
What Your Culture Really Says: The Toxic Lies Afoot in Silicon Valley - tjmc
http://betabeat.com/2013/02/what-your-culture-really-says-shanley-kane-toxic-lies-afoot-in-silicon-valley/
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heliodor
Ouch, but so true. The things that truly define a great place to work are not
quantifiable. They're qualitative, and reporters can't objectively report on
them, so they just don't report on it. They're left with random tangibles,
like how shiny an office is, and that only further helps this bad status quo.

I wonder what were to happen if the company would tell people that there's a
certain budget and they can anonymously vote on whether they want that money
paid out in their paychecks or used on office perks, and if so, which perks.

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tptacek
Dupe: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5253880>

(Flagged this one)

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nhangen
I worked for an ad agency in Florida and I can tell you that the meetings were
an excuse for the account managers and owner to feel like they were being
productive, all while the doers had to spend extra time before/after work in
order to catch up. I've never had a meeting wherein we resolved an issue that
couldn't have been resolved via a Skype chat or email.

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tptacek
She's not saying "all meetings are good". She's saying that the fad towards
banning them entirely in startups has a subtext that is worth inspecting.

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philsalesses
I feel, personally, that the author is using a thesaurus too heavily.

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danilocampos
I thought the writing was pretty tight.

Can you point to an example where a word's connotation didn't match the
context in which it was used?

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michaelochurch
I think she's too cynical, in the sense that she's assuming the worst 100% of
the time, when she should be assuming the worst only about 80% of the time.
Each of these cultural statements she is interpreting in the worst possible
way.

My observation is that companies tend to regress to the mean with size. This
is not unexpected or surprising. What gets left out of the equation is that,
while the _best_ companies are likely to be small, so are the _worst_
companies.

The reality is that culture is complex and almost impossible to determine in
the course of a single-day interview. It also changes. There are a lot of
companies that "compete on culture" dishonestly, by misrepresenting their work
environments, but it's not fair to assume that every company is corrupt and
dishonest.

What would be more useful, but require the perspective of someone older and
more experienced, is how to pick the good startups.

The one thing I would say is that any company that focuses on non-work perks
is showing some serious warning signs. Work and compensation actually matter.
"Free dinner" is a warning sign, not a perk. If the company seems to have more
interest in talking about non-work than work, that's an obvious bad sign.

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rhizome
Large companies aren't able to have intentional culture features like she
describes. Your last paragraph is pretty much what the essay describes, and
kind of contradicts your first 'graph. Furthermore, I'm not sure Pareto
applies sociologically.

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michaelochurch
There isn't a contradiction because some of the cultural statements she
analyzes are related to the work. My point is that non-work "culture" is a
clear warning sign. Statements related to working culture need to be taken
with skepticism, but not rejected out-of-hand as always untrue or misleading.

