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Comment by dave2000 | Hacker News Reader

dave2000

"With our culture of bringing our whole selves to work and seeing team as family, with shared values we live by,..."

It's moronic drivel, isn't it. Apart from being nonsensical (how can you bring less than your whole self to work, unless you've had some sort of psychotic breakdown) and the poor English ("seeing team as family") it just reads like corporate babble. It's not a family. I care about my family. I don't care about my job, its stakeholders, its values, its products or its customers. It's just a job. I'm a wage slave so I do it for the money and for no other reason at all. Whenever I see a company stating their values I immediately lose any respect I might have had for them. It's as if they've been on a fact finding trip to north Korea.

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That's the way you see it, and to a certain extent I feel the same way. But two things:

Even with unabashed cynicism there's no denying that structuring a company like a cult has a huge advantage in terms of retention, dedication, salary requirements, etc. This dovetails perfectly with SV's youth worship because young people are more likely to buy into this crap, and they are also more likely to be willing to conflate their work and social circles.

Somewhat more charitably, not all companies are the same. Given the choice I would prefer to work for Apple than for Facebook because I think the former is generally doing better things for the world than the latter. On a more extreme level, I would definitely consider taking a lower salary from a company or non-profit I felt was doing really good things in the world. The point is, while "we are a family" is straight bullshit, the values of a company should matter. If I were to treat my employment as a purely mercenary transaction with no regards to anything but the transaction then I would be complicit in furthering the global corporate hegemony which unbridled capitalism is leading us toward.

I agree with you. I have other reasons why I do the job I do, but would never do it if the money wasn't there. At the end of the day, the feel-good nonsense has no place in business decisions, and that really goes both ways in an employer/employee situation. You can like your job, even love it, but if you're not looking at it as a business transaction you will get screwed one way or another. Replay job and it for employee and them, and the same holds for the business. It's a mindset thing, and has everything to do with professionalism and nothing to do with touchy feel goodness. Polite but firm negotiations where both parties feel good with the outcome can be achieved no matter whether you like each other or not. (Although the friction may vary along that axis.)

> I don't care about my job, its stakeholders, its values, its products or its customers. It's just a job. I'm a wage slave so I do it for the money and for no other reason at all.

I guess that's what a decade of bad management and shitty start-up/big-corp work does to you. Personally, I'm happy that some people have an optimistic enough view of "the work" to want to change that reality, and make it a positive and good experience when enough money is involved to do so. If you read more into Buffer you will see that it is indeed not your typical company.

> moronic drivel

^ why I downvoted you.

> how can you bring less than your whole self to work

This means basically wanting to be somewhere else rather than at work. i.e., their culture is one of being dedicated to work when you're at work; at least that's how I understand it.

> poor English

This is not uncommon colloquial English. “Team” and “family” here act roughly like “mind” does in the term “theory of mind”—basically nonspecific nouns.

> I don't care about my job…

Sounds like you are a poor fit for the culture they are trying to build. Presumably you would not enjoy working there. That does not make their concept of how to manage their company moronic, nor an explanation of it drivel, however.

Your comment is blazingly condescending toward a post that is clearly very well thought-out and considered, based solely on your disagreement with Buffer's approach to organizing their team and company. That seems wholly unnecessary, particularly since you present zero actual evidence of Buffer's approach being objectively worse, just your opinion that it is.

I just posted my opinion on an aspect of the post. (I don't care about down votes; if I could hide my scores I would.)

I don't need to know anything about a companies culture to know what they're saying is patently specious nonsense. You might be impressed by it, who knows. Do you read a company's mission statement when considering a job and say "company a say they're honest and driven by a desire to put both their employees and their customers first, but company b claims integrity and a desire to raise the standard of customer service to a new level.....oh I just can't decide!"?

If you've been following Buffer at all, you'll know that they actually walk the talk. It's not just a vacuous "mission statement".

When you pile up phrases like "moronic drivel" and "patently specious nonsense", you're tipping onto the wrong side of the HN guideline which asks you not to call names in arguments. It's fine to make an argument against mixing work and family values; others have done so in this thread. It's not so fine, though, to do shrill denunciation in HN comments. That's good for stirring up indignation, if that's your thing, but it's bad for casual conversation, which is our thing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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