Lies Employers Use to Get You to Work with Them

I don't want to hire anyone who would be unhappy working for me. Lying to someone about what their life would be like working at the company seems totally counterproductive to that goal.

I do appreciate it when a candidate has a list of questions related to things that are important to them. In my experience though, that is exceedingly rare - at least with engineers.

I'm lucky to be asked basic questions like what time people are expected into the office in the morning let alone someone asking for concrete examples of advancement.

Usually I have to probe into their past job history to try to figure out what is important to them and doing that in an hour is extremely difficult - just breaking down their defensive barriers so they'll relax and give me candid answers can take half my time. Still, there is only so much I can do in a limited amount of time, so at the end I just try to lay out what an average work day looks like and my philosophy as their manager and hope that they will be able to make an informed decision.

Perhaps it's the legacy of colonialism which gives rise to the "low-trust" structure of modern India?

High-trust and low-trust understate the severity of the phase change, which is more accurately described as a shift from trust-density to trust-sparsity. You go from a state where people spawn with the "bozo bit" off to one where they spawn with it on. You get a completely different political dynamic when that happens.

Obviously, trust has varying degrees and context. In Japan, you can leave your laptop at a cafe; in the U.S., you probably wouldn't. That doesn't mean that we're "low trust" or trust-sparse. We might generally trust most people to be decent while aware of the ~0.05% (?) chance per person (that someone steals the computer.

What is changing is trust with regard to competence. People were never so foolish as to trust all others without limits, but there used to be an assumption of competence in the professional world. Institutions like universities are less trusted, and so are people in general when it comes to basic competence and readiness for autonomy. It would be unthinkable, 20 years ago, that CS graduates from MIT and Stanford could be expected to justify hours of their time in "Scrum ceremonies" (which means that they aren't trusted, which means that their credentialing institutions and work experiences aren't trusted). Even average programmers in the bowels of Fortune 500's IT organizations had more autonomy than the typical "Agile" programmer today.

Right now we are in an era of organizational decline. It's not necessarily catastrophic; it might not even be bad. What it does mean is that institutions (universities, professional organizations, corporations, and even unions) have lost their role as central brokers of trust. It raises interesting questions. Thus far, most of the successful startups have been beneficiaries of institutional decline (and, again, some of those institutions deserved to break down, so I'm not moralizing) and there doesn't seem to be any economic reward to build institutions (as opposed to mere corporations, smaller in scope) up... so it doesn't happen.

Flat hierarchy is a big one. Many startups use it to convince junior hires that they'll be two hops from the CEO when, in fact, that CTO has 75 reports and the junior engineer is actually two de facto levels below where he was told he'd be in the offer letter.

Investor contact is another, related, one. When engineers accept 0.05% equity slices at the expense of hedge-fund jobs, they're doing it because they've been told (and haven't had the life experience to have doubts) that they'll have investor contact within 6 months if they do a good job, and have the connections necessary to be founders inside of 18 months. It almost never happens that way.

> CS graduates from MIT and Stanford could be expected to justify hours of their time in "Scrum ceremonies" (which means that they aren't trusted, which means that their credentialing institutions and work experiences aren't trusted). Even average programmers in the bowels of Fortune 500's IT organizations had more autonomy than the typical "Agile" programmer today.

If that's been your experience with Agile, you've have the misfortune of seeing Agile done horribly wrong in a patholgically unhealthy workplace. You may also be romanticizing a bit about old school way of doing things (I have a co-worker who used to work at a major jet engine manufacturer. They were expected to be sitting at their desks when the bell (literally!) rang at 8:30 am. They were expected to wait for the bell to ring break time in before they went to the washroom. As a programmer! Scrum ceremonies aren't sounding so bad).

Seriously, stand-up isn't supposed to be about accounting for your time, and it isn't supposed to be a vehicle for top-down micro-management. If it's either of these things for you, the problem is your organization, not your specific process.

In my (very positive) experience, stand-up is about maintaining situational awareness in the team. It's a well defined point for people to raise general questions if they've run into ambiguity, or cast a wide net if they've run into impediment. To-do lists are de-emphasized; it's an opportunity to pick the collective brain and gain some clarity / help with what you're doing.