I'm sure the company had a much nicer culture when they started, given that their product attracted so much original content.. So what went wrong ?
1. I fully agree about the fractured organisation with lots of in-fighting.
2. I relate with the statement about "confused hipsters who couldn't differentiate between language du jour and its monads and delivering a product". I think it was more a matter of very clever yet immature kids that loved to play around with eccentric language features. That was not the root of any problem, though. The problem was lack of leadership to curb the in-fighting and give the engineers some direction so that they don't get lost on their drive to experiment around with whatever they feel like it.
3. It's ironical to blame the ex-TWers Brazilians _and_ the monad-loving hipsters. From my perspective, these were distinct groups. The Brazilians were not the stronger advocates of monads and other Scala typing tricks. Quite the opposite. The few Brazilians that were more fond of Scala were not ex-TWers. In short, simplifying the blame to one nationality is very short-sighted.
4. I'm very curious about who we supposedly bully. Or who was bullied at all, for that matter. Perhaps, I was too far from the director ranks to witness that. I'd imagine a director could do something about lowly engineers bullying people.
5. About ThoughtWorks, there's another misconception here. There's a strong cult-like culture there, yes. It happens that the former ThoughtWorkers that joined SoundCloud were exactly the ones that we dissatisfied with the cult, and joined SC in search for a better work culture. The ones that I knew personally have some quite strong feelings _against_ the "social justice" hypocrisy that is rampant at TW.
6. How were we "incestuous"?
I concur with the nepotistic networking in part. Everyone tends to refer people they know personally. Our network was strong enough to become some sort of inner joke. I doubt that this was what brought SC down. Immature acts were not restricted to us.
"We're all big believers in X here. But actually, we don't really believe in X"
"Great news, bro - we offer unlimited vacation! But actually you aren't expected to take more than 10 days of vacation per year."
( I work for Pivotal but not Labs and am curious. )
I joined after the re-organisations that Phil mentions in the linked post here were well underway. From all I could tell, no one regrets it. At the position I head, I only heard rumours about the struggle that he went through trying to improve the engineering problems there.
Everyone (with perhaps a couple of exceptions) I know personally there (Brazilians or otherwise) was trying very hard to improve things. Their efforts could have been misdirected. Their strategy could have been even counter-productive. The intentions were good, though. And I did see some ill-intentioned people in other places.
I even think that thowaway999 was probably well-intentioned. However, an anonymous director calling people that he disagrees with "conniving and intensely political" and claiming a moral high ground is almost comical.
For me what was most difficult and disappointing was not being able to rally peers or their teams to get the necessary work done. Rather they were too busy sniveling amongst themselves — too jaded from burnout, I suspect. I felt incapable in the role at first until I recognized that it was really a maturity problem that pervaded much of the engineering organization.
I knew it was time to call it quits pretty early when seeing that nailing myself to the cross wouldn't affect change but hung on for two years. I was able to help a few people along the way by shielding them from the bullpen and the drama and giving some good career development opportunities. Let's face it: my peers in the leadership circle were long burned out, and I was quickly becoming so myself.
I have nothing but respect for the founders. They had their work cut out for them. Never asked a whole lot from them but they gave it their sincere all when I did. Maybe a learning opportunity for them would be having someone in their steed who was less conflict averse who could have helped referee the discord.
If anything, I wanted to caution folks to not be under any illusions with respect to SoundCloud's organizational and personnel context and work environment in Berlin. Everybody held it up as a panacea, which it sadly wasn't. Irrational exuberance is dangerous.
That's true. I only realised it later. My bad.