Posted on 04/03/2016 8:44:41 AM PDT by Kid Shelleen
Tech startups love millennials. Tasty, tasty millennials who get underpaid, overworked, churned up and turned into nourishment for venture capitalists. Millennials are the Soylent Green of the tech world.
As each batch gets mashed up, there’s a long line of new hires eager to be made into the next meal for the execs and their billionaire backers, as tech survivor Dan Lyons shows in a scathingly funny new book, “Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble” (Hachette Books).
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
You mean like ever increasing standards until you can’t increase anymore and then you’re replaced with somebody who can?
What’s the life of a dot.com? Aside from the freaks of nature and the ones that simply caught the wave, there’s no reason for long term strategy at keeping employees.
—yeah ?—most of them probably need to learn that if it sounds too good to be true, it is a lie-—
The irony is that they would do so much better as an electrician’s or plumber’s apprentice.
But that is beneath them...
Not having to continually train people is one good reason.
It also does well for productivity and morale when people can plan years out in advance as a regular employee - versus worrying if their 3 month contract will be renewed. Instead of worrying about life, things get done.
Candy dispensers and air hockey are gimmicks. They do not provide long term fulfillment within an organization. The article identifies high turnover rates. I believe it's extremely tough to be successful without stability in the org.
This is no different than the 50 and 60 year old middle managers being kicked out of companies to be replaced with younger managers who are paid 1/3 of their salaries and are low consumers of company paid benefits (medical, matching 401K payments, vacation).
Ironically, many companies whose financial people have convinced them they can replace seasoned highly experience workers with lower cost drones have been forced to rehire as consultants some of the gray haired ex employees to deal with information systems, legal issues, customer relationships, technical problems, and manufacturing process breakdowns. There are some business problems and issues where there is no substitute for experience.
Can't believe I missed my opportunity for that lifestyle and instead I have to suit up at 5 in the morning, catch a train to Manhattan and do my best Don Draper imitation at the office. Such old school! I missed being a dot-commer by only 20 years.
Anyone who hasn’t worked for a VC backed company should do a little research to understand the game.
And the game is, they make all the money, they own your IP, and if you’re lucky - REALLY lucky - your options won’t be wallpaper for your bathroom.
One company I worked for (not a dot.com) didn’t like hiring experienced people. “We’re not going to pay for other companies’ training,” they said. Actually, I preferred training my own technicians from scratch, anyway.
Another company I worked for said, “Money will never stand in the way of hiring someone,” and they’d pay for well-qualified, experienced people.
Now, here’s the lesson to be learned. Neither company is still around today. It didn’t matter what they did. They be gone.
Interesting - I wonder if both organizations became complacent? I agree with your take on training, would rather build my own.
Both organizations were in the photo processing industry. One was among the country’s largest professional labs, the other one of many facilities owned by Konica, the Japanese conglomerate. The entire industry succumbed to digital vs film. I retired just before the collapse was complete.
Same as 20 years ago with the bubble. Heck same as 30 years ago in the building of the industry. I know somebody with a “100” shirt for working hundred hour weeks in the crazy days of Apple. The young, impressionable, and unmarried are easy pickin’s for the rah rah and promise of rich. And sometimes it works out, sometimes you get to retire at 30 and a couple years of crazy work isn’t bad. And sometimes it doesn’t.
I came in during .com, wasn’t that awesome. At least for the 99% of us whose companies didn’t cash out big and make us all millionaire who can retire young. For that crowd it wound up being just a job, a job you worked really really hard at, only to watch it miss sales projections and lay you off.
Now I am glad to still be in the software industry, and not on the East Coast. We still get to wear jeans and t-shirts, free soda and coffee, beanbag chairs are gone, no lumbar support. We do get BBQs though, ice cream birthday parties... beats working for a living.
I remember one rainy weekend in Boston, holed up in a brownstone with about half a dozen others, we worked on that website day and night and had pizza, bagels and coffee constantly flowing in, with a few beers at night. I'll never forget seeing the rain pound outside and I'm reclined on a couch for hours at a stretch tapping away on a very primitive Compaq laptop, inserting the proper tags and making sure that everything rendered properly. I would doze off for an hour or so and then get right back to it, day and night.
It was very intoxicating to see the site finally go live and know that I played a vital role in it. But it was not to last long as professionals were eventually brought in and I had to go back to my regular job.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.