hegel

After having worked at a lot of horrible tech startups there is now a pattern that immediately makes me not want to be part of any of it.

If any product people reads the books INSPIRED or EMPOWERED. Don’t get me wrong, they are actually interesting books. But there is a certain personality associated with CPOs that are into these books, and seeing them implement these systems are pure horrors.

If the CEO is writing too many inspirational posts on LinkedIn, I’m out. I’ve seen significant organisational changes happen only so they could be communicated in an inspiring way on LinkedIn. The CEO personality starter pack is getting really boring.

If the company is mainly funded by VCs and if their current goal is working towards a new round of investment, I’m out. VC controlled companies will never make a good product, but rather a good investment for the board. Options, warrants or stocks are usually worthless for the employee but nice for the board.

If the CTO has no prior experience with being a leader. I’m done with first-time CTOs that are mainly interested in programming and not in leading and growing people. You are not qualified just because you are friends with the CEO or because you are a co-founder.

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This is post 4 out of 1000. I have a stupid goal of writing 1000 unedited 200-word-posts.

Working in tech is often a weird thing. There is the weird phenomenon where trivial technical challenges will be the most important thing ever with every one working on designing the right solution. Meanwhile actual important things like diversity and inclusion is rarely considered a problem but rather just the way things are.

In discussions on how to make hiring more inclusive and diverse I am often met with the same opinions: There is just not enough people of color applying to the job, the best candidate will win, our process just reflects how society looks.

I am baffled at how people do not stop and reflect on the first point: why are people of color not applying to your company? Rather than just talking like they don’t exist and that’s why they don’t apply.

And the idea that the best candidate will win is bullshit to anyone who has actually done interviews. In tech the white candidate wins with little effort.

If you believe that your hiring pipeline of mainly white men is representative of how the world looks then you are coming from a very narrow perspective. It should rather be time for you to widen your perspectives, check your privileged and hire someone to run the hiring process who actually knows what they are doing.

It’s funny how it’s often companies that insist they are not political (and politics is an unacceptable topic at work!) who are stuck with a white pipeline.

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This is post 3 out of 1000. I have a stupid goal of writing 1000 unedited 200-word-posts.

Please don't make me use Slack. Or Discord. Or any other real time chat service at work. I just don’t get how I am expected to be productive at work when work is an endless array of inboxes with non-important notifications. I already have issues focusing and this doesn’t exactly help.

The idea is that these tools would enable us to collaborate better and quicker. But instead it’s a shitshow of people triggering one million notifications while chatting to you like this

hi

?

do you have a minute?

:)

An endless hell of people who will tag @channel while posting a gif that only Generation X will find funny. And when I try to close the application to do actual work, I am then being marked as offline. It’s shaming me: LOOK WHO IS NOT WORKING!

Even when I’ve tried to remove the non-important channels I’m in, they announce stupid things: We now support threads on Slack—your inboxes now has their own inboxes!

No matter how many times I press shift+esc it doesn’t take away the pain of me having to navigate this awful world eight hours a day. At this point I daydream about using fax machines at work.

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This is post 2 out of 1000. I have a stupid goal of writing 1000 unedited 200-word-posts.

I'm often quite surprised at the low quality and lack of innovation around community tooling. It seems like the default setup for online communities is centered around a private Discord server and a Patreon page.

This is nice at first. Then it gets overwhelming. The thing is that it just doesn't scale very well. I've been very diligent about the amount of channels I join but still I am currently a member of six different Discord servers—each with 30+ different channels. Quite a lot of them are on a completely different timezone than I am which means I am rarely able to fully participate in the discussions.

It’s not a place for me to engage as a fan or as a community member. It’s just another source of inbox stress. It’s almost like we are replicating what we do to organise work to foster communities. The thing is that communities are not like implementing a button at work, it’s much more than that. And it requires tools that can facilitate just that. Please, no more inboxes. They suck.

I still can’t believe there are no community tools out there that helps us be a better community.

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This is post 1 out of 1000. I have a stupid goal of writing 1000 unedited 200-word-posts.