The Start-Up Bureaucracy
Why Tech CEOs Prefer Employee Malleability Over Personality
The strangest part of the rise of start-up companies is the culture that trails behind it. Upon the founding of the original garage-age start-ups — Microsoft, Apple, Amazon — their legacies spilled over into a massive generational workplace shift. Suddenly, everyone has a Keurig in the work lounge. There’s a foosball table, scooters laying across the office, and beer on tap. An extremely nice woman, the office manager, greets everyone in a T-Shirt and lets everyone who walks in know about the work fun events of the day.
It built into the millennium decades, the 2000s and 2010s. Uber, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Postmates, and numerous other offices favor a similar working environment, supposedly heavily focused on a work-life balance for their employees. This sort of company culture supports a generation of workers focused on work and family, and not as much on professional wear, formal meetings, or holding ones tongue. And everyone has a seat at the table. Until you don’t match the “type” they need, and then the frills don’t matter anymore.
The draw of the start-up for its founder is that it tempts a modern workplace, with a vicious bite of business, and positions like HR are just a woman who is longtime friends with the CEO.
In fact, almost all the leaders of the company are friends — and they used to work at one of the “original” start-ups too, so they know what they’re doing.
They all like the same things. When they think of work, they want to inject an exciting and adaptive environment that promotes productivity through fun.
The only thing is, this high-set of employees in the organization are the only ones who make up the benefiters. Their beer runs cold and long, and their responsibilities change based on whatever close-communications are between themselves and the CEO.
It’s unfortunate that there are hundreds of other employees working under this friend group whose business model has grown from their unsure decisions and quick-to-cut nature. At Uber, workers have been grossly underpaid until the point of global strikes. With Postmates it’s often harder to earn more than five dollars on each meal run — sometimes taking over an hour depending on the order and not even meeting minimum-wage. A sub-contractor loophole ignores the sort of attitudes protecting workers, and this culture is notorious for being quick to let-go. If an employee is a sub-contractor, you’re not really entitled to pay him a fair wage at all — he’s “working for himself.”
When you’re a subcontractor under one of these apps, you find it hard to understand the value of a worker. The policy isn’t super strict without a legible history, and the policy changes are all held on an infinite google doc, one that no one knows was changed this week except for like, five people. The liquidity and confusion makes good coverage for a hasty industrial decision.
We need to cut-back, let’s layoff half of our engineering team with less than a week’s notice. The management isn’t meeting quality and so we are going to switch it around, without reassurance of capability in roles and often without consideration of seniority. And if we’re really clever about it, we can leave Silicon Valley and head to a fire-at-will state.
Start-ups hate unions and they’d like to prevent them if they can help it. What’s gone from an environment based on the worker, with amenities and the vibe, has turned into a place where everyone is worried, day-to-day, that they’ll be next out the door.
Your friend in engineering was let go five days ago, they are downsizing quality, your manager has changed twice in the past three months. Since the fear is there, workers are encouraged to be more productive, and hourly workers can be scraped through without provision of external benefits or security. This fear builds into the workplace and in the end only those friends from the inner-circle stand impervious. Hourly workers don’t have set shifts or work from home opportunities that the work-life balance was supposed to procure. When other employees enjoy their breaks from screens to participate in office workshops or field days, the hourly workers are tied to their screens and monitored each second for productivity.
The start-up bureaucracy hurts the hourly worker and it hurts the consumer. When a consumer receives service that has fear or termination behind it, the quality of care and respect for the business is lower. The company thinks that its customers needs are superfluous and that employees should manage and respond respond to them that way. It’s a risk to customer satisfaction because the company might respond to any action you make in a quick and decisive manner. You could even pack your bags later today.
The CEO is the only one who calls the shots. So, if he chooses to downsize, you downsize. If they did not like that phone-call, you could be let go without a warning. If you question policies or try to argue in good-faith of the customer — you risk your job as well.
So it subverts the notion that the start-up is a worker focused space. It’s an attractive space to the worker, and certainly better than most others. You still get to work in the place with the beer-on-tap and free goldfish.
The space benefits the group who runs it and them alone. A concentrated group of 10–15 people are the only ones who matter in the organization and everyone else is simply purgeable.
When choosing who to purge, the indulgent bureaucrats look to the body of workers and they find the holes in homogeneity. The best ones to find are those who have complained about operations, confusion, or trying to create channels of communication with higher-ups. It’s employees who question fair payment or treatment to other employees throughout the establishment, especially those sub-contracted in the field. Cut the heads you feel uncertain about, and then the company will revert closer and closer to the spirit of the attractive bit you see when you walk through the door.
Start-ups may not have always been like this. Maybe, the “started-up” companies are not like this at all because they’ve been given the opportunity to evolve and provide true worker protections and benefits. The culture trailing behind them however, still affects new organizations operating maliciously and unfairly to workers around the country.
A word of advice, before you take your hourly job at one of these technology-based workplaces, make sure you look for the signs of homogeneity. If they exist, and you don’t match, you might be the next name of the “boys club” hit-list.
