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Dropcam CEO's Beef With Brogramming and Free Dinners
waderoush writes "Plenty of technology companies serve free breakfast, lunch, and dinner to their employees, but Dropcam CEO Greg Duffy says that's a form of mind control designed to get people to to work late. To keep employees happy, Duffy says, it's better to make them go home to their families for dinner. Some other suggestions from the San Francisco video monitoring startup: don't fill your engineering department with young, single, childless males (aka brogrammers). Keep your business model simple by making actual stuff that you can sell for a profit. And don't hire assholes. Why pay attention to Duffy's advice? Because Dropcam has a 100 percent employee retention rate — no one who has joined the 4-year-old company has ever left."
I'd agree with dinner, and maybe breakfast to an extent.
But lunch? It's just a time saver to have it at work.
If I eat while working and don't take the time off for lunch, I can leave sooner.
Whats his position on Foosball ? No Foosball, no work, seriously.
...that we shouldn't want things like identities, families, and lives. It is a joy for us to be interchangeable work-bots. Dissention must be expunged so that we can be assimilated. Obedience is happiness!
To keep employees happy, Duffy says, it's better to make them go home to their families for dinner.
That's fine for regular employees, but assuming sys admins want to go home to their families is just silly.
http://xkcd.com/705/
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
You end up with unmaintainable code, late deadlines and an environment where numerous employees want to kill each other. Profit? Good luck.
It doesn't matter how talented the asshole is if he\she costs more than they're worth. I'd rather have a few mediocre developers who are nice to each other, write to spec, comment appropriately, and write code that anyone can understand and maintain.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
We have brogrammers where I work. Idiots, every one of them.
30 employees and nobody's left? Wow! And they offer maternity leave? O. M. G. Seriously, what kind of ignorant fluff is this?
Some of us are young, single, and childless (not necessarily male). It's a neat perk that keeps the cost of living down, and in the Bay Area those costs are already ludicrously expensive.
Besides, who wants to take advice from a four year old no name company just barely out of its diapers? Come back when you've been around at least a decade.
While I don't disagree with his logic or reasoning I do double his methodology would hold true for a larger subset of employee demographic.
Basically to summarize he states:
Make a highly profitable product.
Don't overwork your staff.
Hire people who can't as easily uproot and change.
Don't hire assholes.
No shit... really.
Some programmers like free dinners, and enjoy sleeping til noon and working til midnight, and don't mind the 12 hours because their best friends are at work.
Other programmers want to work 9-5 to drop kids off in the morning and get home to them at dinner.
Many programmers go through each of those stages in their carreers.
It's not an either/or question. Just make a workplace that accomodates both groups and keeps both happy.
because it doesn't fit my model of reality and goes against all these cool buzzwords that I just made up.
Young, single, childless males are the ones who will dedicate their evenings to making sure not only that things run properly, but that you are in the front of your field. Filling your department with family oriented people is just going to give you a whole bunch of people who will do what they must and anything they need to not to lose their job. If you follow this advice, DO NOT EXPECT TO INNOVATE!
"Some other suggestions from the San Francisco video monitoring startup: don't fill your engineering department with young, single, childless males (aka brogrammers)."
Who's the idiot who came up with "brogrammers"? Sounds like a bunch of gay guys from "da hood".
young, single, childless males (aka brogrammers)
Yeah? Well fuck you (aka asshole), too!
...for having a CEO that actually cares about them.
I've been working as a software developer for the same company for 12. There are 6 other software developers who, apart from 1, arrived before me (1 arrived 1 month after me). Since then, 2 have come and gone. The first came from overseas and inevitably returned there and the second found himself detained at Her Majesty's Pleasure for something or other.
:).
3 of us are single childless males
Having had a company for 4 years might not be enough to qualify for giving advice people should listen to.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Never use the word brogrammer... Ugh who comes with with these terms? Every body goes through stages, I had my 20's when I didn't mind putting in hours, now in my 30's with a family time with them is more important than establishing a career which is what I did in my 20's. So you find a company that is more family friendly, not a startup.
"no one who has joined the 4-year-old company has ever left"
Just like the CIA.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Without RTFA, not sure if retention rate is the be-all-end-all. I can easily get a retention rate of 100%--hire all the incompetent idiots nobody else wants. They'll never leave my company, because they'd be out of a job. Voila!
Not saying this guy is doing it wrong; just saying that retention rate alone isn't that much of a useful indicator.
how many employees are there? just him?
FTA:
Rather, it's that people just like to stay: Dropcam has hired 30 workers to date, and it's never had to give a single going-away party.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
That’s why there are no free dinners at Dropcam—around 6:00 pm the company
I am sorry, at WHAT time? Ever heard the song 9 to 5? 9 to 5! Dinner is at 6 o'clock. Having to stay at work till six and then the commute means you won't be home close to 8. Kids will be in bed by that time. Dinner will be waiting in the oven.
A GOOD going home hour is 5... oh wait. that is rush hour, means you leave "early" and arrive home just as late. Do you know what would be even BETTER? A company with FLEXIBLE hours and a max 8 hours on the workfloor. Now THAT would be a social company. Even better if you can take a half day off to deal with plumbers and other stuff.
Nobody left in the last 4 years. Geez, I wonder why. An economy down the drain may have something to do with it.
Don't get me wrong, a company that doesn't expect unpaid overtime in exchange for a greasy cold pizza (especially if there is no pizza) everyday gets pretty old pretty fast. But closing the doors at 6 doesn't show much of an improvement. You are still putting in a long day, except now you don't get free dinner at the end of the day. What about those without a family for who a company dinner saves time not having to cook for themselves?
It is telling that the article calls him a wunderkind idealist and then fails to list any idealistic thing in the next few paragraphs.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Please do and leave it that way, because no one with a productive/meaningful life cares anything about your trivial host file ramblings.
don't fill your engineering department with young, single, childless males (aka brogrammers).
First off, "brogrammer" is one of those moderately new phrases that hasn't been fully defined yet. I always thought it was any code shop whose members were close friends and did stuff together outside of work. It just coincodence that young single childless programmers don't have established roots and have time to go for a beer after work.
So let's break it down:
-Young: No experience means entry-level pay. You REALLY need at least one experienced guy, but surrounding him with minions and padawans isn't a bad business descision
-Single/childless: No roots means that they (statistically) don't have anything better to do after work... than work. If a manager can employ a guy to do 80 hours for 40 hours of pay, they will probaly do so. Dicks.
-Male: Sadly, sexism in the industry is pretty well established. No good reason for it. There ARE reasons, but none of them good.
Keep your business model simple by making actual stuff that you can sell for a profit.
Did you just associate programming with "actual stuff"? Really?
And don't hire assholes.
Wow, what a revelation. Now, this might actually be news for people who are used to hiring salesmen, but for code shops? Naw.
Because Dropcam has a 100 percent employee retention rate — no one who has joined the 4-year-old company has ever left.
Which anyone can do if they get a group of dead-end-career types who know they're lucky to have a job, any job. The dead sea effect is well known, this guy might just have hit those salty sailors early. He probably does have a good point when it comes to retention and the common family-man sort. Once you have roots it's harder to up and leave for greener fields.
Having 100 percent retention is not necessarily a good thing either. From what I learned, too little retention is bad (for obvious reasons) but a very high retention rate can also be a sign that you are being too lenient on your employees and that may cause them to take advantage.
Apple would never exist
Table-ized A.I.
Google uses dinner as a form of manipulation. It's considered bad form to eat dinner at Google and then go home. It's like training animals with food rewards.
> Some other suggestions from the San Francisco video monitoring startup: don't fill your engineering department with young, single, childless males (aka brogrammers).
Let me guess which group represents the largest of new programmers out there?
30.
So in other words statistically insignificant. That's in line with all the startups I've worked for- we didn't lose people unless we fired them with very few exceptions.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
100 percent retention could also mean that you retain bad employees.
A young, single male is an automatic 'brogrammer' now?
sic transit gloria mundi
don't fill your engineering department with young, single, childless males (aka brogrammers).
Leave the bigotry at home, please. this isn't the 1920s and not all of us subscribe to certain puritan notions of "family".
I would otherwise agree with the idea that "going home" to rest is better than "resting at work" (because as long as you are accessible by work, you are not fully resting and free from it).
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
Has it occured to this person that he's about to be hit with a class action suit by all the single people who applied and were not hired? How do you even find out if people are married with children during the interview without asking directly, which should be a dead giveaway to all the singles who are turned down? Here's a hint everyone: if asked during an interview "are you married/party member/religious?" just respond with "which do I need to be to be hired here?" Whatever the answer, reply affirmative unless the answer is "doesn't matter" in which case echo back "then it doesn't matter".
That's because they cant get away. They are literally chained to their desks. They dont get free breakfast, lunch or dinner but they do get to spend time with their families. By spend time I mean they have visitation hours.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
with regular shifts and work weeks, no forced OT, traditional benefits, decent pay, treat workers like people.. get long term stability.. imagine that. what a novel idea. too bad most companies dont do that anymore.
The proverbial "brogrammer" is the only type of programmer your average valley C-level Dunning-Kruger sufferer can relate to.
ralphbarbagallo.com
So some guy nobody has ever heard of before, who made some company and product nobody has ever heard of before, who has no employees, makes a statement about how he is the greatest hiring genius, and it gets to the frontpage of slashdot? The fuck?
young, single, childless males (aka brogrammers)
Can we address the fact that's not what the term "brogrammers" refers to, at all?
Dropcam has a 100 percent employee retention rate — no one who has joined the 4-year-old company has ever left.
Not a surprise in this crap economy. How many have been fired? In the '80s I worked for a very small company with an extended 100% retention rate; nothing lasts forever.
Otherwise, I generally agree with the sentiment. As for "brogrammers," there's no evidence that young, single, childless males are better than other combinations and I'd argue that herd ("gaggle" -- "braggle"?) of them is a recipe for disaster. Varied experience and perspective are more helpful in the long run.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
everyone they canned they freaking hated.
Slashdot is a .org.
once you take away the "works in silicon valley" and "startup." he says dont hire assholes but then goes on to tout "ethical fiber" as a hiring qualification. what even is that? You dont want a bunch of "single childless males" but what about childless women? as a gay male, is a heteronormative marriage a job requirement for me to work here? sure, people can be hit-or-miss socially but thats why you have harassment and discrimination courses, and adhere to them.
he says he wants a family friendly company that supports paternity and maternity leave but in california those arent things you decide to "do" for employees, theyre state law. saying you're "really diverse" just because you have married couples working for you fails on so many levels to understand what diversity in the workplace means. yes ive worked for startups that buy out bars and clubs for the night, but they also give out baseball and movie tickets too. my last startup work traded in the nightclub perk for a bowling alley because they listened to their employees instead of making vague generalizations about how family friendly or unfriendly the workplace perks needed to be.
he doesnt buy dinner for the company, which is fine. working weird hours in IT means you've alienated my entire shift by robbing me of a breakfast that for you is a dinner. not buying dinner doesnt inherently prevent people from working late. Making intelligent business decisions like purchasing new hardware based on my MTBF and MTTF calculations instead the cost avoidance of making me work 90 hour weeks failing over infrastructure will keep me from working late.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I'm not sure the words "beef" and "dinner" were the best choice to use in the headline... :p
An honest to god company that
a) doesn't trying to abuse it's workers,
b) hires normal people who are decent workers but also have lives outside the office
I don't need a camera. I just want to send them money.
"...ALIVE!!!.."
(Goes into mad Vincent Price laugh as the lights fade...)
I doubt Henry Ford gave his workers an equity stake in the company and the chance to make millions in a few years when he was doing this research that proved you can only get 40-50 productive hours/week from an employee. Probably paid them a nickel per hour extra as overtime.
How many tech companies, (or IT departments of non-tech companies) have you ever worked at? How many of those places would not be temporarily (or permanently) crippled if they suddenly got rid of their young, single male employees?
Stick your drop-cam up your arse 'bro'.
That's in line with all the startups I've worked for- we didn't lose people unless we fired them with very few exceptions.
It also isn't clear that "retention rate" is an important metric, or even if it is a positive thing. The employee "churn" in Silicon Valley is often mentioned as a positive feature, because it leads to cross fertilization of ideas. It is not good for the overall economy for employees to stay in jobs that are a poor fit.
I have worked in 80 hour/week companies and I have worked in 9-5 companies. The latter were nice, but also less successful. A VC once told me that before he invests in a start-up, he drives by their offices at 9pm on Friday night. If the parking lot is empty, that company is going to fail.
A company of 30 employees has not lost an employee in its 4 years of existence. According to the US BLS, the median tenure is 4.4 years. So he has a small sample of people who are already below average in terms of their duration with his company.
A VC once told me that before he invests in a start-up, he drives by their offices at 9pm on Friday night. If the parking lot is empty, that company is going to fail.
Isn't that a self-fulfilling prophecy? I mean, if every VC demands this, then of course every company not meeting these standards will fail--because they won't be able to get any venture capital funding.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
No mention if his company is making profits either. Easy to keep employees with high payroll based on venture capital debt.
Hotel California, now without breakfast, lunch, and dinner!
Depending on the quantity of VC available, it could be profitable to rent ~20 cars and park them in your lot overnight.
Not one single bachelor works at The Firm. They encourage children because children promote stability. Also, nobody has ever left The Firm(alive that is).
Maybe "Dropcam" is just a front for some incredibly lucrative illegal business and the employees are blackmailed into staying?
I sort of doubt he'd be giving interviews and drawing publicity to himself if that were the case however.
for a WHOLE 4 YEARS!? amazing!
Did this guy just publicly admit to job discrimination? As in he won't hire single young childess male programmers?
I've worked at 2 startups that were sold for 125M and 225M, each making more than 5x the invested capital. At neither of them would seeing anyone there at 9 be more than an extreme rarity. 8-9 hour workdays were the norm.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
A VC once told me that before he invests in a start-up, he drives by their offices at 9pm on Friday night. If the parking lot is empty, that company is going to fail.
Isn't that a self-fulfilling prophecy? I mean, if every VC demands this, then of course every company not meeting these standards will fail--because they won't be able to get any venture capital funding.
Indeed, it does seem a bit radical. I've worked in start-ups, incidentally ones that survived the dot-com crash and are doing well nowadays. One had a solid business model and the other one was malleable enough to change gears and explore new business venues.
We certainly did work our asses off, but ours were cycles of 50-hour weeks followed by a week or two of 60-hours weeks prior to delivering milestones, followed by a couple of weeks of 9-5's with a couple of days off. Rinse and repeat. It worked, and I know from 2nd and 3rd hand accounts that similar cycles work in other productive environments.
Sometimes people really have to work crazy hours, but then again, who the hell in this time and age works crazy hours on-site????? That is pretty much what this VC is expecting to see, and to me that's a big fuck-up in terms of technology-oriented work environments?
Fine we work long hours, a good portion of it from home. If I see a tech company parking lot full on Friday 9pm, either that company is a government contractor working with classified shit that needs to be done on premises, or they are a bunch of apes who have yet to discover the blessing of telecommuting.
The VC is full of shit, or maybe his business wisdom is sooooo out of our pedestrian ability to grasp that it looks like magic shit conjured by Harry Potter or something.
That's an outdated notion given the connectivity from home to work that developers have now. Some of the most productive employees I have had would only be in the office Friday night at 9PM during customer crises or integration phases where there is a lot of 'engineer to engineer' communications that needs to happen ASAP because until problem X is solved, nothing much proceeds.
However, these same engineers would be IMing each other and checking in code from home at 9PM, 12AM, 3AM without the distractions of the janitors, automated timers turning lights off, or heated debates between engineers about stuff that wasn't very important.
Some such employees "disappear" online for a couple hours for dinner w/family and putting kids to bed and are then back online for hours.
For his sake, hopefully if that VC is still in the business he's changed his views or he's likely dismissing companies that will be very successful.
If I hear about a startup that hasn't lost any employees then I just figure they're waiting for the IPO. While l like the description of the diverse group of employees and other aspects of the company, I think not mentioning compensation at all is a little disingenuous
If they're paying the people a reasonable wage and the checks don't bounce then employees tend to stay. Add in stock options and waiting for the big IPO, or as mentioned in the article a very big buyout, then you have people waiting for the big payday. The perks ( or lack thereof ) might have had an effect on employee retention thus far, but you shouldn't ignore the hope of substantial monetary compensation as an additional big motivator.
Isn't that a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Of course it is, but self-fulfilling prophecies are the stock-in-trade of the investment community. Without them people might start to realize that the emperor is naked (or at least very scantily clad). For example, say the investment geniuses decide that companies will only succeed if they do more than half their work in India. Since investment geniuses are famed for their group think (oops, I mean great minds think alike) nobody will invest in a company that doesn't do that. Hence the geniuses are shown to be right. Isn't that a nice organized system? Without it you might have the chaos of different companies pursuing different strategies and seeing which worked best.
"...we want people who understand that they are making a product for normal people, for their family and friends. So we often hire them because either they have their own kids..."
My understanding of federal anti-discrimination laws, is that this is illegal. Of course these laws were designed to protect women and Blacks, not beta males, so of course nothing will actually happen.
No, you won't. Not one person who says that has ever done it.
Lol best comment on this worthless story about the megalomania of some dipshit "brogrammer CEO" XD
I mean, if every VC demands this, then of course every company not meeting these standards will fail--because they won't be able to get any venture capital funding.
The very idea that a company is doomed to fail if a Vulture Capitalist doesn't buy them up makes me a saaaaaad panda :(
I guess this means that "The American Dream" has become truly incorporeal...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Slashdot: Its _dot_ _org!_
Mon chien, il n'a pas du nez. Comment scent-il? TrÃs mauvais!
“We bring in breakfast and lunch because we think it makes people more productive if they don’t have to go wait in line at restaurants in SoMa, which are crowded. But we don’t bring in dinner. We don’t make people work late. It’s a way to keep people from getting burned out.”
And this isn't distasteful stereotyping at all because we are talking about young white males and they are free game for everyone! Yay!
Generally if your starting your own buisness you need to work crazy hours to compete with established buisness the first few years. I don't see why the expectations for programmers would be different from a mom and pop store.
RTFA you goddamn moron.
don't fill your engineering department with young, single, childless males
You can't hire and fire based on gender, age, marital status, or family status, it is discrimination. Hire qualified, experienced people.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Don't bother. I've tried it on several occasions, and it does work well to remind me to stay away. The problem is that I eventually realize I have nothing better to do, and that is why I read Slashdot, and so it gets unblocked. Still can't help but think I'd be better off doing anything else, but most of the world is intellectual vomit. Slashdot is just the vomit that still has some salvageable chunks of food in it.
It also isn't clear that "retention rate" is an important metric, or even if it is a positive thing.
Nice insight. But also, he might just hire dipwads who can't find another job somewhere else. 100% retention!
Some churn is good, but lots is not. If the company is growing and never loses anyone, but gains new people, then you get both experience and new ideas at the same time.
But yes, once a company is mature and not growing, 100% retention is not "perfect".
As per my blog post a couple of years ago at http://use-cases.org/2011/06/04/getting-good-estimates/ and http://use-cases.org/2011/06/22/updates-on-getting-good-estimates/
Most good estimates have a range - and not a number, or a number with a confidence (both are interchangeable).
If an engineer says it will take two weeks - I push for a range or a confidence. If the range is weird (2-8 weeks), I push for the engineer to tighten their estimate through discussing or raising and discovering the unknowns or the risks that they are aware off. That sort of estimate would usually end up around 3-5 weeks which is a reasonable margin - and a lot better than than underestimating by 50%.
Same with estimates that are too narrow. "2 weeks +/- day". That implies a full level of understanding, no risk and no dependencies. Almost never happens. Work through the same risks/unknowns and the estimates usually become really bad - typically at least double of the "high confidence" estimate - similar to TFA.
The is lots of reasonably applicable theory behind this (confidence intervals, cone of uncertainty, etc).
Damn. Too many articles open... See in context http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/04/23/2021201/overconfidence-why-you-suck-at-making-development-time-estimates :).
It's just the Hotel California, you can check-in, but you can never leave!
Being a spelling & grammar Nazi is a sign you do not poses the intelligence to contribute to the conversation
I'd agree with dinner, and maybe breakfast to an extent. But lunch? It's just a time saver to have it at work. If I eat while working and don't take the time off for lunch, I can leave sooner.
Agreed. But dropcam does a lot of things that you expect in other areas ... like "maternity and paternity leave and all of the things that used to be things that only big, mature companies did."
Sure, it might be required everywhere outside the USA, but that's a common sense program that really helps an employee get back to being productive, quickly.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
"no one who has joined the 4-year-old company has ever left..."
...the CEO said as he glared ominously at the interviewer then laughed manically. "No one."
It's a trap!
Let's hope they are not all frozen in the basement.. ;)
http://www.hawknest.com/
he was probably just ego-wanking all over you to make you realise what an important big man he was.
only big, already successful companies can afford to own or rent their own parking lots. startups rent office space and most of their employees rely on street parking or nearby commercial parking (or public transport, bicycles, or living withing walking distance of work etc).
The startup might rent a few parking spots for the founders or maybe top employees...but they certainly won't be in an easily identifiable Startup Inc Parking Lot that you can do a drive-by eyeball at 9pm, they'll be a few reserved spots in a nearby car park.
now go wash that VC spoof off your face. and stop lapping it up.
no one who has joined the 4-year-old company has ever left...
... alive.
Now I know why their cam's are bandwidth hogging crap.
companies DISCOVER if you treat people like REAL HUMAN BEINGS we appreciate it. someone tweet this so cnn etc can put this on their news site
A VC once told me that before he invests in a start-up, he drives by their offices at 9pm on Friday night. If the parking lot is empty, that company is going to fail.
I miss the Y2k dotcom era. Startups would pay ME to let me use THIER parking lots.
Wally - WallyWorld Parking Inc.
Please do and leave it that way, because no one with a productive/meaningful life cares anything about your trivial host file ramblings.
And even the people on slashdot with unproductive, trivial, meaningless lives don't care.
I once worked on a place with such "mind control" (I would have put it as "emotional blackmail"). Oooh, free food! Oooh, videogames to play after lunch -there is a one hour mandated break, although most people will be done by 15-30 minutes-! Ooooh, free pizza&beer every Friday! Oooh, lots of parties on weekends! Yeah, well, I got fired because of the mortal sin of going home at about 7-7:30pm despite having been told that I had very good technical capabilities, so I wouldn't say it was a good job.
I'll take owning my time over such "perks" any day, and I wish there were more CEOs like this guy.
I work, I go home when I've done my 8 hours, I get paid. Simple. Why is this so difficult to grasp?
That's just more of the same, and double the asshole if you are doing this in the same room as others. A lot of youngster basement-dwellers at their first job thinks this is how it's done, and that it's so effective but it's not. You are ineffective (compared to taking a solid break and getting some air) and furthermore unhealthy and disgusting. And you are breaking the flow of everyone else in the room, costing even more money.
Ok, I know America is like 50 years behind in management so your boss probably thinks it makes sense. Or, if your job is warming a chair *only* and you are alone in the room, then I suppose it's ok. Otherwise, no.
Why this isn't obvious to anyone over 16 (with no diagnosis) is baffling.
It's probably easier to keep people in your company when the job market is bad.
And that's been the case for a lot longer than 4 years.
If you can keep your staff (without having to pay top dollar) when the market is booming shows that your work environment is worth value.
If companies didn't hire brogrammers and fire anyone over 35-50, as they do, then half of Silicon Valley companies would go bankrupt tomorrow. Their entire business model is dependent on H1Bs living five to an apt. and having nothing to do but work.
Oh and about the assholes. The assholes are already there from the top of management on down. Assholes inevitably hire assholes because they unconsciously recognize each other (assholes are a generalization of narcissists, who like themselves a lot) and because there's nothing an asshole has more contempt for than someone showing obvious signs of having a, you know, conscience.
So what you end up with in all these companies is a two tiered caste system of brogrammers and their asshole overseers. Brogrammers are disposable, assholes are inviolate and the whole thing is run on the model of a pirate ship.
And these are the blue chip NASDAQ companies we're talking about. (been there, done that) Beneath that level , the startups it's likely to be the same dynamic but maybe the asshole tier is populated by a runaway-H1B or three.
American business's go-to model is always exploitation of anyone stupid enough to send in their application, ingenuousness in its dealings with its partners and customers and tax evasion to the limit of the law and beyond.
It's the American mindset and it has been around at least since the days of the building of the railroads.
In Germany and Scandinavia and other more, you know, evolved nations it's very different . There's just not the default assumption that the only / best way to get ahead is through exploitation and as much criminality as you think you can get away with or will still be profitable once you're caught.
There they''re more concerned with building quality products and letting the consumer make their choices.
This is what capitalism is supposed to be about, but the US regulatory structure is deliberately kept too weak to enforce anything like what's needed for a a "free market" to flourish for labor or services or anything else.
It's one of the ironies that people can't get past. A strongly regulated environment is the freest. Employees who work fewer hours and have meaningful time for things like vacations, families and maintaining an interest in the broader culture in which they live are just more productive.
Americans are just not that smart. It really sort of comes down to that basic fact. And I say this as an American.
Many start up restaurants do exactly this.
No one wants to eat at an empty looking restaurant.
This is sort of "damned if you do, damned if you don't."
Are not some young, single, childless males being responsible by planning their careers and family life?
Sorry, how does their future life relate?
Sorry, wrong thread.
or, if you live near a popular nightspot, hire a guard and rent your carpark out on friday nights as secure parking