Even with unabashed cynicism there's no denying that structuring a company like a cult has a huge advantage in terms of retention, dedication, salary requirements, etc. This dovetails perfectly with SV's youth worship because young people are more likely to buy into this crap, and they are also more likely to be willing to conflate their work and social circles.
Somewhat more charitably, not all companies are the same. Given the choice I would prefer to work for Apple than for Facebook because I think the former is generally doing better things for the world than the latter. On a more extreme level, I would definitely consider taking a lower salary from a company or non-profit I felt was doing really good things in the world. The point is, while "we are a family" is straight bullshit, the values of a company should matter. If I were to treat my employment as a purely mercenary transaction with no regards to anything but the transaction then I would be complicit in furthering the global corporate hegemony which unbridled capitalism is leading us toward.
I guess that's what a decade of bad management and shitty start-up/big-corp work does to you. Personally, I'm happy that some people have an optimistic enough view of "the work" to want to change that reality, and make it a positive and good experience when enough money is involved to do so. If you read more into Buffer you will see that it is indeed not your typical company.
^ why I downvoted you.
> how can you bring less than your whole self to work
This means basically wanting to be somewhere else rather than at work. i.e., their culture is one of being dedicated to work when you're at work; at least that's how I understand it.
> poor English
This is not uncommon colloquial English. “Team” and “family” here act roughly like “mind” does in the term “theory of mind”—basically nonspecific nouns.
> I don't care about my job…
Sounds like you are a poor fit for the culture they are trying to build. Presumably you would not enjoy working there. That does not make their concept of how to manage their company moronic, nor an explanation of it drivel, however.
Your comment is blazingly condescending toward a post that is clearly very well thought-out and considered, based solely on your disagreement with Buffer's approach to organizing their team and company. That seems wholly unnecessary, particularly since you present zero actual evidence of Buffer's approach being objectively worse, just your opinion that it is.
I don't need to know anything about a companies culture to know what they're saying is patently specious nonsense. You might be impressed by it, who knows. Do you read a company's mission statement when considering a job and say "company a say they're honest and driven by a desire to put both their employees and their customers first, but company b claims integrity and a desire to raise the standard of customer service to a new level.....oh I just can't decide!"?
It's moronic drivel, isn't it. Apart from being nonsensical (how can you bring less than your whole self to work, unless you've had some sort of psychotic breakdown) and the poor English ("seeing team as family") it just reads like corporate babble. It's not a family. I care about my family. I don't care about my job, its stakeholders, its values, its products or its customers. It's just a job. I'm a wage slave so I do it for the money and for no other reason at all. Whenever I see a company stating their values I immediately lose any respect I might have had for them. It's as if they've been on a fact finding trip to north Korea.