Lots of people take issue with how Silicon Valley operates. Certainly, there seems to be pervasive harassment and discrimination issues, and an ethos of “if you only work 12 hours a day you’re failing us” is as horrifying as it is stupid.
But hearing people like Arielle Pardes at WIRED tell it, the problem isn’t so much those things that we all pretty much agree are bad (weirdly, her piece about how Silicon Valley ruined work culture contains absolutely no references to either harassment or discrimination; perhaps because those existed well before this new culture emerged). No, the problem is foosball tables and hoverboards and the very idea that work should be anything other than impersonal torture.
Let’s take a look at how Pardes describes this new Silicon Valley culture (all of this is said with the exact same derisive tone; ie, there is no differentiation in the article between any of these, they’re all evidence of how Silicon Valley Ruined Work Culture):
Arriving “a bit after nine” to work
Getting free transit to work
Wearing “weekend casual”(?) clothes to work
Not making eye contact with your coworkers
Free green juice, kombucha, and meals
No assigned desks & open floor plans
Listening to EDM at work
12 hour days
You can probably already see the problem I have here.
The article seems to suggest that there are two alternatives - Silicon Valley Culture, and Old Corporate Culture. There’s no other option, and you must take the bad with the good in each case.
Obviously that’s not true, and it doesn’t need to be true. Having a culture where it’s OK to take an afternoon nap doesn’t mean you must also have a culture where people are working all night. Those are two separate cultural markers.
This is most frustrating in one area Pardes mentions specifically: unlimited vacation time. It’s true that, based on some research, people who work in orgs that have unlimited PTO take somewhat less vacation/time off than their counterparts who have a set amount of vacation take. This is presented, almost universally, as a problem with unlimited PTO.
Except It’s not a problem with the policy. It’s a management and culture problem.
If your team feels like every moment spent outside of the office puts them one step closer to the chopping block, that’s not a problem with your vacation policy. That’s a much, much deeper culture problem. If your team doesn’t know how much vacation time is “OK” to take in your culture, it’s because you’re doing a poor job setting expectations (and an even poorer job creating a culture where success is based on results, rather than number of hours worked).
Yes, it’s much easier to blame the policy. And you know what, if you’re unwilling to put in work to make your culture better, you should have a more explicit policy (though it won’t help much). But don’t blame the policy, or your employees themselves, for your management failings.
Of course, Pardes gets a lot right, especially at the end of the piece when she address the pernicious influence of “hustle culture”:
“Worst of all, the tech world has managed to recast this workaholism for someone else’s profit as something desirable: “hustle culture.” It’s replaced the 9-to-5 with “the 996”—that is, 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week. Take it from Elon Musk: Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.”
This is more or less a throwaway near the very end. It’s not so much a substantive critique of what makes a work culture good or bad, so much as it is a token wave at the idea of such a critique.
But even if perks like free kombucha are intended to “distract” you from your employer picking your pockets (which, to be clear, your employers are definitely picking your pockets) the answer isn’t to remove perks or make work less fun or interesting. The answers lie in the underlying critique that the author doesn’t come close to making. And to be fair, it’s not one her employers want her to make, or one that WIRED’s parent company, Conde Nast, wants her to make. It’s not clear to me that Pardes herself is interested in making such a critique. Because that critique would have to challenge the foundations of our economy, of how we decide who gets what, how much they get, and why. That’s not very clicky (and it turns out our current system has trouble finding a business model for journalism that isn’t based on clickiness).
But even if foosball tables at work aren’t her idea of fun (hey, they’re not mine either) they’re clearly not the real problem. Writing article after article saying it is just makes it less likely that any of us will truly examine our work cultures, beyond a few discretionary policies sprinkled on top of a set of apparently unassailable norms.