More context at https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=29969359

I'm still kinda confused - did you have no work to do at all? Or you just were expecting some collaborative team work that's not there? I agree lack of communication seems extreme, but if you are working that's not exactly bench warming.

You should have asked to go remote and avoid the state taxes.

pls name a company, I want a job at that company

Seriously, if I could do all of my work without people trying to talk my ear off all day and let me keep my work life and social life truly separate, that sounds ideal to me.

"Oh the tech was textbook perfect but I didn't like that nobody wanted to stand around and bullshit all day"

Like bruh.

I dunno. Sounds to me like the kind of culture where the first way you hear about poorly communicated expectations is when you're asked to sign a PIP.

Google in Sunnyvale was like this. We had lunch together but the office was eerily quiet. People would catch themselves talking, apologize, then go to a meeting room if they wanted to continue. Low key hated it and I'm not a social person and prefer quiet while working.

That is a rather different story indeed. They made it sound here like they weren't working at all in that five months.

Maybe hitting some hiring target?

This happened frequently in the dot-com era. There was tons of over hiring to inflate the budget and get more VC money. I remember one company I worked for raised $8 million (a pretty good size A round for late 90's), then immediately dumping $1 million into office renovations for a second location down the street.

That office needed to be full. We'd hire guys who could barely spell HTML. The next round was $20 million or so. More hiring. It was like monkeys banging on keyboards. There were no code reviews, no process, nothing like that. We hired some of the most clueless management you could possibly imagine.

The product itself was half baked and ill-conceived. But we just kept on hiring. Eventually 2001 came and there were mass layoffs. I was not among them, but I left on my own about a year later. Eventually there was a fire sale and everything was sold for pennies on the dollar.