Friday, January 09, 2015

What a Wonderful Company Ethic

Any regular follower of my blog should know by now how I feel about the asshat mightier-than-thou "successful" people yearning for their "hungry" slaves in the corporate world, especially the high-tech ones. The constant drum-beat of articles posted on Facebook about them from friends have depressed me so much that I had stopped some of their news feeds just to keep my temper on an even keel, and my stress down.

So it came as a rather pleasant surprise to see on my feed a blogpost from a company that appears to defy conventional "wisdom." It looks like a venture-capitalist company, so they are a group I'm never likely to work for, but man would I love to work for a company (or found a company) with an ethos like that!

http://www.adventur.es/adventures-blog/2014/12/22/no-asshole-rule

I'm also entertained by their URL. They went out of their way to make a cool name stick - they are a mid-west firm, and have a domain name in Spain, just because :).

Anyway, they made my day today. It was that little bit of sunshine I needed in an otherwise gloomy outlook. I even sent them an email thanking them for it. My hope is that they do well, and serve as a shining example of how employers should organize a team around the idea of treating others, and each other well. I think it is what defines us as humans.

EDIT 1/10/2015 - These guys officially ROCK in my books now! I sent them a little email thanking them for helping make my day with that blog post, and they replied the very next day with kind words of encouragement to help me along my current circumstance! It was very sweet of them!

3 comments:

Kevin Jang said...

I have come across enough of these "if you are not good enough, you are just not worth it" and "you are only as worthwhile as you can work for us and nothing else" ideas of the workplace which have been circulating nonstop online, among Singaporean and non-Singaporean people alike. We ought to treat each other well, as real human beings with vulnerabilities and strengths, but the truth is that the current economic times have made jerks out of a lot of people who are more about profit-making.

Chee Wai Lee said...

Yeah, that's why I was so pleasantly surprised, and even more so when they responded when I reached out.

Kevin Jang said...

I have become convinced that your work personality is largely an extension of your real-life personality, and if a person is a mean guy or girl in real life, then he or she is likely to extend that meanness outwards to others at the office in the way he or she relates. Years back prior to my PhD, I was trying to make ends meet post-MA without much avail, and one former friend whom I did not talk to anymore told me that at her office where she works in social services, her colleagues were nasty people who did stuff such as sleeping around, watching pornography, and smoking and cussing, all these even while they were supposed to help the needy and exploited! Needless to say, it was not a healthy environment from what I gathered. The general vibe that I got was, if they are so mean in real life, and they extend this to the way they treat you as a colleague by ostracizing you and all, why are you not leaving or finding a new job? It took a while for her to realize this, and I think that I should not sympathize with people who end up becoming as mean as their oppressors.