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61 " During my time at HubSpot, I was shocked to see how badly managed the company was and how packs of inexperienced twenty-something employees were being turned loose and given huge responsibility with little or no oversight. In the world of start-ups that is now the norm, not the exception. "
― Dan Lyons , Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
62 " The company,” he says, “doesn’t need a reason to fire you. The company can do whatever it wants.” A week later, on September 2, the Tuesday after the Labor Day weekend, Trotsky forwards me an email that Cranium has sent around to everyone in the marketing department. We’re "
63 " Someone like me, with a D personality, is probably going to have trouble working with a C personality, because my personality type tends to be impatient, overbearing, and judgmental, and C personalities tend to be lazy nitwits. "
64 " Dreamforce turns out to be a four-day orgy worthy of Caligula, a triumph of vulgarity and wasteful spending, with free booze and endless shrimp cocktail and a rate of STD transmission that probably rivals Fleet Week. "
65 " But once on stage he seems to enjoy playing the role of inspirational speaker—a kind of nerd Tony Robbins, overly fond of touchy-feely rhetoric and vapid aphorisms. “Success,” Shah says, striding back and forth across a stage, with his head down, stroking his beard, as if impersonating a professor, “is making those who believed in you look brilliant.” Then he will pause, as if he has just said something incredibly profound and wants to give you a moment to let it sink in. Then he repeats the line, and a ballroom full of marketing people cheer. "
66 " By the occasion of the inaugural Fearless Friday I’ve come to realize that HubSpot is just as crazy as the rest of them. But all of HubSpot’s lofty bullshit about inspiring people and being remarkable and creating lovable content might actually be part of a cynical, and almost brilliant, strategy. HubSpot is playing the game, saying the kind of ridiculous things that investors now expect to hear from start-ups. HubSpot is feeding the ducks. "
67 " The happy!! awesome!! rhetoric masks the fact that beneath the covers, there is chaos. "
68 " Spinner at one point comes up with an idea to get some publicity. “We should pitch a story about you working here at HubSpot, and how you’re learning a whole new thing,” she says. “We can call it ‘Old Dog, New Tricks.’” I look at her as if to say, You must be kidding. She tries to backpedal, saying she didn’t mean it as an insult. She thinks it’s really cool that I’ve joined this company with such a young culture and I’ve done such an awesome job of fitting in. I want to believe she means well. I tell her I’ll think about "
69 " I'm anxious to hear what he will say to the people back in Cambridge—the engineers who write the code, the bros in the boiler room who sell it, the grunts in the content factory who generate the leads, the customer service reps who deal with angry people all day.Most of these people will get next to nothing from this IPO, but their hard work had just made Dharmesh an immensely wealthy man. How will he thank them? He embodies our culture: He's the creator of HEART, the inventor of "delightion," the pundit who proclaims, "Success is making those who believed in you look brilliant."This man who has just reaped a $70 million windfall, whose stock will soon be worth more than $100 million when HubSpot shares keep climbing, looks into the camera and says something amazing: "Get back to work. "
70 " (As an aside: I urge you to count the non-white faces in that Halloween photo and consider the claim about “daring to be different.”) "
71 " We’ve lost our way” is how another manifesto author, Andrew Hunt, put it in a 2015 essay titled “The Failure of Agile.” Hunt tells me the word agile has become “meaningless at best,” having been hijacked by “scads of vocal agile zealots” who had no idea what they were talking about. Agile has split into various camps and methodologies, with names like Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) and Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). The worst flavor, Hunt tells me, is Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe, which he and some other original manifesto authors jokingly call Shitty Agile for Enterprise. “It’s a disaster,” Hunt tells me. “I have a few consultant friends who are making big bucks cleaning up failed SAFe implementations.” SAFe is the hellspawn brainchild of a company called Scaled Agile Inc., a bunch of mad scientists whose approach consists of a nightmare world of rules and charts and configurations. SAFe itself comes in multiple configurations, which you can find on the Scaled Agile website. Each one is an abomination of corporate complexity and Rube Goldberg-esque interdependencies. "
― Dan Lyons , Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us