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I remember sitting in rapture listening to a retired Chevron executive describing the way white collar work used to be. You basically got hired at a megacorp fo
by scottlocklin 8y ago
I remember sitting in rapture listening to a retired Chevron executive describing the way white collar work used to be. You basically got hired at a megacorp for life. If things didn't work out after the first couple of years, you were gently taken aside, given nothing new to do, and given a salary and an office for an entire year to find a new position. I was flabbergasted. Only professors with tenure or certain government workers have this kind of job stability, but the entire upper middle class had it at one point. Sure, none of them won .com lotto; they arguably had much better lives on average.
My dad was working class and in the union -he had a different kind of stability.
- Gibbon1 8y agoI talked to a Chevron Exec while stuck on a ski lift 30 years ago. Back then if they canceled or finished a project they just redeployed the workers to other projects. Vastly different than the current system where they just lay everyone off at the end. If things weren't working out bosses would just transfer employees to a role better suited to them. You'll get arguments this is more efficient cause free markets blah blah. However I know one semiconductor company in the valley that bucked that trend. Everyone went home at 5-6pm. Didn't work weekends. They just moved people around instead of firing them. And they totally crushed their competition over 20 years.
- Spooky23 8y ago100% agree with you. The modern organization is so short term focused and so dedicated to purging that they do not develop leadership and cannot handle failure. The cult of metrics breeds dumb. A big company is more like a Soviet enterprise than a functional business.
- pm90 8y agoI am very interested to know what you mean by the cult of metrics?
- sgt101 8y ago"What gets measured gets managed" - corrosively applied by establishing metrics that don't directly reflect business performance and are not under the control of the accountable people (NPS for example) and then directly and blindly using them to determine people's tenure or advancement. BUT! the development and use of metrics like this is helpful in many ways; the problem is that when really dumb people are asked to do this they use them in really dumb ways and this bit (the lack of capability and brains) is the big issue.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ramblerman 8y agoNot op, but metrics are the kingdom of middle-management. Things like "jira tickets closed per day" and other equally meaningless numbers that try create an illusion of productivity. The cult of metrics is then to optimize around the metric itself. Make smaller tickets so you can close more of them.
- scottlocklin 8y agoMBA thinking aka "looting everything that isn't bolted down" and "gaming some metric to make yourself look good" is arguably worse than not having a free market. It's funny, one of my historical bugaboos was the looting of Russia (aka US "economists" like Summers and Shleifer and allied oligarchs looting their economy), but if you look at what was going on in the US during the same period ... same thing. The US didn't do things like privatize LBNL and turn it into a disco, but I'm pretty sure there were people who would have argued for it.
- madcaptenor 8y agoWhat’s an “office”?