"One former employee said their son was admitted to the ER after a car crash. While he was still in the hospital, they said, their boss told them to get back to work. Another said he was asked to work on his honeymoon", just awful. kotaku.com/razer-ceo-bera…
I can't wait until vc twitter chimes in on this story. How brave Tan is for pushing his employees to abandon their kids in the ER to get to work. Or to cancel a honeymoon to get to work. [HIS] SUCCESS DEMANDS [YOUR] SACRIFICE!
But this is what changing tech's culture of work looks like. The stories of all the abusive shit that used to just be "the CEO simply wants to win" starts flowing into the press, and we stop simply shrugging it off as "CEOs will be CEOs", and start demanding better.
Progress like that is always going to meet staunch opposition. Investors who erroneously believe that their profits require such human sacrifice will defend the necessity of human sacrifice! But we don't have to listen, and we can counter. This is not okay.
It doesn't matter if you're making suitcases or gaming mice or software or any other fucking trite consumer or corporate product. Abusing your employees is bad. Bad business, bad PR, bad ethics, just bad. And the odds of you getting away with it are shrinking.
Does that mean that every CEO is expected to be the model of perfection and complete calm at every point? Of course not. We are all humans, we all make mistakes. But there are mistakes, and then there are substantiated patterns of abusive behavior. These are not the same thing.
