The Cake is a Lie

I don't always love my job, but most of the time I like it well enough. There are things which annoy me, or things which I find suboptimal and frustrating, but as a general rule, the work is interesting, the people I work with on a daily basis tend to not suck, and I have a desk next to a window. They also pay me decently, and taking PTO or working from home randomly here or there is never an issue. The company culture is something I've generally regarded more favorably than not; although I don't really buy into certain aspects of the San Francisco progressive mentality, most of my opposition is around implementation as opposed to core ideals. People tend to be genuinely nice; there was only one person I worked with (he is not there anymore) who I legitimately thought was an asshole.

This all sounds great so far, right? OK, let's add to this the fact that our product is used by hundreds of millions of people every month, and that we are pre-IPO (calling a company with a M * $1B valuation and over N * 1000 employees a startup seems incredibly disingenuous to me). I have no idea if/when/how we will go public; maybe next year. Maybe 2019. Maybe 2020. Maybe never (although that would suck). Yet it seems likely that someday my RSU-ship will come in. More things that seem to be pretty good, no?

Now let's talk about the executive team. I don't have too much to say about some of these folks because I've never really talked with most of them; I've just heard them speak here or there at some team or company function. Our head of engineering seems to be pretty solid (much better than the last one, that's for sure - that guy was a dillweed), and we've got a legitimate CFO now. I don't know anything about the new head of HR or the new general counsel. And then aside from the founders, I'm not sure about the others at the executive level - specifically, I'm not sure how many more there are - some people that I'm thinking of might be at the C-level or they might be one step below. Either way, we'll omit all of them, because they aren't really where I want to go with this. The person I really want to talk about is the CEO himself.

If you'd asked me yesterday how I felt about our CEO, I would have said that he seemed to be a genuine, likeable dude who believes in what we're doing and tries to get other people to be inspired by it, too. It's a trite thing to say, but he really does come across as a nice guy, and I say that in the most complimentary way possible. He's done interviews with various media outlets, and they all seem to really like him, and when he's up on the stage in front of the company talking about the things we're going to do or the difference that we're supposedly making in people's lives, it's actually pretty easy to take a sip of that kool-aid.

There's only one problem, and you can find it in the title of this post.^[1] If you knew where I worked and went to Glassdoor and read all the reviews, the 2-3 star ones are particularly illuminating, because they speak of a CEO who cannot handle criticism and who tends to view former employees as those whom we are better off without rather than unfortunate departures^[2]. Another review talks about how amazing our values and culture are and how the execs behave as if they are exempt from adherence to these standards (no, I don't work for anyone with the last name of Trump). Reviews dating back to 2015 talk about morale issues and talent bleed. But, don't believe Glassdoor, believe actual data.^[3]

However, before I get to the numbers, let me explain why I'm even writing this. I have worked at companies that have given out holiday bonuses / gifts to their employees, and I have worked at places that have not. I was at one company many years ago where my first year's holiday bonus was on the order of a full paycheck. Then the following year, while still at the same company when it was making an absolute fuck-ton of money, nobody got anything. The CEO felt that people were expecting something, and he didn't like that. So we all got dick. Since I don't celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah or anything else around this time of year, I've never really thought much about the whole "Christmas Bonus" thing. If somebody wants to give me something, that's cool. If they don't, that's cool, too. I can't remember what we got from BOB during my first year, but I do seem to recall getting something, like an Amazon gift card or somesuch.

Last year, BOB decided to do something different. Since I archive the fuck out of everything, I actually have last year's email from BOB, the CEO of BOB. It reads, in part:

One tradition we have at BOB is giving out an annual holiday gift to employees. This year we wanted to do something a little different: Working with XXX and YYY we'll be giving everyone a $ZZZ gift card to make a donation to a charitable project of their choice.

I think BOB meant well, but this is fucked up. To paraphrase one of my coworkers, the amount of money in question is not that large, per-employee, so it's not a big cost for the company. They can deduct it from their taxes. We can't say that they didn't give us anything, and if we complain, then it makes US look like assholes.

The cake is a motherfucking lie.

Ah, but it gets better. The fact is that the dollar amount of this gift card is less than I spend on food in a week, so it's not like my life is diminished any by not getting a few extra bucks in my pocket. OK, but I don't appreciate blatant falsehoods even if there is no malice behind them. Precision of language is important. Don't tell me that you're giving me dollars to donate to the charitable project of my choice and then proceed to give me a list of acceptable projects.

Fine, I'm an asshole, but I just don't give a half-eaten rat's ass about art and music projects in Bay Area elementary schools. I'm sure they are worthy recipients of the money, but they are not where I would choose to donate MY money, and I don't see anything wrong with that. I thought this was my gift? If you're going to say "here's some money, now give it away," then I'm going to donate to Planned Parenthood, Sierra Club, Amnesty International, or some kind of medical / research charity - IOW, something I actually do give some semblance of a shit about.

I didn't bother to even pick up the gift card last year, because the email went on to say that "our combined donation will cover ALL SF Pre-K through 2nd-grade projects, in addition to arts and music projects for all grades." So, if you didn't pick one of the preselected projects, odds are that it had already been funded by some of your coworkers, and even the piddly-ass choice that wasn't a choice got taken away from you. What's the fucking point?! You're giving me a bogus choice and then taking that away, too? Just don't bother. Just say that BOB doesn't do holiday bonuses and make a fucking donation to whomever you want so that you can feel better about yourselves, but don't pretend like you're doing anything at all for your employees.

I didn't say anything about this shitpile last year; I just let it go. But here we are, one year later, and the cake is still a motherfucking lie. They are doing the exact same thing. The email starts out with this:

One thing I’m really proud about is our tradition of helping others in need. Last year we decided to partner with XXX and YYY to give back to our local communities.

Wait. What? Tradition? You did it once and now it's a tradition? OK, fine, whatever. So I sat there for a few minutes and thought about it, and originally I'd made the decision to bring this up at the next Q&A. However, I thought about it a little more, and while I really don't care if I get a bunch of angry glares from people that think I'm a heartless fuckstick, I figured that maybe I'd get a better response if I just emailed BOB offline. I liked BOB, I thought he was a reasonable fellow, and I wanted to voice my dissent and explain why I didn't like what they were doing, even though I can understand that it's well-intentioned.

So I wrote an email. It contained no instances of the word "fuck", unlike this blog post. I did have one instance of the word "shits" and one instance of the word "sucks" - and R questioned my use of the word "shit" in an email to the CEO, but the way I look at it, he has no problem saying "fuck" and "shit" on stage in front of all of us, so why would I have any problem saying "shit" to him in a private email. I'm not going to go full-on blackbird rage against the boss of the boss of my boss, but I also want to make it known that I don't like this. I kept the email simple, clear, and precise, without any of the extraneous text that I often use when writing other emails (or blog posts) that people have sometimes given me shit over (case in point). I wasn't even really sure if he'd reply. Here's the email itself:

Hi BOB. I remember when you sent out a similar email last year, and my reaction then was the same as it is this year, except that last year I didn't say anything about it. However, being something of a stickler for precision of language, it is unsettling to me that you say that we will be receiving a gift card to support a charity of our choice, when in fact this is not true. Your email suggests that the gift-card program is basically the same as last year's, in which we could either select some local classroom project or just do nothing and it would go to local schools.

Even though I don't agree with the basic mechanics of what you're doing (I have a problem with the idea of giving people a "gift" with the stipulation that they must then give it away) I can at least recognize that it's well-intentioned. The execution, however, kinda sucks. If you're going to tell me that I have X dollars to donate to the charity of my choice, then let me actually choose what charity I want it to go to. I'd rather give my X dollars to Planned Parenthood or the Sierra Club, as opposed to seeing it go to a cause that, to be blunt, I truly give no shits about.

--Raven J. Blackbird

One of our company values is authenticity; it is purportedly a good thing to express how we actually feel and what we legitimately think about things. They want us to feel "safe" providing criticism and negative feedback, and not to feel like we can't be ourselves at work. They claim to care about such things as diversity and inclusion, and whether or not they all believe it, at least some of the folks on the D/I team do talk about more than just the usual biological-diversity traits. People have asked tough questions at Q&A before, too, some of which could have been interpreted as hostile and some of which were rather pointed, and nobody has ever been completely shut down over what they said. All of this stuff goes into what would make for a pretty good company culture, right?

Here's the email I got back, maybe 20 minutes or so later.

Hey Raven J. Blackbird,
Thanks for the note. I'm sorry that the gift doesn't suit you.
Happy holidays,
BOB

Wow. The CEO basically just told me to go fuck myself. Not only that, but he did so in response to me pointing out something which is true (that we cannot just donate to the charity of our choice), for expressing my thoughts on something and suggesting what I think would have been a better alternative, AND for not throwing this grenade out into a public forum. Could I have said things other than "sucks" and "shits"? I could have, yes, but given that this was the response I got, I'm kinda wishing that I had put in the third paragraph about how this whole thing runs counter to our values in the first place by forcing us to be inauthentic and support things that we may not want to support.

Wow. I don't think BOB knows who I am; he might recognize me because of my hair color, but I would be surprised if he has any clue what I actually do for BOB, INC. I suspect that to him, I'm just some whiny, over-privileged tech bro. I wonder if he's recalling the days of my predecessor and wondering if all tech people from Arizona have an attitude problem. I don't know if knowing who I am or what systems I am responsible for would have made any difference in his reply, but perhaps if he knew that I am the ONLY PERSON at the company with expert-level knowledge of these systems, maybe he'd have at least acknowledged that some people might want their gift (if you give me a gift that I'm not free to dispose of as I please, how is it a gift?) to go to a cause that they find more worthy? Oh, and what do I manage? Nothing much, really, just the core databases that hold the entire userbase and all our users' data.

If you'd asked me yesterday morning if I liked my job and the company I work for, I'd probably have said yes, but with just four lines of text, BOB managed to completely invert my feelings for both BOB the company and BOB the person. Whether or not BOB realizes that this is what he's done is somewhat immaterial; having been completely shut down like that, I have no interest in replying back to him to explain that he's basically just activated my resignation program, and that I am going to start replying to all these recruiters that have been hitting me up. Depending on how it goes, I might not last the rest of the year. I didn't think it was possible for me to exhaust the remainder of my fuck supply so quickly.

I'm reminded of a question I asked BOB at Q&A a couple of years ago. I brought up the study by the Harvard Business Review which demonstrated how the open office floor plan is detrimental to productivity and leads to increased stress, and I said that if it's true that we're a data-driven company and we make decisions based on empirical facts, then why are we ignoring all the research that refutes the merits of an open floorplan. The answer I got was basically along the lines of we don't care, get some headphones from IT. I had completely forgotten about that little exchange until BOB's email, at which point it served as a reminder that the dude really just does not care as much as he wants people to think he does.

This is a problem.

Quoting one Glassdoor review: "Asked multiple times at company Q&As, CEO says increased discomfort of current employees is a problem of the individual, takes zero responsibility for sudden attrition & morale drop."

While I don't know who wrote that (it wasn't me), I can say unequivocally that it's dead-on balls accurate. I've been at multiple Q&As where that exact kind of sentiment was expressed. I can understand BOB's perspective - if you don't like it at a given company, one option is certainly that you can vote with your feet and go elsewhere. And maybe sometimes that's the right thing to do, but it smacks too much of the "'MURICA - LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT!" mentality.

Another review said something similar: "Leadership does not know how to address negative feedback. They sweep problems under the rug." Indeed.

Just how bad is it?

The table below shows some data from the past couple of years from some surveys that they send out periodically asking us questions about how we feel about the company and our jobs and our managers and the like. In 2017, they stopped asking whether or not we had confidence in BOB as the leader of BOB and just asked whether or not we had confidence in the direction of the company or some shit like that. But check out that first column. When I started at BOB, the overwhelming majority of people in engineering thought they would still be there 12 months later. At the rate it's going, the next time we take one of these, that number is going to be less than half. ^[4]

HOLY FUCK. That is insanely bad. They tell us that our attrition rates are actually in line with industry. I wonder if that's true. Let's just assume for the sake of argument that not everyone who expects to be gone in a year actually leaves, and also that part of the reason for the increase is that some disgruntled people are still around; they might have said they were quitting on the survey but they haven't done it. Further, it's important to note that that not everyone who's expecting to leave is doing so for reasons of discontent. It seems to be a trend in SF that a lot of people leave companies (at least the startup/pre-IPO kind) somewhere in their third year of service, because after four years, the majority of your equity is vested and there's considerably less financial incentive to stick around unless you've been golden-handcuffed.

Remember what I said (or maybe I just thought it) about how 2015 was the year that had the biggest surge in hiring? As of January, we're all going to start hitting that 3-year mark where things get interesting.

Regardless of the reasons, imagine what would happen to virtually any tech company if over 35 percent of their engineers quit in a 12 month period. BOB would be completely and totally ... yes, I'm going to say it ... DISCOMBOBULATED!

Obviously, I don't want this to happen, because regardless of whether I stay or go, I still want my RSUs to be worth actual dollars someday, but I think there is a more significant risk that this will not happen than people want to believe. BOB has shown little interest in retaining talent from what I can see, and if the reason that most people are thinking about leaving has more to do with unhappiness or frustration than just tenure, BOB could be in for a rough time.

Anyway, I don't know yet what I'm going to do, but the radar is spinning and I'm actively talking to people at other places. Maybe other companies' CEOs are just as douchey as ours, but with any luck they're more open about it so that at least you know what you're dealing with. One of the things I was considering was throwing a grenade at Q&A related to retention and attrition and the like - maybe a little something like this....

So, BOB (human), there have been a lot of changes on the executive team since I've been here. One perspective that was mentioned to me as a way to think about it is that companies at a given stage need a certain type of person / certain set of skills / etc. to get them to the next stage, but then once they get there, the kinds of people who can take them to the next stage after that might be completely different - a simple example might be the person who loves the tiny startup vs. the person who prefers a medium-but-not-too-large company. In light of that premise and the various changes that have been made at the executive level, what about you? Having never done it before, do you think you're still the right person to take BOB (the company) to the next level?

ZING.