Ruining bottom lines at many companies, not the entire tech industry
I thought the article was very well written and like many of the posts here recognised a lot of the behaviour described from my own experiences over the last 20 years in the industry. It should provoke a lot of thought and hopefully inspire some change for the better in a few minds.
However to assume that this culture exists everywhere is to assume wrongly. I've spent a good chunk of my working life in parts of the UK outside the South East and London (my current abode) and on the nearby continent and can say in general that things are less macho there and more pleasant places to work as a result. As well as the social aspects of this, I also appreciate that arrogant, aggresive, macho and egotistical behaviours of the type described can have seriously detrimental effects on the success of companies where this behaviour takes root.
To illustrate this, I have a good real life example from my own experience. I once went for an interview at an up and coming startup company. It was conducted by an arrogant obnoxious egotist who I disliked intensely, and even though I was offered a job, I turned it down as the thought of having to deal with this guy all the time was too ghastly to contemplate. A couple of years later I was doing consultancy work where I got to work in numerous companies in the same geographical area, and during general chats with people I encountered quite a few who had actually worked there. All of them cited that guy as the reason they'd left the company, with highly believable stories about the type of behaviour I'd imagined he would indulge in. I heard stories of horrendous rates of staff retention and more and more candidates being needed for a vacant post as word obviously got about amongst the relatively small pool of people in the area. The startup closed not long after, with the founders probably realising too late that the big mouthed guy who claimed to know it all should not have been allowed to ruin their company.
This is an extreme example, I know, but if you own or work at a company where this sort of behaviour is the norm, please realies that the companies where it isn't tolerated tend to allow more innovation and improvement to flourish, and that really talented people can't abide working with arseholes and leave your company pretty quickly. And that bad reputations travel more quickly than you probably realise.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
