What Your Startup Culture Really Says: the toxic lies afoot in Silicon Valley

You were dismissive. That's not nice.

I'm actually quite surprised how offended some people are getting over this. It seems like a pretty reasonable article trying to bring awareness to how some of the things we laud thoughtlessly can be used as tools against us or others and actually not further our ideals. I had assumed HN was more open minded and deep enough to accept a critique and learn from it. Instead I see it getting flagged, and people dismissing it and being offended.

For a culture that's supposed to love disruption, have anarchistic tendencies and be counter culture, it seems everyone's pretty easy to hurt, easily offended, a little close minded, and not at all open to anything questioning them.

A little disappointed in the HN culture. We should always be reevaulutating and in a state on constant flux. Status Quo is death because then we become the old and some new group who isn't us will out innovate, out manoeuvre us. Being status quo by definition means you aren't disrupting or innovating any more. Why should we only focus on technology and not culture? It seems a big weakness.

While I'm sure these are completely valid truths in some startups, I can't help but feel that the author doesn't really know what it's like to be successful in that sort of environment. You can paint things a hundred different ways depending on your perspective, but if this sort of "culture" works for so many people and they're happy with it, I don't really see an issue. OP was simply not a good fit for the startup scene's culture, and that isn't a BS statement meant to bar out anyone who doesn't fit the mold.

What about all of the people that startup people systematically excludes?

I would be interested in what gave you the impression I was being dismissive, I was shooting for compassionate.

Tell you what, now that I have a bit of time, allow me to share with you my reasoning on why I responded the way I did, and perhaps you can share what you got out of our author's post.

I have always held that 'snark' is a unit of emotional hurt, and this particular posting appeared to be quite snarky. When I read provocative prose with words like 'lies' and 'nuevo-social' and '1% poster children' I see snark. And in this case 'I got no pony!'[1] level of snark. Thus I read the posting with the impression that the author had suffered a strong emotional blow and was venting. With that much hurt (perceived) I gave them slack for their otherwise very sloppy reasoning.

Our author asserts, "Culture is about power dynamics, unspoken priorities and beliefs, mythologies, conflicts, enforcement of social norms, creation of in/out groups and distribution of wealth and control inside companies." which is a highly arguable statement. I would posit that culture is about creating a structure to both set expectations and define success in an environment. Nothing about power over you or creating "in" or "out" groups or wealth or any of the things our author asserts. Our author further asserts that "Culture is exceedingly difficult to talk about honestly." which is also not true, they are attempting to be "honest" here in spite of their own declaration.

As the topical 'setup' for what is an emotional rant, the entire position statement in the first five paragraphs says exactly one thing "I (the author) am mad that I am unable to understand (or possibly to accept) what people are asking of me with regards to my behavior around others."

What follows then are a series of "sound bytes" pulled out as sub-heads with the author's flawed understanding of what they mean. The author has gone out of their way at times to attribute a level of deceit and malice to others that borders on paranoid but let's stick with what they wrote and go over it shall we?

On the sound bite "We make sure to hire people who are a cultural fit" the author claims the intent is " ... We have implemented a loosely coordinated social policy to ensure homogeneity in our workforce. We are able to reject qualified, diverse candidates on the grounds that they aren't a culture fit. while not having to examine what that means ..."

That reads very much like they (or someone they knew) considered themselves "qualified" and yet their application for employment was "rejected as a poor cultural fit." It seems they have taken the path that it is simpler to blame this on some malicious prep school like club when, on closer inspection it never is. The fact is that startups are desperate for qualified talent, that is what makes them go, however if the way in which a candidate comports themselves suggests they will cause friction with people who are already hired then, even if they are qualified, hiring them would be a bad decision if it increased problems at work.

Let's used a contrived example, lets say that three guys decide to start a company and they have always had a rich tradition of commenting their code. In fact they often exchange ideas in comments as they check things into a source repository. They find that this transparency in the thought process allows them to evolve the code based faster in a compatible way. Now, when interviewing to employee #1 (or #10 doesn't really matter) they ask about writing comments in code and the candidate replies : "Writing comments in code just slows me down, anyone to stupid to not be able to see what the code does shouldn't be reading my code." They may stop right there and say, "Thanks, but your not a cultural fit for company."

Nothing about power, nothing about secret societies, just a knowledge that working with this candidate won't "flow" because they depend on that dialog in comments and this candidate is unwilling to write comments. It's the founder's company, and this is a classic case of find people who are "a cultural fit."

Sound byte number two is "Meetings are evil and we have them as little as possible." which our author conveniently translates to "We have a collective post-traumatic stress reaction to previous workplaces that had hostile, unnecessary, unproductive and authoritarian meetings."

One asks (and I did) "Where did that come from?" And I answered myself with "I wonder if this person doesn't have any tools for keeping in touch with what is going on, and so a lack of meetings threatens them." Because keeping in touch as a developer is as straight forward as reading the commit log and talking to people. Now from a strategy, vision, mission perspective? Sure you want someone to let you know where you are heading, but most engineers hate a weekly status meetings that don't provide any value. So it seems our author has again projected their own mis-understanding into some malicious deceit.

One which stuck right out was the response to "We don't have a vacation policy." The authors interpretation of this is "We fool ourselves into thinking we have a better work/life balance when really people take even less vacation than they would when they had a vacation policy."

It would have helped had the author suggested what they interpret that to imply (wow that is a lot of indefinits!) but they chose not to so we have to speculate. Immature individuals will interpret a 'no vacation policy' to mean they can take vacation whenever, and for as long as, they want. A more reasoned interpretation is that folks can count on taking some time off to rest and recover once their product ships. A 'no explicit policy' does not mean that folks don't care how much you produce, rather it has always meant that you take time off to keep your productivity high when you are at work. Some people cannot handle that level of responsibility, either through lack of maturity or through mixed expectations. It isn't the culture that is evil though. Its like teachers who don't grade the homework, they still expect you to do it so that you have satisfied yourself that you understand the material. It doesn't mean "woo hoo we don't have to do the homework!"

Every single 'culture' point our author attacks they do so in a way the imputes some amazing ill will on the person espousing the point.

The most charitable interpretation I could come up with was that this person was feeling hurt, I accept that it is possible they are simply quite immature, or unable to internalize the concept of a culture model based on peer respect rather than explicit rules. I don't know if they read HN but on the off chance they did, I was trying to express, compassionately, that people aren't trying to deceive you with this discussion of culture, they are trying to communicate. Once you understand what they are saying you will understand better whether or not you want to work with them. I guess I failed at that.

[1] http://i-want-a-pony.com/