6 ms·

This seems to be a major epidemic nowadays. I suspect that mechanistic, meaningless, purely mimetic pursuit of success has some pretty negative consequences on

This seems to be a major epidemic nowadays. I suspect that mechanistic, meaningless, purely mimetic pursuit of success has some pretty negative consequences on society. I suspect it might explain why so many people are interested in engaging in politics (or company politics) and zero-sum value extraction schemes instead of just adding value... They're not interested in the process at all, only in the outcome; financial success and social approval from authority figures. Many people are spending most of their lives doing stuff that they don't want to do, so of course they tend to look for shortcuts instead of trying to do things the right way. They have no intrinsic pride in the work they do; it's all about status, money and power. As people have become more free in their personal lives, on the career-side, we've never been so constrained.

6stringmerc 4y ago
A friend recently got what he thought was a great gig with an engineering firm - turned out it was more of a cult - rah rah sessions, after work bowling, softball - and they weren’t shy about shunning anybody who didn’t want all in right away. He got bullied and saw others bullied too - we figure it’s why they prefer to intern pipeline and hire and retain - a lot easier to brainwash when young. I mean it’s not a bad company, they do strong and good work - but acting like it’s the best place ever? Well, most of them have only worked there. We were like, offhand we’ve each had two better jobs than that one.[0] They used culture as a bait for lower pay too. There’s something really disturbing about a company in 2022 wanting to act like a cult rather than accept the job market is turning more mercenary by the day. Oh well, their choice to fail. [0] - Daniel Tosh “America #1” stand up bit for reference
- Invictus0 4y ago
  Name and shame please.
  - 6stringmerc 4y ago
    Not until the payout is in the bank, but yes there will be a reckoning for their unethical wickedness toward innocent well-meaning employees who just didn’t want to drink the kool-aid.
- bsenftner 4y ago
  I wish I could say this is not normal, but I see this everywhere: employers want cult-like fiefdoms, and many are successful creating them. These companies are filled with young developers who completely drink the kool-aid and become no less than fan-boys for their oppressor, as anyone that has had more than 1 job would look at the environment as darkly Orwellian.
  - slfnflctd 4y ago
    Alternatively, some may prefer a basic safe haven from all the chaos out there, because their temperaments make too much rapid change intolerable. Past a certain point, this sort of neurodivergence can be severely detrimental for no good reason, but I do understand why sometimes people accept a non-optimal situation for a while just to have some stability and simplify their lives.
- jongjong 4y ago
  Having worked for many different tech companies, the concept of 'cult companies' seems like a trend. Though I can't say for sure if this is only affecting the tech industry or all industries. One of my ex-colleagues was hired straight out of university by a company and he did not take a single holiday in 4 years because his boss would always try to make him feel guilty or would imply that there would likely be negative consequences for him as an employee. After he eventually quit and changed companies, he had very low expectations and he couldn't believe how much better that second company was... It was a startup so it wasn't exactly low-stress by my standards; it goes to show how extreme the differences can be between companies that even a job which I considered challenging seemed like a walk in the park to him given what he had experienced before.
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    Years ago, I had a very local Hongkong Chinese boss. My holidays were constantly being challenged as "Hey, can you move that holiday?" By dumb luck, I was listening to him one day talk to his boss about an upcoming wedding. "It is so important. I cannot miss that wedding." After that, every single holiday of mine was a wedding or funeral. And I heard him several times "defend" my holiday plans: "Oh, he cannot move that holiday -- wedding/funeral". Ri-don-kulous!
    - jongjong 4y ago
      That's a great example of how people tend to build complex ethical models in their minds to maintain the illusion that they are just and consistent with others.
      - throwaway2037 4y ago
        This is great reply. Do you think this has been written about in "pop" or academic psychology or sociology? I would like to read more about this idea.
- b112 4y ago
  Oracle?
  - 6stringmerc 4y ago
    Negative - as mentioned in a couple other comments here, a different industry. Not a really large company either, like 1700 people, which is a good place as a private firm with a 60% margin on professional services and low overhead… I worked at Best Buy so I recognized the signs immediately. The expression was “man he/she really bleeds blue” and if you hung out with the managers after work - because they all hung out together (and drove the same Scions lol) - you’d be in line for the next promotion. For some people that was a good path. Store Manager life and pay is legit. It’s definitely a “high school hero” type thing where there’s not of lot of experience with leadership outside of sports like football. If it’s all they know, yeah, it’s their playbook. Fortunately here in Texas I know that playbook and I’m helping him go Mike Leach on them and they’re really surprised and not taking it well. Which is good for him.
    - Supermancho 4y ago
      Note: The blue-shirt Best Buy experience is certainly cultish. The software developer side of Best Buy is not (unless you count wokeness and scrum-agile cultish).
      - 6stringmerc 4y ago
        I know there’s a big difference between corp and retail there. MN hq and all. I did abuse the heck out of the BB IT at the time using flash drives and paint.exe admin tricks.
    - throwaway2037 4y ago
      Why is this downvoted? It is a good post.
      - 6stringmerc 4y ago
        I was speaking about my Best Buy Retail experience but they do have other large operations that are different. I’m not sure what drugs the Shipping people are on though - we routinely shuffled 40+ unsold copies of The Benchwarmers into a bye bye crate and they’d show back up a month later but 50+. They were inventory gaming and probably doing some book cooking now when I look back on it.
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  This was exactly my experience at Goldman Sachs. Sorry, I should be posting under a throw-away, but let's be real for a moment. That place was nothing but a cult. Yes, they make lots of money, but you need to sell your soul. I never worked in a place with so many sheep (non-believers but scared to speak-up) and assholes (believers, only because they profit / climb the corporate ladder) _at the same time_. Fortunately, I escaped after two years of that prison sentence. (The whole experience feels like Shawshank Redemption when I write about it now!) All the global investment banks where I have worked, Goldman had the fewest number of mid-career/senior hires. The intern/fresher pipeline was so deep. Now I understand why! They are so much easier to brain-wash. Two stories stand out in my new hire training: We had multiple "partners" (super senior, old-school MDs) tell us: "At Goldman, there is not publically available org chart." Fucking dead wrong. I raised my hand at each of those bullshit meetings and said, "I'm sorry, but this is incorrect. There is a website where you can view and search the org chart." (It was amazing -- no lie/joke.) Each PMD was so "surprised" to learn this. Not sure if real, or encouraging people to do face-to-face networking. Second, they showed all these weird propaganda videos about how Goldman is closely tied with the US gov't, especially during World War 2. So weird, creepy, and out of date! Many senior partners leave Goldman and enter US politics. In American English, they call it "the revolving door" (between private industry and politics). Many democracies have this problem. But why celebrate it? Fuct! The whole thing felt so sleazy. Why is this important to non-US citizens? Many people looked bored and only read their mobile phones during these 90 minute(!) videos.
  - nkurz 4y ago
    > Sorry, I should be posting under a throw-away Nice post, and I upvoted, but it might say something about your personality that you seem to consider 'throwaway2037' a part of your identity and not a throw-away. It makes me wonder if some of what you consider to be a 'cult' might just be what others think of as 'community'.
    - jakzurr 4y ago
      Yeah, I'm kinda chuckling about this. But I'm also wondering if it was a typo, and they actually meant, "Sorry, I shouldn't be..."
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
  > He got bullied and saw others bullied too > I mean it’s not a bad company These two statements cannot exist together when discussing the same organization.
  - 6stringmerc 4y ago
    One department is all he can speak to so the others might be unicorns and elf burps.
Silverback_VII 4y ago
>They have no intrinsic pride in the work they do; it's all about status, money and power the guy with status,money and power is obviously more attractive than the guy who, although he loves his work, is more or less unsuccessful on those parameters. it's intraspecific selection at play. One of the only remaining factor influencing human evolution today. People understandably value what increases their SMV. Konrad Lorenz has written an interesting part about it in his book "Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins" (4. Man's race against himself)
- jongjong 4y ago
  As bad as it sounds, I think this does seem to describe the situation correctly. This is the kind of attitude which helps the individual at the expense of the group. When the group is too dumb to see through bullshit, the people who produce bullshit have a huge advantage within that group. I've seen this dynamic at play first hand in groups and communities of various sizes. It's just incredible how sometimes individually smart people can form a group but somehow, as a group, they act really dumb and they fall for obvious BS over and over... And the people selling BS within the group keep screwing the group over and over again and group members just ignore all the evidence that they are being screwed. Meanwhile those who are working in the interest of the group are shunned because the group ignores the tangible evidence and believes the BS narratives which paints those people as harmful.
hcks 4y ago
> They have no intrinsic pride in the work they do; it's all about status, money and power. Damn these modern people, why would they look after things so irrelevant as “status, money and power” instead of taking pride in completing Jira tickets?
- AvocadoPanic 4y ago
  Agile with a pedantic scrum master is a particular kind of hell.
  - Tcepsa 4y ago
    Not sure whether it would help, but if someone finds themselves in this kind of situation maybe try to find a way to discreetly suss out whether they are doing it because they've drunk the kool aid or as a "work to rule" strategy. It seems to me that many of the Agile methodologies, and Scrum in particular, are susceptible to that kind of approach.
    - AvocadoPanic 4y ago
      If they're brown nosing, suck-up, sycophantic, yes men?
      - Tcepsa 4y ago
        In that case, my condolences.
- fluoridation 4y ago
  No, instead of taking pride in doing something they actually enjoy.
jrochkind1 4y ago
I agree with your basic diagnosis, "Many people are spending most of their lives doing stuff that they don't want to do". But I want to add: most of their lives doing things they find meaningless and pointless. (See Graeber on "Bullshit Jobs" for just an instance, not exhaustive). So I don't agree with your next conclusion, I don't think that's leading to "shortcuts instead of trying to do things the right way." To do things they don't want to do the right way? To do things that are meaningless and pointless, but do them the "right way"? I agree with, I think, the OP, in that what you are suggesting is metaphorical "get better at eating frogs, why are you so lazy about it?" But I agree with your basic explanation. My interpretation of why people might engage in office/politics is: to try and find some meaning in life. The politics seem meaningful because politics (of both varieties) are actually core to what humans as humans do. The problem is not "How do we figure out how to force ourselves to do the meaningless boring stuff we don't want to do the right way?" The problem is: How do we find meaning in our lives that have been structured so we spend most of them doing meaningless things we don't want to do, and are not sure how to live otherwise. And, with regard to harmful or unhealthy forms of "politics" or "drama": In what ways do our attempts to find meaning backfire?
- kbuchanan 4y ago
  I hated college. I never finished for the frogs. But I'm a lifelong reader. I don't regret failing to get a degree, but I regret that I wasn't in the right mindset and that I could have used the time to create meaning.
- plankers 4y ago
  a proper marxist critique of Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" hypothesis: Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015067 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015... from the conclusion: >This article highlights that alternative theories grounded in empirical research are required to understand the social suffering caused by the feelings of useless work that Graeber observes. Therefore, our third major contribution is to demonstrate the value of Marx’s writings on alienation. We take inspiration from Marx’s understanding of alienation to investigate whether the social relations of work can explain why millions of workers do not feel that their work is useful. In particular, we focus on the ways in which the development of workers’ human capacities may be fettered by social relations at work.
discordance 4y ago
Reminds me of that delayed gratification experiment with the kids and chocolates, except instead of eating the 2x reward the kid will then hold off for even more (for their whole life)!
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  Yes, this is one of those ideas that keeps me up at night. When I'm looking at this system in aggregate, I become aware that we're racing toward asceticism. Me and the person next to me are competing in what we can do without. Even more disconcerting is that as soon as we reach a new equilibrium of austerity someone will find a new way to jump ahead with another form of self-denial. Or in other words, those who live in excess are meant to be punished. It's completely absurd. I'm lucky I fall asleep before continuing too far down this path of thoughts
thenoblesunfish 4y ago
I agree about the negative consequences, but I'm not so sure about "nowadays". Haven't most people, throughout history, basically copied what other people did, followed the standard paths, etc., when it comes to trying to make a living? Haven't almost all of them been constrained by needing to do so, or fearing the unknown of not doing so?

6stringmerc 4y ago

A friend recently got what he thought was a great gig with an engineering firm - turned out it was more of a cult - rah rah sessions, after work bowling, softball - and they weren’t shy about shunning anybody who didn’t want all in right away. He got bullied and saw others bullied too - we figure it’s why they prefer to intern pipeline and hire and retain - a lot easier to brainwash when young. I mean it’s not a bad company, they do strong and good work - but acting like it’s the best place ever? Well, most of them have only worked there. We were like, offhand we’ve each had two better jobs than that one.[0] They used culture as a bait for lower pay too. There’s something really disturbing about a company in 2022 wanting to act like a cult rather than accept the job market is turning more mercenary by the day. Oh well, their choice to fail. [0] - Daniel Tosh “America #1” stand up bit for reference

Invictus0 4y ago
Name and shame please.
- 6stringmerc 4y ago
  Not until the payout is in the bank, but yes there will be a reckoning for their unethical wickedness toward innocent well-meaning employees who just didn’t want to drink the kool-aid.
bsenftner 4y ago
I wish I could say this is not normal, but I see this everywhere: employers want cult-like fiefdoms, and many are successful creating them. These companies are filled with young developers who completely drink the kool-aid and become no less than fan-boys for their oppressor, as anyone that has had more than 1 job would look at the environment as darkly Orwellian.
- slfnflctd 4y ago
  Alternatively, some may prefer a basic safe haven from all the chaos out there, because their temperaments make too much rapid change intolerable. Past a certain point, this sort of neurodivergence can be severely detrimental for no good reason, but I do understand why sometimes people accept a non-optimal situation for a while just to have some stability and simplify their lives.
jongjong 4y ago
Having worked for many different tech companies, the concept of 'cult companies' seems like a trend. Though I can't say for sure if this is only affecting the tech industry or all industries. One of my ex-colleagues was hired straight out of university by a company and he did not take a single holiday in 4 years because his boss would always try to make him feel guilty or would imply that there would likely be negative consequences for him as an employee. After he eventually quit and changed companies, he had very low expectations and he couldn't believe how much better that second company was... It was a startup so it wasn't exactly low-stress by my standards; it goes to show how extreme the differences can be between companies that even a job which I considered challenging seemed like a walk in the park to him given what he had experienced before.
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  Years ago, I had a very local Hongkong Chinese boss. My holidays were constantly being challenged as "Hey, can you move that holiday?" By dumb luck, I was listening to him one day talk to his boss about an upcoming wedding. "It is so important. I cannot miss that wedding." After that, every single holiday of mine was a wedding or funeral. And I heard him several times "defend" my holiday plans: "Oh, he cannot move that holiday -- wedding/funeral". Ri-don-kulous!
  - jongjong 4y ago
    That's a great example of how people tend to build complex ethical models in their minds to maintain the illusion that they are just and consistent with others.
    - throwaway2037 4y ago
      This is great reply. Do you think this has been written about in "pop" or academic psychology or sociology? I would like to read more about this idea.
b112 4y ago
Oracle?
- 6stringmerc 4y ago
  Negative - as mentioned in a couple other comments here, a different industry. Not a really large company either, like 1700 people, which is a good place as a private firm with a 60% margin on professional services and low overhead… I worked at Best Buy so I recognized the signs immediately. The expression was “man he/she really bleeds blue” and if you hung out with the managers after work - because they all hung out together (and drove the same Scions lol) - you’d be in line for the next promotion. For some people that was a good path. Store Manager life and pay is legit. It’s definitely a “high school hero” type thing where there’s not of lot of experience with leadership outside of sports like football. If it’s all they know, yeah, it’s their playbook. Fortunately here in Texas I know that playbook and I’m helping him go Mike Leach on them and they’re really surprised and not taking it well. Which is good for him.
  - Supermancho 4y ago
    Note: The blue-shirt Best Buy experience is certainly cultish. The software developer side of Best Buy is not (unless you count wokeness and scrum-agile cultish).
    - 6stringmerc 4y ago
      I know there’s a big difference between corp and retail there. MN hq and all. I did abuse the heck out of the BB IT at the time using flash drives and paint.exe admin tricks.
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    Why is this downvoted? It is a good post.
    - 6stringmerc 4y ago
      I was speaking about my Best Buy Retail experience but they do have other large operations that are different. I’m not sure what drugs the Shipping people are on though - we routinely shuffled 40+ unsold copies of The Benchwarmers into a bye bye crate and they’d show back up a month later but 50+. They were inventory gaming and probably doing some book cooking now when I look back on it.
throwaway2037 4y ago
This was exactly my experience at Goldman Sachs. Sorry, I should be posting under a throw-away, but let's be real for a moment. That place was nothing but a cult. Yes, they make lots of money, but you need to sell your soul. I never worked in a place with so many sheep (non-believers but scared to speak-up) and assholes (believers, only because they profit / climb the corporate ladder) _at the same time_. Fortunately, I escaped after two years of that prison sentence. (The whole experience feels like Shawshank Redemption when I write about it now!) All the global investment banks where I have worked, Goldman had the fewest number of mid-career/senior hires. The intern/fresher pipeline was so deep. Now I understand why! They are so much easier to brain-wash. Two stories stand out in my new hire training: We had multiple "partners" (super senior, old-school MDs) tell us: "At Goldman, there is not publically available org chart." Fucking dead wrong. I raised my hand at each of those bullshit meetings and said, "I'm sorry, but this is incorrect. There is a website where you can view and search the org chart." (It was amazing -- no lie/joke.) Each PMD was so "surprised" to learn this. Not sure if real, or encouraging people to do face-to-face networking. Second, they showed all these weird propaganda videos about how Goldman is closely tied with the US gov't, especially during World War 2. So weird, creepy, and out of date! Many senior partners leave Goldman and enter US politics. In American English, they call it "the revolving door" (between private industry and politics). Many democracies have this problem. But why celebrate it? Fuct! The whole thing felt so sleazy. Why is this important to non-US citizens? Many people looked bored and only read their mobile phones during these 90 minute(!) videos.
- nkurz 4y ago
  > Sorry, I should be posting under a throw-away Nice post, and I upvoted, but it might say something about your personality that you seem to consider 'throwaway2037' a part of your identity and not a throw-away. It makes me wonder if some of what you consider to be a 'cult' might just be what others think of as 'community'.
  - jakzurr 4y ago
    Yeah, I'm kinda chuckling about this. But I'm also wondering if it was a typo, and they actually meant, "Sorry, I shouldn't be..."
HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
> He got bullied and saw others bullied too > I mean it’s not a bad company These two statements cannot exist together when discussing the same organization.
- 6stringmerc 4y ago
  One department is all he can speak to so the others might be unicorns and elf burps.

Silverback_VII 4y ago

>They have no intrinsic pride in the work they do; it's all about status, money and power the guy with status,money and power is obviously more attractive than the guy who, although he loves his work, is more or less unsuccessful on those parameters. it's intraspecific selection at play. One of the only remaining factor influencing human evolution today. People understandably value what increases their SMV. Konrad Lorenz has written an interesting part about it in his book "Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins" (4. Man's race against himself)

jongjong 4y ago
As bad as it sounds, I think this does seem to describe the situation correctly. This is the kind of attitude which helps the individual at the expense of the group. When the group is too dumb to see through bullshit, the people who produce bullshit have a huge advantage within that group. I've seen this dynamic at play first hand in groups and communities of various sizes. It's just incredible how sometimes individually smart people can form a group but somehow, as a group, they act really dumb and they fall for obvious BS over and over... And the people selling BS within the group keep screwing the group over and over again and group members just ignore all the evidence that they are being screwed. Meanwhile those who are working in the interest of the group are shunned because the group ignores the tangible evidence and believes the BS narratives which paints those people as harmful.

hcks 4y ago

> They have no intrinsic pride in the work they do; it's all about status, money and power. Damn these modern people, why would they look after things so irrelevant as “status, money and power” instead of taking pride in completing Jira tickets?

AvocadoPanic 4y ago
Agile with a pedantic scrum master is a particular kind of hell.
- Tcepsa 4y ago
  Not sure whether it would help, but if someone finds themselves in this kind of situation maybe try to find a way to discreetly suss out whether they are doing it because they've drunk the kool aid or as a "work to rule" strategy. It seems to me that many of the Agile methodologies, and Scrum in particular, are susceptible to that kind of approach.
  - AvocadoPanic 4y ago
    If they're brown nosing, suck-up, sycophantic, yes men?
    - Tcepsa 4y ago
      In that case, my condolences.
fluoridation 4y ago
No, instead of taking pride in doing something they actually enjoy.

jrochkind1 4y ago

I agree with your basic diagnosis, "Many people are spending most of their lives doing stuff that they don't want to do". But I want to add: most of their lives doing things they find meaningless and pointless. (See Graeber on "Bullshit Jobs" for just an instance, not exhaustive). So I don't agree with your next conclusion, I don't think that's leading to "shortcuts instead of trying to do things the right way." To do things they don't want to do the right way? To do things that are meaningless and pointless, but do them the "right way"? I agree with, I think, the OP, in that what you are suggesting is metaphorical "get better at eating frogs, why are you so lazy about it?" But I agree with your basic explanation. My interpretation of why people might engage in office/politics is: to try and find some meaning in life. The politics seem meaningful because politics (of both varieties) are actually core to what humans as humans do. The problem is not "How do we figure out how to force ourselves to do the meaningless boring stuff we don't want to do the right way?" The problem is: How do we find meaning in our lives that have been structured so we spend most of them doing meaningless things we don't want to do, and are not sure how to live otherwise. And, with regard to harmful or unhealthy forms of "politics" or "drama": In what ways do our attempts to find meaning backfire?

kbuchanan 4y ago
I hated college. I never finished for the frogs. But I'm a lifelong reader. I don't regret failing to get a degree, but I regret that I wasn't in the right mindset and that I could have used the time to create meaning.
plankers 4y ago
a proper marxist critique of Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" hypothesis: Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015067 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015... from the conclusion: >This article highlights that alternative theories grounded in empirical research are required to understand the social suffering caused by the feelings of useless work that Graeber observes. Therefore, our third major contribution is to demonstrate the value of Marx’s writings on alienation. We take inspiration from Marx’s understanding of alienation to investigate whether the social relations of work can explain why millions of workers do not feel that their work is useful. In particular, we focus on the ways in which the development of workers’ human capacities may be fettered by social relations at work.

discordance 4y ago

Reminds me of that delayed gratification experiment with the kids and chocolates, except instead of eating the 2x reward the kid will then hold off for even more (for their whole life)!

kelseyfrog 4y ago
Yes, this is one of those ideas that keeps me up at night. When I'm looking at this system in aggregate, I become aware that we're racing toward asceticism. Me and the person next to me are competing in what we can do without. Even more disconcerting is that as soon as we reach a new equilibrium of austerity someone will find a new way to jump ahead with another form of self-denial. Or in other words, those who live in excess are meant to be punished. It's completely absurd. I'm lucky I fall asleep before continuing too far down this path of thoughts

thenoblesunfish 4y ago

I agree about the negative consequences, but I'm not so sure about "nowadays". Haven't most people, throughout history, basically copied what other people did, followed the standard paths, etc., when it comes to trying to make a living? Haven't almost all of them been constrained by needing to do so, or fearing the unknown of not doing so?