I would be interested in what gave you the impression I was being
dismissive, I was shooting for compassionate.

Tell you what, now that I have a bit of time, allow me to share with
you my reasoning on why I responded the way I did, and perhaps you can
share what you got out of our author's post.

I have always held that 'snark' is a unit of emotional hurt, and this
particular posting appeared to be quite snarky. When I read
provocative prose with words like 'lies' and 'nuevo-social' and '1%
poster children' I see snark. And in this case 'I got no pony!'[1] level
of snark. Thus I read the posting with the impression that the author
had suffered a strong emotional blow and was venting. With that much
hurt (perceived) I gave them slack for their otherwise very sloppy
reasoning.

Our author asserts, "Culture is about power dynamics, unspoken
priorities and beliefs, mythologies, conflicts, enforcement of social
norms, creation of in/out groups and distribution of wealth and
control inside companies." which is a highly arguable statement. I
would posit that culture is about creating a structure to both set
expectations and define success in an environment. Nothing about power
over you or creating "in" or "out" groups or wealth or any of the
things our author asserts. Our author further asserts that "Culture
is exceedingly difficult to talk about honestly." which is also
not true, they are attempting to be "honest" here in spite of their
own declaration.

As the topical 'setup' for what is an emotional rant, the entire
position statement in the first five paragraphs says exactly one thing
"I (the author) am mad that I am unable to understand (or possibly to
accept) what people are asking of me with regards to my behavior
around others."

What follows then are a series of "sound bytes" pulled out as
sub-heads with the author's flawed understanding of what they mean.
The author has gone out of their way at times to attribute a level of
deceit and malice to others that borders on paranoid but let's stick
with what they wrote and go over it shall we?

On the sound bite "We make sure to hire people who are a cultural fit"
the author claims the intent is " ... We have implemented a loosely
coordinated social policy to ensure homogeneity in our workforce. We
are able to reject qualified, diverse candidates on the grounds that
they aren't a culture fit. while not having to examine what that
means ..."

That reads very much like they (or someone they knew) considered
themselves "qualified" and yet their application for employment
was "rejected as a poor cultural fit." It seems they have taken
the path that it is simpler to blame this on some malicious prep
school like club when, on closer inspection it never is. The fact is
that startups are desperate for qualified talent, that is what makes
them go, however if the way in which a candidate comports themselves
suggests they will cause friction with people who are already hired
then, even if they are qualified, hiring them would be a bad decision
if it increased problems at work.

Let's used a contrived example, lets say that three guys decide to
start a company and they have always had a rich tradition of
commenting their code. In fact they often exchange ideas in comments
as they check things into a source repository. They find that this
transparency in the thought process allows them to evolve the code
based faster in a compatible way. Now, when interviewing to employee
#1 (or #10 doesn't really matter) they ask about writing comments in
code and the candidate replies : "Writing comments in code
just slows me down, anyone to stupid to not be able to see what the
code does shouldn't be reading my code." They may stop right there and
say, "Thanks, but your not a cultural fit for company."

Nothing about power, nothing about secret societies, just a knowledge
that working with this candidate won't "flow" because they depend on
that dialog in comments and this candidate is unwilling to write
comments. It's the founder's company, and this is a classic case of
find people who are "a cultural fit."

Sound byte number two is "Meetings are evil and we have them as little
as possible." which our author conveniently translates to "We have a
collective post-traumatic stress reaction to previous workplaces that
had hostile, unnecessary, unproductive and authoritarian meetings."

One asks (and I did) "Where did that come from?" And I answered myself
with "I wonder if this person doesn't have any tools for keeping in touch
with what is going on, and so a lack of meetings threatens them."
Because keeping in touch as a developer is as straight forward as
reading the commit log and talking to people. Now from a strategy,
vision, mission perspective? Sure you want someone to let you know
where you are heading, but most engineers hate a weekly status
meetings that don't provide any value. So it seems our author has
again projected their own mis-understanding into some malicious
deceit.

One which stuck right out was the response to "We don't have a
vacation policy." The authors interpretation of this is "We fool
ourselves into thinking we have a better work/life balance when really
people take even less vacation than they would when they had a
vacation policy."

It would have helped had the author suggested what they interpret that
to imply (wow that is a lot of indefinits!) but they chose not to so
we have to speculate. Immature individuals will interpret a 'no
vacation policy' to mean they can take vacation whenever, and for as
long as, they want. A more reasoned interpretation is that folks can
count on taking some time off to rest and recover once their product
ships. A 'no explicit policy' does not mean that folks don't care
how much you produce, rather it has always meant that you take time
off to keep your productivity high when you are at work. Some people
cannot handle that level of responsibility, either through lack of
maturity or through mixed expectations. It isn't the culture that is
evil though. Its like teachers who don't grade the homework, they
still expect you to do it so that you have satisfied yourself that
you understand the material. It doesn't mean "woo hoo we don't have to
do the homework!"

Every single 'culture' point our author attacks they do so in a way
the imputes some amazing ill will on the person espousing the point.

The most charitable interpretation I could come up with was that this
person was feeling hurt, I accept that it is possible they are simply
quite immature, or unable to internalize the concept of a culture
model based on peer respect rather than explicit rules. I don't know
if they read HN but on the off chance they did, I was trying to
express, compassionately, that people aren't trying to deceive you
with this discussion of culture, they are trying to communicate. Once
you understand what they are saying you will understand better whether
or not you want to work with them. I guess I failed at that.

[1] http://i-want-a-pony.com/