I hate whining and complaining. But I still do it a lot. Why? Because I care.
Let me tell you a story. There was once a company. Things were great. Then ownership changed and things were not. People complained - and rightfully so. But nothing was done about it. So the whiners left. Then it was peaceful again - the only people left were complacent. Then the company died because the problems never got fixed and the owner couldn't figure it out once all the complainers - the people who knew what it should be like - left.
So, sure, some people are just natural born whiners who will never be happy. But some people just have good taste or instincts and can tell when stuff is broken. I'd say ignore them at your own risk.
And on the other side of the table - if shit is broken and you don't like it - is OP suggestion we just quit? Well, what about the poor sod who takes our seat next? And what about the next place we join - a seat likely vacated by someone who themselves had had enough? It's the tragedy of the commons. If we all just keep skipping out after 1-3 year stints, just to get a fresh set of problems, well, everywhere is just going to suck.
I really think this is the most likely reason software engineers will unionize - this realizing that 99% of companies are helmed by incompetent lottery winners and have been coasting on that initial capital/revenue infusion ever since.
> So, sure, some people are just natural born whiners who will never be happy. But some people just have good taste or instincts and can tell when stuff is broken. I'd say ignore them at your own risk.
Here's some food for thought: whiner communities create a conservative feedback loop that preserves existing problems and singles out for attack those who try to do anything about them. The primary output from these communities is creating a chilling effect that dissuades everyone from acting upon a problem, as doing anything about anything singles you out for attack and criticism.
If you fix a problem, people stop whining. There are no praises, victory laps, or any recognition though. There is only bitching about issues.
That's the problem with whiners. It's a culture based on not fixing problems and attacking those who dare do anything about anything. That's why you must stay away from whiners and complainers. They don't build up, they thrive in tearing others down.
Sometimes the single person making the change is doing so because they're expected to do something, tasked with finding efficiency, cut costs and improve productivity. Fine goals from top level. But implementation translates to stress and disruption followed by overstepping, increase work load, working out of hours, burn out, lower pay is then justified by missing goals and failing to do the failed strategy that was expected to work... single complainers are then scape goated and punished for speaking out which is why a group is necessary to protect those brave enough to say when enough is enough.
learned this the hard way. got stuck with people in a big company that i thought were "cool" but literally hated tech (this included engineers in the group) and the company which they worked for. Constant complaints, everything bad, etc. I joined a much better company after and made friends with really curious/smart people--my own level of care, curiosity and side projects catapulted. I am a completely different person. Complaining is fun, and super fucking easy. Actually doing something about it is a different beast and I want to be friends with the people that understand the world isn't perfect and want to actively make it better by doing rather than incessantly whining and throwing their hands up in the air.
There is some truth to avoiding whiney echo chambers. But these watering holes also give insights into the dirty.
E.g. Amazon, Meta etc. have terrible work cultures. Their terribleness got exposed via whiney digital watering holes, at scale. This is useful information for anyone considering jobs at these places. Without these insights, you wouldn't know that you are merely being hired to be fired.
Avoid whiney watering holes but after collecting required information.
> E.g. Amazon, Meta etc. have terrible work cultures
This is like saying "Switzerland has a terrible work culture". These companies are literally the size of a small country - culture ends up being much more fine grained.
Anecdotally - most people I know at Meta love working there - fewer people love their jobs at Amazon, but many of them enjoy it. I've enjoyed all of my own big tech jobs despite much public griping about what it's like to work at these companies.
I'm not saying my network is represnative - but my experience strongly suggest the following:
- the way you experience work culture at a company is much more determined by your director/vp (e.g. the 50-200 person group you're most closely tied to) than the overall company culture.
- many reports of a toxic work culture are really just cultural mismatches. At scale, this means it's easy to read 100 stories of a bad match and treat it as toxicity.
I worked only in one big tech company, but my impression is that they try very hard to have a consistent work culture across the company. Everything was super standardized and controlled. There's also a high turnover so even if there's a bunch of senior people that maintain a sane culture, they'll leave eventually.
As for director/vp, I barely know mine. I think this guy just wants to keep his cushion job and deliver whatever BS his managers ask him. Just like the rest of us really...
> my impression is that they try very hard to have a consistent work culture across the company
they do - and they fail!
A truism is that your manager is the biggest determiner of your work environment. This is just as true for your manager as for you. To that end, your director/vp has a really outsized influence on the people you interact with the most (and thus define the experience of working at the company for you).
If you're like me and love talking to people you'll find a huge variation in the lived experience of people working these jobs.
> - the way you experience work culture at a company is much more determined by your director/vp (e.g. the 50-200 person group you're most closely tied to) than the overall company culture.
> many reports of a toxic work culture are really just cultural mismatches. At scale, this means it's easy to read 100 stories of a bad match and treat it as toxicity.
And you get both of these nuggets of actionable info in watering holes - which was the original point.
Every large company sucks. You are always just a number. They serve a purpose though. They have a lot of money and allow you to exchange your labor for more of that money and publicly traded RSUs than enterprise development or government.
Every VC backed company sucks even worse, they work you to death, promise you “equity” that will statistically be worthless and they pay less.
I’m not negative. I know the deal - I give a company labor and expertise for 40 hours a week and they give me money. It’s a transaction it’s just that simple - I don’t care about “your mission” and they aren’t my “family”.
When that transaction of money for labor isn’t agreeable for either party, it’s time to move on like I’ve done 9x in my career.
You had a pretty good career if you have gotten RSUs at your jobs, most large companies outside FAANG and types don't give any stock options outside some pitiful purchase plan.
If traditional large companies do give stock options they’re at the closing cost of the date of the award (strike price). Not the zero dollar purchase price of big tech, which makes the much less attractive and profitable.
I was at an insurance company that made a big deal about offering rsus to engineers. We were like is this a joke?
The stock purchase plans at the two non-FAANG companies I worked for that offered them were amazing.
One of them took money out of each paycheck for a quarter and then gave you the better of the price of the stock at the start or end of the quarter. So you got a chance at risk free profits if the stock jumped. I was told that some people put their entire paychecks into it until they put a limit on the percentage of the paycheck you could put in.
The other one was a 15% discount off the stock price, again, done quarterly. Which doesn't sound huge until you calculate the annualized return. The annualized return on the first paycheck of the quarter was around 80%, the annualized return on the last paycheck of the quarter was around 3,000%. No lock up period and the smart thing to do would be to sell immediately and pay the short term capital gains tax.
I'm not smart, I still have the stock from that one. It keeps going up but it could also go to zero at any time. I don't want to pay the capital gains tax though. I should probably look at put options. First world problems.
ESPP programs are great, and I encourage everyone to participate. But do keep in mind that the IRS limits how much you can gain from them. My company allows you to put 15% of your paycheck into them, and almost everyone I know hits the limit. Which means the company is withholding 15% of your pay, but only using about 7-10% in purchasing the stocks. They simply refund the rest at the end of the cycle.
The company where people were supposedly putting their whole paycheck in was before that. Some people have to ruin things for everyone. Both of the ones I participated in limited withholding to 10% of your net pay.
I worked at a huge, non-FAANG but you all have heard of it, tech company, and it actually had a great, supportive culture and great people. The only issue was that the work itself was soul sucking - everything moved slowly, and the product was a joke compared to newer competitors.
At least YC jobs ads are honest about what you are getting in for. They often spell it out "weekends and nights" plus use every hustle superlative there is and the salary is advertised.
> Every VC backed company sucks even worse, they work you to death, promise you “equity” that will statistically be worthless and they pay less.
That has been exactly the opposite of my experience with VC-backed companies. Great culture and support. Companies that stand by their employees and their words when it counts.
I worked at a company which ran out of runway once. Not the first, not the last time I was in this situation. But before it actually did, CEO decided to close doors sooner so he could give everybody effectively a three-month severance. We were all contractors, not employees. He didn't have to do it at all, and I think that if he wished to, he would have found a dozen ways to safely pocket this VC money himself. But he made a choice to do a solid for his employees instead.
This was just the most striking example, but overall it is pretty typical of my experience with VC-backed startups. I'm a cynical, pessimistic person from Russia and Israel, so every time I encounter another super-positive American, my first thought is that they're just phony. But in this particular industry, it just so happens that a lot of them are actually genuinely like that.
Indeed. Years ago, someone I know worked at a VC backed HW startup. It failed. The founder personally met with several CEOs of other companies saying "Hey, we're going to fail. I've got great employees. Do you want to hire them en masse?"
He wasn't selling his company. Just finding a home for the employees.
Who ended up hiring them?
Jensen Huang. This was at a time Nvidia's survival was at stake. He personally traveled to the site (not Bay Area), gave a presentation to the engineers, and tried to convince them to join. Treated them well - it wasn't a case of "Hey, you've got no options other than me" but "Please consider joining me."
YC doesn’t care about the long term value of the companies it invest in. All VC companies want to extract the maximum value out of the company before they get sold to the bigger fool - either acquisitions or an IPO.
That's not the thesis I'm arguing with. You were talking about relationship with employees. Now you're talking about relationship with later stage investors. I am not a later stage investor, I have no knowledge about and no horse in this race.
If you took equity in the company in lieu of your market value, you are an investor. Since you probably would also have a lock up period, you would suffer losses.
Generally it behooves one to take Marc Brooker seriously. That said, without invoking my legally protected right to discuss workplace conditions, I think it's fair to say this particular sentiment in this particular moment rings a little hollow.
I think the article is exactly opposite in what people should be doing.
My advice: avoid positive echo chamber, unless they reveal genuine behind-scene facts.
Negativity is never a problem, people routinely sacrifice a lot for meaningful objective and reasonable leaders. When they turn negative, it's primarily there isn't a positive feedback loop in the environment.
But what's really happening now is that people are instinctively sugar-coating their meaningless job to lure outsiders for their own ego or whatever.
For me in every startup I’ve worked this ended up just being a self selecting group slack DM where we would mock things. We didn’t hate the places but there’s always stuff to have fun with like that. We would just recognize each other and keep adding people.
The article is bad advice because nothing improves without criticism.
The real problem with criticism is that management doesn't like bad news to be advertised, so they punish those who speak out. As such, it's not wise in the short term to illuminate bad truths if one seeks job security. If one seeks firm security, however, then honestly addressing all criticisms is the way to get there.
Another observation about criticism is that it can often be falsely mistaken for cynicism.
> The article is bad advice because nothing improves without criticism.
You're referring to the article that is saying complaining can be helpful?
I'm 100% with the article, BTW. My first job was in a crappy, dysfunctional team (and department, and org). After 4 years, I got out and changed careers.
Every so often, I have lunch with those who stayed. They whine just like they did over a decade ago. And literally nothing has changed. And almost every time I point out "You want to improve your situation? You need to leave."
I'd go the extra mile and say that the reason such watering holes exist is because they are in an environment where criticism usually changes nothing. So the engineers need to find a place to vent. The places I've worked where management is receptive to negative feedback didn't have these negative watering holes.
I hate whining and complaining. But I still do it a lot. Why? Because I care.
Let me tell you a story. There was once a company. Things were great. Then ownership changed and things were not. People complained - and rightfully so. But nothing was done about it. So the whiners left. Then it was peaceful again - the only people left were complacent. Then the company died because the problems never got fixed and the owner couldn't figure it out once all the complainers - the people who knew what it should be like - left.
So, sure, some people are just natural born whiners who will never be happy. But some people just have good taste or instincts and can tell when stuff is broken. I'd say ignore them at your own risk.
And on the other side of the table - if shit is broken and you don't like it - is OP suggestion we just quit? Well, what about the poor sod who takes our seat next? And what about the next place we join - a seat likely vacated by someone who themselves had had enough? It's the tragedy of the commons. If we all just keep skipping out after 1-3 year stints, just to get a fresh set of problems, well, everywhere is just going to suck.
I really think this is the most likely reason software engineers will unionize - this realizing that 99% of companies are helmed by incompetent lottery winners and have been coasting on that initial capital/revenue infusion ever since.
> So, sure, some people are just natural born whiners who will never be happy. But some people just have good taste or instincts and can tell when stuff is broken. I'd say ignore them at your own risk.
Here's some food for thought: whiner communities create a conservative feedback loop that preserves existing problems and singles out for attack those who try to do anything about them. The primary output from these communities is creating a chilling effect that dissuades everyone from acting upon a problem, as doing anything about anything singles you out for attack and criticism.
If you fix a problem, people stop whining. There are no praises, victory laps, or any recognition though. There is only bitching about issues.
That's the problem with whiners. It's a culture based on not fixing problems and attacking those who dare do anything about anything. That's why you must stay away from whiners and complainers. They don't build up, they thrive in tearing others down.
Sometimes the single person making the change is doing so because they're expected to do something, tasked with finding efficiency, cut costs and improve productivity. Fine goals from top level. But implementation translates to stress and disruption followed by overstepping, increase work load, working out of hours, burn out, lower pay is then justified by missing goals and failing to do the failed strategy that was expected to work... single complainers are then scape goated and punished for speaking out which is why a group is necessary to protect those brave enough to say when enough is enough.
It’s 2025. Some websites are still unreadable on mobile. Impossible to even zoom the text.
learned this the hard way. got stuck with people in a big company that i thought were "cool" but literally hated tech (this included engineers in the group) and the company which they worked for. Constant complaints, everything bad, etc. I joined a much better company after and made friends with really curious/smart people--my own level of care, curiosity and side projects catapulted. I am a completely different person. Complaining is fun, and super fucking easy. Actually doing something about it is a different beast and I want to be friends with the people that understand the world isn't perfect and want to actively make it better by doing rather than incessantly whining and throwing their hands up in the air.
There is some truth to avoiding whiney echo chambers. But these watering holes also give insights into the dirty.
E.g. Amazon, Meta etc. have terrible work cultures. Their terribleness got exposed via whiney digital watering holes, at scale. This is useful information for anyone considering jobs at these places. Without these insights, you wouldn't know that you are merely being hired to be fired.
Avoid whiney watering holes but after collecting required information.
> E.g. Amazon, Meta etc. have terrible work cultures
This is like saying "Switzerland has a terrible work culture". These companies are literally the size of a small country - culture ends up being much more fine grained.
Anecdotally - most people I know at Meta love working there - fewer people love their jobs at Amazon, but many of them enjoy it. I've enjoyed all of my own big tech jobs despite much public griping about what it's like to work at these companies.
I'm not saying my network is represnative - but my experience strongly suggest the following:
- the way you experience work culture at a company is much more determined by your director/vp (e.g. the 50-200 person group you're most closely tied to) than the overall company culture.
- many reports of a toxic work culture are really just cultural mismatches. At scale, this means it's easy to read 100 stories of a bad match and treat it as toxicity.
I worked only in one big tech company, but my impression is that they try very hard to have a consistent work culture across the company. Everything was super standardized and controlled. There's also a high turnover so even if there's a bunch of senior people that maintain a sane culture, they'll leave eventually.
As for director/vp, I barely know mine. I think this guy just wants to keep his cushion job and deliver whatever BS his managers ask him. Just like the rest of us really...
> my impression is that they try very hard to have a consistent work culture across the company
they do - and they fail!
A truism is that your manager is the biggest determiner of your work environment. This is just as true for your manager as for you. To that end, your director/vp has a really outsized influence on the people you interact with the most (and thus define the experience of working at the company for you).
If you're like me and love talking to people you'll find a huge variation in the lived experience of people working these jobs.
> - the way you experience work culture at a company is much more determined by your director/vp (e.g. the 50-200 person group you're most closely tied to) than the overall company culture.
> many reports of a toxic work culture are really just cultural mismatches. At scale, this means it's easy to read 100 stories of a bad match and treat it as toxicity.
And you get both of these nuggets of actionable info in watering holes - which was the original point.
Every large company sucks. You are always just a number. They serve a purpose though. They have a lot of money and allow you to exchange your labor for more of that money and publicly traded RSUs than enterprise development or government.
Every VC backed company sucks even worse, they work you to death, promise you “equity” that will statistically be worthless and they pay less.
I’m not negative. I know the deal - I give a company labor and expertise for 40 hours a week and they give me money. It’s a transaction it’s just that simple - I don’t care about “your mission” and they aren’t my “family”.
When that transaction of money for labor isn’t agreeable for either party, it’s time to move on like I’ve done 9x in my career.
You had a pretty good career if you have gotten RSUs at your jobs, most large companies outside FAANG and types don't give any stock options outside some pitiful purchase plan.
If traditional large companies do give stock options they’re at the closing cost of the date of the award (strike price). Not the zero dollar purchase price of big tech, which makes the much less attractive and profitable.
I was at an insurance company that made a big deal about offering rsus to engineers. We were like is this a joke?
The stock purchase plans at the two non-FAANG companies I worked for that offered them were amazing.
One of them took money out of each paycheck for a quarter and then gave you the better of the price of the stock at the start or end of the quarter. So you got a chance at risk free profits if the stock jumped. I was told that some people put their entire paychecks into it until they put a limit on the percentage of the paycheck you could put in.
The other one was a 15% discount off the stock price, again, done quarterly. Which doesn't sound huge until you calculate the annualized return. The annualized return on the first paycheck of the quarter was around 80%, the annualized return on the last paycheck of the quarter was around 3,000%. No lock up period and the smart thing to do would be to sell immediately and pay the short term capital gains tax.
I'm not smart, I still have the stock from that one. It keeps going up but it could also go to zero at any time. I don't want to pay the capital gains tax though. I should probably look at put options. First world problems.
ESPP programs are great, and I encourage everyone to participate. But do keep in mind that the IRS limits how much you can gain from them. My company allows you to put 15% of your paycheck into them, and almost everyone I know hits the limit. Which means the company is withholding 15% of your pay, but only using about 7-10% in purchasing the stocks. They simply refund the rest at the end of the cycle.
Huh, looks like that was done in 2010, https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/benefits-compensation....
The company where people were supposedly putting their whole paycheck in was before that. Some people have to ruin things for everyone. Both of the ones I participated in limited withholding to 10% of your net pay.
Nice. My advice is play the life game. The life game is thinking:
Being broke sucks
Massive improvement 10x once you save 10k
20k ain't much better. 30k.. until you get to a home deposit another nonlinear jump.
Then with a home 100k gives you equity buffer.
Next million does fuck all!
Until you get to X million to not need to work.
Based on this no one should go all in on something. But if you are secure holding a 1M position in one company you believe in may not be mad.
Just 3.5 years out of close to 30. I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than ever go back to BigTech. It served its purpose.
Feel the same about small tech companies. You are the guinea pig to them learning how to run a business.
No government or enterprise exp tho.
That's one third true. The other two thirds are work experience and networking, which you can't do at a job that's a dead end with a good pay check.
I worked at a huge, non-FAANG but you all have heard of it, tech company, and it actually had a great, supportive culture and great people. The only issue was that the work itself was soul sucking - everything moved slowly, and the product was a joke compared to newer competitors.
I can guess which one :)
At least YC jobs ads are honest about what you are getting in for. They often spell it out "weekends and nights" plus use every hustle superlative there is and the salary is advertised.
> Every VC backed company sucks even worse, they work you to death, promise you “equity” that will statistically be worthless and they pay less.
That has been exactly the opposite of my experience with VC-backed companies. Great culture and support. Companies that stand by their employees and their words when it counts.
I worked at a company which ran out of runway once. Not the first, not the last time I was in this situation. But before it actually did, CEO decided to close doors sooner so he could give everybody effectively a three-month severance. We were all contractors, not employees. He didn't have to do it at all, and I think that if he wished to, he would have found a dozen ways to safely pocket this VC money himself. But he made a choice to do a solid for his employees instead.
This was just the most striking example, but overall it is pretty typical of my experience with VC-backed startups. I'm a cynical, pessimistic person from Russia and Israel, so every time I encounter another super-positive American, my first thought is that they're just phony. But in this particular industry, it just so happens that a lot of them are actually genuinely like that.
Indeed. Years ago, someone I know worked at a VC backed HW startup. It failed. The founder personally met with several CEOs of other companies saying "Hey, we're going to fail. I've got great employees. Do you want to hire them en masse?"
He wasn't selling his company. Just finding a home for the employees.
Who ended up hiring them?
Jensen Huang. This was at a time Nvidia's survival was at stake. He personally traveled to the site (not Bay Area), gave a presentation to the engineers, and tried to convince them to join. Treated them well - it wasn't a case of "Hey, you've got no options other than me" but "Please consider joining me."
Look no further than YC.
https://medium.com/@kazeemibrahim18/the-post-ipo-performance...
YC doesn’t care about the long term value of the companies it invest in. All VC companies want to extract the maximum value out of the company before they get sold to the bigger fool - either acquisitions or an IPO.
That's not the thesis I'm arguing with. You were talking about relationship with employees. Now you're talking about relationship with later stage investors. I am not a later stage investor, I have no knowledge about and no horse in this race.
If you took equity in the company in lieu of your market value, you are an investor. Since you probably would also have a lock up period, you would suffer losses.
Your employer is beholden to its investors.
Generally it behooves one to take Marc Brooker seriously. That said, without invoking my legally protected right to discuss workplace conditions, I think it's fair to say this particular sentiment in this particular moment rings a little hollow.
Meh. Be outwardly positive and follow whatever you want to do but the reality is cynical (or you haven't been around much yet).
I think the article is exactly opposite in what people should be doing.
My advice: avoid positive echo chamber, unless they reveal genuine behind-scene facts.
Negativity is never a problem, people routinely sacrifice a lot for meaningful objective and reasonable leaders. When they turn negative, it's primarily there isn't a positive feedback loop in the environment.
But what's really happening now is that people are instinctively sugar-coating their meaningless job to lure outsiders for their own ego or whatever.
I think these watering holes are just called "the IT department". The toxic BOFH vibe should've never caught on.
</whiny rant>
[dead]
> Every organization and industry has watering holes where the whiners hang out. The cynical. The jaded.
I wish. I've worked for startups where I would've killed to have such a space, where people actually felt free to criticize the way things were going.
Toxic positivity is a thing too.
For me in every startup I’ve worked this ended up just being a self selecting group slack DM where we would mock things. We didn’t hate the places but there’s always stuff to have fun with like that. We would just recognize each other and keep adding people.
In my experience this is the same group who is actually fixing things.
There's a lot of toxic positivity in my company. Without the whiners, it would feel like a mental asylum. It's great to know that you're not alone.
But I agree, constant negativity doesn't help.
Toxic positivity, you mean the entire tech industry since 2013 or so?
Blind (a watering hole)?
edit: ehh this is external though
Too toxic to take it seriously
TC or gtfo .... As they say
The article is bad advice because nothing improves without criticism.
The real problem with criticism is that management doesn't like bad news to be advertised, so they punish those who speak out. As such, it's not wise in the short term to illuminate bad truths if one seeks job security. If one seeks firm security, however, then honestly addressing all criticisms is the way to get there.
Another observation about criticism is that it can often be falsely mistaken for cynicism.
> The article is bad advice because nothing improves without criticism.
You're referring to the article that is saying complaining can be helpful?
I'm 100% with the article, BTW. My first job was in a crappy, dysfunctional team (and department, and org). After 4 years, I got out and changed careers.
Every so often, I have lunch with those who stayed. They whine just like they did over a decade ago. And literally nothing has changed. And almost every time I point out "You want to improve your situation? You need to leave."
I'd go the extra mile and say that the reason such watering holes exist is because they are in an environment where criticism usually changes nothing. So the engineers need to find a place to vent. The places I've worked where management is receptive to negative feedback didn't have these negative watering holes.
Criticism can be great. Cynicism is usually pretty toxic.
I'm not so sure about that...