It wasn't really a good thing unless you were a low performer. We had some people who were hired into jobs they couldn't do well, but they got to keep those jobs because it was like their role in the family. People basically never got fired, including the couple guys in the corner who barely did any work but had been there forever.
When money was tight, they didn't do layoffs. They just cut everyone's compensation by the same percentages. Including those people who didn't do much work, because we can't fire family.
Modern companies avoid this phrase because it has become so toxic that nobody wants to be associated with it. It's a holdover from old school management who speak in boilerplate platitudes like "fast paced environment" that don't mean anything.
I'd had a pretty rough year, my last year there - a recent breakup, a deteriorating domestic situation, and a death march at work. Management was aware of all three. In the end, I decided to leave the company. The attempt to retain me was not more money, or really anything around comp - it was something along the lines of (a rough quote): "You really shouldn't leave. We're your family. In times like yours, people can push the people closest to them away, to their own self detriment." And I was shared some links to psychology sites, talking about how folks in crisis can push close loved ones away from them.
Being young and naive, I gave some profuse thanks for enlightening me, promised to stay, reneged on the offer with the other employer... and a few days later, thought, "what on earth did they just do?!"
Needless to say, I put my notice back in, took the other job, and never looked back. The silver lining is that I now have a pretty good radar for management using the "family" argument in manipulative ways.
Take vulnerable people (insecure people who need jobs), add authoritarian influence, have them work for the good of the group, etc
Honestly, I wonder how many (normal?) companies align with cult techniques? Don't most companies create an us-vs-them culture? Didn't steve jobs want all the employees to wear the same uniform at one point? Doesn't Elon Musk talk about the mission to save mankind?
Maybe it is all just part of competing, cooperating and how we create prosperity, but I wonder sometimes.
Once you got hired, it was really difficult to get fired. So much so, most people there hadn't heard about anyone ever getting fired. Eventually, someone heard through the grapevine what a firing offense was: Getting caught having sex on the company campus with a coworker. But! The first time was a warning.
That company had soooo much money to burn. Lots of people did not like to work, they just kind of screwed around all day. Family members of the founders got to use the private jets (of which there was a fleet of a dozen) to do whatever they liked.
I won't name names, but the company name rhymed with "Spamway".
If both/all people are consenting, that might be slightly tacky, but surely shouldn't be a fireable offense.
If anyone could reply to this with the answer I'd appreciate it
Cutting low performers is something we can all agree on, with exceptions to long-tenured employees who are in a temporary low-performance state (divorce, health issues, etc).
At many modern companies, headcount is cut often to increase the stock price for the next earnings report, so leadership can offload shares. Even if the company performance suffers in the long term, they were able to sell their bags at a high price.
An example of a 'family' style company is Kiewit and it isn't anything like the one you described. They are famously aggressive about low-performers. Every employee has ownership shares in the company. You are expected to pick up and move when the company tells you to move. They've never had a negative earnings quarter in the entire history the company... which is notable.
Oh, it means something; usually date-driven development, get stuff out without any care of quality beyond platitudes. Yell at the devs when they're late, then yell at them when they're not because the code is shite.
They have access to vast amounts of resources, but family members don't have free access, far from it. There is council that decides how the funds are allocated, and when family members need some, they need to pitch how they are going to use it, and the expected returns. And if some family members are deemed unworthy, or don't follow some rules they can get expelled and lose access to the familial wealth.
So maybe that's what companies mean by "we are family". Or more likely, it is a combination of the perspectives of the modest families with the warmth of the wealthy ones.
If we're talking about money for investment purposes (you mentioned expected returns) then this is what's know as a "family office"
It's not really an old money thing. It's common for ultra high net worth families to establish a Family Office as a privately held company to manage their assets.
The Family Office runs like a business with a goal of maintaining and growing the assets under management. They may have full-time employees who are not members of the family at all, such as a CFO.
This isn't really related to family dynamics, though. Family members would have ownership stakes in the company and, therefore, proportional ownership of the Family Office's assets. If they wanted money they could sell some of their ownership to another family member (within the various stipulations, of course), but family members can't bypass the business and treat the family office like a piggy bank where they can ignore ownership structures and extract wealth for themselves.
This isn't really related to the "we are family" concept that that companies talk about at all. It's just a business structure that happens to be used by families to manage their wealth like a business. Individual's wealth is still their own to deal with as they please.
Well they're called "trust fund babies" for a reason. But the trust fund doesn't mean free money is flowing endlessly: it is set up so that they cannot blow it all up in a few years.
We are a sports team, not a family. Perform well and you will be paid well, perform poorly and you will get a nice check to go elsewhere. And sometimes you might perform really well but we just don't need someone with your skills anymore, so we'll still give you nice check to go elsewhere, and that isn't a reflection on your abilities.
Basically, that outlook sounds great on paper, but is not so great to actually live.
I can also see how it would be hard to carry over into a startup, because the entire culture rests on the idea that you can pay people top of market to be there, that they don't have to worry a lot about budgets, and that you can afford to give people big checks when they leave.
A simple example. Netflix promotes Freedom and Responsibility. Their engineers seemingly had freedom to choose their own systems to build with their own designs at their own pace. The company's guideline to their managers used to be "All that a manager does is to set context". But really? How can the leaders avoid catastrophic failures? How can the leaders keep their orgs' schedules and promises? How can the leaders draw the line between empowering and micro-management in such environment? It's not there is a runbook. And things do fail and sometimes someone do take the fall. Then who? How much? How do the leaders do it to avoid sink the culture?
If you offer me a typical tech job at 1/20th of what a netflix engineer makes, don't expect me to perform like Michael Jordan.
Sports team dedicate their entire life to performance. 80 hour weeks are nothing to them. Their diet, sleep, and personal lives are part of their jobs. I don't want a typical tech shop to have that sort of control over me unless they are paying me serious money.
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All that aside, modern Netflix is not what Reed Hastings describes. There are tons of tenured benchwarmers lounging around.
It reminds me of Amazon's "bar raiser" requirement. That a new hire has to be better than 50% of the interviewers. The idea that Amazon engineers are the top is laughable to anyone in the space these days. Only the desperate work for Amazon.
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/netflix/salaries/software-e...
Not sure if a typo, but if this is what you actually meant, this is a _gross_ misunderstanding of the situation. The benchmark is that a new hire should _have capability to_ outperform 50% of folks in the current role, not a) _currently_ be able to outperform b) 50% of _interviewers_ (who are potentially of higher level than the interviewee).
Anecdataly, I am ~6 months into my first post-Amazon role (after 10 years there) and have only met a single peer who would have been passable in my previous team.
It's interesting that despite the high-performance culture though, Netflix is still slowly degrading. This past year I finally realized I could cancel Netflix and not feel like I lost anything, and I was an early subscriber to the DVD plan.
Any thoughts on Netflix's degradation over time? My take is that its transitioned from peak phase into cash-cow mode once everyone wanted a piece of the streaming pie.
They don't seem to have as much breakout content as before, but I think they have a lot of minor hits, especially in other countries. And honestly that is better for their business than huge breakout hits.
From what I've heard from friends who are still there, the nexus of the company shifted from the Bay Area to Hollywood a few years ago. At that point they became more of an entertainment company than a tech company. Some have said all the "hard" problems are solved, now they are just making small adjustments. Although I disagree with this: they quietly added live streaming which was a huge tech leap for Netflix, although it was so quiet no one seems to have noticed.
Also, with the economy the way it is and being an entertainment company now, they are starting to worry more about budgets. When I was there the only real budget guidance we got was "don't grow your headcount faster than our subscriber count" and "keep IT costs flat on a per stream basis". I hear now directors get budgets they have to stick to.
Also they added leveling which allowed them to hire more junior engineers. When I was there, there were no levels. We didn't really hire junior engineers. We hired senior engineers to solve problems that usually juniors would be given, and they would solve it with automation and robustness that maybe took a bit longer and would be considered "over-engineered" but that lasted for years and scaled with minimal effort.
But the freedom is still there for the most part. Managers still mostly just provide context and the leaf nodes come up with the implementations.
Netflix both got better and worse at the same time.
With wider audiences and more content, there is both more content for you in absolute terms, and less in proportion to the total amount. So while there's more stuff you will like to see, it gets drowned out.
https://thecorrespondent.com/104/the-great-paradox-of-our-ti...
So now they have tons of content and tons of viewership (and tons of profits the last several years) but they've changed from being "the biggest streaming hub for all your favorites" to "one of many producers and distributors." They might on the whole have more good stuff you'd like - but they have a lot less mindshare for that stuff than when it was stuff that had already done theater and TV rounds.
(What's really interesting to me is that the music industry evolved differently, with almost no exclusives, so you have many competing streaming services (but all that seem to be VERY squeezed profit-wise) all with the same content. My best guess is it's because people want to be able to flow music together in custom playlists, spanning a bunch of artists, vs binging a single series or such?)
I still have plenty of use for Netflix, but here are my thoughts:
From a creativity/artistic perspective: creativity is one of the things where simply throwing more money at it and/or "optimizing" it is not the solution. I mean, it can be the solution from a purely business perspective, but I'm assuming this isn't satisfying to you (or me), hence the "degradation" you speak of. Creativity, as in "good quality things you can enjoy but are not necessarily mass-produced for everyone to like" is not a "problem" to be "optimized" by whatever algorithms Netflix is using.
From a business perspective I've no idea how they are doing. Given their crackdown on account sharing, I'd say things are not as rosy as they used to be. Also, quite obviously, the competition became harder; Netflix is no longer the only player in town.
After a while I had to resign due to mental health problem manifesting as depression and burnout to the point where I couldn't even enjoy my favorite video games. I started therapy which hasn't been going as well as I would like but that's another subject.
A month ago I talked to a colleague to see how they're doing. He informed me that another guy left 1 week after I did, but the best part is how he told me that "unlike you at least he gave a 2 week notice". To this day I still wonder if I was really the one unprofessional and that I should just force myself to "work". And I use quotes because I don't know how anyone would expect someone who literally have to force himself to get up from the bed and brush his teeth to be productive. I'm not the kind of person who sees himself as unprofessional and if I had no health problems interrupting my daily life I'd have no issues upholding the 2 week notice.
Turns out there is such a thing as a toxic family.
As someone who has been in a similar place, I wouldn't think this would be any less professional than if you got in an auto accident, had to be bed-bound for several months, the company couldn't let you work remotely and you had to leave.
Depression's a bitch, it makes you want to not seek out care and makes you more likely to interpret anything in the most negative way. Try to not be too hard on yourself for how you had to handle yourself, for all you know those two extra weeks could have caused you to need to be hospitalized or slowed down treatment.
This was your first and only job. (Therapy is still on going and a month ago you asked what is happening and got some feedback about someone else quitting.) Which is why you don't understand the 2 weeks notice isn't just for you to be productive but to help hand things over.
Realistically, your former colleagues probably had to figure out what you had done and not done. This will leave a nasty after taste.
My understanding is that 2 weeks notice is more of a being nice and not actually required. Most companies won't give you any more notice than they're legally required to. Therefore, I have no problem with people giving them the legally minimum notice.
But overall, you'll find there are many times where you just need to force yourself to work. This is probably a skill you should learn if you need a job to survive.
Like someone else mentioned, if he had been hit by a car you wouldn't be suggesting he force himself to do anything. Clinical depression is your brain being hit by a car. If he had been hit by a car, who cares about whether his coworkers found their work harder as a consequence?
Instead of ravenously draining the life from your body and swallowing your final screams like pez, we've taken a more egalitarian approach of slowly crushing the life out of thousands of people simultaneously, but also giving them time to recover so we can get as much delicious pain juice as possible.
I've grown to interpret "unprofessional" in the scope of resignations as code-word for "it inconveniences your manager". Your higher-ups aren't fending accusations of being unprofessional for fostering hostile work environments that are hazardous to their employees' health. Why should you fend off similar accusations for avoiding the harm they are doing to their workforce?
Complaining how an employee dismisses himself is particularly hypocritical when it happens in jurisdictions where at-will employment is the norm.
I've been lucky that 4 companies I've worked at in my life so far have been very "employee forward" - creating scenarios of employee growth and engagement (vs putting employees in the seat of powerless cogs). All 4 companies have had a layoff of some sort for various reasons (business line shutdown, covid business hit, interest rate hit, grew too fast - respectively) and I have been affected by one of the layoffs (the other one, I left right before employees were bought out) but I am still happy to have worked there vs anywhere else because of these factors.
"Family" doesn't mean employing you past the point it makes sense, it's more about how you're related to when you're here. Are you encouraged to grow, to make connections, are you paid well, does the company try to give you good benefits, etc. You want a place that does all of that. You don't have to call it "family" - but it's a totally different vibe from a sweatshop.
Actually family does mean that, literally. It makes absolutely no sense to use this term in a business context.
I agree that the "family" metaphor breaks down around termination of employment (whether initiated by employee or employer)
What I was trying to say in the line you quoted, that IN THE WORK CONTEXT nobody uses family to imply permanent employment - it's strictly about how you are with each other while there. Which is still a big deal.
We had a great nanny for our son. She went above and beyond, treating him like a grandson. We went above and beyond for her (max flexibility, paying her days when she couldn't work, lots of bonuses and gifts, etc.)
Both of us exceeded the "employment contract" - gave more than we had to and we both came out ahead. That only worked because we were both willing to go beyond.
What's the point? We treated each other "like family" even though it was a work situation. When our son didn't need a nanny anymore, it didn't make sense for us to work together (so in a way, she was laid off although in reality we found her another gig) but that didn't take away from the quality of our relationship while it lasted.
This is directly analogous to employment dynamics I've had at work for 20 years now. You may find that "creepy" but I also suspect you are oblivious to what the upside can be like.
The hackernews galaxy brains trying to define a company based on one word in a mission statement is every bit as foolish as the recruiter who describes their culture as 'family'.
At one company party, the employees were going around the room telling me how nice it was to work for me (which is very kind of them). The last guy sheepishly shrugged and said, "I don't want to be standoffish but I felt this way at my last company, and they let me go. This is just a job to me." I felt like this is overall the most healthy attitude to have when thinking about work, and frankly to hear it out loud was refreshing. I love that kind of honesty.
It is!
My problem is when companies feel the need to say it. If it's actually true, they wouldn't have to.
>We are family!
No boundaries, underpaid, nepotism, etc.
>Fast paced working environment!
Mostly toxic environment.
>Attention to details!
“Big boss” will scream at you for silly things.
>Will require working overtime if needed!
Self explanatory.
>Fun loving, company culture activities, etc.
Your typical kindergarten office activities, you can’t refuse either.
I will also add this but not always the case
>open office style
Yeah, nope!
I get it.. some people really enjoy that, but that's not everyone. It feels like it's by design to exclude other kinds of people who don't enjoy a hyper social environment.
This seems too vague and broad for meaningful discussion.
I'm not picking a side, but for the sake of comparison, I've seen office environments with "we are family" messaging treat individuals with autism or disabilities more inclusively and with more grace than otherwise.
Of course, this is coming from someone who really enjoys drinking on the company dime
Supportive, abusive, dysfunctional, a mafia with constant internal power struggles…
To me family is a lot of responsibility, it's an emotional investment, it's a time investment. There are rewards, but also limits and boundaries even in families. At a company, that's an endless amount of just relationships to manage in the form of a family. I have that with my family, that's enough for me.
I worked at a place where after several moves and re-orgs we ended up sitting next to a very strange HR group. They all seemed like good friends in HR, friends outside of work, and yet at the same time they fought like children... a great deal. A lot like a family might.
It was HORRIBLE. I don't know the phrase but they had these constant "emotional impositions" (not sure if that's the right phrase) on each other and everyone around them.
I'd constantly run into one of them in the conference room I reserved ... crying. Now a few times, whatever, I'll happily shepherd everyone to another room. It happens, no big deal. But it wasn't once in a while. It was constant, and if it wasn't someone crying it was them arguing unprofessionally and so on.
They even went so far as to complain the people sitting next to them (overworked, ultra busy tech support team) "are not social" / was "always at their desks working" and complained that tech support didn't attend their events that always had the food and events they wanted (weird pizza, etc). They complained to management about it constantly, I don't know what they expected those people to do, force them to socialize?
As a family goes, I kinda expect all that, but I don't want that at work. It's unprofessional, unproductive, and IMO emotionally manipulative.
I've formed close relationships at work, I care about he people I work with, that's great, but it's a choice and I don't just embrace any given stranger as "family", nor is it appropriate to expect anyone to.
But not all mission statements are meaningless, and not all attempts by executives to create a family-like culture come from a bad place.
Much of it comes from a good place, and it often works. But people who experience this I think are less likely to write on HN.
From my experience, the more a company TALKS about being a family, the less it acts like one.
Talent cutbacks are a loss of invested resources, and signals a failure to predict market trends. Sure it can also bump a laggard stock short-term, but ultimately signals other internal structural issues.
Good luck, =)
This is also why layoffs during vacation windows and on remote sites is more common in IT.
Giving people time to deal with the emotional aspect is important. As exposing a vulnerable backbone to those motivated with grievances is unwise. Recall, 93% of breaches are internal, and proprietary assets tend to leak with layoffs.
It is never an easy task, but it can be done respectfully. =)
Most think a family is a group where people love each other and care for each other. This is wrong, love and affections are symptoms of a healthy family, you can love and care for your friends, you don’t have a family with them. You can actually not really like spending time with many people in your family, but you are still a part of a functioning family (many such cases). In extreme dysfunction, individuals in a family face abuse but for all our intuition they still are a part of a family until the state intervenes.
To this one might say a family is then bonds that occur due to blood relations between its members. This again is a symptom, children in an adoptive family still constitute a family.
So what exactly is a family? A family is a binding contract where individuals agree to stay together regardless of the circumstances. In the past this contract was enforced to death out of necessity, now this contract is enforced out of necessity till the child becomes 18 generally. There may be hatred, sickness, or a litany of other disturbances but the individuals still stick by each other. This by definition is something a company cannot recreate (without coming awfully close to slavery), and thus it is hopeless for a company to try to aim to be your family. You can leave when you want and they can let you go when they want. That simply is not the same bond as a family.
Cultural messages that use therapy-speak, if not necessarily promulgated by actual therapists, encourages more and more atomization. Anyone that is annoying, disagreeable, or who has the wrong ideology is labeled “toxic” and people are encouraged to cut them out of their lives. This includes parents, siblings, spouses—of course an uncle or cousin is entirely disposable.
The "unseverable" bonds of family have caused a litany of mental and physical problems for me my entire life. It's only since my "toxic" behavior finally exhausted their fidelity that I've begun to feel like myself.
I'm not so sure. My set of friends have been friends for over 35 years. We're as much family as our blood relations, in pretty much every way I can think of.
or "As you know, Grandma has Long Covid. With her reduced efficiency, and diminishing ROI, tough choices have to be made"
> Edit. Not sure why the negative feedback. We all know this is satire and a joke right?
It's the basis for sites like The Onion and Beaverton.
Many years ago, I learned that "we are a family here" is a red-flag phrase that is indicative of that being a poor place to work.
>Being in a family relationship at work never redounds to the benefit of the children
In (most of ?) Europe, this severance is law and not debatable (as discovered by Musk recently), so this sentence would be outright illegal. You can talk about your salary with anyone you want, discuss it with your colleagues, that's even mandatory for mass-layoffs (through unions and/or elected representatives).
You should fight for some more rights, sometime <3
But it's not a one-way street. Being easier to fire makes American employees easier to hire, which is at least in part responsible for much higher pay in the USA compared to employee havens such as Europe.
Furthermore, Americans tend to pay less tax. This isn't usually thought of as an employee rights issue, but in my mind, keeping more of your money = stronger property rights
When you include state taxes, social security from the employee and employer, then it starts to look like much less of a difference.
When you include health insurance and college education, Americans get much less value.
I do agree with the first half of your comment. American labor laws make it easier to fire which allows employers to take more risk in hiring.
Sure, I make more than 2x the salary, but the cost of living of a bit tech hub chips away most of it. Specially housing, which has increased dramatically since Covid. Even with my big fat tech salary, getting in the properly ladder seems to be years away.
Pay less taxes? sure, but then you have to pay for everything and then some, and everything is incredibly expensive. And we don't even have children yet. I can't imagine being able to afford childcare even with my current income.
I agree that I choose the worst time to move over. In the last year we experienced drop in stock prices combined with soaring inflation, which means that both my income went down, and my expenses went up. Also it's not like I can change employers and get a better deal. Even if the job market wasn't depressed, my visa (L1) doesn't allow me to change employers. Also the latest visa bulletin pushed the current date of my visa category back a couple of years, so Green Card seems like a somewhat distant dream.
All in, I'm not sure my quality of life in this country is better (and the UK itself is not doing great lately).
I've lived in two countries that went through this transition in labor laws to follow the neoliberal playbook. Guess what happened.
See also “less regulation will mean more agile and competitive market which will auto regulate itself”, etc.
Only if you're a highly sought after tech person and thus have actual leverage. Farm workers, hospitality employees, construction workers - they're all exploited just the same.
Whether Americans pay far more for health insurance, and whether they're far more likely to be bankrupted by a health crisis, has a very straightforward answer: "yes."
Privatised social services - most obviously health, but also some utilities, transport systems, rented housing, and so on - are de facto corporate taxes.
Americans are subjected to constant and insistent "private good, government bad" propaganda from birth, so it's not always easy to get this point across.
Even so. If you're being forced to pay for essential services, and those services are unaffordable and/or may bankrupt you, you would - unquestionably - find that public ownership would be significantly less precarious and more affordable.
This isn't actually true. The total US tax burden is very similar to that of other modern nations.
Can you please explain the causation between easiness of firing / hiring and high salaries?
No, there's nothing easier about hiring US employees. It only makes it easier to fire them. This reduces the risk of bad hires for the employers, by allowing them to be easily fired.
That encourages employers to be less risk-averse in hiring, but, once again, it does not facilitate the hiring process.
Here on earth, what you wrote is much closer to the truth. The American economy is awash with opportunities to work for small businesses, with employees free to move around and chart their own destiny.
I suspect the labor protections in Europe are part of the reason there aren't many billion dollar software companies there and the salaries are low, hiring is risky when firing is hard.
Then there's health insurance which never stops going up, and having to save a large portion of each check for our own retirements because when we're past 50 we're relegated to greeting at WalMart.
I'm not sure which is better, since each Euro country is different and such, but just looking at salary numbers isn't much to go on.
It's probably true that it's easier to upscale a company in the US. The hire and fire strategy wouldn't work here as it would only attract poorly educated people that are willing to take any job. It may be a cultural difference, but most middle class people like to have financial stability here, even if payment is lower in that case.
I think that for software companies, the history of computers plays a big role as well. US has always been at the forefront when it comes to hardware, (military) investments and research of integrated circuits and computers, which led to big companies like IBM and subsequently Silicon Valley companies like Apple and MS. I think it may not be the best example because there isn't really any other country or continent that equals the US here, regardless of wages and labor rules.
Care to elaborate on why this is a bad thing? Also, software salaries are not all salaries and are probably not all that representative to the bigger picture.
I wish we could fight for more rights. We are too spread out for protests to work. The politicians do everything they can to separate themselves from their electorate. And the average person doesn't have enough money to weather a week of no paychecks. Meanwhile half the populace gets angry at the thought of helping out anyone beneath them as they don't want them to get ahead.
The worst is that you have a very vocal minority trying to constantly burn down the house so that they can be king of the burn pit.
One word, Unions.
Its why Europe is doing so well with workers rights in STEM today compared to America.
For all the other just absurd lack of rights employees have in the US, that at least is one that employees do have. Companies are legally _not allowed_ to stop you from discussing your salary with coworkers, or punish you in any way for you having done so.
[0] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/labor_law/publications/la...
What is the purpose of these 'rights'? As a software engineer in America, who's been laid off many times, I get (1) unemployment, (2) 100% free medical (few SW engineers apply, but most who are laid off would be eligible, if they cared),(3) a free vacation for however long as I want, (4) lots of savings because I make so much more than my European counterparts, and (5) a great job market so I can rinse and repeat 1-5. Exactly what am I missing? Having spoken to many non-American devs... they're the ones being abused by being forced to work for sub-market wages for very little gain, and very little opportunity should they decide to branch out on their own.
How does one end up being laid off many times? Have you had a long career or do you specifically seek out high-risk high-reward jobs?
Or just the roll of the dice?
Could you explain this one? Do you mean via medicaid?
Rights enshrined by legislation are worth a bit more than individual agreements
I agree that "withholding pay" is not the answer here, but if it went to court it might net out in the end.
I also think this type of European mentality is the reason for its stagnation. Constant regulation that saps the energy out of amazing talent in Europe.
All this to say, it’s probably legal.
Additionally, a company putting this language in their termination agreement doesn't make it legal.
I neither want nor desire government to be my parent
