> The author of this piece made the classic, and often unavoidable mistake of being between a rock and a hard place and not vetting the company she interviewed at
> Even if you're not an engineer/designer/data scientist (or one of the typically highly desired people for a startup), you should be working at places you love and believe in
Look.
The job market most people participate in is very, very different than the job market for Silicon Valley engineers. In the job market most people participate in, there aren't a whole lot of jobs to go around, at the moment. This means that participants don't have the luxury of having so many opportunities thrown at them that they can afford to pick and choose between them, or to walk away from one just because a place they "love and believe in" more might come along tomorrow. Walking away from a paying job could mean weeks or months or even years of unemployment. Not "funemployment," but the real kind, where you lose sleep at night wondering how you're going to make next month's rent.
In that kind of environment, you can't blame people for taking a paying job when one is offered to them. If you were in their position, I guaran-dang-tee that you would do the exact same thing. When you have few options, you take the least bad one that's on offer, not the perfect golden unicorn of your dreams.
> If you don't believe in your leaders, and don't trust them, you are in a lot of trouble.
You know what real leaders do? Real leaders lead. They don't let an office full of people they are paying run around saying and doing potentially legally actionable things on the company's dime instead of getting work done, for instance. They organize those people into functional teams, and keep those teams so busy working on things that create value for the business that they don't have time to pretend they're back playing Ultimate Frisbee on the quad.
> 12 hour days is insane, and wrong
And also potentially, um, illegal. You know?
> The constant 'want to hear a joke' and racist/sexist tone at the company is also not acceptable, but clearly was supported by the people working there at the time
Again, real leaders lead. If there's an environment in a workplace where behavior like this flourishes, it's because the managers are OK with it flourishing. If they weren't, they would put a stop to it. They don't, so they are.
One of the subjects HN is obsessed with is "culture," but many HNers seem to not understand that culture is not just a synonym for "dumb rules we force underlings to follow." If you're in management, culture is the tone you set through the decisions you make. And if the story is anything close to accurate, at Handy those decisions resulted in a culture where playing with toy helicopters and telling "ching-chong-Chinaman" jokes are a higher priority than making sure their products and services are excellent, obeying the law, or even just being a decent human being.
If I were an investor in that company, I'd be pretty furious about that.
> Look.
The job market most people participate in is very, very different than the job market for Silicon Valley engineers.
I know, I'm not an engineer, I work in support, this is the point I was trying to get across, I seem to have gone wrong by nit picking a few things about the story, which I otherwise see as a reasonably accurate representation of the hell people who aren't engineers go through when looking for work. Agreeing that these things happen isn't an endorsement of those things, if anything, they are a call to action to recognize they exist and make sure they don't exist in your own organization, which is what I do :)
> Even if you're not an engineer/designer/data scientist (or one of the typically highly desired people for a startup), you should be working at places you love and believe in
Look.
The job market most people participate in is very, very different than the job market for Silicon Valley engineers. In the job market most people participate in, there aren't a whole lot of jobs to go around, at the moment. This means that participants don't have the luxury of having so many opportunities thrown at them that they can afford to pick and choose between them, or to walk away from one just because a place they "love and believe in" more might come along tomorrow. Walking away from a paying job could mean weeks or months or even years of unemployment. Not "funemployment," but the real kind, where you lose sleep at night wondering how you're going to make next month's rent.
In that kind of environment, you can't blame people for taking a paying job when one is offered to them. If you were in their position, I guaran-dang-tee that you would do the exact same thing. When you have few options, you take the least bad one that's on offer, not the perfect golden unicorn of your dreams.
> If you don't believe in your leaders, and don't trust them, you are in a lot of trouble.
You know what real leaders do? Real leaders lead. They don't let an office full of people they are paying run around saying and doing potentially legally actionable things on the company's dime instead of getting work done, for instance. They organize those people into functional teams, and keep those teams so busy working on things that create value for the business that they don't have time to pretend they're back playing Ultimate Frisbee on the quad.
> 12 hour days is insane, and wrong
And also potentially, um, illegal. You know?
> The constant 'want to hear a joke' and racist/sexist tone at the company is also not acceptable, but clearly was supported by the people working there at the time
Again, real leaders lead. If there's an environment in a workplace where behavior like this flourishes, it's because the managers are OK with it flourishing. If they weren't, they would put a stop to it. They don't, so they are.
One of the subjects HN is obsessed with is "culture," but many HNers seem to not understand that culture is not just a synonym for "dumb rules we force underlings to follow." If you're in management, culture is the tone you set through the decisions you make. And if the story is anything close to accurate, at Handy those decisions resulted in a culture where playing with toy helicopters and telling "ching-chong-Chinaman" jokes are a higher priority than making sure their products and services are excellent, obeying the law, or even just being a decent human being.
If I were an investor in that company, I'd be pretty furious about that.