I can't fully express how much of a relief it has been to not work in that industry anymore, despite the financial hardship of being unemployed.


If there's anything I could criticize about this video it's that it's too flattering.

I agree with Old Ziricon on that one - I remember a few years ago when my old company started shilling a "social media monitoring & analysis module" that we'd purchased the rights to sell via a third party. While all the catch phrases and charts/graphs always wowed the clients, in the end we never sold much of this product because neither we, nor the prospective customer knew exactly what to do with it. The real winner in that whole sham was the Canadian company who convinced our corporation that this was something we needed to have available, just for show if nothing else.

In the end a lot of people at my company lost their jobs - mostly low-level employees who had nothing to do with the whole clusterfuck.

I'm not going to name my old employer's parent company for my own protection but they are a major, international media corporation who own a lot of things you would all recognize and probably use regularly. I know for a fact that they lift a lot of their data from Last.fm and have pretty good evidence that they also lift a lot of stuff from Netflix.

They also run a website that aggregates unlicensed streams of TV and movies and exists entirely as a datamining operation to help them better market toward people who are illegally viewing and distributing their clients' products.

Oh, and the product is completely irrelevant because it was developed for a different market when we were a small, independent company and then hamhandedly adapted to a market that simply doesn't need it when the old CEO decided to cash in and sell it a few years ago (with pretty much no transparency; one of the other top people described it to me as his attempt at a "Zuckerberg moment").

The first quarter that didn't meet their projections, all of the most experienced (i.e. most expensive, although by IT industry standards we were still making fry cook wages) senior employees at the lower level were laid off with 2 days notice and no compensation of any kind, only days after we were told that our positions were secure.

You worked for poeTV?

You don't have to name the company. Every tech company that I've worked for, including every tech company everyone I know works for has the exact same story to tell.

Even though the dot-com bust happened, the corrosive element of the work force hasn't gone anywhere. The most successful people seem to be the people that talk a big game to get in the door, spend 12-24 months convincing the company to adopt risky/dumb/wasteful strategies and projects to justify their employment, then already have the first part of the cycle started at another company while wrapping up their ejection strategy at the current place.

The people who actually create shit are just a means for supporting the people playing this game.

Where I work, most of the engineering team quits about every 12 months and the new guys try to rewrite everything from scratch.

If it makes you feel any better, I was in a startup that got bought out, and the only people who got rich was the VC firm from siphoning money out of the company via their board members and then using it to dilute employee shares further.

Even when you win, you lose.

I will take a higher salary and/or a better dental plan over more stock options any day. Fuckers always dilute them to worthlessness.

Fuck stock options, literally every publicly traded company I or anyone I know has worked for has been horrible, both in terms of their business practices and their treatment of workers. As far as I'm concerned, if stock in a company even exists it's best to avoid them as much as possible.

So you're saying they just used social media to cover for a lack of original thought?

meerkat got the joke.

I don't understand.

I've never actually watched an Onion Talk all the way through, they're pretty mediocre

I've never actually watched a Ted Talk all the way through, they're pretty mediocre