this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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I mean… this honestly sounds a bit too cartoonish. “Burning effigies” and “ritualistic chants” with company personnel…?
Honestly, I believe it.
I have worked at an amazon warehouse. Bezos was never referred to as anything but Jeff and every day during the stretches we would be told how impressed Jeff was with how well we were doing.
At Costco, we would have daily meetings. At least twice a month the assistant manager would interject to remind everybody that they had once had lunch with the original CEO. There was also this strange creation myth of how the company was able to dominate the grocery industry within less time than everybody else. It involved the CEO inventing a new way to filet a Chinook salmon or something like that.
Cult behavior is surprisingly strong within corporate America.
Usually a good idea to take early reporting with a grain of salt. Thorough investigation to get to sound conclusions takes a long-ass time, where drama, rumors and propaganda are much, much faster.
I mean, it's clearly a meltdown of some sort, but going to need some more corroboration here to really know wtf is actually going on. Not anonymous corroboration either, ideally.
It could be worse, and tech startups like this can have some weird practices. One company I worked at literally burned tech debt. They wrote it down and burned it. (It never really fixed the core problems either. Imagine that.)
Tech startups can be a little cultish at times. I have seen super healthy cult behavior and also super weird cult behavior. Motivating younger engineers can be a challenge, so if it works, whatever. (I never cared about that kind of stuff as long as I got free food.)
As long as nothing turns religious or harmful, I don't care. Good engineers can be some very unique people and most likely have some kind of underlying mental disorder. (I am absolutely not being derogatory! Without a doubt, I am in that category of engineer as well, but I am much older and restrained these days.)
In my experience the engineers usually hate the motivational bullshit that managers dream up because they have too much time and no actual skills. The best thing you can do is give the engineers a bit of respect and some quiet time to do their work.
It's wildly variable who likes that stuff or not, in my experience. If there is purpose behind it and it's mildly healthy, it can lean more on acceptance'ish. To your point, complete outlandish bullshit does get disregarded quickly. (I have seen both scenarios but I also did a bad job of expressing that the landscape of personality types is massive.)
Effigy, eh? Yeah, nothing burns like an effigy.