Be Nice Or Leave

There appear to be a number of anecdotes in the book Hatching Twitter where Fred Wilson is painted as the bad guy. I wonder how much of this was for the book, or how possibly I am misinterpreting it.

I worked at a company once that conflated mean-spirited policies with "just business". The result was a downfall that was entirely preventable.

Vacation and sick leave were combined ("PTO") which meant that you had to take a vacation day if you got sick. The result of this was that people came into work when ill and everyone was less productive. Very little ever got done in the winter, because it was just one constant office-wide cold. (I had so many colds, that season, that I saw a doctor to find out if something was wrong with my immune system.)

Open-plan offices are another penny-wise, pound-foolish institution. They're not used because they're "collaborative" or "hip" but because they're cheap, and they're cheap because they're shitty. The result, however, is high turnover, increased sick load, distraction and antagonism. There's also an overwhelming amount of evidence that open-plan offices hurt the best employees the most, which means you're losing off the top. That's not where you want to lose.

The killer was when it bought (cough rescued) another company and installed the acquired company's upper management. The new regime's first move was to kill the acquiring company's R&D team-- not because it wasn't doing useful work (it was) but because "their side" (the acquiring company) didn't have an R&D team. So a high-performing R&D team that had already built some powerful stuff (and was 6-9 months away from solving an existential-risk fraud problem) was shut down. Those guys over there have too much freedom! They're in danger of actually saving the company! Shut them down, now!

Of course, the health benefits were shit, which meant that days of work time were lost to haggling with insurance companies and hospitals about bills. Whatever pennies are saved by having a crappy health plan is lost when employees have to haggle on their own behalf to get health care.

Sometimes, cost cutting is the right way to go, but that's rare and usually in a well-understood existential crisis. As in, "this company won't be around in two years unless we're really tight, and here's how we plan to make it up".

I can't respect companies that play against their employees. If you have a crappy health plan, a bad PTO policy, closed allocation, stack ranking, and a bad office space, then you're not playing to win. Instead, you're in the business of competing against your employees, when you should be in the business of excelling at something, and of winning in the market. You only get to pick one, in the long term, in this world.

Unfortunately, for the individual executive, the "be a dick" strategy often works. Most "tech" startups are scams: companies not built to last, but just to be sold to some "greater fool" before it falls to pieces on account of its own sloppy constitution. The individuals who build these crap companies generally get to cash out (or, at least, move on to cushy venture capital jobs) before that happens and, when it does, they can plausibly (if falsely) blame their successors.

I have noticed certain people seem to think 'being nice' equals 'dumb' and 'unexperienced'. Most people are so used to others claiming everything; their time, their concepts, designs,… they think just because you're not an asshole, you're a push-over.

That's a ridiculous way to make a point.

Being blunt and calling someone a "fucking idiot" are not the same thing.

I think How to Win Friends is one of those books that you (you being someone in the supermajority of people who isn't naturally gifted at interpersonal relationships) know you should read but you avoid it.

Then one day, you are desperate and you read it and wonder "my God why didn't I read this sooner!"