker bitch (and lie! Hi Sam) about startups. Way over here in reality: I've worked for 6 startups, some you've heard of, and some you haven't. At the smallest I was employee 6; at the largest ~60. Now, I'm not claiming I've never seen unprofessional behavior, but 1 - the interview process has been pretty obvious. Yes, I've grabbed d…
Whining about white and asian males is fine, but how on earth did he miss indian males? Has he ever seen the valley?
Uh? On the maps I have India is in Asia.
Re: Inside the Mirrortocracy
#5Carlos sounds like a wanker who spends too much time reading trust fund assholes on gawker bitch (and lie! Hi Sam) about startups. Way over here in reality: I've worked for 6 startups, some you've heard of, and some you haven't. At the smallest I was employee 6; at the largest ~60. Now, I'm not claiming I've never seen unprofessional behavior, but 1 - the interview process has been pretty obvious. Yes, I've grabbed d…
Whining about white and asian males is fine, but how on earth did he miss indian males? Has he ever seen the valley? Uh? On the maps I have India is in Asia.
are you from the UK? In the US, colloquially, asian == japan, korea, china, vietnam, cambodia, laos and indian = people from india. Or perhaps you would call them south-east asian? But you would never call a person from india as asian.
Re: Inside the Mirrortocracy
#6> This implies that there is a large untapped talent pool to be developed. Since the tech war boils down to a talent war, the company that figures out how to get over itself and tap that pool wins...You want a juicy industry to disrupt? How about your own?
This is a great post, but I take issue with the author's conclusion.
The harsh reality is that most of these so-called Valley Culture startups aren't actually competing in a "tech war." Most have relatively simple CRUD apps with at best moderate usage. Founders delude themselves into believing that they need far more engineering resources than they really do for obvious reasons, and investors have plenty of reasons of their own for indulging and rewarding these delusions.
The good news is that no disruption is needed. The majority of the Valley Culture startups will die off in the next several years and at some point, the economic and monetary policy environment will ensure that they're not replaced with a new batch of Valley Culture startups.
In the meantime, there are plenty of opportunities (in the Bay Area and elsewhere) for folks who don't want to deal with the nonsense.
Re: Inside the Mirrortocracy
#7 > It’s not that we’re so petty or strict about the dress code
> that we are going to disqualify him for not following an
> unwritten rule, but we know empirically that people who come
> in dressed in suits rarely work out well for our team.
http://tressiemc.com/2013/10/29/the-logic-of-stupid-poor-people/
Re: Inside the Mirrortocracy
#8> This implies that there is a large untapped talent pool to be developed. Since the tech war boils down to a talent war, the company that figures out how to get over itself and tap that pool wins...You want a juicy industry to disrupt? How about your own? This is a great post, but I take issue with the author's conclusion. The harsh reality is that most of these so-called Valley Culture startups aren't actually comp…
Yes. I agree with you. The post is great but the conclusion is weak. I believe, a lot of this Culture constructo comes from marketing needs. They want to have a nice IstockPhoto start-up for investors.
Re: Inside the Mirrortocracy
#9I have noticed this myself at a few places I have interviewed and after the 2nd or 3rd time you can kinda smell it. Most of the time the company is just a bunch of 20-somethings running around with their heads on fire, working ridiculous hours because they have no idea what their tech stack is supposed to actually be, all the while getting paid almost nothing for wasting their best years in a monoculture bubble.
Best thing you can do is just avoid those places like the plague. There are places that are run by grown ups and I don't mean people older than 20-something but people that are mature enough to understand what diversity and culture really mean. Places where there is a balance between work and personal life and where people don't pretend to be in a frat house because it is the only way they know how to handle themselves.
I think the only reason those cultures persist is because they are extremely cheap to maintain from a capital perspective and you can have 10 of them running in parallel to increase your odds of hitting a jackpot and getting acquired by google or facebook and raking in some nice returns for your investors which by the way are way older than 20-something. So if you look at it from that perspective it is all about maximizing returns from an investor's perspective and the rest of it is just-so story to keep the pipeline of 20 year olds churning. I think there are some nice parallels between virgins waiting in heaven and million dollar acquisitions. The tactics being used to exploit the minds of the impressionable are the same in both scenarios. The insular cultures that result from those tactics is just a natural byproduct.
Re: Inside the Mirrortocracy
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whining about white and asian males is fine, but how on earth did he miss indian males? Has he ever seen the valley? Uh? On the maps I have India is in Asia.
are you from the UK? In the US, colloquially, asian == japan, korea, china, vietnam, cambodia, laos and indian = people from india. Or perhaps you would call them south-east asian? But you would never call a person from india as asian.
South-East Asia generally refers to Vietnam, Thailand, etc. Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, etc. are South Asia.