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That is the worst! I remember when a long-time team member died unexpectedly one weekend. We all learned about it at the Monday standup meeting and we luckily h

That is the worst! I remember when a long-time team member died unexpectedly one weekend. We all learned about it at the Monday standup meeting and we luckily had the common sense to cancel the standup because no one wanted to talk. A number of us went to the funeral and his wife told me (I had met her once before) that she was so happy that his co-workers came to pay their respects. It made her feel that he had a larger impact than she knew of and it was comforting to her. I hate, hate, hate the way corps try to brush away any unpleasantness like ignoring it means it didn't happen!

anonporridge 5y ago
> I hate, hate, hate the way corps try to brush away any unpleasantness like ignoring it means it didn't happen! I personally don't mind it. It's a good reminder that we as individuals are just replaceable cogs in the machine, that all of us are only as valuable as the productivity we can contribute in the future, and that our sense of loyalty to it should be adjusted accordingly. Don't ever expect a corporation of any kind to act like a human or a family, because it's not, even if they try to put on a humanoid face. Having said that, I expect more corporations will start trying to act more humanely in the face of this kind of trauma, precisely because those that don't will engender a sense of deep distrust and disloyalty from their employees, which will make them weaker in the long run. The more generations of people go through the machine and see how it really works, and teach their children the truth, the less they'll be able to take advantage of naivety. This also tends to be a reason that the powers that be want tighter control on social media, so people can't as easily share widely the truth of their lived experience that will preemptively poison the trust of others towards machines designed to use and discard people.
- gunapologist99 5y ago
  Corporations are like a computer program. Sometimes they act a bit sentient, but mostly they just do what they're told. The only people who are people are people.
- ajkjk 5y ago
  The corporation may not be kind as an entity, but it would be nice if the individual people are.
  - trinsic2 5y ago
    That's the rub, at least for me. The poster above you is right, corporations are just corporations. If you look up the etymology of the word it comes from latin: corpus (genitive corporis) "body, dead body, animal body. This is why I think that, more and more, people who have a heart, are moving away from big entities like this. I expect in a couple of generations corporations will be a thing of the past, or something so far removed from society, that it will no longer exist as a social norm. The biggest problem is not the people, its the amount of people that organize together to make something happen. When you live and work in a sea of people vying for attention, to be seen and heard, there is no possibility of humanity. Its the size that makes or breaks the organization, not the people in it. It breaks accountability and it breaks social connections. I see smaller organizations all the time that act responsibility. These organizations usually consist of smaller teams. This is the future, a new way of living, small decentralized organizations providing the world with what it needs in a human way.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      > If you look up the etymology of the word it comes from latin: corpus (genitive corporis) "body, dead body, animal body. You could just shorten this to "body", which has the same range of meanings. If you want to say "corpse" in English or Latin, you can use a more explicit word, but you don't have to. The idea of "incorporation" is that something comes into existence - that it becomes "corporeal", not "soulless".
    - anonporridge 5y ago
      > I expect in a couple of generations corporations will be a thing of the past, or something so far removed from society, that it will no longer exist as a social norm. Alternatively, in a couple of generations, people who have too much heart/soul and can't stomach being part of a corporate machine will be bred out of the gene pool and/or thrust into the powerless underclass, while the psychopaths that have no problem with them will acquire the most resources and reproduce the most, passing on their genes and their way of thinking to their children. Some might argue this already happened generations ago.
- pizza 5y ago
  Once heard this in response to a discussion of an org's virtue signalling. What do you make of it, in this context? A man had been injured on a journey and was lying on the road, wounded. A good Samaritan saw him and helped him get up. Onlookers then retorted, "Well, the good Samaritan only helped him get up to signal their virtue!"
  - quantified 5y ago
    ‘Tis more blessed to give than to receive. Means you’re preventing someone from obtaining a blessing if you don’t take their gift. And by definition, it’s less blessed to receive than to give. But if everyone only gives, no one receives, grinds to a halt. Metrics on virtue make things so difficult.
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    An evolutionary psychologist might argue something like that. Another way to put it, is that while the individual might act selflessly with pure and honest empathy, with no conscious expectation of something in return, this kind of behavior wouldn't have survived in our gene pool if there wasn't some evolutionary advantage to behaving that way. So, the onlookers would really have to specify whether they're talking about the conscious being who is the good Samaritan or if they're talking about the unconscious entity that is the generic big brained ape that has deeply embedded survival and reproductive instincts that drive their conscious behaviors and desires outside of their control. I can simultaneously say that the person was honestly just being good while acknowledging that the biological entity may have achieved some kind of advantage by signalling their virtue. Alternatively, I could also say that the good Samaritan is actually acting in a way that is a detriment to his survival, and only happens because of a bug in his generic and psychological programming or an old beneficial feature that is no longer good for a new environment and will eventually be removed via natural selection.
    - dahfizz 5y ago
      It's not self evident that virtue _signals_ are evolutionarily advantageous. Actually being virtuous is what provides a benefit to your society / tribe / species.
- saghm 5y ago
  > I personally don't mind it. It's a good reminder that we as individuals are just replaceable cogs in the machine, that all of us are only as valuable as the productivity we can contribute in the future, and that our sense of loyalty to it should be adjusted accordingly. To the company as a whole, yes. To each other? No, I don't think I believe this. This doesn't mean you owe anything to your teammates in terms of staying in a job if a better opportunity comes or if you aren't happy or treated right, but we're still all human beings seeing each other every day, and if you build a bond with those you work with, it's not any less real just because you only happened to meet due to the coincidence of being hired by the company. I've only been out of college for less than a decade, and I've had some coworkers I did not get along at all with, some who I was indifferent towards, a great many I had casual friendly relationships with, and a select few who are this point are as close to any friends I've met outside work and remained that way after one or both of us moved on from the job where we met. I still don't think I'd be completely emotionally unaffected if someone who I was currently working with in the first two categories happened to die, and I certainly would be if someone I worked with in one of the latter two groups did. It's not at all uncommon to feel grief or numbness when even a casual acquaintance outside of work dies, and the fact that whatever company you work for happens to consider you only a value-generating machine doesn't magically make this go away. Humans are humans even when working together, and I don't think pretending that's not the case is in any way more emotionally healthy than acknowledging it.
- Kon-Peki 5y ago
  > Don't ever expect a corporation of any kind to act like a human or a family, because it's not, even if they try to put on a humanoid face. Many years ago, we hired a guy from halfway across the country. For money reasons he left his wife and kids behind and started the job ASAP, with the plan to rent an apartment and go back to get them over a holiday weekend approximately 1 month away. So he worked with us for about 4 weeks, and then when driving his family here on that holiday weekend they were hit by a drunk driver; he and his wife were killed and the kids needed to be airlifted to a big city hospital. Our CEO intervened with the insurance companies to backdate everything so his life insurance would pay out and the kids' medical bills would be paid for as long as they needed to be paid. He made sure that the kids got airlifted again - to the hospital nearest to their grandparents, and then said that any employees who wanted to travel to attend the funeral would get paid time off to do so (he went too).
  - alxndr 5y ago
    Did the Board of Directors approve all of that?
rhizome 5y ago
>I hate, hate, hate the way corps try to brush away any unpleasantness like ignoring it means it didn't happen! Remember that study that found psychopathic traits in upper management? https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-psychopathic-ceo/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-p...
- zdragnar 5y ago
  Everyone is a bit of a psychopath. https://youtu.be/xYemnKEKx0c https://youtu.be/xYemnKEKx0c
synergy20 5y ago
Job places are never your family, it's just a place to make money to keep life going, my take is, don't expect too much from the company you are working at other than paychecks. instead, building friendship outside of work(if you have friends at work, that's good too), and spending more time with your family,etc. I think this is also called work-life balance. This does not work for people that needs extra help though, e.g. those who experiences mental illness, depression, down-cycles in life etc. HR and benefit package should have a humane way to do it better, at least, providing free hotline as a medical insurance add-on for all employees. A good manager should stay aware of personal concerns cautiously in the team other than just checking their agile sprint schedule, it's part of your work. For years that a direct manager never met a key team member, never video chat with him/her, still keeping him as a contractor after 7 years, sorry, I put quite some blame on the manager. A good manager takes great care of his team, which in the end, will benefit his own boss/company too. Blaming the corporate for your team members' lack of benefit is barking the wrong tree, it's you who did not fight hard enough for your key team members, you're the one should be blamed.
samstave 5y ago
I had a colleague die in his cubical at Lockheed... I was IT director and I had to do a post mortem (no pun intended) about his activities in the facility by checking his badge-ing in and out of various doors to determine the time of death... that was super fn weird. We were able to determine he went to the break room at ~1am or something, made himself a cup of tea, went back to his cube and died before he even drank his tea.
- sailfast 5y ago
  Whoa. This sounds really tough and I’m sorry you had to go through that.
  - samstave 5y ago
    I had another colleague at Lockheed that forgot that when he was on VPN, his default printer was an MFP in the office... he *printed* (2AM) out a bunch of gay porn not realizing he was on VPN... yeah that was also super FN weird when HR came to me in the morning and handed me a manila envelope containing said printed out gay porn... and demanded "I NEED TO KNOW WHO PRINTED THIS OUT NOW!" it was an EVP... married with kids.... He may be dead now but he left lockheed to become a park ranger. ---
    - nomdep 5y ago
      That’s just gossip and has nothing to do with the theme of the thread
      - samstave 5y ago
        its not gossip. this literally happened.
  - samstave 5y ago
    oooh I have another lockheed story: head of HR comes to me with sme issue with her blackberry.. I have her unlock it, and my phone guy is right there as she was claiming some issue... We open her phone, and the first thing that pops up is a video of her giving the evp of sales a BJ... my phone guy NOPED THE FUCK OUT ASAP... that was fun trajectory to manage...

anonporridge 5y ago

> I hate, hate, hate the way corps try to brush away any unpleasantness like ignoring it means it didn't happen! I personally don't mind it. It's a good reminder that we as individuals are just replaceable cogs in the machine, that all of us are only as valuable as the productivity we can contribute in the future, and that our sense of loyalty to it should be adjusted accordingly. Don't ever expect a corporation of any kind to act like a human or a family, because it's not, even if they try to put on a humanoid face. Having said that, I expect more corporations will start trying to act more humanely in the face of this kind of trauma, precisely because those that don't will engender a sense of deep distrust and disloyalty from their employees, which will make them weaker in the long run. The more generations of people go through the machine and see how it really works, and teach their children the truth, the less they'll be able to take advantage of naivety. This also tends to be a reason that the powers that be want tighter control on social media, so people can't as easily share widely the truth of their lived experience that will preemptively poison the trust of others towards machines designed to use and discard people.

gunapologist99 5y ago
Corporations are like a computer program. Sometimes they act a bit sentient, but mostly they just do what they're told. The only people who are people are people.
ajkjk 5y ago
The corporation may not be kind as an entity, but it would be nice if the individual people are.
- trinsic2 5y ago
  That's the rub, at least for me. The poster above you is right, corporations are just corporations. If you look up the etymology of the word it comes from latin: corpus (genitive corporis) "body, dead body, animal body. This is why I think that, more and more, people who have a heart, are moving away from big entities like this. I expect in a couple of generations corporations will be a thing of the past, or something so far removed from society, that it will no longer exist as a social norm. The biggest problem is not the people, its the amount of people that organize together to make something happen. When you live and work in a sea of people vying for attention, to be seen and heard, there is no possibility of humanity. Its the size that makes or breaks the organization, not the people in it. It breaks accountability and it breaks social connections. I see smaller organizations all the time that act responsibility. These organizations usually consist of smaller teams. This is the future, a new way of living, small decentralized organizations providing the world with what it needs in a human way.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > If you look up the etymology of the word it comes from latin: corpus (genitive corporis) "body, dead body, animal body. You could just shorten this to "body", which has the same range of meanings. If you want to say "corpse" in English or Latin, you can use a more explicit word, but you don't have to. The idea of "incorporation" is that something comes into existence - that it becomes "corporeal", not "soulless".
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    > I expect in a couple of generations corporations will be a thing of the past, or something so far removed from society, that it will no longer exist as a social norm. Alternatively, in a couple of generations, people who have too much heart/soul and can't stomach being part of a corporate machine will be bred out of the gene pool and/or thrust into the powerless underclass, while the psychopaths that have no problem with them will acquire the most resources and reproduce the most, passing on their genes and their way of thinking to their children. Some might argue this already happened generations ago.
pizza 5y ago
Once heard this in response to a discussion of an org's virtue signalling. What do you make of it, in this context? A man had been injured on a journey and was lying on the road, wounded. A good Samaritan saw him and helped him get up. Onlookers then retorted, "Well, the good Samaritan only helped him get up to signal their virtue!"
- quantified 5y ago
  ‘Tis more blessed to give than to receive. Means you’re preventing someone from obtaining a blessing if you don’t take their gift. And by definition, it’s less blessed to receive than to give. But if everyone only gives, no one receives, grinds to a halt. Metrics on virtue make things so difficult.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  An evolutionary psychologist might argue something like that. Another way to put it, is that while the individual might act selflessly with pure and honest empathy, with no conscious expectation of something in return, this kind of behavior wouldn't have survived in our gene pool if there wasn't some evolutionary advantage to behaving that way. So, the onlookers would really have to specify whether they're talking about the conscious being who is the good Samaritan or if they're talking about the unconscious entity that is the generic big brained ape that has deeply embedded survival and reproductive instincts that drive their conscious behaviors and desires outside of their control. I can simultaneously say that the person was honestly just being good while acknowledging that the biological entity may have achieved some kind of advantage by signalling their virtue. Alternatively, I could also say that the good Samaritan is actually acting in a way that is a detriment to his survival, and only happens because of a bug in his generic and psychological programming or an old beneficial feature that is no longer good for a new environment and will eventually be removed via natural selection.
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    It's not self evident that virtue _signals_ are evolutionarily advantageous. Actually being virtuous is what provides a benefit to your society / tribe / species.
saghm 5y ago
> I personally don't mind it. It's a good reminder that we as individuals are just replaceable cogs in the machine, that all of us are only as valuable as the productivity we can contribute in the future, and that our sense of loyalty to it should be adjusted accordingly. To the company as a whole, yes. To each other? No, I don't think I believe this. This doesn't mean you owe anything to your teammates in terms of staying in a job if a better opportunity comes or if you aren't happy or treated right, but we're still all human beings seeing each other every day, and if you build a bond with those you work with, it's not any less real just because you only happened to meet due to the coincidence of being hired by the company. I've only been out of college for less than a decade, and I've had some coworkers I did not get along at all with, some who I was indifferent towards, a great many I had casual friendly relationships with, and a select few who are this point are as close to any friends I've met outside work and remained that way after one or both of us moved on from the job where we met. I still don't think I'd be completely emotionally unaffected if someone who I was currently working with in the first two categories happened to die, and I certainly would be if someone I worked with in one of the latter two groups did. It's not at all uncommon to feel grief or numbness when even a casual acquaintance outside of work dies, and the fact that whatever company you work for happens to consider you only a value-generating machine doesn't magically make this go away. Humans are humans even when working together, and I don't think pretending that's not the case is in any way more emotionally healthy than acknowledging it.
Kon-Peki 5y ago
> Don't ever expect a corporation of any kind to act like a human or a family, because it's not, even if they try to put on a humanoid face. Many years ago, we hired a guy from halfway across the country. For money reasons he left his wife and kids behind and started the job ASAP, with the plan to rent an apartment and go back to get them over a holiday weekend approximately 1 month away. So he worked with us for about 4 weeks, and then when driving his family here on that holiday weekend they were hit by a drunk driver; he and his wife were killed and the kids needed to be airlifted to a big city hospital. Our CEO intervened with the insurance companies to backdate everything so his life insurance would pay out and the kids' medical bills would be paid for as long as they needed to be paid. He made sure that the kids got airlifted again - to the hospital nearest to their grandparents, and then said that any employees who wanted to travel to attend the funeral would get paid time off to do so (he went too).
- alxndr 5y ago
  Did the Board of Directors approve all of that?

rhizome 5y ago

>I hate, hate, hate the way corps try to brush away any unpleasantness like ignoring it means it didn't happen! Remember that study that found psychopathic traits in upper management? https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-psychopathic-ceo/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-p...

zdragnar 5y ago
Everyone is a bit of a psychopath. https://youtu.be/xYemnKEKx0c https://youtu.be/xYemnKEKx0c

synergy20 5y ago

Job places are never your family, it's just a place to make money to keep life going, my take is, don't expect too much from the company you are working at other than paychecks. instead, building friendship outside of work(if you have friends at work, that's good too), and spending more time with your family,etc. I think this is also called work-life balance. This does not work for people that needs extra help though, e.g. those who experiences mental illness, depression, down-cycles in life etc. HR and benefit package should have a humane way to do it better, at least, providing free hotline as a medical insurance add-on for all employees. A good manager should stay aware of personal concerns cautiously in the team other than just checking their agile sprint schedule, it's part of your work. For years that a direct manager never met a key team member, never video chat with him/her, still keeping him as a contractor after 7 years, sorry, I put quite some blame on the manager. A good manager takes great care of his team, which in the end, will benefit his own boss/company too. Blaming the corporate for your team members' lack of benefit is barking the wrong tree, it's you who did not fight hard enough for your key team members, you're the one should be blamed.

samstave 5y ago

I had a colleague die in his cubical at Lockheed... I was IT director and I had to do a post mortem (no pun intended) about his activities in the facility by checking his badge-ing in and out of various doors to determine the time of death... that was super fn weird. We were able to determine he went to the break room at ~1am or something, made himself a cup of tea, went back to his cube and died before he even drank his tea.

sailfast 5y ago
Whoa. This sounds really tough and I’m sorry you had to go through that.
- samstave 5y ago
  I had another colleague at Lockheed that forgot that when he was on VPN, his default printer was an MFP in the office... he *printed* (2AM) out a bunch of gay porn not realizing he was on VPN... yeah that was also super FN weird when HR came to me in the morning and handed me a manila envelope containing said printed out gay porn... and demanded "I NEED TO KNOW WHO PRINTED THIS OUT NOW!" it was an EVP... married with kids.... He may be dead now but he left lockheed to become a park ranger. ---
  - nomdep 5y ago
    That’s just gossip and has nothing to do with the theme of the thread
    - samstave 5y ago
      its not gossip. this literally happened.
- samstave 5y ago
  oooh I have another lockheed story: head of HR comes to me with sme issue with her blackberry.. I have her unlock it, and my phone guy is right there as she was claiming some issue... We open her phone, and the first thing that pops up is a video of her giving the evp of sales a BJ... my phone guy NOPED THE FUCK OUT ASAP... that was fun trajectory to manage...