Thread by @QuinnyPig

Screw it, I've got a few minutes. I'm starting a new imaginary corp, "Facebook for Ethics." We're based here in California. I'll walk through many of the ways we'll serve our core mission: absolutely screwing over our staff.

Any resemblance to real companies is coincidental.

We'll start with "unlimited PTO." We very carefully will avoid giving guidance as to what is "appropriate." Is it really unlimited? Try taking six months off and find out!

We need pay none of it out when you leave (voluntarily or otherwise).

We're VC backed and privately held, so we'll pay below market salaries and offer equity. Folks have gotten wise to the "options" game so we're forced to give RSUs to attract talent.

"You'll get 400,000 shares if you join us!" Out of how many, you ask? We will absolutely not tell you that. We also will never, ever commit to not diluting your equity with additional funding rounds.

Don't even ask us about different share classes.

If we forget that we're trying to hurt you and start thinking of you as a friend, you're STILL banking on me as a founder out-negotiating the future investors who do six of these deals a week *AND* putting your interests ahead of my own.

If you express skepticism we'll point at @SnowflakeDB as if it were the common case instead of a once-in-a-generation winning lottery ticket.

If our valuation skyrockets and you try to leave, guess what? You'll have a limited window to exercise your shares (though some companies are extending this out). Due to the appreciation if we're the next Snowflake or Uber, your exercising tax bill can be stratospheric NOW.

Unlike a disturbing number of other employers on Twitter recently, we know we can't *actively* attempt to fire employees attempting to unionize. Instead we're going to do a full court press around how bad unions are internally, and magically fire the folks who seem unconvinced.

Anyone who protests any of this will be pointed at Snowflake. I really can't stress how much we're going to milk their wildly successful IPO to dupe a whole generation of new grads.

The name of the game is "retaining staff." To that end, we'll periodically make statements about how suspiciously we view applicants with short stints on their resumes. The lesson of course will be "if you hate your job, better stick it out if you want to be employable."

We'll periodically tell our staff that "anyone who can pass our interview can get a job at Google." That used to mean something a bit different than it does today so I'll take a note to update that talking point for the modern era.

We'll actively sponsor employees on visas not because we believe diversity makes for stronger teams (HA! Do we really strike you as the kind of company to accept academic research?) but rather because it's WAY harder for those folks to quit and remain in the US.

Non-competes aren't enforceable in California, so instead we'll give hefty signing bonuses up front, with a "you owe us a pro-rated refund if you quit before the term" to keep folks in line.

We're going to offer a whole host of perks to our staff. Laundry, 3 meals a day, pet sitting. These are cheap compared to the value: getting the staff to depend upon us for their daily life.

When someone leaves we will immediately begin the character assassination play. Every poor decision for the past two years is now laid at their feet. What're they going to do about it? They don't work here anymore!

Our employee handbook is 450 pages long. Nobody knows what the hell the policies are. It's mostly there until we hire someone we end up disliking; that way we can flip through it to find transgressions that are now magically fireable offenses.

We'll have a cutesy name for our staff to form identities around like "Googlers" or "Amazonians." Branding is important; we want folks to define themselves by working here.

We'll have succeeded when people's bios lead with the fact that they used to work here.

We'll develop some form of ritualized hazing that we'll dub "our technical interview." Just like boot camp breaks down raw recruits, this leaves smart people feeling beaten to shit and confused so we can give them a lowball offer.

When times are tough we'll make veiled allusions behind closed doors towards blackballing staff. "You'll never work in this town again if you quit," we'll lie as if anyone gives a good goddamn what we think about basically anyone or anything.

Our tech stack will be esoteric and edgy. "You don't have to know it coming in; we'll teach you!" What we're really teaching you is to ignore the passing of technological evolution in the rest of the world so you're ever more unemployable.

If staff objects to our 80 hour weeks (we call it "crunch" but let's face it; when everything's an emergency than nothing is) we'll point at their equity and ignore the fact that if this place unicorns I'll buy a yacht and they'll buy a used Toyota.

We will actively mock the idea of a retirement plan. "Your equity in this company is your retirement plan!" we'll boldly assert. Nobody will question the wisdom of that statement; they wouldn't be True Believers if they did.

We will subsidize public transit passes for our staff because we care about them and the environment and we're all in this together and oh by the way it's a San Francisco requirement.

We're disrupting the world of whatever the hell our company does, so it stands to reason we're smarter than everyone else at unrelated areas like "hiring."

We'll recruit primarily from Stanford and the HackerNews comments where people are downvoted for being too much asshole.

We'll make heartfelt statements about racial justice and diversity on our website, right next to the "about our team" section that looks like a Proud Boys rally.

Our on-call rotation will be a trial by fire. All engineers will take a turn in the pager cycle except for the rock stars we wish to retain. Anything citing Human Factors research will be dismissed as "Twitter whining."

If we get bullied into having a retirement plan we're going to shove out the vesting period on our (tiny) match as long as we can. We want to make it as hard as humanly possible to leave without foregoing a pile of money.

We will trust our staff with "root in production" and the keys to the AWS account but we will take up residence in their buttholes over a $29 expensed technical book.

Our recruiting team will be bonused based upon hires. We will DISRUPT that market and also pay bounties for them discovering existing staff who are looking for work so we can shitcan them before the malaise spreads.

When it's time for reviews we will be very harsh on The Woman We Hired's performance. Sure, we made her sit in on every interview we conducted, and then give a fuckton of talks about diversity and inclusion, but that's no excuse for not shipping as much code as her male peers.

As the CEO I will have an open door policy. That way when you come in with a concern I can loudly berate you and the entire office will hear.

"Do we support remote work?" Are you out of your mind?! We're in San Francisco because that's where the good developers live. You want to be here!

Despite making you get three different vendor quotes for a bloody keyboard, we only present one salary survey that justifies our salary bands. They're the only company that does it, honest.

The fact that it pays like we're in Greater Duluth is definitely curious, but NMFP.

You don't want a corporate credit card; that's paperwork. You'd much rather have the points on your own personal card. Go ahead and put your new laptop on your card and we'll reimburse you later.

Everyone has great credit. You'll never convince me otherwise.

The expense policies that apply to you versus the ones that apply to me are worlds apart. My kickboxing classes are "management training" which in light of this thread... fair.

We'll talk as if every employee were an engineer making engineering wages. The administrative assistant winces every time we talk about money, but who has two thumbs and couldn't give less of a shit? This guy!

And that about does it. Building this thread was easy; I lived most of it. When we built the Duckbill Group we set out to not do that.

If you want to come shitpost like this with me, get in touch. We're hiring a Director of Marketing. apply.workable.com/duckbillgroup/…

...and I really, really hope nobody quotes any of the tweets in this thread out of context or I'm in a whole mess of trouble.