The first time I attended a recruiting event at Yahoo!, a panel of five enthusiastic employees gushed about why Yahoo! is a great company to work for. To sum up the entire presentation, they loved Yahoo! because they believed that it had and would continue to change the world. In other words, I thought they were freaks.
I like Yahoo!, and I agree that it has played an important role in our increasingly internet-dependent society. In fact, I am a Yahoo! small business customer, I have four different Yahoo! e-mail addresses, two different web sites hosted by Yahoo!, and Yahoo! is pretty much the only web service I access on my mobile phone. But I couldn't imagine fitting in with people who worship the company they work for. I was completely turned off by the presentation.
As always, I told anyone who asked (and several who didn't) exactly how I felt. One of them cleverly pointed out that the problem was me, not Yahoo!. She was, of course, more tactful than I am. The words she used formed sentences that sounded like, "You just don't belong to the Yahoo! cult. You belong to the Apple cult."
Over time, I've grown to understand that I really am a part of the Apple cult. How else would I have found a friend who follows an Apple-designed calendar? And what non-Apple-culter would understand and agree with celebrating Easter on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007? I would worship my company too if I worked for Apple. And I think it's awesome that employees love their company. So the Yahoo! guys weren't freaks afterall, they were simply evangelicals from a different cult.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment