5 ms·

A poetic summary. Toxic work culture is a very serious thing. It's both a cause and symptom of a dysfunctional economy and we need to fix it with the same urge

A poetic summary. Toxic work culture is a very serious thing. It's both a cause and symptom of a dysfunctional economy and we need to fix it with the same urgency as problems of transport, environment and health (and it relates to all). Every small company starts out "like a family", full of good intentions, and then ends up in a psychological race to the bottom of naked exploitation, greed and systemetised ignorance. Modern HR selects primarily for desperation and compliance. Management is essentially an activity of self-preservation. Qualities like duty, loyalty, initiative and industriousness are deemed weaknesses. There is no way we can build globally competitive and innovative business in this milieu. How do you do full hard-reset and reboot on an entire culture?

kuramitropolis 4y ago
>Modern HR selects primarily for desperation and compliance. Management is essentially an activity of self-preservation. Qualities like duty, loyalty, initiative and industriousness are deemed weaknesses. This is true for the white collar world - the entire point of which is to put restraints on the actual skilled workers, so they don't start changing the world quicker than psychopaths can adapt. Otherwise the idiots will just drop off the gene pool, and then who's gonna start our wars for us, eh? >How do you do full hard-reset and reboot on an entire culture? You ask this rhetorically, as if it's some sort of intractable question, but the 20th century is full of examples of the West "rebooting" the cultures and economies of non-aligned states, and it sure ain't pretty. Takes about a generation of chaotic violent struggle, give or take. Then, a new local optimum emerges as power inevitably consolidates into the same externality-blind primate hierarchy, "but different".
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > You ask this rhetorically, as if it's some sort of intractable question Sorry if it came over that way. I certainly didn't mean it to sound rhetorical. I'm all about actually changing things. > 20th century is full of examples of the West "rebooting" the cultures and economies of non-aligned states And Britain long, long before that. All have been failures, since all were looting presented as benvolent reform and aid. People help themselves, which can generally happen only once the boot is romoved from their faces. So perhaps "rebooting" is clumsy language, if you're suggesting that a new boot will simply take its place :) Maybe de-booting is what we're after? One cannot impose a culture. But there's no reason it need take "a generation of chaotic violent struggle". That seems a little pessimistic. Historically, "blind primate hierarchies" [1] have civilised themselves rapidly under the right conditions. It would be nice to think we could reason our way into a better place before it comes to the point W. James's "Moral Equivalent of War", as climate change, inevitably brings us to our senses. [1] Do you think of Western culture as a blind primate hierarchy? Is not that very perspective part of the problem?
  - openfuture 4y ago
    > I'm all about actually changing things. Me too. Where I am from there is a lot of bullying. All the way.. from small kids and up to the political representatives. What I am doing (and I do not recommend this btw) is to exit every norm, so I do everything superficial poorly. I never edit anything I write, I just post the first draft, I don't cut my hair, I don't wear shoes, my clothes I've just found, I can't remember when I last bought clothes, I don't own a phone, I don't use any social media. Basically I set myself up for being bullied. However! I also work on the most important problem; the idea being that the absurdity may wake people up to the idea that maybe it's better to help me (by editing things or contributing things) than it is to bully me when what they are doing is nonsense and what I am doing is necessary... The point is that if you cannot use violence then you've got to use humor and poke fun at the holes in the opponents argument.
    - parthianshotgun 4y ago
      Are you a hermit?
      - kuramitropolis 4y ago
        People who care about you, care about you. The rest is trapping(s). I thought our individualistic culture was based on the shared understanding that, the more value you provide to others' lives, the more your nonconformities are accepted. Aint much you can do for your fellows when your hands are in handcuffs though, golden or otherwise, so we better keep up with 'em Joneses and don't dare imagine freedom, or else.
        parthianshotgun 4y ago
        I'm not quite sure how to parse this or if this was even meant for me, but I do hope that this isn't some pretense to dispair or annihilation (the bad kind)
        kuramitropolis 4y ago
spaetzleesser 4y ago
“ Qualities like duty, loyalty, initiative and industriousness are deemed weaknesses.” Wherever you look, loyalty is for suckers. Be it as employee, car insurance or cell phone plans. Only the new guy gets respect.
- badpun 4y ago
  Everybody is hoping to acquire lazy and complacent suckers, who won't switch to another employer or cell phone/insurance provider even though the terms they're getting are no longer on par with what the market offers. This strategy largely works too, as I've worked with some exceptional developers working for really meh salaries. They don't think about leaving, too.
  - Frost1x 4y ago
    >who won't switch to another employer or cell phone/insurance provider even though the terms they're getting are no longer on par with what the market offers. This strategy largely works too, as I've worked with some. Acquiring competitive market rates and competing in market rates isn't always easy or even reasonable. Sometimes it takes significant effort due to barriers and some of these barriers were erected by companies. Take the modern interview process. Weeks of evening prep time, lots of applications/artificial networking/cold calling/recruiter responding, the time/emotional/ mental energy to step through several hoops, etc. and all this for a chance to compete at a position that probably isn't all that great anyways beyond TC.
- theteapot 4y ago
  Do you have friends?
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    That sounds a little rude as a bare question. But it's a good one. Because friends (real ones that would drive to to the hospital) are where we start to rebuild this mess.
club_tropical 4y ago
“Modern HR” (aka in-house commissar) is a top-down legally mandated entity to 1) exert regulatory control on all but the tiniest companies and 2) reward the useless-nagger constituency of the party with jobs. There is no system-wide hard-reset, not in our lifetimes. There is retreat & regroup, away from the eye of sauron, while the parasite devours the host.
- imwillofficial 4y ago
  You know I always joked about getting a goat farm. Now it’s looking more and more likely every day.
  - club_tropical 4y ago
    do it before they force Beyond Goat!
    - imwillofficial 4y ago
      Don’t get me started
- alpaca128 4y ago
  > There is retreat & regroup, away from the eye of sauron, while the parasite devours the host. Especially when the CEO publicly brags about being called the Eye of Sauron by employees, as Mark Zuckerberg did.
- edmcnulty101 4y ago
  > There is retreat & regroup, away from the eye of sauron, while the parasite devours the host. This is a great way to put it.
Mezzie 4y ago
> There is no way we can build globally competitive and innovative business in this milieu. How do you do full hard-reset and reboot on an entire culture? Leave and build lifestyle businesses. Not every business has to be globally competitive. Create more opportunities for freelancers. Basically, there need to be attractive options for employees outside of working at globally competitive companies in order to force the change. After all, from the already existing global businesses' point of view, the current methods are working fine.
P_I_Staker 4y ago
> we need to fix it with the same urgency as problems of transport, environment and health So do nothing and ignore it, especially if the person is poor.
thethethethe 4y ago
> How do you do full hard-reset and reboot on an entire culture? easy, hire management consultants
edmcnulty101 4y ago
It goes in hand with monopoly culture in society. When you have so many mergers/aq. that build de facto monopolies there's no incentive for companies to care about their employees and the emphasis becomes on the image of caring vs actual caring. As the employee has a small selection of companies to work for and jobs become about bureaucracy and politics instead of actual `work` and there's not much you as employee can do about it. The companies not caring about customers but pretending to is another story tangential to this one.
DeathArrow 4y ago
>How do you do full hard-reset and reboot on an entire culture? One way would be for people to team up and form cooperatives. A cooperative is owned by all the workers and all the workers share the profits and have a saying.

kuramitropolis 4y ago

>Modern HR selects primarily for desperation and compliance. Management is essentially an activity of self-preservation. Qualities like duty, loyalty, initiative and industriousness are deemed weaknesses. This is true for the white collar world - the entire point of which is to put restraints on the actual skilled workers, so they don't start changing the world quicker than psychopaths can adapt. Otherwise the idiots will just drop off the gene pool, and then who's gonna start our wars for us, eh? >How do you do full hard-reset and reboot on an entire culture? You ask this rhetorically, as if it's some sort of intractable question, but the 20th century is full of examples of the West "rebooting" the cultures and economies of non-aligned states, and it sure ain't pretty. Takes about a generation of chaotic violent struggle, give or take. Then, a new local optimum emerges as power inevitably consolidates into the same externality-blind primate hierarchy, "but different".

nonrandomstring 4y ago
> You ask this rhetorically, as if it's some sort of intractable question Sorry if it came over that way. I certainly didn't mean it to sound rhetorical. I'm all about actually changing things. > 20th century is full of examples of the West "rebooting" the cultures and economies of non-aligned states And Britain long, long before that. All have been failures, since all were looting presented as benvolent reform and aid. People help themselves, which can generally happen only once the boot is romoved from their faces. So perhaps "rebooting" is clumsy language, if you're suggesting that a new boot will simply take its place :) Maybe de-booting is what we're after? One cannot impose a culture. But there's no reason it need take "a generation of chaotic violent struggle". That seems a little pessimistic. Historically, "blind primate hierarchies" [1] have civilised themselves rapidly under the right conditions. It would be nice to think we could reason our way into a better place before it comes to the point W. James's "Moral Equivalent of War", as climate change, inevitably brings us to our senses. [1] Do you think of Western culture as a blind primate hierarchy? Is not that very perspective part of the problem?
- openfuture 4y ago
  > I'm all about actually changing things. Me too. Where I am from there is a lot of bullying. All the way.. from small kids and up to the political representatives. What I am doing (and I do not recommend this btw) is to exit every norm, so I do everything superficial poorly. I never edit anything I write, I just post the first draft, I don't cut my hair, I don't wear shoes, my clothes I've just found, I can't remember when I last bought clothes, I don't own a phone, I don't use any social media. Basically I set myself up for being bullied. However! I also work on the most important problem; the idea being that the absurdity may wake people up to the idea that maybe it's better to help me (by editing things or contributing things) than it is to bully me when what they are doing is nonsense and what I am doing is necessary... The point is that if you cannot use violence then you've got to use humor and poke fun at the holes in the opponents argument.
  - parthianshotgun 4y ago
    Are you a hermit?
    - kuramitropolis 4y ago
      People who care about you, care about you. The rest is trapping(s). I thought our individualistic culture was based on the shared understanding that, the more value you provide to others' lives, the more your nonconformities are accepted. Aint much you can do for your fellows when your hands are in handcuffs though, golden or otherwise, so we better keep up with 'em Joneses and don't dare imagine freedom, or else.
      - parthianshotgun 4y ago
        I'm not quite sure how to parse this or if this was even meant for me, but I do hope that this isn't some pretense to dispair or annihilation (the bad kind)
        kuramitropolis 4y ago

spaetzleesser 4y ago

“ Qualities like duty, loyalty, initiative and industriousness are deemed weaknesses.” Wherever you look, loyalty is for suckers. Be it as employee, car insurance or cell phone plans. Only the new guy gets respect.

badpun 4y ago
Everybody is hoping to acquire lazy and complacent suckers, who won't switch to another employer or cell phone/insurance provider even though the terms they're getting are no longer on par with what the market offers. This strategy largely works too, as I've worked with some exceptional developers working for really meh salaries. They don't think about leaving, too.
- Frost1x 4y ago
  >who won't switch to another employer or cell phone/insurance provider even though the terms they're getting are no longer on par with what the market offers. This strategy largely works too, as I've worked with some. Acquiring competitive market rates and competing in market rates isn't always easy or even reasonable. Sometimes it takes significant effort due to barriers and some of these barriers were erected by companies. Take the modern interview process. Weeks of evening prep time, lots of applications/artificial networking/cold calling/recruiter responding, the time/emotional/ mental energy to step through several hoops, etc. and all this for a chance to compete at a position that probably isn't all that great anyways beyond TC.
theteapot 4y ago
Do you have friends?
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  That sounds a little rude as a bare question. But it's a good one. Because friends (real ones that would drive to to the hospital) are where we start to rebuild this mess.

club_tropical 4y ago

“Modern HR” (aka in-house commissar) is a top-down legally mandated entity to 1) exert regulatory control on all but the tiniest companies and 2) reward the useless-nagger constituency of the party with jobs. There is no system-wide hard-reset, not in our lifetimes. There is retreat & regroup, away from the eye of sauron, while the parasite devours the host.

imwillofficial 4y ago
You know I always joked about getting a goat farm. Now it’s looking more and more likely every day.
- club_tropical 4y ago
  do it before they force Beyond Goat!
  - imwillofficial 4y ago
    Don’t get me started
alpaca128 4y ago
> There is retreat & regroup, away from the eye of sauron, while the parasite devours the host. Especially when the CEO publicly brags about being called the Eye of Sauron by employees, as Mark Zuckerberg did.
edmcnulty101 4y ago
> There is retreat & regroup, away from the eye of sauron, while the parasite devours the host. This is a great way to put it.

Mezzie 4y ago

> There is no way we can build globally competitive and innovative business in this milieu. How do you do full hard-reset and reboot on an entire culture? Leave and build lifestyle businesses. Not every business has to be globally competitive. Create more opportunities for freelancers. Basically, there need to be attractive options for employees outside of working at globally competitive companies in order to force the change. After all, from the already existing global businesses' point of view, the current methods are working fine.

P_I_Staker 4y ago

> we need to fix it with the same urgency as problems of transport, environment and health So do nothing and ignore it, especially if the person is poor.

thethethethe 4y ago

> How do you do full hard-reset and reboot on an entire culture? easy, hire management consultants

edmcnulty101 4y ago

It goes in hand with monopoly culture in society. When you have so many mergers/aq. that build de facto monopolies there's no incentive for companies to care about their employees and the emphasis becomes on the image of caring vs actual caring. As the employee has a small selection of companies to work for and jobs become about bureaucracy and politics instead of actual `work` and there's not much you as employee can do about it. The companies not caring about customers but pretending to is another story tangential to this one.

DeathArrow 4y ago

>How do you do full hard-reset and reboot on an entire culture? One way would be for people to team up and form cooperatives. A cooperative is owned by all the workers and all the workers share the profits and have a saying.