Is this a roundabout way of saying that they wish to hire folks on a short term basis, make them work really hard, pay pennies on the dollar and then fire them?
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
219 points (99.1% liked)
LinkedinLunatics
5436 readers
17 users here now
A place to post ridiculous posts from linkedIn.com
(Full transparency.. a mod for this sub happens to work there.. but that doesn't influence his moderation or laughter at a lot of posts.)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Isn't 'bootstrap' a sorta dogwhistle in this scenario?
Or foreshadowing?
I always figured "bootstrap" means "I can't even get VCs who will throw money at anything to throw money at me."
Lol so you are denigrating companies that don't take VC funding? I imagine you'd have criticisms for companies which are VC-funded.
My company is bootstrapped which means we are forced to grow in a sustainable way, we listen to our customers and optimize the product for their experience, and we don't have to listen to any investors.
I'm very curious why "bootstrap" would be any sort of dogwhistle.
This meme made me look up the term "bootstrapped."
Which then made me wonder what a "bootstrap" is even supposed to look like.
Which led to a frustrating failure of an image search where I learned that even DuckDuckGo stopped accepting a minus sign to exclude search terms. Trying to look up any combination of "bootstrap -code -coding -web" etc. failed to bring up anything except the purple Bootstrap logo. My search was eventually resolved by separating the word into "boot" and "strap," but that's bullshit because according to multiple dictionary sites, "bootstrap" (in reference to a strap attached to a boot) is, indeed, one word. I even tried Google (lord help me), just to confirm this isn't some niche DDG difference.
It seems that literal bootstraps are so out of fashion, that simply finding pictures of them is a challenge. Yet people keep using the phrase "pick yourself up by your bootstraps" as if it's an intuitive symbol everyone understands. I don't know about you, but I've never used bootstraps, and the concept sounds as old-timey as hitching a wagon to a horse.
So, a lot of times archaic terms get preserved in an idiom. A good example of this is "moot point" or "bated breath". Most people understand what those phrases mean, but they probably don't know what a "moot" is or what "bated" means. This is not that, though.
A bootstrap is the strap at the back of a boot that you use to help pull the boot onto your foot. Every pair of boots I've ever owned has had them.
Not sure what Century you're hailing from, but all my boots have bootstraps, so do my climbing shoes.