
My year in startup hell - amirmc
http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyons/
======
nocarrier
Apparently Hubspot did dirty tricks to try to obtain a copy of the manuscript,
as well as blocking publication. The CMO and a VP are gone because of it. You
can't make this stuff up.

[https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/03/23/documents-
re...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/03/23/documents-released-
hubspot-probe-involving-author-dan-lyons/VZH4CN4kR5p7iyhsKEdwJI/story.html)

Edit: Here's the worst stuff the article mentioned, I figured it would be good
to highlight the relevant quote. These are felonies.

 _The documents also say there was an effort “to obtain sensitive information
on individuals with access to the book’s transcript, or control of the
publishing deal. The information found was then used as leverage in an attempt
to prevent the book from reaching the market place.”_

 _The report also mentions “tactics such as email hacking and extortion” in
the attempt “to railroad the book.”_

~~~
Spooky23
I'm curious as to why there was no prosecution. Given the heavy hand wielded
by the Feds in this region for other cases, you'd think extortion and hacking
would be a slam dunk?

~~~
emodendroket
Well unfortunately I think part of the answer may be the victims in those
cases were more influential.

------
pfitzsimmons
I worked at HubSpot for many years. (disclaimer - I do not have a financial
interest in the company. But I do still have strong emotional and social
connections, and I was there long enough that I feel some sense of ownership
for the company culture).

Remember that this article is written in order to entertain and sell books.
Everything is hyper exaggerated. There are a few fair points (for instance we
were very overcrowded, we could not lease new sections of the building we were
in fast enough. And yeah, some of the "change the world through Inbound
marketing" messaging was over-the-top and made my eyes roll). But a lot of it
is either inaccurate or spun to seem bad when it wasn't (see my other comments
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11370077](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11370077)
or
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11370016](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11370016)).

For the most part, HubSpot was a normal workplace where the vast majority of
the time people worked hard and did their thing. People occasionally
interrupted work for fun hijinks and we did sometimes have parties after work.
By packing in every outrageous story into a few paragraphs, he makes it sound
way crazier than it was.

I should also add that overall work-life balance was pretty good, and the
company made efforts not to be "ageist". I had both mothers and fathers on my
team and they could get out of the office on time to be with their families.
As we matured, we planned our fun team-building events in ways to ensure that
parents could attend them. There is an implication by the author that he did
not fit in because he was old, but I do not think that is a fair critique.

~~~
mmf
I do not think he was implying that he did not fit because he's old. He
implied that he did not fit because he's mature...

~~~
SFLemonade
I didn't get a total feeling of maturity from his writing. Did you read it?
Mostly low-ball shots taken at startup practices that are pretty commonplace
now, primarily for their proven effectiveness. Like the fact that he was
disturbed to find that Zack, being so young, wasn't an assistant but a
manager. It's like the idea of promoting individuals based on results and
performance, rather than age and tenure, was foreign to the author. And
ironically, he displayed a lot of ageist qualities himself there. I wouldn't
exactly characterize that as maturity.

~~~
drumdance
I got the same impression. And I'm close to the same age as the author so it's
not like I'm a teenager thinking "You just don't get it!"

------
patio11
Hubspot (disclaimer: I hold a nominal number of shares I bought on IPO day,
entirely because I like them) is, contrary to take in this article, a software
company which makes a suite of things that are essentially me-in-a-box at a
price point that a business with $500k in revenue can tolerate. With specific
reference to the spam bit: they neither teach it nor allow it, because (like
everyone else in email marketing) if one of their customers spams and they
don't address that, Google/Yahoo/Microsoft will end their business.

The basic model on that side of the business is really simple: teach people
how to write things that good prospects would find useful. Get them to write
those things. Trade a copy for their email address and permission to send more
things they will like. Send them more things they like, including
recommendations on what you have that they should buy.

I know this sounds like black magic. It's not. Consider an insurance agent who
sells to small businesses. They have zero software people in-house and perhaps
1.5 people who do marketing.

You tell those people "Write about the businesses you work with. Write about
the kind or risks they have. Write the stuff you know that they don't about
E&O policies and bind documents and what own occupation LTD means and how it
is superior to any occupation LTD. Get the emails of businesses who could
purchase from you. Then, after becoming their trusted advisor in the confusing
world of insurance, sell them insurance. They did not do the research on E&O
because they were fascinated with the subject intellectually. They did it
because they have a legitimate need for it. Do the work upfront on education
and you will be the obvious place to buy it from."

This works. Very well.

I can't comment on the company culture. Many startups seem pretty wild to me
on that score. At the end of the day, though? It's a bunch of people, with
jobs, engaged in honest labor. Insurance agents need marketing software;
Hubspot makes it; this leaves the world a bit better off.

~~~
analog31
I delete about fifty or those things a day.

~~~
Bjartr
Why not just click unsubscribe at the bottom? I've found that's a very
effective way to stop them being sent.

~~~
csixty4
It's never just one list. As savvy inbound marketers, they added you to the
list for their daily newsletter. But they also surreptitiously added you to
separate lists for monthly and quarterly news, book releases, and events.

And since you didn't read the fine print, you didn't realize you were being
signed up for those five lists at each of the parent company's properties.

But they all have separate unsubscribe links. So just when you think you're
done hearing from them, you get an email from another list.

That's what happened to me recently when I signed up for daily "running tips"
from a major publisher in the field. I ended up setting up a filter for the
publishing company's name straight to spam. Then I hop in my spam box every
week or so & unsubscribe.

Edit: today's lists were "You have been unsubscribed from our Men's Health
Special Offers email list. Thank you." and "You have been unsubscribed from
our Organic Gardening Special Offers email list. Thank you."

------
CM30
"For example, it instructs that when someone quits or gets fired, the event
will be referred to as 'graduation.'"

Well, they're certainly laying on the euphemisms here. I mean, maybe it's just
me, but that reminds me an awful lot of 1984 esque newspeak and the Ministry
of Love. It's all 'lets make the worst possible stuff sound like a good
thing'.

~~~
tacostakohashi
Using euphemisms, particularly with the goal of making bad events seem good,
is indeed grating and lame.

I think the intention here is sound, though. There is so much negative baggage
around "fired", "laid off", "quit", etc, when these are really not negative
events at all. This is where an employee is liberated from a situation that
isn't working (quite possibly at a company that isn't doing well, is poorly
managed, or in a shrinking industry), and will generally end up working
somewhere better, taking the opportunity to travel or start there own
business, and grow.

Trying to remove these associations from the process is a worthwhile goal, but
it would be rather more honest to just go for something neutral like "no
longer with us" than trying to co-opt "graduation", which obviously means
something completely different.

~~~
oblio
> There is so much negative baggage around "fired", "laid off", "quit", etc,
> when these are really not negative events at all. This is where an employee
> is liberated from a situation that isn't working (quite possibly at a
> company that isn't doing well, is poorly managed, or in a shrinking
> industry), and will generally end up working somewhere better, taking the
> opportunity to travel or start there own business, and grow.

Yeah, right. Try to tell this to a single mother of two trying to pay the
mortgage.

For a lot of people (I'd say most people), being fired is _not_ a pleasant
experience.

~~~
phamilton
True. Words are cheap. However, with sufficient severence and a removal of
social stigma it might someday be less of a "your life is a failure"
situation.

------
4pm
Can we create a thread called "my year in big company corporate IT department
hell"?

I'll go first:

I reported to an incompetent business person who having failed at doing
anything that required business sense, used his considerable political skills
to lead a tech team instead. Management practices included lying to create
enemities between team members.

I am also writing a book about it. :)

Would you rather work in a room full of motivated smart people who are
building somthing useful, or a rigid heirarchy that lacks transparency and
puts its own personal interests over the work they do? Hmmm hard choice.

~~~
FLUX-YOU
The support ticket reads:

"I can't upload this lab document to the site!"

I call the person up for details, get the file they were trying to upload, and
recreate the issue. I pull up the code for this site, run it on a local copy
to get the exception, and find out that someone's string concatenating SQL
queries from form inputs. This site was written in 2014. I bring it up in a
meeting but we can't allocate time to fix that because it currently works well
enough.

~~~
F_J_H
Using bind variables?

------
rycfan
Two reactions to this article (and I say this as someone near 50):

1\. Dan's obviously not cut out for startup life. When he meets Zack, he
assumes Zack must be someone's assistant because he is young. Dan has no
concept of the fact that someone might have their position because they are
skilled and perform well. In his mind, the only way to have a fancy title is
tenure and age.

2\. Sure, the language of startups is interesting (graduation as a euphemism
for quitting or getting fired), but the clear message is that this is odd, and
thus, wrong. As though normal corporate America is the one true way and is
just fine. Bullshit. Let's make sure to keep the workplace exactly as it's
been for the last 100 years and never evolve.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
But this _is_ normal corporate America. Dan apparently isn't familiar with the
history of IBM, which was so bonkers it had its own song book attempting to
engineer a cult of personality around Thomas Watson.

[http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/08/tripping-through-
ibm...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/08/tripping-through-ibms-
astonishingly-insane-1937-corporate-songbook/)

This was back in the 1930s. Apparently not much has changed.

In the 60s and 70s the DEC people used to talk about "Mother DEC" and "Father
Ken (Olsen - CEO)" \- and DEC was a vastly more pleasant company to work for,
if you didn't mind meetings where people shouted at each other a lot.

Elsewhere, this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RINizGmhrYo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RINizGmhrYo)

US corporate culture is insane. It has always been insane. The insanity takes
different forms, and the web startup version frequently manages to be both
insane and infantilising. (See also, startup names that sound like baby talk -
more of a thing before DotCom 1, but there are still a few relics today.)

This is not what an adult professional culture looks like. Signifiers of
playful childlike wonder and creativity shouldn't come in stick-on corporate
office multipacks, especially not if they hide much uglier relationship
dynamics in the office space.

It's fascinating to wonder why this has been such a strong trend in the
startup space. Obviously it's more likely to appeal straight-from-college CS
grads than battle-hardened senior engineers. But my guess is it's also an
evolutionary adaptation to trigger paternal (less often maternal) feelings in
investors and VCs, who are more likely to feel generously disposed and still
part of youth culture if they sponsor a brogrammer creche, and less likely to
feel threatened by kids who look nothing like direct competitors.

Social signalling in business is a very interesting thing, and maybe isn't
questioned often enough.

~~~
rycfan
Great point on this actually being part of corporate America. I had
neglected/forgotten that point, when I'm pretty sure buzzword bingo predated
the rise of startups (synergy, touch base, strategic alignment were all part
of the lingo when I worked at larger companies).

I wasn't really commenting on the healthiness of the startup culture, just how
out of touch and corporate Dan was (apparently so out of touch he doesn't even
realize he's out of touch). But you make some really good points about this
trend. I'll have to think about that some more.

------
justinlaing
Summary: guy gets hired by company he doesn't like in an industry he doesn't
like by someone he doesn't like. Spends a year there doing things he doesn't
like. Writes book about what he didn't like about it.

I'm sure HunSpot isn't for everyone. But I'm also sure it's awesome for some
people. They make a real product people find useful and helps them run their
business.

Don't believe everything you read. Especially when it's to promote something
(like a book or a company).

~~~
ghc
It's awesome for young people. Back when they were a lot smaller I had some
friends there and considered joining, but all the parties they invited me to
in an effort to recruit me made me feel too old, and I was still under 30 at
the time. The book is exaggerated to sell books, sure, but in reading that
article I didn't see anything _grossly_ exaggerated based on what I've seen at
their parties/events and what friends who work there have told me.

------
cubano
As a 50-something guy as well, I guess I see it much differently than this guy
did.

Firstly, IMO, there was nothing "hell"-ish about Hubspot's culture or business
model. It seems to me they were just playing the game-as-given, and doing it
quite well frankly.

The proof of that is IPO.

Personally, I find it beyond refreshing that management is making a powerful
effort to change up the typical gray-flannel corporate work/life thingy.

So old-school didn't get it, or even see beyond his own prejudices at the
positive work culture meta-messages.

That's on him, not Hubspot.

~~~
oriolid
ELI5, "positive work culture meta-messages"

~~~
cubano
To me it means they are showing effort and interest in the workplace
environment, and not just making it a drab cubicle farm, and messages
something beyond just the actual stuff like dogs and music instruments.

BTW, nothing personal but I hate trying to explain my writing as I am a big
fan of metaphor and ambiguity.

~~~
cballard
I have dogs in my office. They run around and bark all the time. Their
presence shows to me that serious engineering work is not important, but the
image of being a "startup" is. The idea of a musical instrument being played
while I am trying to focus on engineering is horrifying.

There's also a whole world of potential designs besides "drab cubicle farm"
and "kindergarten mashed-up with ComicCon". For example, the 37signals[1]
office.

If they want to show effort and interest in the workplace environment, they
should try providing private offices with doors that close.

[1] [https://37signals.com/office](https://37signals.com/office)

------
noir_lord
As someone who has never worked in a SV startup I find the whole culture alien
(fascinating but alien).

I don't want an adult sized creche, I want somewhere quiet I can think.

~~~
Disruptive_Dave
One of the most difficult things to do in today's young/modern/culture-y
office is work.

~~~
bunderbunder
Y'know, I've been working in one for 6 months now, and, despite some initial
trepidation, I haven't found that to be true at all. Sometimes you do have to
put on headphones to cut down on the auditory distraction, but otherwise it's
been just fine.

Granted, every office has a different culture. I'm guessing the most
distracting offices are the ones where everyone is distracted to begin with.
For example, if you're at a startup where everyone works 60-80 hour weeks and
is so chronically sleep-deprived that their ability to concentrate for any
length of time is shot, then yeah, that's going to be a hellhole.

~~~
CydeWeys
I'm in an open floor plan space with about one hundred desks in it and it's
never particularly distracting to me. I barely ever even have to use
headphones to concentrate. People simply don't have loud distracting
conversations. It'd be different if I were mixed in with salespeople having
phone conversations from their desks all day every day, but we're all
engineers. I appreciate being able to easily ask my coworkers a question as it
occurs to me immediately.

~~~
bunderbunder
OK, fair point. I did once get rearranged into an open plan office where all
the teams were intermixed for I-still-don't-know-what reason. Half the staff
was sales, and yeah, it was impossible to concentrate. Fortunately, we had a
liberal work from home policy, so I had a means of escape when I had a
deadline approaching. But I still only lasted for a few months after that.

Just to reiterate, I don't think the open plan office was really the
fundamental problem. It was the attempt to mix oil and water.

------
equalsnil
Step 1: Read the article.

Step 2: Watch these videos:

[https://www.youtube.com/embed/Sknnd-
pkQ8A](https://www.youtube.com/embed/Sknnd-pkQ8A)

[https://www.youtube.com/embed/avzzEOWFj9k](https://www.youtube.com/embed/avzzEOWFj9k)

~~~
dennisgorelik
Learn what promotional videos actually mean.

~~~
inflagranti
Business Maverick and humble genius? Does that really not sound completely
over the top and ridiculous to you?

------
ryandrake
As someone closing in on 40, the depiction of this place does indeed seem like
hell.

To all the ex-Hubspot people getting defensive: This article isn't about that
specific company. Hubspot was the author's convenient example. It's about the
ideas that companies like it exemplify: That work has to be "a cross between a
kindergarten and a frat house" (I'd add "a cult"). That work should include
partying and nerf guns and dodgeball outings. That you have to always pretend
your company is about "leading a revolution" or changing the world. That you
have to follow its culture and believe in its mission and values. That your
work has to be more than an exchange of your labor for money. That's what this
article is about, and that's what all the cynicism about tech startup culture
is aimed at--not Hubspot in particular.

~~~
berkay
Cynicism is fairly easy, defining the alternative is harder. For example based
on what you describe the characteristics of what makes the startup culture
"like hell", it sounds like you prefer that work should be nothing more than
an exchange of your labor for money, you don't interact with your colleagues
other than work, company to not have a defined mission and values other than
making money. A hired gun to do whatever we're paid to do. That's also
definition of hell for many of us. I don't know whether the author has
anything constructive in his book but judging what's in the article, looks
like it's pure snark.

~~~
hitekker
Actually, cynicism can be fairly painful.

It grows from a lot of moments.

One moment your leader is asking all the employees if they're ready to change
the world. Everyone thinks the company is a rocketship. They slave away into
the moonlight and beyond. The next moment, the leaders gets everyone together
and announces news that don't quite match what was promised before. Sad faces.
Stiff upper lips. No worries, we can work past this.

The moment after that: more bad news starts trickling in. Then a flood. Then
empty desks. Maybe, you get out first. Maybe, you're the first to discover
your key card won't let you in the building anymore.

Throughout these moments, the faces of your comrades-in-arms will stay with
you; the way the light in their eyes fades and fades and fades. You were
"family", you were together, you were united in purpose...

And now what are you?

Fast forward years later. Your friends from the old startup no longer talk to
each other. They all work at big companies. You're interviewing at a fresh up-
and-comer. Someone 10 years your junior sits you down and asks if you're ready
to change the world.

What do you say?

... Writing aside, I think the best company cultures tend to be filled with
people who have been fooled before (the essence of cynicism) yet still manage
care about what they're doing and building. These folks also tend to have
meaning and identity outside of their work.

~~~
berkay
Well articulated. Clear description of what pushes us to become more and more
cynical. I find it far easier to empathize with you than the author. It did
not feel justified (based on the article).

I hope that it does not have to be this way. I hope we can create companies
that strive to be better. Culture does not have to mean one has to put the
company above everything else. Making the environment that we spent most of
our lives better requires more than nerf guns and ping pong tables. Having
meaning and identity outside works in essential. I just don't want to give up
the working hours. May be I have not been fooled enough times ...

~~~
hitekker
I appreciate the hope you have for the future. I, too, would not like to give
up the working hours, though I have yet seen observe a general-purpose,
adequate solution that works outside of extremely specific situations[1].

Perhaps "Insufficient data for meaningful answer" as a certain computer would
say.

[1]Certainly not "Management Consulting" :)
[http://paulgraham.com/before.html](http://paulgraham.com/before.html)

------
cjbprime
Wait. They hired Fake Steve Jobs and didn't make him sign an NDA? That's..
going to end a lot like this. o_O

~~~
moritzplassnig
I'm pretty sure he signed an NDA when he accepted the offer (part of the
employment agreement), but that's different from the
nondisparagement/nondisclosure agreement mentioned in the article (normally
done when somebody leaves a company).

~~~
analog31
The latter comes at a price, such as severance pay.

------
billhendricksjr
> “You don’t get rewarded for creating great technology, not anymore,”

This resonated with me the most, as I learned it the hard way through my own
failed startup. I was informed by several investors that tech was a commodity
and they only wanted to discuss our go to market plans.

~~~
rboyd
If indeed this is a bubble and we do pop, about the only enjoyable thing to
watch will be all these junior associates that autodial on fishing expeditions
scrambling around for new work. Never actually started a company but they've
analyzed plenty of models.

------
7ewis
I don't understand why people dislike working in a startup environment. I work
for a tech company that has really outgrown it's startup stages, but still
acts like one.

It's brilliant, I'd never want to work for a corporate company! We have
regular parties, play table tennis daily, beers on Friday. It just makes work
so much more enjoyable.

Admittedly, this is only my second job, and I am only 20, but I can't imagine
ever wanting to leave. The only company that may tempt me would be Google.

~~~
noname123
>It's brilliant, I'd never want to work for a corporate company! We have
regular parties, play table tennis daily, beers on Friday. It just makes work
so much more enjoyable.

When you leave or a bunch of your friends who used to go to happy hour
together leave "for better opportunities," you'll realize that most people who
are your work drinking buddies didn't really know you or felt or thought
deeply about your personal experiences. (It's not that they're bad people,
it's just what happens when people are put in an artificial social environment
where people slap high-fives after work rec dogeball and shout out witty one-
liners).

Also when you realize after 5 or 6 years of working, and the startup mantra of
"changing the world," your other friends whom you laughed at before, toiling
away in their fields have started coming on their own. You have only pushed
bits for marketing, spam, online shopping, on-demand on-gig economy for people
like yourself to get a stick of gum delivered in an hour. You can try to
justify how you are promoted from junior all the way to lead to technical
product manager, or how you led your team to switch from Rails to Node, SQL to
Cassandra, Java to Scala. But you'll begin to see the thin-veneer of how
little management cares about tech and how most of it is a pep-rally, a race
to the bottom for those at the top of the Ponzi scheme to enrich themselves.

You look at other people in other fields or in other area's of tech. At work
cafeteria IKEA lunch table (after a lengthy morning standup where there was
yet another pissing match about React vs. Angular), People shoot the breeze
about AlphaGo or that Tay twitter bot, and someone else shoot another witty
one-liner comeback, everyone laughs, one person groans - in between the
silence after the reactions settle in, it dawns slowly on your mind that we've
all become spectators in the real information technology revolution.

That what you are toiling away when you go back to your desk after this lunch
conversation is just another Twitter stream, another HN comment, Instagram
heart, albeit decorated in syntax highlighting to the "AWS/Google Cloud/Azure
Twitterverse."

That is just the same as the well-dressed girl or guy sitting in the next row
over in the open-office environment, whom you never talk to but to make
yourself feel better, secretly put down in your mind because what they do "is
so much BS, social media customer engagement"; but they are the same, and
you're all the same...

You call your friends up from college and hear their stories at the precarious
precipice of 28-30. How many hours they stayed up at the hospital during a
rotation, and a critical debate they had with their attending whether to admit
a patient; or how many e-mails they had to sent to get their 15 minute film
considered at 50 different film festivals; or staying on after getting finally
their PhD, to work for free to do the technology transfer to industry the
physics research they worked on in their group; and always, the one-liner
remark, "tech has it so much better, you guys make so much money!"

Of course, the response begets a begrudging smile or another sequitur to
equalize the conversation; but come work Monday, the habit to don on the noise
canceling headphones, the cursory checks on social media to keep abreast
fantasy football leagues/stock portfolio's, the internal monologue of the
recalculation how much your employee stock options are going to be worth/vest,
have all become instinctive rituals to not let the existential dread set in.

~~~
lr4444lr
That's some good writing right there.

------
jbuzbee
Dan Lyons sure gets around. In another life, he was an early and vocal
supporter of SCO in their lawsuits against Linux. At least in the end he
finally came around and admitted that he'd been "Snowed By SCO"

[http://www.forbes.com/2007/09/19/software-linux-lawsuits-
tec...](http://www.forbes.com/2007/09/19/software-linux-lawsuits-tech-oped-
cx_dl_0919lyons.html)

[edit for typo]

~~~
keithpeter
Looks like he worked it out in the end.

Meta: Forbes are convinced that I'm using an ad blocker to the extent that I
had to google/cache the article linked above. I actually have no plug-ins at
all, just accessing the site thru' and academic connection, suspect proxy may
be blocking stuff. First time I've had that one.

------
pitchups
I read the entire article trying to figure out what exactly was "hellish"
about the experience - but couldn't find anything other than what can only be
called a really bad culture fit.

~~~
shitgoose
125 pages inspirational memo for starter. I have been working for a number of
banks in the past years, but this level of BS is off the chart.

------
sajid
I'm not sure if this is satire. 1 + 1 = 3 ? Orwell will be turning in his
grave.

~~~
pfitzsimmons
I worked there, it wasn't anything as bad as what he makes it out to be. It
was just shorthand for saying, "the whole is greater than the sum of the
parts."

Our whole sales pitch was that we were all-in-one software. So instead of
running one system for your blog, another system for your home page, another
system for email, another system for analytics, another system for your
contacts database, etc, etc, you would just run HubSpot, and when all the
tools work together you get much better results then when they are separated.
To make good on that sales pitch, we had to be constantly thinking of ways of
how we could add value by integrating pieces together and making things work
well together. Hence we were told to always be thinking about how to make 1 +
1 equal 3.

~~~
dennisgorelik
The right notation would be:

    
    
      f(1) + f(1) = f(3)

~~~
RealityVoid
More like: f(1) + f(1) < f(1+1)

------
jamesblonde
How is it now in the valley - can you get a startup funded if you don't have a
higher mission that workers work towards? Can you just say it will be a nice
place to work and we will treat our workers with respect and pay them
competitive rates? It all feels very 'power of nightmares _' in making up
bogus mission statements to create a shared sense of purpose, but done
completely cynically (at least by the power-brokers).

_ [http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x20su5f_the-power-of-
nightm...](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x20su5f_the-power-of-
nightmares-1-the-rise-of-the-politics-of-fear-bbc-2004_news)

------
h1fra
The absurdity of this article make me laugh more than it should have. I'm
still not quite sure if I red a testimony or a scenario from an arrested
development/parks and recs

Definitly saving it !

------
mooreds
I wonder if the author bought into Newsweek's mission when he worked there, or
if he was just as cynical?

~~~
ghaff
The cynic is inclined to ask what Newsweek's mission is exactly these days.
That snark aside, Dan Lyons seems to have largely shifted into a writing style
that's more entertainment than journalism. And the Jon Stewarts of the world
aside (and even there at times), it's a difficult blend to pull off. There's
always this tradeoff between what is objectively balanced and accurate--and
some would argue that's an impossible goal--and what attempts to convey an
entertaining "truthiness" of a thing even is it plays a bit fast with specific
facts.

------
kordless
> I’m heading for my first day of work at HubSpot

Having been forced to use Hubspot, I can say their UI is fairly horrific.

------
mathattack
It's just a small point, but I like the idea of treating people who leave as
"Graduating". Yes it's contrived, but it's better than silence or badmouthing
which is a frequent alternative. (I have no connection to the company)

------
chris_wot
Holy shit - 1+1=3; what is this, the mind of George Orwell transplanted to the
tech boom?

------
jpace121
While this article somewhat makes fun of the overally idealistic, sugary,
positive culture HubSpot built, I'd much rather work there then somewhere
where everything is done out of fear.

~~~
jonsterling
Everything likely _is_ done out of fear—the kind of fear where you barf of
dialectics at the proletarian youth league meeting to avoid having a struggle
session in your honor.

------
sjg007
Love it. I can relate!

------
cushychicken
I have nothing but good things to say about HubSpot. I never worked there, but
I did work in the same building for about two years, and I managed to sneak in
to a few of their parties, as well as snag a few bowls of free cereal. (They
play up the candy wall too much. The cereal wall was where it was at.)

