I suspect, as someone early in his career, what you interpret as "asshole," pg interprets as niceness. From pg's perspective, those whip-cracking middle managers are getting the productivity they need to make his or Ron's investments increase in value. You're on the receiving end of some harshness, but the money-men don't care. Why should they?
Its amusing when we play the moralism card in business. I'm fairly personable and I'm sure would be considered nice, but if tomorrow I opened the worst sweatshop in Vietnam and turned $10,000 into $1m I would be praised. pg or my investors wouldn't care about the social issues of the young people working in my sweatshop, or if they cared, it wouldn't be enough to deem me a villain. They get to meet a fairly nice guy who can turn a little money into a lot. I'd brand myself a fashion entrepreneur, write some pretentious blog postings careful to never address labor concerns, and be done with it. The nitty gritty isn't on a level where investors and other money-men care about. They care about my workers as much as they care about the electrons in my CPU that powers my website. Its works, right? It makes money? Fine. You're "nice." No, I am absolutely not. I own an abusive sweatshop.
This is one of the problems of judging people by their forward facing personality. Its easy to be personable and charismatic when you have money or social capital. I have people below me who have to be mean. I don't need to be. The same way Putin kisses babies and tells jokes on TV while his troops murder civilians and annex land in Ukraine with impunity.
There's a meta narrative here that's concerning as well. Programmers tend to be INTJ males. We have bad social skills and are often naïve. What does this say about charisma and those who can use it effectively? Are we easy to game? I think so. pg's essays are usually top notch except when they're about soft social skills. These last two are questionable, at least to me. I feel the niceness question is a bit more complex than pg suggests, and often it fits not only into a hard game-theory framework but also a soft social skill framework that encompasses everything from salesmanship to how we talk to power or act when we are the ones with power.
Mine was more like:
Owner
"Shit you are leaving??? Can't you stay at least until xxx so we can deliver xxx and save our asses?"
Me
"Hum... I really need to start next week, but I will do my best"
I stayed for one month more that I needed in contract, my new employer was pissed of but agreed with it. In the end the Owner didn't pay me my leave that was due and was agreed to be paid and delayed the pay of that month for 15 days. I had to threaten them with a lawsuit to get that last month payment.
I've had harsh managers and 2 of them are my friends now. That is nothing related to that is about being a scumbag.
> Mine was more like: Owner "Shit you are leaving??? Can't you stay at least until xxx so we can deliver xxx and save our asses?"
Dude, you gotta learn to say no. I would categorize this as letting people walk over you.
I understand the desire to do a good job and help out others as much as you can but keep in mind that when you help someone the overall net outcome needs to be positive. If your helping someone results in more harm to you than help to the other person, you need to walk away.
I got the impression from your post that you made a commitment to your new employer that you're going to start on a particular date. And your old employer wanted you to break that commitment because they had some deadlines of their own to meet.
At this point you if stay longer at your old job, you're inconveniencing two entities: (a) yourself because you're not going to look professional to your new employer if you make a commitment (or even give the impression of a commitment) to join at a particular time and then not deliver, and (b) your new employer because they may have made certain plans based on your availability.
In theory, it's possible that the work you were going to do at your old place is so important that this situation could result in a net positive even if you broke the commitment you made, but I think it's unlikely. And in any case, even if your old employer really really really wanted you around, they need to compensate the new place too, not just you!
The way I would've dealt with this would be to tell my boss something like this: "I can't stay longer because I've made a commitment to the new company and they have made plans based on my availability. However, if you think that having me around is very crucial, let's bring them into the loop as well and we can work out some terms under which you can compensate them and me for being more flexible in my leaving dates."
At this point, my guess is that a scumbag will backpedal because any stunt they pull will now be documented by multiple people.
If your boss says "Before you quit, stay and do X at the usual pay rate", this is probably a boss that doesn't respect your decision to quit in the first place. (Probably you quit because you don't want to continue doing Xs at the usual pay rate). The correct answer is either "No" or "Sure, but it will cost you $TEXAS".
For what it's worth, I know exactly the type of thing you're talking about. So I wanted to chime in and say "No, you're not crazy, even though everyone else in this thread seems to be trying to convince you that you are."
Getting To Yes, if you haven't read it, might be a good read for you. It's specifically about negotiating, but in general, the theme of the book is mutually beneficial arrangements are vastly superior to one sided arrangements.
I've been in similar situations to the one you described and I wish I had some of the knowledge and skills I have now. I could have helped the dude out and negotiated for some more money while doing it.
> pg or my investors wouldn't care about the social issues of the young people working in my sweatshop
I think it's rude to accuse people of hypothetical malfeasance. If there's evidence that someone is callous, show us the evidence. If you think you know of scenarios in which they would be callous, then just tell us what evidence led you to that conclusion instead.
Considering pg praises Ronco's investing background without even mentioning his controversial high-profile political background, I think its fair to say that pg probably isn't too concerned with the social issues at play here. None of his essays seem to address labor rights either. I'm certainly using him in a hypothetical for my argument, but its not an entirely fictional and unfair strawman. I think on the investor level, at least from my personal experience, skill workers are just cogs. They are part of a money making machine, and their concerns are very much at the lower end of importance. This is why we can have things like secret deals not to poach engineers and the H1B problem.
I think by the standards of casual internet commentary, my comment is perfectly acceptable and appropriate and using high-profile characters in hypotheticals to make a point is fine. If NVIDIA did something displeasing to the FOSS community and someone wrote, "Oh man, Linus is going to full asshole on them tomorrow," I doubt you would be white knighting him. Lets maybe turn down the pg fandom a bit, eh? He's certainly not above criticism.
The recent support pg gave to expanding the H1B program is arguably prima facie evidence of this "hypothetical malfeasance" behavior. Except I wouldn't characterize it as malfeasance. It is human nature to shy away from fractally complex issues, and supply chain ethics are very fractal. It would be a sufficient nightmare to validate the ethics of a lead pencil supply chain (cf., classic essay, "I, Pencil" [1], leaven with healthy critiques [2]), not to speak of programmer labor markets and laptop manufacturing supply chains.
It is counter-productive to use a binary evil/not-evil bit switch here. Rather, once you realize we all value our time, and an "I can't be bothered with those details" is an expression of that time preference (albeit in a manner that can be interpreted as malicious), it becomes easier to understand why we see this behavior. This doesn't mean you have to condone it and throw your hands in the air; understanding is the first step in debugging.
The line-crossing and bit flip can happen when someone else performs the dogged time-consuming legwork, assiduously gathers the evidence, and presents it on a silver platter, and the response is still a reflexive "I can't be bothered with those details". When that happens, at the very least Upton Sinclair's pithy observation is at play, and yes, at the very worst the basest of human nature is on full display.
There are nuances beyond all this of course, but that's a wall of text I shan't inflict upon you.
[3] It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it! From I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935), ISBN 0-520-08198-6.
And we are being conditioned to think of niceness in the personal level, and even worse judge with superficial BS like nice clothes, clean appereance, etc.
A well behaved rich person will immediately strike as "nicer" (with the meaning of "good" too) than a poor guy on the street or a homeless person, even if the latter has a heart of gold and the first is a huge negative for society. If the rich person is also famous, it's as if people lose their mind to its "aura".
This is probably because as a species we were "evolved" to look for immediate personal threat (attack etc), which looks more probable with a homeless person than with a well dressed oil baron or ruthless businessman. But the glitch is that we use that to also judge for "goodness" and morality.
Our entire economy is predicated on the notion that people get money by doing good things for society and the money is their reward. In that sense more money should correlate with more service to society. (Whether it does....)
We're also selfish, "good" is subjective. A homeless person can be as kind as they want but how much can they do for you? A rich person can benefit you in many ways and it may not cost them very much.
>Our entire economy is predicated on the notion that people get money by doing good things for society and the money is their reward.
Yeah. It's an idea of protestant origins (initially: wealth is a kind of reward for the fair from God), and one that, as someone from a non-protestant country, abhor.
>A homeless person can be as kind as they want but how much can they do for you? A rich person can benefit you in many ways and it may not cost them very much.
People are more often screwed in the large by rich persons than by homeless persons. For starters, homeless persons don't start many wars, nor do they get trillion dollar bailouts for collapsing the economy...
Its amusing when we play the moralism card in business. I'm fairly personable and I'm sure would be considered nice, but if tomorrow I opened the worst sweatshop in Vietnam and turned $10,000 into $1m I would be praised. pg or my investors wouldn't care about the social issues of the young people working in my sweatshop, or if they cared, it wouldn't be enough to deem me a villain. They get to meet a fairly nice guy who can turn a little money into a lot. I'd brand myself a fashion entrepreneur, write some pretentious blog postings careful to never address labor concerns, and be done with it. The nitty gritty isn't on a level where investors and other money-men care about. They care about my workers as much as they care about the electrons in my CPU that powers my website. Its works, right? It makes money? Fine. You're "nice." No, I am absolutely not. I own an abusive sweatshop.
This is one of the problems of judging people by their forward facing personality. Its easy to be personable and charismatic when you have money or social capital. I have people below me who have to be mean. I don't need to be. The same way Putin kisses babies and tells jokes on TV while his troops murder civilians and annex land in Ukraine with impunity.
There's a meta narrative here that's concerning as well. Programmers tend to be INTJ males. We have bad social skills and are often naïve. What does this say about charisma and those who can use it effectively? Are we easy to game? I think so. pg's essays are usually top notch except when they're about soft social skills. These last two are questionable, at least to me. I feel the niceness question is a bit more complex than pg suggests, and often it fits not only into a hard game-theory framework but also a soft social skill framework that encompasses everything from salesmanship to how we talk to power or act when we are the ones with power.