Away with them
0Reported today on TechCrunch
For the full article visit: https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/09/away-with-them/
Away with them
Every so often a story comes along which is unremarkable on its face but erupts into wider attention because it seems to represent some larger social fracture zone. …And then there's the recent story of mismanagement and malfeasance at Away, which has caught the tech world's attention because it seems a shibboleth for all the industry's fault lines.
This story is whatever you want it to be. It's a tale of exploitation of the poor and struggling by executives born rich and privileged; of the unfair, disproportionately harsh and negative scrutiny that women CEOs get; of the inherent cultural toxicity of constant surveillance (Away banned emails and DMs, insisting that all communication took place in public Slack channels); of the need for tech workers fo unionize; of the need for young workers to toughen up and live in the real world, which sometimes has asshole bosses.
Fine, I'll take a paragraph break, but I'm not done: a tale of how not to apologize (clue: don't try to exercise draconian control over your employees' personal social media accounts on the same day you're publicly apologizing for your previous draconian mistreatment of them); of the sacrifices required to build a startup; of how the real problem boils down to mismanagement and misaligned incentives, and the rest is noise; of how what previous generations considered shitty but acceptable boss behavior is now judged as completely unacceptable toxic abuse.
It is, in short, the perfect Rorschach test for today. Like most Rorschach tests, the panoply of reactions to it is much more interesting than the story itself. This is especially true because of the widespread suspicion that there was a disparity between public responses and private thoughts - that people wh