Why Working At A 'Cool' Company Isn't All It's Cracked Up To Be

In the corporate world, there is a defined hierarchy of coolness. In recent years, tech companies (your Googles and your Facebooks) tend to be at the top of the heap. Being seen as cool is now a recruiting imperative for a brand looking to attract top young talent. Some companies are able to update their image successfully (see 3M supplanting Google as the most coveted 2016 workplace for millennials) and some fail more awkwardly than your 60-year-old dentist wanting to chat about Frank Ocean’s new album while he’s drilling your teeth. Consider the hilarious Microsoft intern recruitment email that went viral last month.

But cool isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. I was looking into a SaaS product last week and stumbled across the company’s blog. What caught my eye was a post about internal culture and how the company had been “experimenting” with it. In the space of approximately 18 months, they had cycled through various approaches to structuring their work -- at one point or another doing away with job titles, getting rid of managers, allowing employees to decide their own salaries and letting everyone pick which project they’d like to be associated with instead of having a defined set of job responsibilities. These permutations didn’t sound enlightening so much as utterly exhausting. When you dig behind a company's cachet of "cool," you'll often find some unpleasant surprises.

They often don’t try hard.

Just like a beautiful person who gets by on looks without ever having to develop much of a personality or an athlete whose off-the-field antics are forgiven in light of his prodigious talent, cool companies don’t necessarily have to back up their image with solid management and positive working conditions. They know that by virtue of rep alone, they’ll be able to attract fresh talent on demand, that there will be a seemingly endless line of eager young employees who will overlook stress, disorganization, non-existent HR policies or (hilariously) shady promotional practices in order to be able to boast a stint at a hot employer on their resume. If you don't care about a little crying at your desk, you'll be fine!

They’re frequently cliquish.

Fit is a hugely important consideration for any job seeker, but fit can make or break you at a cool employer. Often, being committed to the company counts as much if not more than your actual job performance. Simply keeping your head down and doing your job professionally isn’t enough. These companies are able to maintain their coolness because they hire and promote people who are willing to go all in on the way of life they’re selling and they’re quick to smoke out anyone who doesn’t sip the company Kool-Aid. If you’re the type to draw a distinct line between your professional and personal life, expect to feel like an outsider at a company with a 100-slide deck outlining its cultural code, mandatory quarterly retreats and competitive office ping-pong, softball and ultimate Frisbee leagues. They’re looking for active evangelists, not solitary monks.

The work may not be as cool as the image.

A cool reputation is no hedge against boring, tedious work. A company’s public image doesn’t necessarily translate into a stimulating environment with plenty of challenging initiatives to sink your teeth into. A stodgy-seeming brand might have hidden within its walls a dynamic R&D lab where young engineers get to go wild dreaming up projects to improve the longevity of car tires or house paint. The hot unicorn employer du jour may have a 50-person team paid minimum wage to spend all day answering support tickets from irate customers who want to complain about its app’s functionality. As first-person narratives tell us, no matter how cool a company seems, there is always unglamorous entry-level work to be done.