I’ve made some version of this comment to many people over the past few years: “this software engineering internship is the worst job these interns will ever have”, and usually people look a little puzzled, because the software engineering internship I’m referring to is, regardless of the company, an objectively great job. But my comment is usually accurate: it’s an internship, meant to get early experience in a field, and the interns in those internships will go on to future jobs as software engineers [in tech companies], and they’ll likely never wait tables or ring groceries or mow lawns or monitor an assembly line or really do anything they don’t want to do, ever, for the rest of their lives. Which is not, on its face, a bad thing. But it does explain a lot about… a lot.
One of the rules I enforced at the most recent startup I worked for* was “you do not complain about free food, ever”, which seems… easy! But you’d be amazed at 1. the number of people for whom complaining about anything that even slightly misaligns with their wants — including the variety of free catered food and unlimited snacks — comes so naturally, and 2. how over time, you, too, may become desensitized to the largesse, even if if you were quite sensitive to, or even overwhelmed by, it to begin with.
I would like to read more of these and fewer “how to get your dream PM job at Hooli” posts, please. Also this.
Related:
“There's always been this kind of unwritten rule at Basecamp that the company basically exists for David and Jason's enjoyment,” one employee told me. “At the end of the day, they are not interested in seeing things in their work timeline that make them uncomfortable, or distracts them from what they're interested in. And this is the culmination of that.”
that quote is from this piece on the Basecamp dumpster fire that was consuming the tech-company-culture discourse a few weeks ago (I started this draft while that was happening, and then life happened, and I’m sending it now. If you did miss this small saga, you didn’t actually miss anything; I’m sorry for bringing it to you). Hot tip: when people seem to sort of just like hearing the sound of their own voice — like maybe they’ve spent a lot of time writing *5* self-righteous how-to-not-give-a-f*ck-in-business books while supposedly running a business…? — it’s probably because they like hearing the sound of their own voice. And they probably want to hear less of other people’s.
Now please close your computer and/or put down your phone and go outside for a while and enjoy spring. The peepers here are amazingly loud and it’s so cool.
Here are some other things to read/watch:
this is so good I’ve cycled through about 12 ways I wanted to intro it**
more of this, please
this is a little broken but probably useful ?
“every restaurant is, in some sense, a theme restaurant”
the above Helen Rosner piece is a ~vibe~, as all things are now
chill noodle vibes
this article is from a year ago. it’s still correct.
this is lovely (another insanely quotable post: “the color of California, the color of a dirty martini… Everyone has always wanted a party, and everyone has always wanted to lie down… It turns out that many of our human feelings and experiences— about home and family, about the past and the future, about comfort and fear, about money and desire and lacks and sufficiencies and our attempts and failures to love people and to recognize ourselves— are also sometimes furniture catalogs.”)
but howwww will the children learn? (I am aware that my feelings about knowing how to drive a stick shift are similar to these eternal moral panics)
* it’s my rule at all [tech] companies, really, but you’ll make more progress shaping the culture when you’re 1 of 8 people, than you will when you’re 1 of 600 or more
** “Moxie is the guy the Basecamp guys desperately want to be” was a contender
*** I misread this line: “Carbone’s story is ‘Big Night’ by way of ‘The Big Short’: a sharply tailored suit, a satin cocktail dress, a little lust, a little blood” as “‘The Big Chill’ by way of ‘The Big Short’” and… I think I like both options! Although now, as ever, I just want to watch '“The Big Chill”. (Worth reading the New Yorker’s review of The Big Short, though, for the description of Ryan Gosling’s character, “a kind of lizard with sideburns”.