4 ms·

He and his executive team had just somehow driven hundreds of people to work hard for months, giving 20 hour days, even 48 hour sleepless stints... If put in m

• meterplech 16y ago
  Maybe, but this is in stark contrast to the courage of Pixar's bosses in saving their employees that recently was on the front page. Easy to be cynical about life in BigCorp and the vicissitudes of your bosses, but doesn't make it any less wrong to treat people who trust you this way.
  • wmeredith 16y ago
    I think it's a telling contrast when compared against the success of the respective companies.
  • rbanffy 16y ago
    > the courage of Pixar's bosses in saving their employees that recently was on the front page It can also be a rational decision. If you believe the layoffs being imposed on you will cripple the company, it's better to leave the failure to your successor.
• nhangen 16y ago
  Exactly, and if you aren't happy, why not quit? You can't tell me that people at MySpace with technical skill couldn't find a better job somewhere else.
  • endtime 16y ago
    If you were a skilled technical worker at Myspace, wouldn't you have already left by now?
    • shubber 16y ago
      I for one have heard a lot of stories of interesting technical work being done at MySpace. Sure, as a website it's terrible, but there's a lot of demand for scale that was happening much earlier than it was elsewhere.
      • endtime 16y ago
        Have they really had to scale up at any point in the last 3-4 years?
• patio11 16y ago
  Jack Welch once said something to the effect of "On Friday, after you receive your paycheck, you and the company are even." Corporate America seems to have mostly embraced this. I'm perfectly fine with that as long as all parties are on the same page. You would have to be a singular company to make me trust any promise, explicit or implicit, about monetary or non-monetary compensation which had a time horizon longer than a paycheck cycle. I'm not intending on ever being a salaryman again, but if I were, an American company which even suggested the desirability of a deathmarch would receive a firm handshake and my two-weeks notice immediately. (There are quite a few Japanese companies where I'd actually trust the company to make good on its side of The Offer. It's still not a good offer, but it's at least understandable to me that someone might take them up on it.)
  • rdtsc 16y ago
    Just curious, why such a distinction between an American and a Japanese company?
    • gwern 16y ago
      The salaryman culture isn't dead in Japan; and that culture came as a bargain - loyalty was a two-way street, as the saying goes. So he would consider working without contractual guarantees because those corporations still have a track record of delivering without contractual guarantees. Whereas American corporations haven't had that spirit for a long time (replacing it with a letter-of-the-law attitude) and a number apparently actively seek to exploit their employees' delusions that some might still have that spirit, as this MySpace example perhaps illustrates.
    • cletus 16y ago
      I'm not sure to the degree it's still true but it was once true that in Japan a job was essentially for life. Not only did the employee have loyalty to the company but that loyalty was reciprocated. Like I said, it's probably not quite as much as once was but there is no doubt remnants of that still there. Chris Dixon eloquently articulated the types of work relationships that exist more commonly in the developed world. Broadly, there is the transactional view (as per Jack Welch) or the collective view (eg a startup where you have some equity stake in the company). See http://cdixon.org/2009/10/23/twelve-months-notice/ http://cdixon.org/2009/10/23/twelve-months-notice/