First of all, no one on Wall Street wears Prada suits. Prada suits are high fashion trash. They wear Zegna or Canali or bespoke.

And second, what about this story reads you as sociopathic? Sure, there's alot of shuffling in this business, but how much worse is that than any other? Restaurants and bars close down all the time, and no one accuses restaurant and bar managers of being sociopaths.

In a restaurant and bar though the employees are viewed as humans, they actually know the person deciding their fate and the reason for that decision. In his story there was always an invisible hand guiding decisions that could completely devastate or make his life.

I mean, the largest percentage of restaurant and bar layoffs are just due to the restaurant and bar closing. In that case, the invisible hand of the free market can be even more cruel than these.

Especially since you won't get severance.

Anecdotally I've heard my friends who work in small business food and alcohol places as servers, cooks, bartenders, etc. call their bosses and business owners sociopaths more than once in unrelated conversations.

I mean, that's always going to be a standard capital v. labor argument. What I'm saying is that industries like tech shouldn't be singled out for run-of-the-mill decisions.

They are, and they should be. Which industry gave us stack ranking?

Depending on how broad your definition of stack ranking is, every industry does stack ranking.

Every single successful business has the problem of "we have this large amount of money in bonuses that we would like to distribute out to our employees and we want to figure out equitable way to do it". Invariably they end up having the rank and group the employees to do that.

“The behavior this engenders, people do everything they can to stay out of the bottom bucket,” one Microsoft engineer said. “People responsible for features will openly sabotage other people’s efforts. One of the most valuable things I learned was to give the appearance of being courteous while withholding just enough information from colleagues to ensure they didn’t get ahead of me on the rankings.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-l...

How’s that different than Jack Welch’s famous “fire the bottom 10% of your workforce” that he implemented in GE in the 80s? Honestly, it was close to textbook management strategy when originally implemented at Microsoft.

Now, sure management science has advanced since then, and a lot of the ways that Microsoft implemented stack ranking at the beginning we’ve realized are counterproductive.

But that doesn’t really change the core principle that they end up ranking employees at some point in time

I don't know the specific case of GE, but could imagine that, as it was a novel strategy at the time, workers weren't already in a competitive ranking-focused mindset.

Additionally firing the bottom 10% is something that should happen naturally as you discover hiring mistakes. Of course just firing the bottom 10% when they are close to average performers is counter productive.

I've already been refuted by the fact that GE did it first.

The shocker to me is that such a huge player in our industry applied it to a collaborative task like software development.

Not tech. Jack Welch at GE gave it to us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve

The most famous example is GE which is a huge conglomerate that spans many industries.

1.) I hardly think the brand of suit detracts from my point.

2.) Go read the comments on the article itself. It’s littered with antecdotes about training your own replacement, being fired before a stock vest, etc.

3.) I would argue that bars and restaurants are a different story all together. The article mentions being a contractor in charge of six-figure decisions which to me reads as a could treat people appropriately chooses not to.

> 1.) I hardly think the brand of suit detracts from my point.

Not saying it does; I'm just saying you should learn some more about suits.

> 2.) Go read the comments on the article itself. It’s littered with antecdotes about training your own replacement, being fired before a stock vest, etc.

I did. The major anecdotes are:

* layed off from a job with one month severance, three months healthcare, because the company realized it needed a different direction

* multiple difficulties with interviewing and attempting to find a new job

* another layoff when a company is acquired and his position is eliminated, where even the author says he considered his severence "more than fair"

* one experience as a contractor where his contract was cancelled with no severence

Sure, it's crappy to have all of those events happen to you, but other than the one contracting gig, I'd consider those layoffs extremely empathic and generous.

I’m interested where you are going with this. I made what I thought was a pretty innocuous comment about actions mattering more than appearance. Are you making the point that tech in general is not building in some sociopathic behaviors as an industry?

I think that backlash against tech has reached such a fever pitch at this point that a huge number of criticisms of it are overblown.

Does tech have problems? Sure. But in order for the criticism of it to be effective, we shouldn’t mix it in with general compliants about our current economic system.

I interviewed with a bank recently, and was blown away by the level of professionalism I experienced compared to everywhere else in tech I've been.

My mental image of finance was "bros a'broing", but the reality of the experience was professionals who were fully attuned to the reality of dealing with billions of dollars, and no delusions about how a few lines of javascript will change the world.

Whereas when I went to Google, I was met with a mix of "you're changing the world, selling eyeballs to advertisers" and "It's so great, we get to dress like we're 12 and play like we're 12".

Or the long since pivoted startup I interviewed who was doing their best to break the internet through awful PDF readers while in the office, everyone was ziplining and pogo-sticking around. (I await the mod slap for speaking ill of a YC company).

Reading these threads as an European tech worker is weird. Or maybe I've missed all the pogo-sticking companies. The most I've seen was some people wearing inoffensive t-shirts and jeans, and a couple of companies which had a foosball table in the break room.

I've been in offices where the ping pong table was square in the middle of the open office, and games ran during the workday.

I've heard of other offices where they didn't have the pingpong table, so they just threw the ping pong balls at each other all day.

This is in the midwest, at lower-tier tech companies that you probably haven't heard of but you probably have used some of their work.

VC Money is a helluva drug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWccN_uu0gY

Here I thought at first "well that looks relatively reasonable even though it's a big space." and then the go carts....

Same here. I was prepared to say "Okay, that's silly, but they still work", but the zip line was a tad too much. Why would you have that in your office?

Edit: They did a follow-up some years later (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v7v51le0lc) and somewhat surprisingly they were still pretty similar! I guess they really know how to balance themselves, since they do seem to be putting out a good product.

Yeah I caught that, too. Also had nothing against Scribd because I came onto them later and liked the platform. I wouldn't have guessed that's what the place was like. Though I'm not sure I'd personally like it. But I understand @jowiar's point a bit.

How familiar are you with the early history of Scribd?

They were a darling of HN(YC financed the early rounds) here at first in the late 200Xs following the classic Youtube/Kim Dotcom growth strategy of allowing pretty much any content on Scribd.

The "any content is good content" strategy seemed to work and Scribd grew in popularity but profits remained elusive.

Then Scribd went all dark-patterns on users locking content behind paywalls. This was content that users had submitted themselves.

Finally the inevitable pivot to ebook subscription services happened.

Scribd seems somewhat respectable now although how profitable?

This culture is firmly entrenched in the West coast of the US, and possibly some East coast finance. I worked in the tech industry for decades in a large US city and only came across that type of culture once, and that company folded within a year.

It exists in Chicago, too.

American tech workers also make double to triple the total compensation...

Yes, I realize that. Not sure how it's relevant, but okay.

I work in tech. The company I sell for is a big well established company that sells services to other big companies across many industries.

The closes we get to "bros a 'boring" is the occasional free beer on a Friday.

Outside of SV it seems like that culture is a minority.