The moment I understood the company's values weren't real didn't arrive with a scandal or a resignation. It happened in a conference room on a Wednesday or Thursday afternoon, during what was supposed to be a routine discussion about hiring plans.

The slide on the wall listed the familiar phrases. Excellence. Transparency. Ownership. Merit. The typography was clean and assertive, the kind that implies inevitability. We'd all seen the deck before. The words and phrases appeared in onboarding sessions and offsites, printed on thick paper and passed around like something ceremonial or religious. Managers used those phrases to frame employee feedback. New hires were taught to quote those words, use them in decisions.

The founder stood at the front of the room, jacket off, pacing slightly. He had the relaxed confidence of someone who knew the company was, in the final sense, his.

He was charismatic and quite often right. That combination makes scrutiny feel almost impolite. When someone is correct frequently enough, disagreement begins to feel like poor judgment, and eventually something like disloyalty. The founder never demanded that feeling, but he didn't have to.

We were reviewing team performance when the conversation shifted, casually, toward "dead weight."

He didn't use names and didn't need to. The room understood.

He talked about people who were "not hungry enough." He said it lightly, almost playfully. The kind of comment designed to float in the air for a bit, not land. People who treated this like a job instead of a mission. People who "checked out early."

There were seven or eight of us in the room. Some of the people he was likely describing were sitting at the table.

One of them was a man who always left at five.

He was one of the more reliable people on the team. Never flashy, not loud. He delivered on what he promised and stayed calm when projects turned messy. He left every day at the same time to pick up his son from school. He'd mentioned it once early on, almost apologetically, and then never again. He didn't make a show of it and just left when he needed to.

The founder laughed and said something like, "You can tell who's serious by who's still here at eight."

A few people laughed with him. Not loudly. Just enough.

The man who left at five looked at his laptop, expression neutral. He didn't smile or defend himself. His posture never changed. I remember thinking how practiced that stillness must have been.

Behind the founder, the slide still said Merit.

Not one person pointed at it. No one asked how staying late correlated with excellence. No one asked whether output mattered more than visible devotion.

Sitting there, watching the founder casually signal that belonging required physical presence and visible sacrifice, I understood something simpler. Proximity was the metric. Hunger was not about output. It was about allegiance.

Eventually, I asked whether this was the right way to think of impact. "Some of us can't be in the office that long."

The values on the slide were not lies, exactly. They were just not what decided things.

After that meeting, some in the room reorganized in small ways.

People lingered more visibly in the evenings. Slack messages sent after nine carried a certain tone. One-on-ones with the founder became a form of currency. There were those who already had easy access and those who did not. The difference became clearer once you knew what to look for.

I told myself I was just being pragmatic to schedule more check-ins. I made sure my work was visible in the right channels. I stayed later than I needed to on days when leaving at five would have been unremarkable before. When the founder made a joke at someone's expense, I smiled in the careful way that signals understanding without enthusiasm. It felt less like compromise than adaptation, the ordinary business of learning a system's actual rules and following them.

The father left a few months later. His departure was framed as mutual. The values page didn't change.

Which was when I stopped reading it.

New hires kept arriving, earnest and slightly disoriented. They absorbed the principles during onboarding and tried to navigate by them. The most perceptive adjusted quickly, and the most literal struggled longest. You could see the confusion when recognition flowed toward whoever had been in the room with the founder that week. The newest kept searching for the meritocracy they had been promised and interpreted their confusion as personal failure.

Meanwhile, the values became punchlines in private. Irony is an early-warning system. When humor starts orbiting the culture deck, something underneath has already shifted.

The words themselves remained good words. That was part of the strangeness. They described something worth building. A company where the man who left at five would have been rewarded for reliability rather than quietly marked as insufficiently hungry.

I sometimes wonder whether the problem was the words or the absence of courage to enforce them.

Enforcing "Merit" would have required something visible. It would have required defending the man who left at five, not in private but in the room. It would have required saying that output mattered more than posture. It would have required irritating the inner circle, slowing the evenings, accepting that hunger looks different when you have a child waiting.

It would have required the founder to contradict himself. It would have required the rest of us to back him when he did. I didn't test whether that version of the company could exist. I adjusted to the one that did.

There are companies whose values alter infrastructure. Netflix’s early culture deck is the canonical example. Remove the principle and the organization would have had to redesign itself. Others optimize around aggression and get what they optimize for¹.

What unsettled me was not that power collected around a founder. Every organization has gravity. Influence compounds. That part is ordinary and entirely natural.

What unsettled me was the coexistence of two systems. One printed and ceremonial. One performed and decisive. The printed one spoke in universal principles. The performed one ran on instinct and above all, access.

The slide described an aspiration. The room described the system.

Years later, I still find myself clicking the "Our Values" page when I land on a new company's website.

I read the words slowly. I try to imagine the conference room.

I'm never quite sure which ones decide.

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