> The culture of “we are awesome” has dominated most internal communications for the last couple of years, including in 2022. We all believed that we were awesome and would continue growing and winning.
This is the big thing that drives me nuts.
I don't know if it's a fragility of ego thing or what the cause may be, but it results in a corporate inability to critically self-evaluate at the highest levels. If you can't say where your weak areas are, you're not improving.
One of the experiences that untreated ADHD blessed me with was routinely failing classes. That repeated exposure to undeniable failure (and the consequences of it) really helped me accept that failure is the default. If you're not constantly fighting against failure, you're failing. You can't pretend that something didn't work out, or stop thinking about it because it hurts.
The self congratulatory back-patting (even if it's just "everything is fine, we're doing great") is treating success like an achievement. Success requires vigilance. Excellence is not an achievement, it's an activity.
We need more leaders that talk about the things we could be doing better, and doing so inspirationally, not derogatorily. It's ok that you're not the best at something. Very few are. That doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't do better.
Try internalizing that if you're not constantly struggling to do better, you're not living up to your potential.
Stripe had a few “official” principles that I really liked along these lines: “We haven’t won yet”, “macro-optimism but micro-pessimism”.
They’re no longer official principles though, and I’m not 100% sure how much they were actually acted upon while they were (at least during my tenure).
I like the book Crucial Conversations, which tells us to avoid the "fool's choice" and be 100% honest and 100% respectful at the same time. The fool's choice is when a fool thinks something like "I can either tell the truth and be fired, or keep my mouth shut". The book teaches that with some thought you can find a way to tell the truth without being fired, etc. This is advice for an individual, but not an entire organization.
For organizations, they could at least hire a consultant / speaker to do a presentation every year on how people can effectively give negative feedback. The speaker could say "you all see bad things happening at the company, things you aren't happy about but don't want to risk speaking about, here's how you can speak about those issues without any risk". Teach people things like, studies have shown that proposing a solution along with your complaint makes it more likely to be accepted, etc. For the price of a speaker or two, you could train your company to effectively deliver and act on negative feedback. Too many people don't know how to effectively express their problems.
If someone wants to start a consultants / speaking tour you can have this idea.
Part of me is imagining ‘tell the truth and not be fired’ to involve some kind of Yes Minister strategy like the Rhodesia solution.
But more realistically, most modern tech companies are going to want to not fire people for telling the truth or more generally speaking their minds, and individuals can often have a bigger impact than they would imagine. It doesn’t really make sense for a reasonably well run company to ignore such things from employees they clearly think are valuable.
That said, there are still exceptions, e.g. labour activism in the US is probably a good way to get fired (with a nice big severance), and if you work at Boeing and write some email like ‘this plane is designed by clowns and I won’t let my family fly in it’ (or perhaps even just reasonable concerns) that is also bad (because that email will show up in court if there’s an accident and you can’t say ‘we want to have a workplace where all engineers can raise concerns about the safety of our planes’ – better to just not do it over email, which is a bit of a silly incentive)
> most modern tech companies are going to want to not fire people for telling the truth
I agree. I gave that as an extreme example of "the fool's choice". More realistic examples include "I can tell the scrum master he talks to much in retrospectives and he will dislike me, or I can be quiet about it". Truth is you can probably find a good time and way to tell him that will not hurt his opinion of you.
As for raising safety concerns at Boeing (for example), maybe that's not a "fool's choice", but simply a choice. Are you going to do the right thing or not? Sometimes the "if I speak up, bad things will happen" mindset is the unfortunate truth, but not as often as many think.
Still make the complaint, I never said it was required. In fact, I heard of a company where management said not to complain unless you had a solution and it really bothered me; sometimes you don't know the solution, but the complaint still needs to be made.
You can still do something like offer to help or proposing a meeting as the "solution", or at least the start of a solution.
also, the complaint can be perfectly valid and important without having any solutions for it. many times employees don't have the knowledge needed to know what are the possible solutions.
but individually their solution is to go where their needs are met (as much as possible of course)
This is an interesting idea, I have I feeling I know the what they’re getting at, but if you have any examples of how they put that into practice I’d love to hear it.
Adding on to the other reply, the first place I heard of this general idea was from a survivor of a POW camp in Vietnam, who said that the people who thought they’d never get out didn’t fare well, but that the people that fared the worst were the ones who thought they’d be out by Christmas. Christmas came and went and they still were in the camp, and that really demoralized them. The move was to know that you’d eventually make it out, but be very pessimistic about when that would be.
HN is guilty of this constantly. Everyone who posts here is implicitly in the right and users unequivocally back that attitude, even when it realistically is a scenario of "maybe you were a shit employee and were fired for it and your employer isnt in the wrong?" or "your Show HN really isn't that impressive". We're not allowed to say anything critical of other HN users without being downvoted or reprimanded by dang.
So why is it any surprise that every startup company has precisely the same back-patting culture?
The context is somewhat different on an anonymous online forum such as HN. Giving feedback as a stranger can be fraught with insufficient information. Criticism can easily spiral into negative flamefests full of assumptions of the receiving party. Thus, mods try to dampen it from getting too negative and toxic.
> So why is it any surprise that every startup company has precisely the same back-patting culture?
They are different because presumably coworkers are people you at least personally know in passing, and are not anonymous usernames.
We should be gracious to strangers but more critical to those whom we do know.
My statement was certainly an oversimplified assessment.
> Valid, level-headed criticism
This is a good clarification to make, thank you. Ultimately this is what I'm longing for more of in the world. "shitting on" either yourself or someone else isn't helpful.
The problem with this stupid website is I (or no one else) couldn’t even properly reply to you due to censorship.
I intended to write a sample of what actually “shitting on you” would actually be, but I knew the autistic mods would ban me just the same as if I was actually doing so because they lack the prefrontal cortex material responsible for comprehension.
So engaging with you, or really in any valuable conversation on HN, is an exercise in bad faith, everyone must always wrap themselves in a thick layer of bullshit to appease the gods above or else face sanction.
> The problem with this stupid website is I (or no one else) couldn’t even properly reply to you due to censorship.
You know you're welcome to make your own community, right? You're not actually being censored, you're just in a venue that doesn't support communicating how you'd like.
> I knew the autistic mods would ban me just the same as if I was actually doing so because they lack the prefrontal cortex material responsible for comprehension
You've succeeded in your goal of posting a sample of what actually shitting on someone looks like. Hint: it doesn't look good on you.
> So engaging with you, or really in any valuable conversation on HN, is an exercise in bad faith, everyone must always wrap themselves in a thick layer of bullshit to appease the gods above or else face sanction.
Engaging with society requires wrapping everything in a think layer of bullshit. Being able to show some restraint is what keeps things civil, because there's a wide range of social norms. Get a therapist and learn how to cope with it.
Again, you could also find or create another venue. You're not entitled to a platform.
Alternatively I could tell you to fuck off, because absolutely nothing about your statement is factual or fair in even the slightest.
People like you love to say shit like “well just go make you own platform”
Cloudfare will ban you, AWS will ban you, the investors that are poor fronts for private equity will ban you, it’s controlled. You won’t be able to take payments in your little rebel SaaS because Visa will
Kneecap you.
You pretend that there’s some kind of free, open exchange of ideas where some free market determines what is popular and thus allowed for social discourse. Instead there’s the allowed discourse of the elite, which you freely participate in with glee, and worst of all you pretend you’re free.
So please keep simping like a good little serf. It does all of us good when we conform to what your institutional therapist thinks is “good” lol
There’s a big difference between the people in control of a company back-patting everyone when employees’ livelihoods are actually in danger, and back-patting an individual for sharing their personal projects and experiences in good faith even if they have a lot of room for improvement.
> "maybe you were a shit employee and were fired for it and your employer isnt in the wrong?" or "your Show HN really isn't that impressive". We're not allowed to say anything critical of other HN users without being downvoted or reprimanded by dang.
These things absolutely can be said on HN, if you list some points that make you think so. If OTOH your comment ist literally just that one sentence then I don't see why it shouldn't get downvoted and flagged. This is not the YouTube comment section.
> These things absolutely can be said on HN, if you list some points that make you think so.
Only if what you say doesn’t oppose the current zeitgeist of the thread. I’ve seen some of the most well thought out and level headed comments get flagged to death while some insult floats to the top.
HN cannot escape the group dynamics that are universal to all gatherings of human beings, this is likely to have been true throughout the history of this site, even if to different extents.
If their point is that they get mad because people would downvote "Your Show HN isn't really that impressive", then I guess so. I would certainly downvote that kind of comment, because it's pretty much by definition a jerky comment.
But I have seen tons of reactions to Show HNs that are "How is your product different from XYZ?" or "How will you address problem Foo?" Those comments actually bring something helpful to the discussion. I've also seen, in cases where the Show HN isn't something the community generally appreciates, get fair comments along the lines of "Your product just appears to make it easier to spam people. Why should we like this?"
Offering critical commentary without a point isn't something that adds to the value of the site.
I would not say that HN does this constantly or agree with much of what you write. In general I think written/upvoted comments tend to be biased towards being critical[1] and disagreeing with the comment/article being responded to.
In general, the guideline is for comments to be curious and “maybe you were a shit employee” or “your Show HN really isn’t that impressive” do not sound to me like they are curious. However I realise it is hard to describe in general comments that would surely contain specific things.
An alternative strategy to the former general comment might be to try to get curious about the details more. For example one might discover that the likely cause was a breakdown in communication leaving the employee unable to understand what was actually wanted and being fired for failing to read minds to meet expectations. However I think it can be hard to actually be curious here rather than applying some kind of smug-Socratic method[2] asking innocent-seeming questions where the answers lead to one’s unwritten hypothesis, though perhaps the answers can give an opportunity to update. I think it can be doubly hard to do these things in a kind way, especially when, like in the general examples, the topics are personal to one participant rather than a typical internet discussion where parties may pretend to be disinterested.
[1] There are two common meanings of ‘critical’. One is related to ‘critical thinking’ or critiquing: looking specifically and carefully at the faults or merits of something. The other meaning is similar to ‘disapproving’. Generally the former kind is accepted here and the latter is less accepted, though I think comments which are negative and not particularly thoughtful or curious often do better than I would hope. Further, the acceptance of the former kind of critical discourse may sometimes be hidden behind for comments that perhaps fit into the latter sense (when they don’t fit I would say it is because they are too mean to really deserve to be called critical).
[2] I think this roughly corresponds to what the guidelines call cross-examining.
Never really noticed posts about people getting fired and complaining. My impression is that the HN audience is generally pretty strict on work behavior.
"Oh, you slightly smiled when everyone else did not? Not appropriate, we are a serious and professional enterprise, you should be fired and restricted to ever work in this industry again."
That said, claiming the audience is or does something specific is probably always a large generalization.
"your Show HN really isn't that impressive"
On that I do agree. The criticism is often very direct. There is a certain aspiration that product or solution x must be either the best or it doesn't deserve to exist at all. On the other hand such criticism can still be valuable if it is still received as hinting to stuff that can improve.
I don't know if this was the meaning of the OP's message, but the way I read it tells me that he dislikes the "everything is fine" BS that some companies keep on doing, not the fact you still need to criticise constructively, which "your show hn isn't that impressive" clearly doesn't do.
Realistic, yes, but you don't have to be an ass, that's kind of how I interpret it.
>We all believed that we were awesome and would continue growing and winning.
Hilarious since Klarna has one of the worst customer service experiences I have ever witnessed.
Their real monetization strategy seems to be to get your mobile information. It is not necessary to micro-finance through them, just to do anything at all after that!
They actually have a website, which you might think would be an alternative way to manage your account, however it also requires your verified mobile device (not a phone number) to access.
Now, they never tell you any of this and none of the people that work there seem to know that this is policy and are shocked that you can't do things like check your balance, pay off your balance, basically anything you might want to do.
I worked for a company where the C-suite used the phrase "drinking our own champagne" instead of "eating our own dog food". To me, this just oozed insecurity about the product and the company.
IIRC there was an ad involving a dog food manufacturer feeding their own dogs the food they made. "Dogfooding" then became synonymous with using your own product.
I always thought it was intentionally derogatory in order to make the listener really think hard about what they’re outputting.
I.e. what you’re making is bad. It’s going to be bad. Force yourself to use it until you understand why it’s so bad, so that it’ll be as not bad as it can possibly be for the people you’re offering it to.
> In 2006, the editor of IEEE Software recounted that in the 1970s television advertisements for Alpo dog food, Lorne Greene pointed out that he fed Alpo to his own dogs. Another possible origin he remembers is from the president of Kal Kan Pet Food, who was said to eat a can of his dog food at shareholders' meetings.
I think this term started in the enterprise software space, and was probably coined because subconsciously, enterprise software sales and management people realized that their products were on par with dog food - ground up mystery stuff that is just barely edible except for animals that will practically eat anything. But package it up in nice marketing and sales efforts, and away we go!
This is coming from someone who spent WAY too much time in the Enterprise software space.
> experiences that untreated ADHD blessed me with was routinely failing classes. That repeated exposure to undeniable failure
Huh. Never thought of this. In a balanced culture, this offers no advantage. But in one still recovering from the self esteem days, when even games were encouraged not to produce any losers, I see how that awareness is competitive.
I used the word blessed somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I'm not sure I would call it an advantage, rather just a different set of experiences than a large majority of the tech world.
I suspect most standup comedians are in a similar boat, so to speak. You keep failing until you succeed. You can't keep your audiences recycling only the same old jokes over and over, you need to keep writing new ones, tuning them over and over at small gigs so that you've got enough material that works for the bigger shows.
More than just failing, though, I think the lesson is learning to tolerate failure, and learning from it so that you can try again.
> More than just failing, though, I think the lesson is learning to tolerate failure, and learning from it so that you can try again.
This is the real trick.
From my own personal experience: I went through a period of intolerance to failure -- "failure can't happen again". hypervigiliance[0] is just as problematic as negligence.
Accepting that failure will happen has allowed me to unwind quite a bit, aided in finding more empathy for others, and changed my focus to managing failure and risk. Somewahat oddly I'd come to that spot in regards to managing software in production earlier than I had been able to apply it to my own psyche.
In a way, accepting that failure happens is an optimization technique. It affords the room for curiosity and forgiveness that is required in practice to have the greatest reduction in incidents or impacts of failure over time.
It is going sound odd, but I mildly disagree. Long time ago I listened a lecture of a Harvard professor, which went something along the lines of and I am paraphrasing:
>> We did so well to get here and maybe we just have not failed enough.
This really stuck with me, because in my eyes failing and having to earn each 'win' is what gets job done. Yeah, there is always someone smarter, but there are few people, who can stick to something until it is solved. I am actually saying ADHD may have been a blessing in disguise since it forced you to work harder for things others take for granted.
And that is apart from being able to see things in ways majority of population does not.
I think a lot of this is that nobody has long term incentives and plenty of people believe "we are awesome" is truth.
As a developer, if I paper over problems and claim to have resolved them, people will love me, trust me, and give me bonus pay. If I bring up problems, people consider me a trouble maker.
And when the bill comes due, I will just jump to another company.
I really think this just comes from the fact that most startups are either:
1) from California
and/or 2) have founders that worked in California
and/or 3) raised money from VCs in California
I'm all on-board with it being better to be an optimist than a pessimist, and also on-board that destructive criticism doesn't really "serve" anyone.
But there's just this rampant over-optimism like nowhere I've experienced.
The culture of "we are awesome" to me - is culture of California.
I prefer California culture over doom and gloom and pessimism - but a little more reality, I think, is welcome.
The thing that rubbed off on me about California that I'm really grateful for is to always start with the positive. I'm definitely a happier person from getting absorbed into that culture.
But I think when you get to the point where you just completely ignore or don't speak about the negatives, it's not really helpful anymore. It's just delusion.
Wonder how similar Sweden is to the North American west coast, culturally speaking. It is the center of Scandinavia's tech scene, after all, and has birthed many companies.
A comment from when I knew theater and film people in SF: "In New York, they tell you when you suck. In Hollywood, they don't call you back when you suck. In San Francisco, they don't tell you that you suck. So you can suck forever."
(Yes, SF once had a film scene. Mostly because there was cheap warehouse space South of Market usable for production.)
Interesting point, but the example here is HQ'd in Ohio. I think some of what you talk about in California is true but you could say that about New York, or once upon a time Hong Kong. Places where ambitious people come to breed a certain mindset. California is a big state and very rural parts California arre like Idaho (I'm not talking exurbs).
I dealt with Klarna once, made a mistake. Gmail filtered out all their invoices & reminders, had to pay reasonable extra sum. No leniency, fine, but nothing special or awesome about them, they are just a regular credit company. No special tech or whatever, no special awesomeness, no special kindness.
Gmail filtering out invoices has been a big issue for my btw, Im forcing the government to send me invoice in print, even though they don't want to.
I worked at a place where the executives constantly sent out company wide congratulations emails, to each other.
The HR director wrote “why it is a great time to work at X part 1” and then we did some layoffs… and part 2 was sent out the next day without missing a beat.
That company eventually stumbled and failed largely because they wouldn’t cancel a product that was clearly deficient (a far superior product was available but wasn’t invented by the established engineering manager, so they killed that product instead ).
I think people in an organisation are constantly confronted with the problems and downsides. Engineers always know where the problems in the code and architecture are. Sales people and support always see the complaints from customers. CEOs see how high-valur prospects always find new issues to lower the negotiated prices and how features are delivered late. And so on.
My interpretation is that the overly positive view aims to drive the positive points forward and remind everybody about the positive things and how well things work on a macro view. If you stick small negatives in the message to cover "reality" this is what sticks.
I can't stand these motivational speech, but I also don't see a good speech for high level talks and not saying anything is bad as well and for some kind of people that seems to give them a push.
> The self congratulatory back-patting (even if it's just "everything is fine, we're doing great") is treating success like an achievement. Success requires vigilance. Excellence is not an achievement, it's an activity.
I used to wonder why friends of mine would get gifts for things like graduating elementary school or even high school. I asked my father for something because I was graduating highschool on the honour roll, and he told me completely stoned faced "i am not going to reward you for things that you are just simply expected to do". That sticks with me 20 years later and I apply that to everything I do in life, especially work.
If you aren't succeeding, you are failing - and I was expected and taught to succeed by default.
> If you aren't succeeding, you are failing - and I was expected and taught to succeed by default.
Nitpicking, but you were expected to succeed by default, and also taught to strive for success by default (and presumably also taught the tools and approach to maximize likelihood of success). People cannot be taught to "succeed by default", anymore than someone could be taught to "win the world series by default".
And then that unpacks the challenge of this particular world view (and points at why the 'self-esteem thing' is a thing), is that learning to strive for success, and learning the tools and methods to achieve success does not mean you will actually reach success (this would just be a variant of the just-world fallacy). The challenge is how do you create the motivating factors and structure for as many people as possible (hopefully everyone) in your society/culture to earnestly strive for success, but not crack apart when they encounter continued failures.
I've had my fair share of failures that's for sure. I'm do not expecting to actually succeed every single time, but I am putting in the best effort to at least try to succeed instead of just trying to coast along or shrug it off being like "meh, just wasn't in the cards". I also don't expect massive celebrations when I actually do succeed - success is what is expected. If I'm supposed to make the big sale, I don't get a party after I just move on to the next big sale. It's what is expected, not exceptional.
That's fair. And to be honest, I have a very similar mindset - so I'm super not judging.
Just making an observation that scaling this up to a population level is tricky. Easy to mangle up the nuances when trying to impart this to children. I suspect you need a relatively stable environment for this to really take hold as well. And finally, you do actually need to be able to feed the child some degree of external success to get them to actually buy into this.
Maybe I’m not articulating myself correctly because I certainly do not want to imply or say that there is no joy in my life. I guess the “joy” in my life is just intrinsic rather than extrinsic? I get immense satisfaction out of my work itself and “succeeding” in and of itself is motivating. I also find mentoring/helping others succeed to also be extremely rewarding. The greatest joy I get in life is seeing how my actions have improved the lives of others in some way.
I also feel very fulfilled from my personal relationships, family and lifestyle that my “success” affords me.
I feel sorry for you that your father never got you that gift for graduating high school. My father got me an HP calculator and it's still one of my treasured possessions. It has had no negative impact on my success.
My father has gotten me plenty of gifts, for a variety of reasons and sometimes for no reason at all. Don’t get me wrong, I love my dad very much and he is a very generous man :)
In Brazil, where I am from, the big achievement that warranted a celebration used to be graduating from university (I guess you call it college in the US). For many families the celebration was also the gift — those things don't come cheap.
But in the last 30 years or so, I have noticed that many now celebrate completing high school, completing primary school, or even completing kindergarten (!) — and not just something symbolic or small, but big events.
Maybe I'm just old and grumpy, but this rubs me off in the wrong way: I also believe that these "achievements" are things that you are simply expected to do. Congratulations and positive reinforcement are always welcome, but when there is an expectation of a reward then to me it crossed the line into something unhealthy.
In Canada (I don’t know about Brazil myself) it is very very difficult for children to “flunk out” of the public education system. The system is setup to push every line through as much as possible. So to me, the “participation trophy” culture which is similar to what you describe in Brazil is especially egregious to me.
It comes from a time when it was not so mundane. My grandfather on one side was the first in his family to truly read and write well enough to have a job involving it.
That is a big deal and far from a default.
Yes, now graduating high school is not an achievement, but it used to be quite one, especially for the average person.
Nothing matters as long as a company is growing. You don't have to improve or have the best tech or the best sales or do everything right or have the best culture. The only thing that matter for a company is to grow.
Ben Horowitz talks about this somewhere near the start of his book "The Hard Thing about Hard Things“. If I remember correctly, he said that it was very difficult for him as a CEO to load the problems he had onto his employees because handing the burden over felt bad. He was responsible for the burden. It makes some sense if you think about it like that. Later he did turn things around and share his worries and to his surprise the employees weren’t to worried and actually started to solve some of the problems.
> failure is the default. If you're not constantly fighting against failure, you're failing.
This. Any success, let alone wild success is highly unlikely. Just assume you’ll work on interesting problems and at some point you’ll realize either you or the problem will change in a way that makes disengaging the right answer.
No, it's not. Your focus will probably take a sharp turn to another thing, but because you're not entertained. Here... it's probably because ADHD doesn't mean you'll fail, even if untreated.
I think social media today makes you think you have many conditions, when in fact you just have normal behaviors. You don't need to have ADHD to get distracted, especially if your brain is trained to pay attention to a thing for 15 seconds max by said social media.
Try reading paper books, or focusing your eyes on a candle for 5 mins a day, your attention will improve.
This is the big thing that drives me nuts.
I don't know if it's a fragility of ego thing or what the cause may be, but it results in a corporate inability to critically self-evaluate at the highest levels. If you can't say where your weak areas are, you're not improving.
One of the experiences that untreated ADHD blessed me with was routinely failing classes. That repeated exposure to undeniable failure (and the consequences of it) really helped me accept that failure is the default. If you're not constantly fighting against failure, you're failing. You can't pretend that something didn't work out, or stop thinking about it because it hurts.
The self congratulatory back-patting (even if it's just "everything is fine, we're doing great") is treating success like an achievement. Success requires vigilance. Excellence is not an achievement, it's an activity.
We need more leaders that talk about the things we could be doing better, and doing so inspirationally, not derogatorily. It's ok that you're not the best at something. Very few are. That doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't do better.
Try internalizing that if you're not constantly struggling to do better, you're not living up to your potential.