

Is Square an unpleasant place to work? - olivercameron
http://quora.com/Square-company/Is-Square-an-unpleasant-place-to-work

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jacobquick
When I was working at startups in Cambridge, there was a company there that
had a similar reputation called "JumpTap". They were in the same building as
us and their people complained a lot a the nearby bar. Long hours, long weeks,
no recognition, even guys on the same team sabotaging each other's projects to
chase promotions. When I saw that comment "getting a lot of advice from JP
Morgan's Jamie Dimon," I remembered that JumpTap was founded by a former
Morgan banker.

At the time I knew some people at investment banks and they basically report
the exact same environment. Right around then my friend went to JumpTap and
lasted about 5 weeks before he walked out, reporting the exact same thing. So
when they called to recruit me I knew it would be wasting my time to even
explain to them I thought that they should fix their rep as an employer first
- rapacious and exploitative is the only environment they know how to run. It
works for Morgan's and Goldman and the rest of Wall Street so they bring it
with them into tech. It seems to me that only about 5% of engineers are suited
for it, that suitability doesn't correlate with actual technical talent, they
don't really gain anything in the long run for the extra time they put in
(JumpTap's never gonna have a big stock pop, and Square employees will never
see a Google kind of IPO payout), so for pretty much everyone it's best to
steer clear.

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nobody_nowhere
Is [rapidly growing and successful startup x] a pleasant place to work?

FUCK NO

You're growing fast. Everyone's overwhelmed and strained to their limits.
People get bitchy and burn out. Systems fail. Corners are cut. Employees do
the math on options and come up short.

Not pleasant. Pleasant and fast growth don't have a lot of overlap. Is it
worth the ride? Everyone has to figure that out for themselves.

~~~
rdl
I disagree -- plenty of fast growing teams and companies treat employees well,
even during hyper-growth. Sure, it's a lot less stable than an established
company, but what people are talking about in this Quora question doesn't seem
to be related to growth.

I know a fair number of people at Facebook during the 2006-2010 period (and
some from 2005+), and they paid people well, didn't measure productivity by
butt-in-seat hours, etc. Facebook was growing at least as fast as Square.

~~~
nobody_nowhere
In 2006 facebook was already more than 150 people from what i can tell...
square pushed through that boundary much more recently -- that's the really
painful bit

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BryanBeshore
I have not spent much time thinking about this, but do you think, possibly,
that the reason why a minor screw-up from an engineer is looked at as a huge
mistake (and ultimately the engineers feel like crap day-in-day-out), is
because of the industry in which Square operates?

A minor error could practically take a company alike this down.

~~~
rdl
None of the behaviors ascribed to Square seem like the kind of things which
contribute to Quality (in the measurable/repeatable process sense). In fact,
most of the issues raised on Quora (whimsical firing, excessively long hours,
incompetent HR and management, etc.) are directly counter to any decent
Quality program.

Yes, a financial company needs more focus on test, quality, etc. than a social
network or game, but you don't really get those things by terrorizing
employees.

If you look at the organizations producing the best, most bug-free code,
they're generally 9-5 shops with very experienced people, probably way more
qualified than a startup employee for the same role, and for roles where the
requirements and performance metrics are pretty well established.

Trying to avoid all defects is kind of the opposite end of a spectrum from
rapid innovation. You can have low defects in production through great test
and rapidly catching/fixing bugs, but at a certain point, you do need to
accept higher overhead and slower development speed to deliver very low defect
products.

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rdl
I'm not sure if anything has changed, but in 2010 and early 2011, Square had
one of the most effective recruiting efforts in Silicon Valley -- they were
able to recruit away from startups, Facebook, etc. (Palantir was the other
one, with Facebook being the "big company" who had no problems recruiting
otherwise).

