A consultant's perspective on working full-time for a corporation

I've been working as a software consultant at Binomial LLC (a company Stephanie Hurlburt and I just started) for just enough time now that my perspective has begun to shift from my former full-time mentality. I'm obviously no expert at this, but I'm learning as fast as possible, and I intend on sharing everything I learn.

Let's compare what it's like to work full-time somewhere from the viewpoint of a consultant's perspective. This is something I couldn't do before, and very few if any of my coworkers ever talked about stuff like this at all:

Note: Obviously, not all corporations are bad places to work. I'm very much generalizing here from multiple past experiences at medium (say >50 people) to large corporations. There are some very nice companies out there too.

- Corporations are Control Freaks

With full-timing, your "client" (your employer) is extremely controlling, even in open office and "no manager" type companies.

Your control fetish "client" probably requires you to commute every day, sit in an office somewhere in a noisy non-optimal environment, and bang out code like a machine every day of the week for weeks and months at a time.

Some clients actually encourage the other "consultants" (your coworkers) to use peer pressure on you so you work longer than is sustainable or healthy. Or, they just require you to overwork yourself.

Some clients record and monitor all of your network traffic (or your emails, instant message traffic etc.), monitor when you enter and leave the workplace, etc.

You know what? Working for ultra-controlling clients like this sounds terrifying from my new perspective.

- Corporations and recruiters work together to suppress wages and opportunities

I know many programmers who are locked completely up within the corporate fill-timing paradigm. When they inevitably loose their jobs (due to layoffs, random purges, teams or companies failing, etc.) they are thrown to the full-timing wolves that orbit all the major tech companies.

Now you need to put yourself on the market, start talking with recruiters, and dust-off your elite whiteboarding skills - fast.

With consulting, a good goal is to build up a community of potential clients over time and keep this community as happy as possible. You're not dependent on any single client this way, and you gain access to more potential projects this way. Price fixing is unlikely if your client community is diverse.

- Corporations can harbor, even encourage Toxic Teams

A few years ago at one company, I got tossed onto a horribly abusive, brutal, and kinda nutty team right out of the starting gate. That was a super intense, Alice in Wonderland type experience that I will never repeat. (Why did I stay on this team for around a year, even though I should have left? Because I loved the company's products and this team was trying to build a new engine for future products. I eventually moved to another team that was actually shipping something real.)

With consulting, we can first sign a short-term contract (from days to a few months depending on the scope) to feel each other out. If it doesn't work out, no big deal, the damage (to both parties) is minimized. Working for a new company as a consultant isn't this stressful, life changing event like changing jobs is.

- Corporations Demand Intense and Extreme Loyalty

These "clients" want to basically own your life.

Working full-time at a corporation, you negotiate, then sign a contract. That's usually it. Truly renegotiating can be tough, because to have a real negotiation you must be willing to leave. This is a type of client that demands total absolute loyalty! Many corporations even claim ownership over all your work, even things you do on your own time at home.

As a consultant, you can potentially renegotiate in between every project. It's not that big of a deal.

- Corporations are Work-A-Holics

At a corp, if I want to take time off I must check to see if I'm allowed first. At many places you only get a handful of weeks off once every year. If you get sick, or have some life changing event you need to deal with, you're potentially screwed.

This seems analogous to a "toxic client" in consulting, one that is super jealous and extremely demanding of your time! 

- Corporations limit your freedom

At one of my previous companies, I could theoretically wheel my desk anywhere and pick and choose what team I worked with. In practice, office politics and super-cliquish teams massively constrained this freedom. At another company, I was stuck on the same team basically forever, because the org structure had ossified around us over many years.

As a consultant I can pick and choose who I want to work with. Obviously, I tend to choose nicer clients, because at the end of the day this is a social process and I personally like working with friendly and no-ego teams. My market of teams to work with is potentially massive now. I can wheel my little virtual desk anywhere in the world.

Rad's Kraken is looking awesome

Kraken is a big deal. More news soon!

More company culture quotes from Disrupted

Interesting quotes from Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (which I'm only 1/3rd through):

"I've been warned that at a place like HubSpot the worst thing you can say is anything that was done at your last company is something we should think about doing here. Even if your last company was Google or Apple, nobody at HubSpot wants to be told, especially by some newcomer, some outsider, that there might be a better way. HubSpot is HubSpot. It's unique. It's different. HubSpot has its own way of doing things. We're rethinking everything. We're challenging all the assumptions. We're not just making software, we're reinventing the way companies do business."

A funny take on HubSpot's usage of the DISC personality test:

"Managers, people like Zack, get the same training that I'm getting, but then they go to an extra class where they learn how to use DISC when they are managing people. Try to image the calamity of that: Zack, age twenty-eight, with no management experience, gets training from Dave, a weekend rock guitarist, on how to apply a set of fundamentally unsound psychological principles as a way to manipulate the people who report to him."

It's crazy what people will do for money.

Hiring Group Dynamics

So there are several interesting hiring related phenomenon I've seen at various companies. I think some of the most exaggerated hiring behavior will emerge at "flat" companies with yearly bonuses based (partially) from the data gathered during peer feedback.

Here's a description of one category of emergent behavior I noticed when the programmers have nearly free reign to run the hiring process and who will ultimately get hired:

Want a good bonus? Never hire new competition!

You would think the programmers doing the hiring would always be fair and unbiased in their assessments of each candidate's abilities, right? And they would, of course, always optimize for adding value to the company by making good hires. The company programmers involved in the process would choose good candidates for each opening, irrespective of politics, or concerns over their future positions or bonuses, etc.

In practice, I think especially at companies with massive yearly bonuses, the company's programmers will band together unofficially and make it practically impossible for potential competition to enter the company, make waves, and possibly eclipse the old guard. We have a classic conflict of interest situation here. This tendency to embargo your competition is especially effective when hiring specialists, such as graphics programmers, although I've seen it happen regardless of specialty.

At one well-known company, I watched around a dozen experienced graphics programmers get rejected in our interview process. Each time, without exception it was a NO HIRE, even though we were in dire need of graphics programmers. A few of the names were pretty well known in graphics circles, so my jaw dropped after several of these NO HIRE interviews.

I was involved in some of these interviews. Almost every time, these candidates would do sometimes incredible things during the whiteboard interview, but somehow one or two graphics programmers would always find some other reason to be thumbs down. (I didn't say anything at the time, because I was afraid doing so would have made enemies and hurt my career at this company. I was basically incentivized to say nothing by the peer feedback based bonus system.)

Eventually, upper management quietly noticed that irrespective of our company's dire need of graphics engineers, we weren't hiring them anyway. This company had a major upcoming threat to its primary profit generating product looming in its future, and the counter to this competitive threat involved some very specialized graphics engineering. The CEO had to step in and basically just subvert the entire completely broken hiring process and just start hiring graphics contractors almost sight unseen.

Unfortunately, these graphics contractors had virtually no path to full-time employment, so they got treated like 3rd class citizens at best and all were eventually pushed out. (Sometimes years later, even after delivering massive amounts of value to some teams.)

Anyhow, how do I know all this stuff? At this particular company, I somehow fell through the cracks and was interviewed and hired as a generalist programmer, not a graphics specialists. Eventually, the old graphics guard basically got lazy and shied away from the company's toughest graphics problems (or actually shipping anything involving new graphics code), but somebody had to do this "dirty" graphics work. The non-graphics programmers figured things out and started sending graphics work my way, and I started asking myself "why are we not hiring any graphics programmers?!"

Unfortunately I'm terrible at saying "no" to requests for help, so this resulted in a lot of work.

Turns out, that refined, "fair" hiring machine that management was so proud of was a total joke.

Tips for Interviewing at Software Companies

Here's another blog post in the "Rich goes off the rails and reveals a bunch of shit he's learned over the years while working as a corporate programmer" category.

Companies Must be Continually Reminded that the Interview Goes Both Ways

Many corps have an internal company culture that places the company in the superior position relative to job candidates. These companies feel they can choose who they want from a seemingly endless variety of potential employees, so who cares how they're treated right? The reasoning goes "we'll just hire someone else" if a candidate pushes back.

We need to collectively turn the tables on companies like this. Let's give them a powerful form of feedback. Let's exercise our right to "route around" bad companies and not apply or accept job offers from corporations that act like we are replaceable cogs. (Alternately, let's all talk between ourselves and collectively compare notes and boost our compensation rates and working conditions. They can't stop us!)

I'm hoping this blog post will help make people more able to discern the good companies from the bad ones. For the record, I do believe there are many good companies out there, but for every good company there seems to be a bunch of bad ones.

Remember: We Write the Software Which Runs the System

Here's a key concept to internalize: We write the software that literally drives this entire system. Food production and distribution, electricity production and distribution, telecommunications, government, finance, trucking, planes, etc. It's all ran by computers one way or the other, and we write the code that makes these computers work. Without computers this entire system crumbles into the dark ages.

As time goes by more and more of the system is becoming automated and computerized. This means we as programmers collectively have the power in these relationships with corporations, but we haven't effectively organized ourselves or figured out how to best exercise our power yet. We now have the technology to instantly communicate between ourselves, which if we all start using it can lead to massive changes in a relatively short period of time.

Interview Tips

Some corps are exquisitely designed to extract as much "value" from you as quickly as possible, your health and sanity be damned. Above all, I want to help other programmers avoid places like this. When applying for a position at a software corp, keep these things in mind:

- Follow your instincts.

Ask a lot of questions. Learn how to interpret body language. Are you treated with respect? Are your questions answered in a straightforward way?

Remember, the hiring pipelines of these companies are tuned to take advantage of the macro-level psychological profile of "typical" programmers. Get educated, fast. These companies are not your friends. They will try to get into your brain and "bend" you psychologically in order to make you conform and "fit in" to their brand of corporate utopia.

Trust your gut feelings during the interview! If you feel disrespected or not taken seriously, don't ignore it. It's not just in your head. Run away! You won't grow there, and it'll be a dehumanizing place.

- "You need us to achieve success, you are nothing so follow us!"

Run away fast! I've seen this tactic applied against dozens of developers after one company collapsed in Dallas. Sadly, it worked with a bunch of people and they ultimately all got screwed.

- Deeply analyze any critique given to you during the interview

Sometimes critique that seems merit-based is really bias in disguise. It's very important that if you get bad feedback, you stand back and think "Is this true? Or is there just something wrong with this company (elitism, sexism, they just didn't want to hire you, etc)?"

- How much is your time worth?

Ultimately, you are selling your time for digital digits in some bank computer somewhere. You will not get this time back, period. It's worth a lot, probably much more than you think.

How much income does the company actually make given your time? Some companies make millions of dollars per software developer, yet pay only a fraction of this to you.

Remember, this is a market and market principles apply here. By increasing our communication levels and giving feedback to the market (by routing around bad companies, demanding higher pay during negotiations, pushing back during interviews, etc.) we can collectively raise our salaries, compensation packages, and improve our working conditions.

- Are you gambling your time away trying to get your stock "lottery ticket"?

In this scenario, you're willing to be underpaid, but you're hoping the company will sell out in X months or years and make you millions. Just beware that this is a form of gambling with your time and finances. 

I've seen a few companies exquisitely exploit and continually encourage this "gambler mindset" with its workers in order to suppress wages. Be careful!

- Admit that you probably suck at negotiating

Generally, in my experience programmers make horrible negotiators. The most important thing is to approach the negotiation with the proper mindset. They need you, not vice versa, and they probably have much more money (and the capability to pay you) than you suspect.

This is a topic definitely worthy of another blog post.

- Learn how to recognize negative psychological traits like sociopathy and narcissism.

Some companies are full of sociopathic monsters whose job description (and honestly, their corporate duty) is to exploit you as much as possible.

Learn to recognize the signals. They will try to get into your head, quickly build a mental model of you, then play off your willingness to not rock the boat or be seen as a "troublemaker" to the corporation. They will find subtle ways to threaten you, if needed, to keep you in line.

Narcissists can be especially horrible to work around, especially when they are in management. Learn the signs.

- Beware of code words like "Elite", "10Xer", "no bosses", "scheduled crunch", etc.

"Elite" - Programmers willing to work endlessly in sometimes horrific conditions are labeled "Elite". Yes, we have a very screwed up system here, where people who get exploited and are worked until exhaustion are labeled "Elite". Avoid companies like the plague that use this word in their job descriptions or recruiting emails. 

(Attention recruiters: Please stop sending me emails with the word "elite" anywhere in them. Thanks!)

"10X programmer" - Someone who hacks up some shit (sometimes actually using stolen ideas), and then depends on other practicing programmers to do the actual work of making these (sometimes very sub-optimal) ideas actually shippable. These programmers tend to publicly take full public credit for things they only partially worked on or thought up. We don't need more of these "10x" assholes, instead we need to completely reboot our programmer culture so the very concept of a "10x'er" is totally alien.

"No bosses" - This recruiting shtick from 1999 means there are many powerful bosses in hiding, and/or that everyone is effectively your boss. Also avoid companies that advertise this like the plague. It's a recruiting tactic designed to attract programmers who had bad bosses in the past. (Believe it or not, there are many very good managers out there!) 

Also, without managers, you will be directly exposed to the many wolves out there who can make your programming life a living hell. A good manager will shield their programmers from endless bullshit and insanity.

"Crunching" - This means the company externalizes the cost to your health and sanity of working endless hours. They may have bad planning, or bad business models, whatever. Avoid companies that crunch endlessly like the plague unless you just don't care about your health.

"Scheduled Crunch" or "we occasionally crunch" - Again, any company that schedules crunch just doesn't understand or care how to plan, or is ignoring the cost of working crazy hours on your health.

- Ask: Does the corp own all your work?

Can you work on stuff at home, like open source software or your own commercial software? Avoid companies like the plague that don't let you work on your own stuff.

- Ask or check for insane contract clauses

Is there a non-disparagement clause? If you quit, must you wait X months or whatever before you can work on something else? Push back and avoid companies that do questionable shit like this.

- Who contacted you first?

If the company reached out to you first, did a recruiter contact you, or an actual programmer at the company? 

Ideally, a real-life programmer reached out to you. Only a programmer working at the company can genuinely answer your questions and give you a real idea about the working conditions and types of problems you will be working on there.

Remember recruiters are just part of the company's "hiring pipeline". The pipeline is basically "X Programmers In -> Y Programmers Out". You are just a replaceable number to these companies. Recruiters will say anything in order to get you to sign the dotted line.

- Is there a whiteboard interview?

Is there a whiteboard interview? Push back and say no. I've helped hire at several successful companies (easily over 100 people over the years) that didn't use whiteboard interviews at all. Anyone saying "this is just the way things are done" doesn't have perspective and is part of the serious problems our industry has.

After taking and giving way too many of these whiteboard interviews, I think they are total fucking bullshit. Whiteboard interviews test a candidate's ability to scribble uncompilable pseudo-code on a chalkboard (!) while being faced down by multiple adversarial programmers. (Who in some cases would rather be doing anything else, and who don't want more internal programmer competition in the first place!)

Some companies give programmers whiteboard questions from various books verbatim, like this one. This is just downright ridiculous, a waste of time for everyone involved, and a total demonstration that the process is completely bogus.

Whiteboard interviews are extremely stressful to candidates. I've seen amazing programmers just lock up and become dysfunctional in these conditions. We are testing candidates for the wrong abilities. I refuse to take part in any more of this insanity.

Some programmers use these bogus hazing ritual-like whiteboard interviews to help drive down the applicant's ego while simultaneously driving up their egos. This is a huge red flag -- avoid these programmers and the companies who employ them.

- "We only hire senior programmers"

Let's translate: We don't help train new programmers. The phrase "programmer empathy" isn't on our radar here. We probably treat each other like complete trash. We actually assume you are an idiot until you battle your way into a position of respect. Avoid companies like this!

Remember, all senior programmers at one time were junior programmers.

- What's the company's culture?

Ask lots of questions from people who work there. Is the official company message great, but when you pull programmers aside they actually hate working there? Search the web for reviews of the company, search linkedin and find former employees and ask them about the company.

- Talk to the executives

Are they sociopaths? Raging narcissists? Ask them what they look for in programmer candidates, and see how they respond. Do they treat you with respect?

I've known execs who thought programmers were literally crazy, and trust me the companies they ran were not healthy.

- Look around the office

Little things can give you a lot of information. Is the office a mess? How much space and privacy do employees have? Is the environment quiet or loud?

- Does this company give proper attribution for ideas it uses?

I'm throwing this out here because I've noticed one very well known VR company outright steal ideas from its competitors or academics working in the space. Explicitly ask the company about its attribution policy.

Personally, I will never involve myself in any way with people or corporations who outright steal ideas for personal or corporate gain. (I can't believe I have to even say this. We have fallen to the level of stealing and re-branding ideas from each other!)

- Master your fears

What do you fear? Recognize it and look past it, because these companies are designed to exploit your fears and use them against you as a weapon.

Why I left Unity

I left Unity about a month ago. It was a short, but amazing and enlightening, experience. I felt that my job there was done (or here). My first little contribution to the world of VR.

Instead of pivoting onto some new project or something, I've decided to basically pivot my entire life. Currently, it seems a large subset of the industry has rearranged itself around VR/AR, so I figure my timing couldn't be better. Unsurprisingly, pivoting your entire life isn't easy but I believe it's for the better. Working a full-time software job endlessly bulldozing countless lines of anonymous C/C++ code isn't on my list of happy things to do anymore. Screw that!

I'm now living in Seattle, a city I've only visited like 3 times in my entire 6 years living in Washington. Holy shit, what an amazing city! Bellevue is such a barren wasteland compared to Seattle it's ridiculous. I'm avoiding the eastside completely because the place reminds me of a mental prison. I've got some particularly bad memories there. I can't even look at downtown anymore without thinking of various horrible memories. I'm now a much happier independent consultant here in Seattle.

You know, just thinking here: I must be a bunch of game/software industry execs worst nightmare. "Oh shit, Rich is some crazy ass SOB, he's going to spill all of our endless secrets and damage our hiring and spotless reputations!" Yes, I've seen a lot of shit in my career. A lot of it the world should know about -- someday. If it makes you feel any better, I'm almost as public as I possibly can be, and I'm staying that way. I really love blogging.

I've been thinking a lot about the word "counterculture", especially in relation to the software industry. I know exactly what the "mainstream", or "normal" software developer culture is. The corporate software development and game industry culture I've seen so far is immature, exploitative, abusive, and downright dehumanizing. Where are the alternative software developer cultures?

Imagine the kinds of amazing new software that could be created in alternative cultural environments. To really improve this industry we need to upgrade our culture, not our hardware, comp-sci curriculum, or office arrangements. We need to fix the root problem, which is to escape from this insane mainstream culture and create something healthier.

Quotes from "My Year In Startup Hell"

I loved this article on Fortune.com (exerted from "Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble"). It covers so many corporate company culture things I've seen or experienced in my game development career in a single article. The article is from a startup perspective, but much of this applies to many other more mature companies. These quotes especially struck a chord with me:

"Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language—even, to some extent, inventing their own reality. This happens at all organizations, but for some reason tech startups seem to be especially prone to groupthink. Every tech startup seems to be like this. Believing that your company is not just about making money, that there is a meaning and a purpose to what you do, that your company has a mission, and that you want to be part of that mission—that is a big prerequisite for working at one of these places."

On people that get fired:

"Dharmesh’s culture code incorporates elements of HubSpeak. For example, it instructs that when someone quits or gets fired, the event will be referred to as “graduation.” In my first month at HubSpot I’ve witnessed several graduations, just in the marketing department. We’ll get an email from Cranium saying, “Team, just letting you know that Derek has graduated from HubSpot, and we’re excited to see how he uses his superpowers in his next big adventure!” Only then do you notice that Derek is gone, that his desk has been cleared out. Somehow Derek’s boss will have arranged his disappearance without anyone knowing about it. People just go up in smoke, like Spinal Tap drummers."

On what I call "Reality Shaping":

"The ideal HubSpotter is someone who exhibits a quality known as GSD, which stands for “get shit done.” This is used as an adjective, as in “Courtney is always in super-GSD mode.” The people who lead customer training seminars are called inbound marketing professors and belong to the faculty at HubSpot Academy. Our software is magical, such that when people use it—wait for it—one plus one equals three. Halligan and Dharmesh first introduced this alchemical concept at HubSpot’s annual customer conference, with a huge slide behind them that said “1 + 1 = 3.” Since then it has become an actual slogan at the company. People use the concept of one plus one equals three as a prism through which to evaluate new ideas. One day Spinner, the woman who runs PR, tells me, “I like that idea, but I’m not sure that it’s one-plus-one-equals-three enough.”

This is so true:

"Another thing I’m learning in my new job is that while people still refer to this business as the “tech industry,” in truth it is no longer really about technology at all. “You don’t get rewarded for creating great technology, not anymore,” says a friend of mine who has worked in tech since the 1980s, a former investment banker who now advises startups. “It’s all about the business model. The market pays you to have a company that scales quickly. It’s all about getting big fast. Don’t be profitable, just get big."

 Yup:

"On top of the fun stuff you create a mythology that attempts to make the work seem meaningful. Supposedly millennials don’t care so much about money, but they’re very motivated by a sense of mission. So, you give them a mission. You tell your employees how special they are and how lucky they are to be here. You tell them that it’s harder to get a job here than to get into Harvard and that because of their superpowers they have been selected to work on a very important mission to change the world. You make a team logo. You give everyone a hat and a T-shirt. You make up a culture code and talk about creating a company that everyone can love. You dangle the prospect that some might get rich."

Umm yea I know the feeling:

"Training takes place in a tiny room, where for two weeks I sit shoulder to shoulder with 20 other new recruits, listening to pep talks that start to sound like the brainwashing you get when you join a cult. It’s everything I ever imagined might take place inside a tech company, only even better."

On the office environment:

"Everyone works in vast, open spaces, crammed next to one another like seamstresses in Bangladeshi shirt factories, only instead of being hunched over sewing machines people are hunched over laptops. Nerf-gun battles rage, with people firing weapons from behind giant flat-panel monitors, ducking and rolling under desks. People hold standing meetings and even walking meetings, meaning the whole group goes for a walk and the meeting takes place while you’re walking."

Personally, I've learned over the years that I really need to live solidly in reality. I can't switch back and forth from "Corporate Enforced Reality #57" to "Real-World Ground-Level Reality" every single day of the week and stay happy and healthy long term.

I've learned that I don't need to associate myself with any corporation to be a "real" developer. If you aren't treated with respect by someone because you aren't associated with a company label, that person may very well not be a person you want to associate yourself with.

Here's a little rant: I think having to rigidly conform to a corporate mental model (like the insane one described at the company above) to earn money is demeaning and even dehumanizing. Folks, 1+1 does not equal 3. This is insane.

Somewhere back in time I must have fallen into some jacked parallel universe where treating workers like utterly replaceable mind controllable automatons is normal, accepted, encouraged, and even something to be proud of. In the universe of 1984, 1+1=3.

And the money the company gives you? It's just binary bits in some bank computer. There are plenty of ways of making money that don't involve becoming mentally insane. Trading off sanity for a bi-weekly set of binary digits added to your account balance actually isn't the greatest idea in my experience. Staying at a job you are unhappy with thinking that, eventually, you will achieve true long lasting happiness during "retirement" is also a pretty extreme way of living life. There are other paths to happiness.

My brain now pushes back when I think about living and working this way again. It basically says "hey that's super unhealthy and unsustainable!". I used to be irrationally fearful of working outside of a corporate bubble. Fear is your worst enemy and can make you much more manipulatable to others.

A long time ago, at Ensemble Studios in Dallas, I was completely wrapped up in our company's special little super insular "tribal" company culture. The company collapsed overnight and we all learned what was actually occurring at the corporate level for the previous 6-9 months. It became super clear that we all were living in a fairy-tale corporate enforced reality bubble. Even many of my "company friends" evaporated overnight into non-friends. It was ugly: even the very personalities of formally awesome coworkers instantly changed.

My ego was tied solidly into this company's culture and products. After it collapsed I had to carefully hit the "ego reset button". I had to strongly resist automatically following the locally exploitative paths laid out for me after Ensemble collapsed.