Tech's 'best place to work' grift - The Australian Financial Review

Rear Window

Mark Di StefanoReporter

Jun 6, 2023 – 8.00pm

In a packed field, there are few more dry retch-inducing workplace legacies of the Silicon Valley-era than the corporate collective noun.

You can trace the trend back to Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page calling employees “Googlers”, and Jeff Bezos dubbing his “Amazonians”.

Twitter now hires “Tweeps”, Pinterest has “Pinployees”. In Australia, the country’s most valuable private start-up refers to employees as “Canvanauts”.

Linktree founders Anthony Zaccaria, Nick Humphreys and Alex Zaccaria. Eamon Gallagher

Corporate nicknaming is designed to make employees feel like they’re part of something bigger, and more meaningful, than just building software.

You’re not in a Uniqlo-wearing cult. This is a family. We have a barista, free massage Fridays, and the toasted almonds are on us. (Also, please don’t unionise!)

It’s also a helpful way for the boss to infantilise the workforce when things go bad.

On Tuesday morning, one of Australia’s most promising tech start-ups, Linktree, sacked a quarter of its staff. Co-founder Alex Zaccaria addressed the internal memo to his “Linkies”, telling them the link profile service popular with influencers and OnlyFans porn stars was pivoting to the United States.

“To be able to hire for those roles and further our growth in the US, we will be reducing our overall team by about 27% today, primarily impacting Linkies based in Australia and New Zealand,” he wrote.

This message wasn’t just sent to underlings. He posted the email to his own public LinkedIn page first thing in the morning.

In this, Zaccaria has taken the lead from other start-up founders who feel the need to publicise the “difficult decisions” they have to make. Job cuts are not the result of bad commercial moves. Or a company’s lack of an actual business model. Bad news is an external event. No one is actually responsible.

For the T-shirt and chino class, sacking workers has become a personal branding event.

The mass Linkie slaughter comes at an awkward time. Less than two months ago, Linktree was crowned by this masthead as the Best Place to Work award in the medium-sized organisation category, and the Best Place to Work in the technology sector.

Zaccaria and his co-founders were given the award because of their $6000 in benefit programs and commitment to transparency. “The team understands every aspect of what affects their role and every aspect of what affects the company’s growth and trajectory,” he told The Australian Financial Review.

The grand winner this year of the AFR BOSS Best Place to Work was VC firm Blackbird Ventures. Numerous sources describe it as being quite pushy with employees in the lead-up, coaching them on Slack about how to fill in the surveys.

It should come as no surprise that these types of awards are extremely appealing in tech. Not only are they important, crucial storytelling to investors, but they can easily be gamed by firms with buzzy incentives and employees going through Stockholm Syndrome.

In their pursuit of a kinder, better workplace, VC-backed firms too often seem to forget the best employee perks are more cash and being treated like an adult.

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