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| DATE | 2016-04-10 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout-NYLXS] Through my ole pal Billy - Milliniums are mulch
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http://nypost.com/2016/04/03/millennials-are-being-dot-conned-by-cult-like-tech-companies/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons
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).
Lyons became a strange kind of celebrity a decade ago when he began
posting nutty but funny insights as “Fake Steve Jobs.” Today he’s a
writer for HBO’s brilliant tech comedy “Silicon Valley,” but in between
he blogged for a Boston tech company called HubSpot and wrote this book
about it.
How worried was HubSpot about what secrets would emerge in the book?
Very. At the company, three top execs were implicated in a scheme to
suppress the book, which led to an FBI investigation of alleged
extortion and email hacking. The FBI closed its investigation with no
charges filed. But two lost their jobs and a third, the CEO, was
reprimanded. In a press release, HubSpot said the personnel actions were
taken “in connection with attempts to procure a draft manuscript of a
book involving the company.”
HubSpot compensated its overworked employees with nap rooms, author Dan
Lyons writes.Photo: Getty Images
HubSpot comes across as a kind of kindergarten cult that plies its young
charges with parties, toys, naps, playtime — and not much pay. A huge
chunk of potential compensation at tech startups comes in the form of
stock options, which could turn out to be worth nothing but are
certainly worth nothing if employees get so burned out that they leave
before the options vest.
This is part of the plan. Tech firms basically operate like South
African gold-mining operations, with confident young Tame Impala fans
being the bodies thrown into the pit to break their backs digging up
nuggets. All of the IPO gold, though, goes straight into the pockets of
their masters topside.
At HubSpot, every time another bedraggled would-be “world changer”
hauled his dejected remains out the door, or got fired, the company
would say he or she “graduated.”
“Team, just letting you know that Derek has graduated from HubSpot, and
we’re excited to see how he uses his superpowers in his next big
adventure!” a typical email would read. You know, kind of like how L.
Ron Hubbard didn’t die, he simply “discarded the body he had used in
this lifetime.”
‘What is the difference between a loyal employee and a brainwashed
cultist?’ - Dan Lyons
“HubSpot’s leaders were not heroes,” says Lyons, “but rather sales and
marketing charlatans who spun a good story about magical
transformational technology and got rich by selling shares in a company
that has still never turned a profit.”
Inside HubSpot’s colorful offices — orange, the official color, is
everywhere, as is the company logo, which to Lyons looks like a sprocket
with three phalluses sticking out of it — fun is mandatory. Workers,
many in shorts and flip-flops, are inordinately proud of the “candy
wall” where they can fill up on free snacks. Dogs roam the halls.
Occasionally, amid a slave-ship galley of workers hunched over laptops,
a Nerf-ball war breaks out. Conference rooms contain beanbag chairs.
For bike commuters, there are showers upstairs, but too many staffers
were using them as sex cabins, so a memo went out to discourage that.
Oh, and there’s unlimited vacation.
Which turns out to be one of the many traps of HubSpot: Fired employees
have no accrued vacation time, which saves the company payouts to its
“graduates.” Firms with vacation plans are also required to set aside
cash reserves to cover the cost. HubSpot dodged this cost.
Another big perk at HubSpot was the “candy wall.”Photo: Rebecca Churt
via Wikimedia
Like the show “Silicon Valley,” “Disrupted” nails the workings of
spastic, hypocritical, delusional tech culture, notably:
• Ridiculously grandiose claims. “We’re not just selling a product
here,” Lyons was told in training. “HubSpot is leading a revolution. A
movement. HubSpot is changing the world. This software doesn’t just help
companies sell products. This product changes people’s lives.”
An exec claims that the biggest companies in Silicon Valley are jealous
and that HubSpot has the best marketing team in the world. Lyons notes,
“I’ve spent years covering Silicon Valley, and before coming to HubSpot
I’d never heard of the company.” Cheerleaders inside the company keep
calling its products “magical.”
The product, Lyons says, is a chunk of buggy marketing software for
businesses that HubSpot has yet to turn a profit selling. “Our
customers,” Lyons notes dryly, “include people who make a living
bombarding people with email offers.”
Every month, he notes, HubSpot’s customers send out more than 1 billion
email pitches. More spam = changing the world! Join the spamolution! At
HubSpot conferences, attendees are taught tricks like using misleading
subject lines in spam to trick people into opening the message — lines
like, “fwd: your holiday plans.”
• Relentless self-congratulation. HubSpammers — sorry, HubSpotters — are
told it’s really special to work there. A favorite line is that “it’s
harder to get hired at HubSpot than it is to get accepted at Harvard.”
HubSpot also has a game room.Photo: Rebecca Churt via Wikimedia
Except every place gets way more applications than it has slots to fill.
Harvard’s acceptance rate is around 6 percent — but at times both
McDonald’s and Walmart have hired less than 6 percent of applicants.
Looking around him, Lyons says the hires are mostly “Mormon-level white”
kids straight out of college who played sports or joined fraternities or
sororities.
• An all-pervading sinister air. Calling HubSpot a “startup cult” and
comparing it to Scientology, Lyons notes that employees have to wear
rubber bracelets containing transponders, which are needed to lock and
unlock doors when moving around HQ. Which means, of course, that the
Company is tracking you at all times. The Company also gives employees a
lengthy, pseudoscientific, entirely scary-sounding personality test
(devised by a crackpot whose claim to fame was creating the Wonder Woman
comics). All of this sounds kinda like the bizarre questionnaire
Scientologists take while grasping tin cans.
So eager are innocent young bunnies to comply with the unique language,
rituals and culture of this happy-face corporate police state that
“drinking the Kool-Aid,” while a trite phrase in Silicon Valley, is
scarily apposite. “What is the difference between a loyal employee and a
brainwashed cultist?” asks Lyons. “Perhaps by accident, or perhaps not,
tech companies seem to employ techniques similar to those used by cults.”
Groovy young techies, you’ve been played. Tech startups are one
gigantic millennial meat-grinder.
A 128-slide PowerPoint presentation that describes HubSpot culture (one
slide says “team > individual”) describes “a kind of corporate utopia .
. . where people don’t worry about work-life balance because work is
their life.” No one, Lyons emphasizes, ever jokes about any of this stuff.
• Unyielding death-grip on childhood. The company’s chief technology
officer announces he’s bringing a teddy bear to meetings and invites
everyone else to do the same. On Halloween, everyone comes to work in a
wacky costume so the company can do a group photo captioned, “We dare to
be different.”
To convey the feeling that life means carrying on campus goofiness
indefinitely, training sessions are held by “marketing professors” and
“faculty” belong to “HubSpot Academy.” Beer taps are installed in the
kitchen. The worst thing you can say is that “at my last company, we
used to do it this way,” because that implies you’re a grownup with
experience instead of a peppy little lamb seeing the world with fresh,
dewy eyes.
After serving as technology editor for Newsweek, and with decades’
experience, Lyons finds his intern-age boss is a guy with only one
previous job (an entry-level gig doing sales for Google). People
constantly talk about imaginary friends such as “Mary,” a marketing
person they think of as their typical customer. Mary has a detailed
persona: She has an MBA from Babson; she’s 42, has two kids (10 and 6),
etc. One Friday, Lyons discovers a group of employees sprawled out on
the carpet making “ghastly” paintings on poster board. After a while,
Lyons’ children send him off to work mornings with the words, “Have a
good day at kindergarten, Daddy!”
• Chaos. The marketing department at HubSpot features so much personnel
churn that it acquires the nickname “the French Revolution.” Employees
disappear without warning. The human resources people have no clue how
to discover talent, asking potential hires, “How weird are you, on a
scale from 1 to 10?” Applicants with proven job skills get ignored
because, Lyons says, they’re in their 50s and HubSpot prefers young
know-nothings.
Due to what Steve Jobs called a “bozo explosion,” mediocrities hire even
more mediocre people to work under them. All of these worker bees bustle
around doing nonsense work such as creating would-be viral videos that
vanish into the void. “Watching this video gave me cancer,” a viewer
said in a comment on one such video, a parody of “What Does the Fox Say?”
A young blogger suggests guiding customers to more traffic by running
ideas through a Blog Topic Generator. On the receiving end of this
genius idea was a customer of HubSpot who worked for a hospital and was
promoting cervical-cancer awareness. She complained that the BTG was
spitting out ideas such as “Why We Love Cervical Cancer (And You Should,
Too!)” and “Miley Cyrus and Cervical Cancer: 10 Things They Have in
Common.” After that, notes Lyons, “The BTG is never spoken of again.”
For no apparent reason, staffers in Lyons’ department are asked to stay
all night to work on ideas in a “hackathon,” as though fatigue is going
to make dumb ideas any better. “Who’s in charge?” Lyons wonders.
“Nobody. Everybody. One day, we are told the company will focus on big
enterprise customers and that this decision has been etched in stone and
will not change. Two weeks later, we’re going back to selling to small
businesses.”
Yet HubSpot and many similar tech startups have certainly found a
winning formula: a handful of founders and venture capitalists get rich
— HubSpot, after its 2014 IPO, sports a value of $1.5 billion — without
making a dime in profit.
What matters is “scale,” which you create by hiring people right out of
college and making work seem fun. Give them foosball and beer, plus
cultishly reinforced propaganda oozing with blather about how “you can
make the world a better place” and you will secure, Lyons writes, “an
endless supply of bros who will toil away in the spider-monkey room,
under constant, tremendous, psychological pressure, for $35,000 a year.
You can save even more money by packing these people into cavernous
rooms, shoulder to shoulder, as densely as you can. You tell them you’re
doing this not because you want to save on office space but because this
is how their generation likes to work.”
Groovy young techies, you’ve been played. Tech startups are one gigantic
millennial meat-grinder.
Filed under cults , millennials , startups , the workplace , trends
, venture capital
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