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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> I had one guy threaten to punch me in the face for looking at him. Another guy was worse...he smashed his phone on the desk about two feet from my face to "show me who is boss," occasionally got physical with me, and would routinely say stuff like "I own your soul" to me while I was working.

This is literally abuse. It's also not normal. Not from my short time in banking and longer time in trading (around lots of bankers). Not from anyone I know in the field. I'm sorry you had to go through that--you may want to talk to a lawyer.

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> This is literally abuse. It's also not normal.

I agree it's abuse, but it's more normal than people realize when there is a lot of money on the line in high stress situations. The solution is to remove some of the stress, but I'm not sure how easily that can be done when so much money is on the line since they naturally go together.

I remember working in a 'startup' in the 90s with people routinely yelling at each other. I remember hearing the owner stomping around, slamming doors and yelling at my boss (who was awesome). Then my boss came in and asked me if I could build a client demo. After I responded sure, he said we needed it in 3 hours so he could present it and hopefully get the next check. Let's just say I may have then yelled at the computer while coding. Fun times :)

Heck, one of the owners decked the other one in a meeting, walked out, and we never saw him again.

Yeah it’s not abnormal unfortunately. Anywhere that “alpha personalities” are likely to clash is bound to result in some physical clashes.

My own experience was getting into a fist fight with someone after I told them to fuck off and open a ticket because I wasn’t going to drop everything and fix his shit right there right then.

Fist fights never go how you expect them to which was fortunate for me in the end.

We’re still friends 20 years later :)

Edit: I’d like to clarify that this is in no way acceptable but it is normal to some degree.

Thank you for sharing this. Its crazy how worked uo we get in the crucible of the moment. Do either of you even remember what the ticket was fixing?

Not a clue. Wasn’t really important though in the scale of things. You only work that out as you get older.

Sounds like it wasn't about the ticket, but about not accepting abuse. Likely worth it and the right reaction.

That's what I don't get in these abusive industries: Just because someone is higher up in a hierarchy he is not strong, he is not untouchable, the police is not on his side. Those pencil pusher bullies get in the face of the wrong young new intern and they get trashed. Should happen all the time. Should end such behaviour very fast. But doesn't. Seems like it's baked into recruiting, only hiring people that wouldn't even think about defending themselves.

crucible of the moment. I like that phrase!

I read it as cubicle at first. Haha

a reminder that the scientist who coined the term 'alpha male' to describe wolves abandoned it as useless years ago davemech.org/news.html

https://www.businessinsider.com/no-such-thing-alpha-male-201...

It's great to learn this; I hear so many "alpha male" references (or a gender-neutral "alpha") when talking about human behavior, and it's always rubbed me the wrong way. Even if wolves did have this sort of social structure, it's absurd to immediately assume that humans work the same way. Good to know it's rubbish even when talking about wolves.

> stomping around, slamming doors and yelling at my boss

This is fine. It's a hostile work environment. But if everyone's on the same page, it can, I don't want to say work, but not totally suck. Especially if there's good money.

Threatening to punch people, smashing things near someone to show them who's boss and "getting physical" is different. It's abuse. It's illegal. It was somewhat commonplace in and before the 80s [1], but it has not been common for decades now nor should it be.

[1] I have a theory for this, and it involves leaded gasoline.

> [1] I have a theory for this, and it involves leaded gasoline.

May just be coincidence but this is the second time in the past few weeks I've heard about this, and I'm curious. Would you mind going into more detail?

Basically there's a time period where people were growing up with a low level of lead poisoning caused by the burning of leaded gasoline.

Lead causes brain damage specifically in executive function and leads to aggression, impulsivity and behavioral control issues.

What others have said. It's also a fairly prominent theory that it's at least a factor in why crime rates have dropped.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesi...

There's a LOT to chew on in there.

Capitalism incentivizes abuse, because abuse is profitable.

You haven't lived in the USSR or in the Eastern Bloc, have you? So far, there wasn't a way of living invented where there were no abused and/or abusers.

How can you argue against the statement "capitalism incentivizes abuse" by talking about communism?

Note that I don't disagree with your notion that abuse is abundant in all human societies.

No traces of capitalism there, yet abuse was deeply engraved. Conclusion: abuse has nothing to do with the type/philosophy of the market.

That makes sense if the original statement was that capitalism is the only thing that can ever incentivize abuse.

If you assume that abuse can be caused or influenced by more than one thing -- which I believe makes sense but you might disagree -- then it doesn't matter what communism was doing if we're talking about capitalism.

There's nothing inherently profitable about abuse. Making your workers miserable generally makes them less productive.

The thing with banks is that they aren't productive in the first place. They're scalping off whatever they can get, with fierce competition. If you're fresh out of college and get hired into these places, you can't just walk away without risking your whole career. It's a monopsony. That's what enables abuse, human nature takes care of the rest.

Non-capitalistic societies have historically been brutal and devastating for the unfortunate population experiencing it.

While I don't exactly agree with this, I'd like to remind the sibling comments that simply saying communism is worse isn't a valid argument for capitalism.

That first yconbinator batch was a rough group.

Many industries have stress. It is a natural and obvious side effect of competition. Some organizational cultures will work to curb asshole behavior, some will not.

Regarding acting calm in stressful situation I encourage anyone to watch the last America's Cup races. Even if you're not into sailing it's quite amazing. These boats are incredibly fast (40kt boat speed out of 10 kt wind) and extremely difficult to handle, they have videos and all the crew intercoms on live TV and the calm instructions of the helmsmen and other crew even when things really go wrong is absolutely amazing. Extremely focused without any panic, yelling, anger.

There's such a shocking difference between amateur sailboat racing and the pro's. Your average weekend beercan race worldwide is an order of magnitude slower, with loads and danger a fraction of what you see in even a fast circuit boat, and everyone's just screaming at each other thinking more volume will unwrap the spinnaker faster.

It really really hammers home the power of training.

You can see this in any well-disciplined team (often found in sports). Years of training (and practice) and good examples set by those who came before them can make people work smoothly even in incredibly high stress situations. See well-trained pro firefighters, ER medical teams, or fighter pilots.

I have found that engaging in stressful situations that force me to control the stress translates all across my life. Training Jiu-Jitsu for example forced me to control stress while being physically attacked by another person. It makes work stresses seem minor in comparison, and has made me better equipped to recognize a stressful situation and control my response.

About ten years ago I worked at a startup where things could get heated at times, though I doubt it's anywhere near as bad as what many people here are talking about.

I remember two instances pretty clearly: in one, the CEO and head of architecture were having a 1:1. The CEO got a bit shouty, and the head of architecture very calmly said, "Don't talk to me like that. If you do it again, I'm walking out the door and never coming back".

Unfortunately in another incident, with a different coworker and his boss, my coworker did get pissed enough at his boss' tone that he walked out of the conference room, slammed the door, left the building, and never came back.

This is all just toxic garbage. The people in power require that their employees "act professionally", but then feel free to heap verbal abuse on their people. Not ok in any situation. If you're unhappy enough with an employee's performance that you feel the need to yell at them, you either just have anger management issues and should see a therapist, or they're a bad employee, and you should step back, calm down, and after you're calm, fire them.

> Then my boss came in and asked me if I could build a client demo. After I responded sure, he said we needed it in 3 hours

This is why I never agree to anything until they tell me the deadline :-P

In some companies, “act professionally” is code word for shut up and accept whatever abuse gets thrown at you.

It's also not normal

It's unfortunately common in many places. Maybe "normal" denotes the default state, and perhaps abuse of this sort isn't the default, but it seems to occur in lots of high-competition, high-stress workplace hierarchies. I experienced it working in a sales branch for enterprise business equipment (pre- and post-sales support) where there were junior sales, sales, team managers, branch manager, regional manager, regional VP, and this sort of verbal & even physical intimidation was an every day thing. I was "fortunate" that I reported to the branch manager and couldn't be pushed around too much by the rest: "Take it up with my boss" became a mantra, and no one ever wanted to do that because they'd get shat on in some form or another, but that just meant I had lots of shouting matches with people who wanted me to do things but couldn't actually force me to do it-- and most of the time their issue was that someone else had already reserved my time and I wasn't available for them. I still had to endure a verbal tirade from the branch manager, complete with common macho comparisons to a little girl, when I decided to take a better position with corporate headquarters.

(My whole experience at the branch level left a bad taste in my mouth though, so I didn't stay much longer... it didn't help that I became part of a team with an incredibly competent manager that had already automated away most work, leaving mostly boring tasks. Interesting work was on the horizon with a new system implementation coming up, which is why they kept a full team, but as I said-- bad taste. That second manager did however leave an impression, and I've tried to be strategically lazy in automating my own work ever since)

Isn’t it? Michael Lewis’ book Liars Poker describes much the same in his experience at Lehman Brothers.

*Solomon

Salomon.

*salmon

No, the reference is to Michael Lewis's book Liar's Poker, which is about his time as a trainee and bond salesman at Salomon Brothers, which at that time was a Wall Street firm (now part of Citigroup).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_Poker

it was a joke

Which was tail end of 80s. Normal is supposed to be a little nicer now.

Saloman Brothers.

My anecdotal experience suggests that it's normal. Bear and Lehman were among the worst, but every major firm has/had its own flavor of it, and all of them were really bad.

Trading is nowhere near the same as IB

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