Silicon valley “bro” culture — what else could it be?
I just read a Times article about the “bro” culture in Silicon valley. Basically, it’s the idea that many startups are run, and feel, a bit like a frat house more than a company, and that this is the main problem with them.
I agree wholeheartedly, but the author has strange reasoning around why, which I disagree with.
Dan Lyons states that one reason he sees this frat culture perpetuating is that investors themselves are graduates of this culture, and it’s all one vicious cycle. This sounds like someone who’s never talked to an investor before. The problem is much deeper, and is based on a huge cultural lie we tell ourselves: the job interview.
Of course, I can only speak about the tech world, but I imagine it’s the same in every industry. At a job interview, if you’re asked “Why do you want to work here?” you can never answer “My last job downsized me, I have 2 kids and a mortgage and would like to not be on the street.”
Sometimes (apparently) that’s a valid secret answer, but not the answer you say. You say something about how this has always been your dream, and if you died tomorrow, you’d be perfectly at ease knowing you’ve done this one thing… or something along those lines. Then the person you’re interviewing with knows you know how to ‘play the game’ and move on. Or something like that. (At least, that’s the subtext I gather from these kinds of articles)
Here’s the thing you have to understand about tech startups: we don’t do it that way. We take that cultural ideal literally, and pride ourselves on picking co-workers that way. If you don’t literally imagine dedicating yourself to the start-up’s mission, and you don’t get true near-spiritual life-satisfaction from the job, you’re out. If you pretend, give a fake answer like above, or are insincere about this in any way, you’re out. Hell, some companies go so far as to pay the insincere people to quit. We’re all some of the strictest purists you can imagine this way. This is what gets burned into our brains. This is what investors are actually looking for. This is what drives the engine, and most critically, this is what all of western culture tells us is “right”.
Now, imagine being such a person. Imagine actually deriving all your life-satisfaction from your workplace. Friends? Hobbies? Starting a family? All of those are still human needs, only now they have to blend seamlessly into work. Bet you didn’t think of that. But that’s exactly what you get when you take this cultural ideal to its logical conclusion.
If you do your job right and hire the right people, every one of them will be so pathologically obsessed with your startup’s mission, that they can’t stop talking about it. Instead of just throwing parties, they’ll throw parties and talk about the startup. Naturally, they’ll want to be around others that want to do the same. All of the sudden, you’ve blended a party with friends and a corporate event, because there’s literally no difference. Similarly, if you like sailing as a hobby, you want to sail and talk about the startup with your friends who are also obsessed with the startup. So your sailing hobby becomes an official offsite team-building exercise as well.
Under these constraints, of course you hire your friends and people you’re attracted to. If we take the cultural lie literally and create a workplace that is to totally subsume you as a human, that workplace will, by necessity, have to subsume your more base humanity as well. Of course it’ll be a frat house; frats are live-in organizations by nature. What else could it be?
Hiring Professionals
To sum up, Lyons misunderstands what investors are selecting for. They’re not looking for the frattiest of frat bros as he insists, but are looking for the most dedicated. Who, in turn look for the most dedicated. When taken to its logical extreme, the best candidate doesn’t have a family, financial obligations, or strong non-tech social ties. By necessity, this candidate’s more base and carnal needs will become interwoven into the company, and we will get frat culture, or something resembling it, over and over again.
In order to curb all this, we have to deeply change what we look for when we hire. We need to select for the ability to leave work at the office. We need people who have aspirations outside their chosen profession as well as within it. We need professional detachment. We need “I have a mortgage” to be a valid answer, and one we listen to, because we know that person will guard that line between personal and professional.
And that line between personal and professional needs to be maintained, because everyone, even your darling CEO, needs room to be human. They can either be human on their spare time, or let their all-too-human id bleed out onto your portfolios and cause scandal after scandal.
