throw_away_1234

100% agree. I think it's also important to acknowledge the extent to which financial distortion can cause cognitive distortion. Some other comments here have pointed out that this person probably made between three and five million US Dollars per year, and the commenters have used this information to reach some relatively specious conclusions (e.g. that comments against the work culture are not founded due to the amount of money in play).

It is true that most people cannot even imagine making enough money to buy six to ten million Jack in the Box tacos every year. I am a public defender, and this person's alleged salary exceeds the annual budget of most places I have worked, and the five-year budget of some of them. I think it's precisely this effect that makes the article itself so problematic.

Nobody would care what this person thought about work culture (or hire them to consult on the topic) if they didn't graduate from a SV unicorn that generated mythic profit. But many people, especially hopeful managers will read this, and try to emulate the obviously toxic and harmful practices espoused by the author. Emulation will be more harmful than the original practice, because organizations who emulate will not have junior level employees who can buy four to seven reasonably priced single family homes in NYC every year.

I say "organizations" rather than "companies" because fetishization of the hypercapitalist "grow fast and get rich" myth is not limited to the for-profit world. Plenty of government agencies and nonprofits will read blogs like this and plunder their organizations in a misguided quest for success.

Entangled with this is a causation fallacy. There is actually no reason to believe that Stripe was successful because of its culture. I acknowledge that this is not the author's explicit thesis, but one must make that underlying assumption to engage with the article. I think the most we should responsibly believe (I'm doing my best to be generous to the author), is that all of the toxic policies and cultural artifacts described in the article were endemic in the industry at the time. For example, everyone was expected to eat dinner at work, but it just felt good at this time and place because of the culture. With that frame, it's just as easy to infer that the causal link is reversed: it was more tolerable to work at Stripe because the company was sufficiently funded that it could hire the author at a salary which allowed her to buy a fully loaded Tesla Model X either three or four times every month.

If you reflect on it and decide that you can't let it go, try to arrange your possible actions in terms of escalating intensity. Many of the first steps have already been suggested and the exact order of gravity will depend on your organization (e.g. going to manager may be more intense than mentioning in slack, depending on org culture), but roughly:

1) Raise privately in your direct line of authority ("I am uncomfortable with...");

2) Build any possible consensus and raise publicly as a common issue ("We have noticed...");

3) Skip a level of management and raise privately ("A few of us on different teams have noticed x and I thought you would be the person to bring it to");

4) Don't comply.

Then think about which is the least intense intervention which is likely to be effective.

Try to reflect at every phase. Perhaps you decide that it's worth raising with your direct supervisor, but then not worth going any further. Also consider that order of operations matters and some actions will block you from using others later. A classic example is if you start with talking to supervisor (1), you will probably not ever be able to ignore the rule (4). Another is that starting with (3) could prevent (1), (2), and (4).

Finally, try to determine and neutralize the underlying perceived need. I used to work at a place that had a 5pm all-staff every month. At some point I decided that management would be unlikely to move the meeting to within work hours, so I tried providing a written work progress update to my supervisor and skipping the meeting (4). I didn't call out sick or make an excuse, I just said "I can't make 5pm this month, here is a progress report." It worked perfectly, so I started doing it every month. This strategy would probably have failed if I hadn't predicted the objection and solved the management concern.