
Fuck You Startup World - shem8
https://medium.com/@shemag8/fuck-you-startup-world-ab6cc72fad0e
======
km3k
This article explains well why I avoid startups. I've considered joining some,
but always get turned off by the interview phase. The ones that bug me the
most...

> Fuck your crazy work hours

In my opinion, if you're working crazy hours, you've already failed, likely
due to poor management of the project. The only exception I see is if you
don't really have a life outside work and are working on a project that you're
really passionate about, but even then it should be a temporary thing.

> Fuck your open space floor plans, You really think Zucks builds a Facebook’s
> 2017 roadmap while a nerf war is ranging outside

I want to get work done and move on with life, not play silly office games.
Open space floor plans kill my focus.

> Fuck you startups with your extravagant parties and crazy off-site events
> that cost way too much money

I've never understood this. I want to work for your company. If I want to go
on vacation, I'll do it with my family, not my coworkers. I have no desire to
be best friends with all my coworkers.

~~~
noxToken
> _I want to get work done and move on with life, not play silly office games.
> Open space floor plans kill my focus._

I always found the people against cubicles but for open floor plans strange.
In reality, it's pretty much impossible to build offices for every employee.
Cubicles were supposed to be the fix for that. You have a open office with
space and partitions to separate you from other people. Then someone said that
open offices offer substantial collaboration for employees. The people who
were drones in a cubicle farm bought into it, because I supposed it was a
change from the Office Space type scenery.

But now all we get are interruptions with no recourse. We have desks that are
fixed to other desks or desks that are clustered together where the only thing
that separates you from your neighbor is your monitor. Everything is open, so
now the collaboration areas (they're meeting areas, but calling it
collaboration areas make it agile or some crap like that) aren't fully
enclosed. Everyone in a 30 foot radius gets to sit in on the meeting as well!

From the other side, I get management types telling me to keep my voice down,
because I'm disturbing the collaborators. Never mind that I'm trying to get
work done by hammering out details with other devs and testers - their meeting
that encroaches on my space in always more important. So much more important
that their jokes, their laughs, their applause, their voices, and any other
other form of noise have no upper noise limit. No sweat though, it's not like
I'm working or anything.

Heaven forbid I do anything like open personal email, bank account info, etc.
The person to my left, to my right, behind me, and that small cluster of 5
people in that collaboration area can see my screen as plain as day.

But cubicles are somehow terrible.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
> _Then someone said that open offices offer substantial collaboration for
> employees._

> _From the other side, I get management types telling me to keep my voice
> down, because I 'm disturbing the collaborators._

> _But cubicles are somehow terrible._

As someone who grew up in the Eastern Bloc, I find this kind of Doublethink
almost... nostalgic? Ahhh, the good old days, when we were all following Dear
Leader's flawless directives!

~~~
threesixandnine
Sorry...totally unrelated but I remembered your name fellow telescope maker ;)
I think I read about your atm journey on cloudynights. Are you the one who did
simple turntable grinding machine?

------
Bartweiss
This feels like a bizarre mixture of sensible criticism and sour grapes.

Standing desks? Actually pretty great for those who want them! If your back
hurts after a day of sitting, go find some option you like better - why should
the rest of us be upset by it? Yeah, they're not an option at a lot of jobs,
but demanding that everyone standardize on a bad experience because "you're
not special" is a great way to make every job awful.

A book a week? Not so bad, especially if it's something light! There are
plenty of books you can read in <10 hours, even content-rich ones.

Understanding complexity? Interviewing is a mess, that's a standard belief,
but constant time versus exponential time isn't meaningless yet. Start by
getting rid of tree reversal questions, not declaring Big-O a useless concept.

And yet there's something pretty good buried under all the impractical
complaints. Putting together a "user story" shouldn't be necessary when the
task is "our login page is broke, let's fix it". Adding layers of media
references and cultural touchstones to every possible concept just creates
useless barriers to entry. A/B testing a hundred different features in
isolation isn't a viable way to build a product.

So yes: there are a lot of things to criticize, and I know this is hyperbole.
It's still a weird mix of justified and left-field attacks.

------
andrepd
>I never had to shift a bit in a C array in my life! And I never got a
compilation error on a white board, when I need an hash set in Java I just use
HashSet- _I don’t fucking care about the complexity of this code block because
I can afford another EC2 instance!_ So fuck you.

No, fuck _you_ for making everything run so slow on our pocket and desktop
supercomputers.

~~~
Ezhik
...I said, as I shared this article in a JavaScript-powered desktop team
collaboration application, and went back to writing a JavaScript-powered
server-side application in a JavaScript-powered text editor.

------
KaiserPro
Haha, most excellent.

One thing that I'm only now (and stupidly late) realising is that tech
journalism almost never critiques new trends.

Sure there are some gut "this fucking sucks" but there is never a real effort
to provide some critical thinking about the PR emanating from whichever
source.

For example, soylent is the brain child of someone who has possibly crippling
[OCD]([http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1331](http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1331))
(Having been blighted by it for most of my teenage and childhood.) It looks
like one of his coping mechanisms.

I'm sure its a great product, but I wouldn't want to emulate someone's OCD
lifestyle. Yet we are asked to "emulate the habits of these successful XXX"
without stopping to ask, are they happy?

Yet no one seems to ask the question: "is this good?" or "whats the logical
outcome?" They just seem to be keen to breathlessly relay the PR line,
possible with a pithy snap reaction.

I'm not suggesting a flame war for every press release, just a health helping
of critical thinking, and some research.

------
kafkaesq
_Fuck reading a book a week. No one can read that fast. Let me repeat that -NO
ONE CAN FUCKING READ THAT FAST._

Finally someone has the courage to tell the truth. I mean, I get the part
about the necessary skimming one has to to do not just get through school, but
be a practical, working academic (as described in the HBR article). Or the way
that techies need to skim lots of tech books to stay ahead in one's career.

But that's not _reading_ (in the sense of works meant to be _read_ and not
just "understood" \-- that is, fiction, or high-quality non-fiction). Which
means getting in the author's head; making their language your own (to the
point of it sometimes actually does become the language you use, in ordinary
speech and writing); getting to know their characters to the point where they
have at least a partial feeling of tangible reality to them (like people you
actually do know from the physical word); and their stomping grounds, to a
point where they feel like places you've actually live in.

That's why it often takes me weeks, sometimes months (and multiple readings)
to "read" a book. Very part-time, mind you -- I suppose I could make it go
faster, if I made a "system" about it. Yeah, I suppose if I put my mind to it,
I could get through a good-sized book in a week or so.

But then I would probably just end up "understanding" the book. Not _reading_
it.

~~~
cardigan
Sorry that's not the truth, I read about a book a week. This week I've read 3
and started another 2. The secret is to read for enjoyment, a lot, and
eventually you get fast. If it feels like a chore, you're not reading the
right books: read something else. If you're enjoying it, it's easy to get
carried away and read for many hours at a time.

~~~
kafkaesq
Yeah, I get the "enjoyment" part. What it comes down to is that some people
just like to read (certain kinds of things) more slowly, even though they
could be reading them more quickly. Guiding principle being: it's not the
number of words (or the number of books read in a year), but the intensity of
the experience that they're after.

------
CobrastanJorji
> Fuck your crazy work hours.

Yeah!

> Fuck you drinking culture too.

Yeah!

> Fuck your open space floor plans

Yeah!

> Fuck the transparency trend, the post mortem and the 5 whys.

Yea---wait, what? Those other things are reasonable complaints, but wondering
why things go wrong and trying to stop them from going wrong for the same
reason tomorrow is, you know, good.

~~~
bichiliad
To be fair, "5 whys" is more of a feel-good rule of thumb way to determine the
root cause of errors, but it's rarely as effective as you'd think[1].

[1]:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys#Criticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys#Criticism)

~~~
CobrastanJorji
I concur. Incidents have many causes and different levels of failures, and "5
Why" documents make it too easy to target an easy or politically convenient
solution without needing to mention the other failings.

Postmortems in general are fantastic, though. "Here is what (not who, what)
went wrong, here is the list of things that made it go wrong, and here are the
steps we're taking to make sure that this can't happen again or will not be as
bad when it happens again."

------
quinndupont
The irony of the fact that I read this during my morning 30 minute read
through of tech news—at Hacker News, the über site, no less—is not lost on me.

Although a funny essay, there's a great deal of truth here, and should make us
ask some hard questions about how, why, and when the technology world and its
culture should infiltrate the everyday.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Now that the 30-minute routine of tech news is done, we shall reflect on this
essay during the 30-minute meditation session and add appropriate actionable
items to our quarterly and yearly goals.

;).

------
ensiferum
I don't work or live in the valley but that was hilarious and based on the
blogosphere probably on point too. Except for the part of the hash map
complexity. In fact as the volumes of data grow the complexities become more
important, not less. You simply cannot brute force your way out of a bad
complexity.

------
tomc1985
Hoping this is the vanguard for a new rebellion against toxic SV-style startup
culture, and the nitwits that propagate it

~~~
dasil003
Toxic SV culture is ripe for parody, but words won't stop it. What will stop
it is when the money stops flowing so easily and the wider economy improves so
that it's no longer the place to be for the greedy. Not sure I see both those
things happening any time soon, in the meantime Tech is sadly the new Finance.

~~~
ixtli
Or, we (engineers) could all take a cue from workers of the past and organize
to demand an end to abusive labor practices.

Seriously guys, just because we're making 10x the salary of a miner doesn't
mean we're not also generating 100x the money for our employers without being
allowed to take part in decisions that effect our lives.

~~~
ch4s3
You probably aren't making 10x what a miner makes. Mine foremen make around
95K[1]. A regular miner makes somewhere in the range of 40k-55k. Do you make
400k as a software developer? I'm making a broader point here, in that you
aren't as seperated from blue collar workers in terms of your economic
interests as you may think.

[1][https://www.google.com/search?q=mine+sallaries&oq=mine+salla...](https://www.google.com/search?q=mine+sallaries&oq=mine+sallaries&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.2655j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=mine+salaries)

~~~
jeffbax
Yeah, but you get to make it without hugely-out-of-your-control health
complications. Developers can get fat eating a lot of pizza, but they can run
it off. Harder for a miner to avoid all the hazards with the job. As much as I
hate the open workspace, I also would prefer being at a computer than doing
manual labor in a claustrophobic mine.

~~~
ch4s3
Yeah, of course. I meant you income -> social position relative to the people
who own the capital. There are interesting parallels. Mining companies operate
on leased land with leased equipment backed by institutional investors... they
keep it lean. The contemporary mine operator isn't totally dissimilar to the
CEO/founder of a largish startup in how they approach their business. Yeah, of
course writing code won't give you black lung, but you're still working for
the man. The coal mine machine operator is a lot more like me than I am like
Jack Dorsey.

------
hellofunk
This was so much fun to read. You know why it's funny? Because it's so true.
That's why.

~~~
pawadu
Seriously, there are so many great points in there hidden between the
expletives. Here is one that really touched me:

> And what the fuck all those parties after raising money. Don’t you get it?
> You just dug your grave a little bit deeper. You should celebrate any day
> that you don’t have to sell off another part of your company.

------
minimaxir
Although I genuinely miss Valleywag and all the absurdity that it covered
(e.g. Clinkle), I'm not sure if this is a fair critique of startup culture
outside of having the excuse to say the F word a lot. As someone living in San
Francisco, I can say that there are more to startups and startup culture than
the stereotypes seen in Medium thought pieces and the Hacker News front page,
although given the end of this particular Medium thought piece, that may be
the point.

~~~
coldtea
> _I can say that there are more to startups and startup culture than the
> stereotypes seen in Medium thought pieces and the Hacker News front page._

Yes, but not much.

------
_vya7
He either completely misses the point, or completely gets it.

Every single one of these "benefits" are very well thought out and calculated
shams meant to deceive and manipulate impressionable kids into working insane
hours for less than a realistic living wage. _That 's the whole point._

It's just like that circus in the Pinocchio movie.

~~~
6stringmerc
Not quite as exploitative as the music industry prefers to behave in pursuit
of profits, but I concur the general top-down structuring of environments like
that is not particularly an accident. Like hard seats in a fast food
restaurant - they're not supposed to make you want to stay for an extended
period of time, in theory.

------
bmelton
The only takeaway for me is the wondering whether or not the author really
thinks you can't read a book a week. I mean, yeah, you have to make time to
read the books, but an average length book takes something like 6-8 hours to
read, so if you allocate an hour a day (which I maintain is worth doing),
you're generally going to be able to comfortably knock out a book a week.

Sure, you're not churning through War & Peace every week, but for regular
books, it's really not that hard.

~~~
fdgdasfadsf
His point is that reading is about the journey not the destination. Better to
read less books but savour and enjoy them (or if non-fiction is your thing
take the time to learn the materials properly) then finish them to say you
finished them.

~~~
bmelton
I mean, sure, and of course that's right -- but you can do that and still
easily read a book a week at the same time.

~~~
fdgdasfadsf
Yeah but don't make that the target. Make having time to read and enjoy it the
target.

~~~
bmelton
I've known a number of folks who have done "read more" challenges, whether 50
books a year was the target or some other number, and while this is surely
anecdotal, the _real_ goal wasn't hitting some arbitrary number, but simply to
encourage reading more, and prioritizing reading as a hobby.

As someone whose greatest pleasure is a day off with a good book, it's hard to
balance reading with all the grownup responsibilities we have, and as a
leisure item, it's usually the first thing cut from a busy day's schedule.
Reading a book a week isn't as much about the number, but by gamifying the
outcome, you prioritize it above things you might otherwise not.

------
TeMPOraL
> _Fuck your eating disorders, why the fuck does everything has to be so
> extreme with you? On one end of the scale you’ve got the pizza-guzzling,
> office-snack hoarding monster, and on the other end you have the ‘I-must-
> optimize-every-living-second’ douche that only drinks fucking Soylent.
> Seriously, what the fuck?_

And from me: also fuck your third extreme, of eating fucking hipster fruit
salads all day every day, because everything has to be healthy and natural and
organic and stuff. And fuck the way you force it on the industry events, so
that I can't get a goddamn pizza on a programming conference because
everything now has a catering company providing various kinds of weird-ass
vegetarian food. I can eat healthy at home; I come to industry events for the
fucking pizza.

There, I said it. I feel a little bit better.

\--

As for the rest of the essay, it's a little heavy on the expletive side, but
pretty much spot-on if you look at the media side of things. I'd say things
aren't so bad in individual startups, but the overall culture - the
blogosphere, the professional publications, etc. all feel like encouraging and
glorifying this kind of nonsense.

~~~
justin66
> I can eat healthy at home; I come to industry events for the fucking pizza.

Really? In most realms outside IT, that's the food you buy when you consider
the people eating it not worthy of actual catering. I can understand wanting
pizza if the alternative is salad and water, but still.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
...And where do you live? If you live in a town with good pizza (New York, New
Haven, Chicago, etc.), trust me, pizza shows up at events.

------
collyw
I stared coming to hacker news for the tech conversations reading this made me
realize how much I have been sucked in to the dark side of it.

------
Animats
I keep thinking it's time for the next dot-com collapse. The level of excess
is too high. But we haven't had the first really big failure yet. Yahoo and
Twitter are almost ready to collapse. Uber is still iffy, because they
subsidize rides with investment capital to buy market share and lose money.

~~~
captn3m0
Theranos was a pretty huge investment (~700M). Would that count?

~~~
throwanem
I don't think so, because its failure didn't precipitate a crisis of
confidence in the Web 2.0 economy.

------
cmollis
awesome. so awesome. (actually I did have to shift bits once in a C program..I
did some AND'ing and OR'ing. I felt like a man.)

~~~
AstroJetson
You should look into getting an embedded systems job, those programs are full
of shift / AND / OR / bit twiddle galore. You'll feel awesome for awhile, but
trust me, all that low level bit stuff is sometimes a huge pain.

Now UI stuff, that's where the real fun is!! ;-)

------
NickBusey
I feel like most of the people commenting here missed the closing line.

> But more than all, start-up world, fuck you for making me one of you.

------
noonespecial
Am I... on your lawn?

I'm on your lawn, aren't I?

I should get off, shouldn't I...

~~~
coldtea
"Get off my lawn" implies some curmudgeon against newness and progress.

Doesn't say anything for people against things that legitimately suck though.

------
t0mbstone
This is pretty much exactly how I felt when I left the startup scene in
Denver. So much bullshit.

~~~
jordache
which industry may I ask?

~~~
t0mbstone
I was doing software development for a couple of different tech startups

------
singold
" You should celebrate any day that you don’t have to sell off another part of
your company."

------
AffluentApe
I can't wait to watch this video at the top of Hacker News. I imagine
something a la Ed Norton in 25th hour.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgL_5QcZCMo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgL_5QcZCMo)

------
k__
> you’re not going to get to space

:(

~~~
bluejekyll
Seriously, why'd he have to go there! I've had that dream since the day I was
born, and now it's shattered.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Here I say, fuck him, I'm going to space no matter what. Low Earth Orbit is
the minimum I aim for in this life.

------
cwyers
> Fuck reading a book a week. No one can read that fast. Let me repeat that
> -NO ONE CAN FUCKING READ THAT FAST. How about actually reading that god damn
> book?!

What the hell are you even talking about? Can't read one book a week?

~~~
enkiv2
This one was pretty strange. I often read several books a day...

~~~
scadge
Yeah true, I've read several while writing this comment.

------
buckbova
Reminded me of this from 25th hour.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgL_5QcZCMo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgL_5QcZCMo)

I was hearing Ed Norton say "fuck you!" as I read this.

------
tmaly
Aside from what others have said, I got a great laugh out of reading it.

------
avitzurel
Stereotypically entertaining.

Living in the bay area and working for a startup it's easy to relate and it's
funny, i'll five the author that.

After the second paragraph it starts getting pretty old though...

------
noobermin
I don't think you need to censor titles on Hacker News.

~~~
enkiv2
I wasn't entirely sure. But, hey, this version got to the front page while at
least two others didn't -- so I guess it worked.

~~~
noobermin
Yes. Censoring a vulgar word makes it seem more naughty than if you spell it
out.

------
antfarm
> Fuck you and your stupid interview questions. Who the fuck thinks of these
> stupid fucking questions? I never had to shift a bit in a C array in my
> life! And I never got a compilation error on a white board, when I need an
> hash set in Java I just use HashSet- I don’t fucking care about the
> complexity of this code block because I can afford another EC2 instance! So
> fuck you.

Startup or not, I wouldn't hire that guy.

~~~
antfarm
> Fuck you startups with your extravagant parties and crazy off-site events
> that cost way too much money, you’re supposed to buy some fucking servers
> instead!

So he can continue wasting CPU cycles out of pure ignorance ;)

------
blahshaw
Serious question, what's wrong with deploying 100 times per day? I'll take
that over one monstrous semi-weekly deploy.

------
julian25
Look, I get the issues with startup culture but this guy doesn't offer any
reasonable suggestions on how to fix them and just uses his Medium soapbox to
throw a tantrum. If you want things to change, writing an article with 35
"fucks" is not the way to do it.

~~~
enkiv2
There's a system that more or less works, and generates a much greater
innovation to hype ratio. And, that's the system of normal small businesses.
The alternative shouldn't need to be mentioned, because everywhere other than
SV, it's omnipresent.

------
moneytide1
I'm going to finish building my solar panels cell by cell and learn to live
off the land.

------
mattdeboard
Hey I like my standing desk :(

it's one of the automatic deals and has presets and --

i don't even eat doritos

------
bogomipz
Funny read. It was certainly comprehensive. I don't think they missed
anything.

------
zethraeus
fuck your anger. :)

~~~
_vya7
Sometimes anger is justified. And sometimes it calls for a good venting.
Sometimes it even calls for a little activism. And sometimes all of these are
just futile, because richer people are in control of what you see and hear,
who have interest in keeping their pockets full using the hard work of young
impressionable kids who don't know the real value of their own time. It's
sickening, and the anger is justified. The rant is probably going to be
forgotten tomorrow though, and unfortunately won't save a single soul from the
startup world.

------
squozzer
That is so punk rock.

------
egwynn
I stopped reading at “dwont”.

------
maxwellito
I fucking love this post!

------
abritinthebay
> Fuck reading a book a week. No one can read that fast.

Now the rest of the complaints are... well at least reasonable to rant about
(well, the technical ones are kinda crap, but culture ones are apt).

But this? This is just silly.

Reading a single book shouldn't take someone a week. A good sized book can be
read in weekend afternoon if you're really into it. But 3 days of occasional
reading should get most writing that isn't incredibly dry polished off.

All that complaint is is the author saying "I don't want to, and I won't make
the time to."

~~~
josebaez
really? try to read the joy of clojure in one weekend.

~~~
smnplk
thanks for reminding me I have to continue reading that book :D

------
meira
Upset ratio means something? Because you irritated a lot of people here in HN.

------
meira
Great article. He knows what he's talking.

------
meesles
Meh. I could write this same post about the corporate world stereotypes, but
that would be dumb. This person has a problem with healthy people, fat people,
people who have an interest in their field, people who work hard and
overachieve, just an absurd breadth of random adjectives and interests that
make people unique.

It just seems like they wish everyone was the same so they wouldn't be
compared to the tons of people who've found success in the 'startup world'.

2/10, barely entertaining.

~~~
kbenson
Maybe we need a HN edition.

Fuck you HN, and your overly critical and serious comments complaining about
how the article isn't new, isn't cool, isn't specific enough.

Fuck you HN for feeling the need to comment just to get your voice out there,
just to put something down, just so you can add your snide remark at the end
to prove your own intelligence to your peers.

And fuck _me_ , for doing all of the above in pointing that out.

