Now, whether that comes down to "things used to be less stupid and we're just all younger and don't know any better" or whether it comes down to "the author just got really frustrated and impatient about things that didn't bother most of us" I don't know. But I will say that I've gotten unreasonably impatient about different things before, so I get it, and I think a person has the right to rant about work without backlash even if it doesn't make for the world's most insightful piece.
Edit: I read the rest of it, and yeah, after the dev env stuff things got a bit weirder. However, in my limited experience, it's not outside the norm for large tech companies to treat their employees like children (which is one of my pet peeves too, which is why I don't work at them). It's also not outside the norm for "new-wave" tech companies to be a bit haphazard when it comes to office/workstation setup and such. But generally you're picking one poison or the other. Given that I'm pretty sure the author was talking about Lyft, I can see how in this case they ended up with both.
I've had on-boarding that was basically: set up SSO creds + 2FA, login to the wiki, read all of the things, install your own damn tools. I had a PR open by the end of the day.
I've been at the complete opposite end as well: no PC for the first 3 days, multiple systems with unique logins and varying password requirements, file multiple tickets in some ancient (HEAT) ticketing system for access to different things, setting up meetings with different teams just to find the code and infra that it all runs on.
Some companies end up with solutions that just don't age well. Most of us struggle through it because we know on-boarding will eventually end. The group activities are probably not a good indicator of things to come, but tangled systems are.
Sounds like some one in HR has built a little empire out of this.
My first job onboardings consisted of a tour being issued my lab coat and being shown the portacabin that was my office.
Then it was go and se Keith he will give you a quick run down on how a PDP11 works and there is a book on Fortran in the company library learn it
I kept going, and it wasn't worth the read. The seven paragraphs on the internal tool training were only a bit weird. I could see a company spending an hour or two having new hires answer contrived questions with internal tools.
Being a woman. The dogpilers are most likely cluing in on her name.
What this means is that no measured discussion can be had either way and the comments are almost always a disaster (at least here, on HN).
It's weird, I don't know what's the root cause of all this vitriol (other women authors don't get this treatment on HN, it's just this particular domain).
I’ve made another comment here about what I think is behind her post. But if you want my general common sense opinion on why the post didn’t resonate with most people is because it falls under the old adage of ‘know your audience’.
People are getting laid off, there’s entire groups trying to break into the industry, there’s entire groups in inconsequential positions that are easily commoditized, and so on.
Yet here is someone being critical of what appears to be a 3-day on boarding, many of us would be lucky to have that job, and even luckier to be able to bounce from it on a whim.
Goto a third world country and complain about how Costco has long annoying lines in America.
Anyway, that’s the underlying sentiment behind the post that I think most people are reacting to.
Know your audience, or even better, get your timing right. Don’t bring this up when there’s 39 million unemployed.
You seem to misunderstand my “serious accusation” as if I’m saying criticizing a woman is unacceptable. I’m saying I believe there’s a gender difference in people’s default level of empathy.
Spoiler: I thought her post about the onboarding sucked too, for all the same reasons everyone else did. And I’m someone who usually loves her blog.
I try to be empathetic to the fact that we’re all different people and will react to the same situation in vastly individual ways. Her reaction to that onboarding situation is her own, and those emotions are the kind of thing that can’t really be “wrong” or up for debate. You can’t reason somebody into un-feeling an emotion.
Maybe the HN discussion for her post could have been about making these kind of huggy feely human processes more accessible? Instead it was about how she’s so ungrateful, or about how she shouldn’t have published it, or even speculation about her neurotypicality.
Lots of people in tech circles talk a big game about how they’re so progressive and support all people’s differences because a person can bring so much in other areas despite the areas where they are weak. Just don’t be female I guess.
As for how to bring up her issue? Well, her initial way was one way. It turned out it wasn’t the best. The parameters you can modify is when and also to whom.
Believe it or not, speaking directly to faang level senior engineers can provide insight into higher levels of standards that a larger diverse audience can extract value from since due diligence was done on providing perspective. That’s an adjustment.
Edit:
I’ll just add one thing to give an example of honing perspective. It is entirely possible that the first three days of on boarding is a dream come true for a lot of people, just to finally be at that company. Now how would I sound if I compared my dismissive experience of it in contrast to that?
If this is you fifth or sixth go around, and you picked up some good/bad, make that clear, and be aware of the diversity in people’s experiences so that your critiques are palatable in a variety of contexts.
I would trust that both of you are telling the truth about the way you experience reality, wouldn't assume that one had to be false for the other to be true, would probably try to offer some words of sympathy or encouragement for your bad experience, and would do my best to accommodate both in the future, of course :)
On-boarding is harder to empathize with. For most readers it was likely a while ago, and other memories of their company have replaced the experience of the very first week. Even if it was bad, readers who are employed at a company just put up with it. Thus, Rachel's "this is stupid and so is everyone one involved except me" tone, falls flat by insulting the reader.
Then there was the promise - of hearing about red flags. Personally I expected some sort of horror story. "Here's the Kafkaesque story of why I didn't have a laptop for 3 months and was forced to access my email using a fax machine".
Instead, there was this bit with having to gasp talk to a coworker while being taught the company's HR system. Searching for a dog is inane, but hardly a nightmare. I'll be honest, I didn't keep reading much past that.
If you changed the details in "my nightmare delivering a project for a client" to be "THEN, the client spent a bunch of time with me speccing out the work to be done, and then gave me plenty of time to do the work they asked, and I couldn't do it", would you blame the commenters for a "this person must be incompetent" sentiment? The situation's less clear cut than that, but the devil's in the details!
I suspect tone to be the secret sauce. You can rewrite most things in ways that at least some people will dislike without changing the facts. You can also rewrite them in a way that will solicit sympathy from those same people. Tone can change a lot.
And as I said, usually the commenters will give you the benefit of the doubt: yes, that legacy code sounds like it probably sucked, or yes, the client's requirements were nonsensical and contradictory.
Except here.
I disagree with this. I think Rachel's blog is fairly aggressive as far as HN submissions go, which doesn't elicit a lot of sympathy. It's pretty argumentative with sniping and a sense of superiority:
>Now, when I run into a thing like this, I start getting snarky and bitchy and start thinking laterally. Like, okay, watch me not use your stupid system but get the answer anyway.
And I don't think that's an unjustified reaction based on the content, but it's also not typical for blog posts that show up here. So the tone is aggressive, and commenters end up being unsympathetic. I completely agree with the parent comment that changing the tone of the post would likely result in a different set of comments (not that the author seems to care).
I've also noticed this in the HN comment section. There's a well-known member who ends up picking fights often in the comments; I usually don't read usernames at all, but if I notice a comment written in a certain bitter, argumentative way, then it's almost always from this person.
You can sound arrogant, you can call people names, you can sound like you're about to ask to speak to the manager, you can add some self-deprecating jokes, you can show empathy for whoever created the mess while describing the problems you had with said mess etc, that's the tone.
The content stays the same, but people will react very differently to it based on the tone. Some styles work for nearly all audiences, some don't.
If the story is of the oft-posted, "My nightmare dealing with a legacy codebase" or "My nightmare delivering a project for an inept client" flavor, there's no shortage of people jumping in the comments to echo the sentiment and reinforce with their own stories.
You change a few details, however, to the "My nightmare onboarding with a new company", and suddenly the comments dogpile on "Wow, this person must be incompetent!" sentiment.
What's the secret sauce here? Age? Reputation? Subject matter?