14 ms·

For decades, I never thought people who kiss ass could have been serious. I was sure they were just cynically playing a game of advancement, and I despised them

For decades, I never thought people who kiss ass could have been serious. I was sure they were just cynically playing a game of advancement, and I despised them for it. What I've come to learn -- as disappointing as it is to me -- is that some people view this sort of thing as actual, legitimate opportunity, and are acting out of internal integrity. They don't see the hypocrisy of the power imbalance and how the company is using them when acting this way. It just doesn't factor into their equation. Higher-ups look for these suck-ups, of course, but I see now that the "real" ones are the ones that really advance because of it. The process optimizes for what I call the "true believers." They wind up in positions where they can, and often do, impede the progress of people who want to make significant contributions to the bottom line. The remaining open question in my mind is to what percentage the "true believers" actually occupy positions of serious power in a Fortune 500 -- say, at the highest 3 levels -- and how many people promoting them are just knowingly using them and their precious lack of objectivity.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
taormina 6y ago
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... This is a fantastic read.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- EthanHeilman 6y ago
  As I was reading the above post, I started to remember reading an article on ribbon farm. The next response is someone posting the article I remember. The Hn bubble is real and in some cases has surprisingly low-entropy.
- eeeeehhhhh 6y ago
  I knew this was going to be posted. I've been thinking about this post for a decade now and I can't help but feel that, although it does reflect part of reality, the Gervais Principle is overly cynical in my opinion, and those who adopt the view will have it compounded by confirmation bias because it is partially true. The things described happen at toxic organizations but the author leaves no room for honest positive and meaningful work, and at risk of pointing out the obvious, there's a lot of meaningful work to be done. To the author of this post, finding meaning in your employment means that you're necessarily a sucker or a psychopath. Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients? And God forbid you find the real nobility in doing your workaday job and doing a good job at it, and feel good about yourself. According to the Gervais Principle that makes you the ultimate sucker. Adopting this philosophy is dooming oneself to a neverending feeling of being exploited and the argument that this is what is actually happening in totality is all philosophical opinion so why would I adopt a philosophy that is so personally ruinous, demoralizing, and demotivating?
  - ramblerman 6y ago
    Thank you for putting this so eloquently. I have been down this cycle myself becoming almost nihilistic and seeing it all as a pointless game of machiavelian diplomacy. These days I'm much more optimistic, and doing much better overall but in hindsight your explanation is exactly what I went through at my worst.
    - deagle50 6y ago
      Both scenarios can be true, you can be "clueless" and optimistic at the same time. Even if the Gervais Principle is real, it doesn't mean you need to be nihilistic. If your work is giving you meaning and joy, does it matter if sociopaths are benefiting more than you? It's kind of like being resentful of professional athletes, it simply wasn't in the cards... Saying this as a definite "loser" btw.
  - mdpopescu 6y ago
    > Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients? In fiction? Back on the original topic, Erik Dietrich's "Developer Hegemony" has a less extreme view of the corporation; worth reading IMO.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- minsc__and__boo 6y ago
  This is too true. I just went through a full MacLeod cycle in the past three years and can attest how uncanny the accuracy is.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
  Wow. And what's so startling about this breakdown is that you can figure out which of the 3 groups someone is in within 10 minutes of your first meeting with them.
- tommilukkarinen 6y ago
  This article is interestingly promotes kinda flawed communist thinking about 'overperforming losers'. Most companies make 'reasonable' profits or even losses. You could say normal range for profits is -5% to +10%. When the company is people intensive, it basically means, that revenue is paid in salaries. For better salaries to be paid, profits must grow first. For profits to grow, existing people must perform better. If profits don't grow, salaries can't follow. Now when profits grow, we face a decision on how to split the new profits, and it does not always fall on the existing employees. Sometimes profits go into hiring new people, sometimes they go into pockets of the owners. But I have also often seen in my 25 year career, that performers are compensated. I have also always seen the costs rise, and the costs been mostly salaries. So profits eventually go to the pockets of the employees. So actually it is good idea for everyone to perform, because if the profit growth stops, salary growth stops as well. Anyway, my bottom line is that this 'sociopath, clueless, loser' is flawed thinking, but probably something people genuinely believe in just like many people believe that vaccines are bad.
  - TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
    The article addresses this. You're just talking about the early stages/small company part of the lifecycle. In my case, working for a 100-year-old manufacturing company, I looked around the cube farm one day, and realized there is a small army of people who's job it is to festoon every vertical space within eyesight, at scores of facilities across the globe, with flyers and promotionals and health insurance factoids and retirement plans and educational resources and on and on and on. (And maps of the cube warrens, because people thought wacky floorpans were cool 40 years ago.) Those are the definition of "Loser" jobs, and they're everywhere. My company is so far down the article's referenced lifecycle that there are several large groups of people who copy information from the mainframe into Excel sheets, and then hand this over to another group who take that information, and put it back into the mainframe. And the "Clueless" have fought me, tooth and nail, to try to improve these kinds of barbarous workflows.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
gabereiser 6y ago
It's not just Amazon. You'd be surprised at how middle-upper management operates the same way at large enterprises. At least from my experience. Some were good at their jobs, most were there because of who they knew.
- GordonS 6y ago
  I've worked at various enterprise-scale companies over the past 2 decades, and this has been my observation too. As you say, there are exceptions, but a lot of managers are there because they've "played the game" well - they're good at networking, know the right people, say the right things at the right times, and when they think it will help them, they don't hesitate to throw other people under a bus.
TriNetra 6y ago
You'll get millions of dollars invested in hype-and-nothing-really-to-show-for-it startups, or sold for hundreds of millions of dollars to a fortune 500 the product which is then phased out into a black whole in an year two from the buyer company's portfolio for the same reasons – having found a right connection at one of those three levels.
- higerordermap 6y ago
  When all this bullshit actually works, I feel like there's something deeply wrong with the way modern bureaucracies are structured. If people have knowledge of field they are going to manage, this is less likely to happen. As Joel Spolsky puts it, The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
brnt 6y ago
The things people will do for crumbs. The poor or middleclass aren't the only ones mind you. You find willing lackeys at every paygrade.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
vimacs2 6y ago
This rings so true and is seen in a lot of other industries as well. I believe the world of gaming is among the worst for this where hordes of customers ardently defend the clearly abusive practices of multinational companies that do not give the slightest shit about them except their influence on their bottom line. Gamers find it easier to be up in arms about journalists being bad at video games and women having too many opinions on their hobby than the fact that they are getting actively screwed over by the hyper-predatory monetisation tactics of the game publishers and the fact that a company like Activision let go of more than a hundred employees on the same week as they gave Bobby Kotick a $200 million bonus.
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  > Gamers find it easier to be up in arms about journalists being bad at video games and women having too many opinions on their hobby Why lump real concerns in with blatant sexism?
  - vimacs2 6y ago
    Probably because the actual influence of "official" video game journalists has waned significantly compared to individual critics on Youtube and other platforms. Yes, it's pretty pathetic that somebody who's job involves playing video games got stuck on the tutorial of Cuphead but then again, who cares? I don't consider it a real concern simply because outlets like IGN are waning in influence anyway. A far more insidious concern that bears barely no attention is the fact that publishers practice shady shit like deliberately withholding review copies to overly critical reviewers or how journalists are incentivised to prioritise officially mandated press releases over reports of abuse. Notice how the very recent case of the rampant sexual and racial abuse in Ubisoft has been nearly forgotten by video game journalism. Movements like Gamergate failed because aside from the rampant sexism within their ranks, their focus was narrowly on individual bad actors in video game journalism when the real problem is more systematic than that.
    - d1zzy 6y ago
      You mean how all these Amazon attack articles are focusing on the systematic problem and not narrowly on a single company /s
chacha2 6y ago
Noam Chomsky with Andrew Marr https://youtu.be/lLcpcytUnWU?t=173 https://youtu.be/lLcpcytUnWU?t=173 "If you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you are sitting"
bostonsre 6y ago
It's tough out there. There aren't many jobs out there for that skill level that pay as much as shuffling boxes in warehouses. There isn't much opportunity for advancement no matter how hard you work. It may seem a little immoral, but I couldn't fault people too much for trying to better provide for their family using whatever means are necessary. The incentives for each layer are geared towards maximizing shareholder value. First layer managers aren't trying to soley optimize box throughput, else they could give raises to incentivize employees better. They are trying to get as many boxes through as possible while keeping costs low. They cut hours to avoid paying OT and sometimes Healthcare. They rule with fear. This forces employees to fight for scraps and do other things they normally wouldn't do like become an ambassador to try to better provide for their families. The moral managers don't advance their careers while the ones good at exploitation do and are promoted. It's a darwinian survival of the most vicious and cunning.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

taormina 6y ago

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... This is a fantastic read.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
EthanHeilman 6y ago
As I was reading the above post, I started to remember reading an article on ribbon farm. The next response is someone posting the article I remember. The Hn bubble is real and in some cases has surprisingly low-entropy.
eeeeehhhhh 6y ago
I knew this was going to be posted. I've been thinking about this post for a decade now and I can't help but feel that, although it does reflect part of reality, the Gervais Principle is overly cynical in my opinion, and those who adopt the view will have it compounded by confirmation bias because it is partially true. The things described happen at toxic organizations but the author leaves no room for honest positive and meaningful work, and at risk of pointing out the obvious, there's a lot of meaningful work to be done. To the author of this post, finding meaning in your employment means that you're necessarily a sucker or a psychopath. Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients? And God forbid you find the real nobility in doing your workaday job and doing a good job at it, and feel good about yourself. According to the Gervais Principle that makes you the ultimate sucker. Adopting this philosophy is dooming oneself to a neverending feeling of being exploited and the argument that this is what is actually happening in totality is all philosophical opinion so why would I adopt a philosophy that is so personally ruinous, demoralizing, and demotivating?
- ramblerman 6y ago
  Thank you for putting this so eloquently. I have been down this cycle myself becoming almost nihilistic and seeing it all as a pointless game of machiavelian diplomacy. These days I'm much more optimistic, and doing much better overall but in hindsight your explanation is exactly what I went through at my worst.
  - deagle50 6y ago
    Both scenarios can be true, you can be "clueless" and optimistic at the same time. Even if the Gervais Principle is real, it doesn't mean you need to be nihilistic. If your work is giving you meaning and joy, does it matter if sociopaths are benefiting more than you? It's kind of like being resentful of professional athletes, it simply wasn't in the cards... Saying this as a definite "loser" btw.
- mdpopescu 6y ago
  > Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients? In fiction? Back on the original topic, Erik Dietrich's "Developer Hegemony" has a less extreme view of the corporation; worth reading IMO.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
minsc__and__boo 6y ago
This is too true. I just went through a full MacLeod cycle in the past three years and can attest how uncanny the accuracy is.
TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
Wow. And what's so startling about this breakdown is that you can figure out which of the 3 groups someone is in within 10 minutes of your first meeting with them.
tommilukkarinen 6y ago
This article is interestingly promotes kinda flawed communist thinking about 'overperforming losers'. Most companies make 'reasonable' profits or even losses. You could say normal range for profits is -5% to +10%. When the company is people intensive, it basically means, that revenue is paid in salaries. For better salaries to be paid, profits must grow first. For profits to grow, existing people must perform better. If profits don't grow, salaries can't follow. Now when profits grow, we face a decision on how to split the new profits, and it does not always fall on the existing employees. Sometimes profits go into hiring new people, sometimes they go into pockets of the owners. But I have also often seen in my 25 year career, that performers are compensated. I have also always seen the costs rise, and the costs been mostly salaries. So profits eventually go to the pockets of the employees. So actually it is good idea for everyone to perform, because if the profit growth stops, salary growth stops as well. Anyway, my bottom line is that this 'sociopath, clueless, loser' is flawed thinking, but probably something people genuinely believe in just like many people believe that vaccines are bad.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
  The article addresses this. You're just talking about the early stages/small company part of the lifecycle. In my case, working for a 100-year-old manufacturing company, I looked around the cube farm one day, and realized there is a small army of people who's job it is to festoon every vertical space within eyesight, at scores of facilities across the globe, with flyers and promotionals and health insurance factoids and retirement plans and educational resources and on and on and on. (And maps of the cube warrens, because people thought wacky floorpans were cool 40 years ago.) Those are the definition of "Loser" jobs, and they're everywhere. My company is so far down the article's referenced lifecycle that there are several large groups of people who copy information from the mainframe into Excel sheets, and then hand this over to another group who take that information, and put it back into the mainframe. And the "Clueless" have fought me, tooth and nail, to try to improve these kinds of barbarous workflows.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

gabereiser 6y ago

It's not just Amazon. You'd be surprised at how middle-upper management operates the same way at large enterprises. At least from my experience. Some were good at their jobs, most were there because of who they knew.

GordonS 6y ago
I've worked at various enterprise-scale companies over the past 2 decades, and this has been my observation too. As you say, there are exceptions, but a lot of managers are there because they've "played the game" well - they're good at networking, know the right people, say the right things at the right times, and when they think it will help them, they don't hesitate to throw other people under a bus.

TriNetra 6y ago

You'll get millions of dollars invested in hype-and-nothing-really-to-show-for-it startups, or sold for hundreds of millions of dollars to a fortune 500 the product which is then phased out into a black whole in an year two from the buyer company's portfolio for the same reasons – having found a right connection at one of those three levels.

higerordermap 6y ago
When all this bullshit actually works, I feel like there's something deeply wrong with the way modern bureaucracies are structured. If people have knowledge of field they are going to manage, this is less likely to happen. As Joel Spolsky puts it, The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

brnt 6y ago

The things people will do for crumbs. The poor or middleclass aren't the only ones mind you. You find willing lackeys at every paygrade.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

vimacs2 6y ago

This rings so true and is seen in a lot of other industries as well. I believe the world of gaming is among the worst for this where hordes of customers ardently defend the clearly abusive practices of multinational companies that do not give the slightest shit about them except their influence on their bottom line. Gamers find it easier to be up in arms about journalists being bad at video games and women having too many opinions on their hobby than the fact that they are getting actively screwed over by the hyper-predatory monetisation tactics of the game publishers and the fact that a company like Activision let go of more than a hundred employees on the same week as they gave Bobby Kotick a $200 million bonus.

throwaway3699 6y ago
> Gamers find it easier to be up in arms about journalists being bad at video games and women having too many opinions on their hobby Why lump real concerns in with blatant sexism?
- vimacs2 6y ago
  Probably because the actual influence of "official" video game journalists has waned significantly compared to individual critics on Youtube and other platforms. Yes, it's pretty pathetic that somebody who's job involves playing video games got stuck on the tutorial of Cuphead but then again, who cares? I don't consider it a real concern simply because outlets like IGN are waning in influence anyway. A far more insidious concern that bears barely no attention is the fact that publishers practice shady shit like deliberately withholding review copies to overly critical reviewers or how journalists are incentivised to prioritise officially mandated press releases over reports of abuse. Notice how the very recent case of the rampant sexual and racial abuse in Ubisoft has been nearly forgotten by video game journalism. Movements like Gamergate failed because aside from the rampant sexism within their ranks, their focus was narrowly on individual bad actors in video game journalism when the real problem is more systematic than that.
  - d1zzy 6y ago
    You mean how all these Amazon attack articles are focusing on the systematic problem and not narrowly on a single company /s

chacha2 6y ago

Noam Chomsky with Andrew Marr https://youtu.be/lLcpcytUnWU?t=173 https://youtu.be/lLcpcytUnWU?t=173 "If you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you are sitting"

bostonsre 6y ago

It's tough out there. There aren't many jobs out there for that skill level that pay as much as shuffling boxes in warehouses. There isn't much opportunity for advancement no matter how hard you work. It may seem a little immoral, but I couldn't fault people too much for trying to better provide for their family using whatever means are necessary. The incentives for each layer are geared towards maximizing shareholder value. First layer managers aren't trying to soley optimize box throughput, else they could give raises to incentivize employees better. They are trying to get as many boxes through as possible while keeping costs low. They cut hours to avoid paying OT and sometimes Healthcare. They rule with fear. This forces employees to fight for scraps and do other things they normally wouldn't do like become an ambassador to try to better provide for their families. The moral managers don't advance their careers while the ones good at exploitation do and are promoted. It's a darwinian survival of the most vicious and cunning.