Startup culture vs. business culture

One of the side-effects of being in a fast growing business is you find yourself interviewing lots of candidates for new jobs as the company expands. So, I'd estimate that I've personally interviewed getting on for 100 people over the last twelve months and therefore I've also listened to myself answering the same kinds of questions over and over again, too.

One of those questions is often 'So, what's it like working here?' to which my stock answer is 'Fun, rewarding, exciting, challenging, amazing but I've never worked harder in my life."

That last part is a deliberate warning designed to initiate the required portion of the interview conversation where you try to smoke out people looking for 'just a job'.

I remember times in my career where I'd have the occasional slow day, the kinds of days you reserve to clean out your cluttered inbox, defrag your hard disk, tidy your desk, get your shit together and take stock. Not a lazy, slacker day; just a day when you have some headspace to attend to the kinds of tasks that always seem to come second place to the more important, pressing matters of the day.

These days don't exist in a startup.

Instead, in startup (or just post-startup) it's relentless and akin to standing in front of an out-of-control tennis ball machine. I thought I'd worked pretty darn hard in the twenty odd years I'd expended before coming here, and I've had some challenging, demanding jobs.

How wrong I was.

PS. I'm hiring.

Tweet of the year

Nigel Farage tried to escape Scottish protestors by hiding in a pub. Which is like trying to hide from a lion by putting on a zebra costume.

— Frankie Boyle (@frankieboyle) May 17, 2013

Revenge of the Nerds

I sort of like the idea of Google Glass but it makes me uneasy in the sense that it's a further and quite significant social encroachment, as if people staring at their phones all day wasn't already bad enough. So, in a sense Google Glass signifies to me that we've gone too far down a particular blind alley and we probably ought to do a reset and rethink what we want technology to do for us, and why.

There's also a sense that Google Glass is a product of the lunatics finally having taken over the asylum, in this case the lunatics being the one-time social outliers - nerds & geeks and what have you - only these days they're not so much outliers defined by poor social skills and bad hygiene as much as they're outliers with Lamborghinis who are increasingly architecting larger and larger parts of our tech dependent society.

And with Google Glass they're subconsciously having the last oppressive laugh by now insisting we all walk around wearing nerdy spectacles in their own image, like a post-modern nerd remake of Mao's communist China uniform.

My money's on the smart watch as a much more socially digestible form of personal tech.

Real just got shit

There's been a flurry of chatter following Stephen Poole's article in the New Statesman; Why are we so obsessed by the pursuit of authenticity?

I occurs to me though, that there's an obvious and inexorable path that the drive for authenticity ought to take. And rather than thinking of this growing realisation as some form of awakening to the duplicity of corporates like Tesco owning faux-indie coffee shops, surely the fact that Tesco has been revealed as deliberately masking its identity is just another step down the road to what I can only imagine is a theoretical singularity of truth and authenticity. Where presumably we'll find a baby in a wicker basket, or something.

Briefly uncomfortable perhaps, but not entirely unlike yanking on a curtain to discover that the Great Oz is in fact a charming if misguided old gentleman.

Regardless, I do suspect that behind the quest for authenticity, exemplified not least by personal blogs like this one, never mind high street brand pretending to be indie - lies a subconscious desire for truth and integrity in a world increasingly marked by the unceremonious dismantling of institutions like celebrity, church and state.

And I wonder when we look back decades from now if we'll see this era as the sketchy origins of the future utopian society that science fiction has long since imagined for us. That's somewhat naive, admittedly, but nonetheless a more up-beat plot than the 'we're all going to hell in a hand-cart' refrain we often hear.

Ethics In Business II - Prelude To The Maddening

It's troubling. Either I'm somehow subconsciously ascending to some higher plain of heavenly rectitude and the world is the same as it ever was, or the morality of the planet has degraded to the point that a stranger would just as soon as nick your watch as ask you the time of day.

All I know is I've still got the hump about business ethics, or rather the ever growing black whole where they used to be.

What have we become...

PS. I realise these pleas when read a certain way might mistakenly betray the impression of your correspondent succumbing to a deepening, spiralling madness inside which I may well have surrounded myself with photos of my unethical protagonists with their eyes scratched out and pinned to the walls around all me, curtains closed, a single track of Norwegian black metal blaring incessantly, piles of unopened mail behind the door, weekly Amazon Prime deliveries of bulk-buy tinned food and toilet rolls. That will later descend into some perverted mission to serially dispose of those who pollute the sanctity of the pristine chapel that is my concsiousness.

But that would be reading too much into them. The postscripts, I'm not so sure about.