What Startup Culture Codes Really Tell Us

You have no individuality. You have no rights. And the work you’re doing is not fun.

When I started in the tech work force many years ago, the closest thing we had to a corporate culture code was that occasionally a few of us would go out and play video games, or throw a frisbee around in the corporate parking lot. There were stories about those wacky places in California where business meetings took place in hot tubs and employees came to work wearing Tie-Dye shirts. On the more repressive East Coast, the nerds at Bell Labs — those same crazy kids who thought up Unix — had a freewheeling work culture where rumor had it they could occasionally be spotted sleeping mid-afternoon on the corporate park lawn. Heavens!

Then somewhere in the 90s and early aughts corporate culture became a thing when two wildly successful West Coast tech companies — do I even have to mention their names? — began to be known as places where nerd culture was thriving and making zillions of dollars.

However, things were a little different at my end of US Interstate 80. At around that time, I knew of Unix consultants who were making unheard of hourly rates on Wall Street. There wasn’t really a culture built around them — they were just high-paid help who were tolerated, just barely, by the bankers.

I once briefly worked at a fancy investment bank during the mid-90s as a consultant in the IT group: I was the guy could speak nerd and translate what they were saying to management. Ok, I was a…