How corporate culture excludes me, or why I never bothered interviewing at Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

Every so often, I read an article breathlessly talking about the greatness of any particular meeting process and how everyone should aspire to such a meeting culture. And it got me thinking about my career choices.

I never interviewed at Google earlier in my career because they wanted my grades. My grades undersold my abilities because of my neurodiversity. And anyone who thought they measured me accurately was probably a place I never wanted to work at. And then there was this whole class of companies founded by ex-googlers that I associate with that culture and choose not to even consider. I didn’t trust them to judge me based on deeply flawed metrics.

I never interviewed at Facebook because I saw how they had these all-night hack-a-thons, and I was about to be a dad, and I never wanted to work at a company where spending the night hacking was a requirement for my job. In particular, I knew that the people who could spend time would build social relationships that endured, and I would be formally excluded from them or have to choose not to see my kid. There were these youtube videos of the corporate culture and the hacking, and I was like – Nope, not for me. At Zynga, we introduced hack-a-thons, and folks wanted to mimic the all-night nature, and I remember throwing a temper tantrum in an exec meeting, and we agreed that they would not be all-night extravaganzas.

And so similarly, if a recruiter said ex-Facebook, I was like – probably not the kind of place where wanting to be with your family and in your bed will be a place for career growth.

I never interviewed at Amazon and had panic attacks when folks at VMware wanted to introduce Amazon-style meetings because, again, because of my neurodiversity, I knew it would exclude me. But I was always curious whether it was as bad as I thought.

Amazon came to VMware to have a meeting complete with a six-pager, and I was in the meeting because they needed my buy-in to get some technical work done. The meeting was precisely the disaster I expected. I was expected to read a print-out (I use text-to-voice) in some standard font (I use Open Dyslexic). I was expected to read this wall of text in 20 minutes (I scored in the bottom 3% of the population in reading and retaining information) and offer comments.

Did the Amazon employee ask if this works for me? No. Instead, I was expected to endure. So I did my best. What made it worse was that my other coworkers happily did this work. That was humiliating. I felt I was being denied access and treated as a semi-human being. And I realized I could never work with Amazon as a partner or an employee. And companies would copy this style, and I would be pushed out of those companies as well. And that this megalith of a corporation was about to kick me out of the tech industry. Talk about motivation to make VMware win.

And if I was in a charitable mood at the beginning of the meeting, I was livid by the time we got to my chance to talk. I was like, damn if they are this inconsiderate to partners, I can’t begin to imagine how they treat employees, and I thought – nope, not for me. They came to get my support, and their meeting structure did the wrong thing.

In the end, I was determined to ensure Amazon failed. I wanted them to fail. Because if their success meant more of these meetings, by god, I would do everything in my power to fight back.

I will observe their proposal was ridiculous, and it never went anywhere, more or less for the reasons I described in the meeting. I wasted an hour reviewing a ridiculous proposal and being humiliated.

A win, I guess?

Every so often, someone asks why it is such a big deal, and Sheri Byrne-Haber (disabled) explains it oh so well. Because those meetings are designed to make people like me less effective, I wonder if that’s the intent. But I know me, and mine are not welcome, and I will leave.

Now, I will observe that I had to grow up as well. When I got into a position of power, I, too, wanted meetings that only worked for me. And my team blew a gasket and demanded change, and so I changed begrudgingly. But it was only when I got into a shouting match with a senior executive who wanted the text, not a draining meeting, and we argued. I learned that to be inclusive, I had to accommodate his needs as much as he had to accommodate mine. So I used voice-to-text to produce documents, and he used tools to create text I could process via audio systems.

The point is that any rigid system is a rigid system. And its purpose is to force people to conform and, if that conformance doesn’t work for them, to force them out. And if you want to work with all the best and the brightest, then you need to be flexible and creative and not rely on rigid rules of how meetings must work.