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What delusional playbook does every tech leader get the idea to refer to their employees by cringey names like "Plaids" or "Metamates" in serious memos like thi
by lxe 4y ago
What delusional playbook does every tech leader get the idea to refer to their employees by cringey names like "Plaids" or "Metamates" in serious memos like this?
Imagine if your physician did this...
"Hey there KaiserPermanientoid! You have cancer!"
- somehnacct3757 4y agoIt's in the Kool-aid recipe
- kaesar14 4y agoYou're a customer in that case, not an employee?
- woeirua 4y agoIt's all part of the cult of personality. "We're all a family." Remind me, when was the last time your father just cut out half of the family?
- Swizec 4y agoMy family cut out the underperforming father when I was younger. Does that count?
- notpachet 4y agoIt happens.
- triyambakam 4y agoAnd it's considered dysfunctional or abusive
- chrsig 4y agoMore often than you'd think. The best retort to "We're all a family" is "You obviously haven't met my family, or you wouldn't be saying that."
- Tommah 4y agoI used to say that it's a bad idea to go into business with family.
- hinkley 4y agoDivorces can be ugly. But the thing is that people being cut off aren’t part of the cult anymore. Starting the conversation with the in group name is not just bad form, it probably also starts the rest of the people wondering if that name means anything anymore. Maybe nobody is actually a Plaid except the board members. The rest of us are merely The Help, being coddled to extract more concessions from us.
- dimmke 4y agoBut like, who at this point is not cynical enough to fall for this? I guess brand new college grads. When I worked at Amazon, it was all "Amazonians" like I'm supposed to feel some kind of kinship with the 1 million+ people who work there. Plus the cheap branded clothing. Ugh.
- csours 4y agoIt's like a Cory Doctorow/William Gibson/Philip K Dick story
- im_down_w_otp 4y agoAt my company we called everyone Auxon, but then eventually figured out that engineers are way more expensive than livestock, so we replaced them all with oxen. Now it's just me, my co-founder, and a smelly barn with keyboards on the ground connected to Emacs terminals getting sporadically trampled by hooves. /s Also, I have no idea where this compulsion comes from, but I agree that it's peculiar. To me it has always felt like a bit of infantilization. It does appear to work wonders for some company cultures though where they've managed to unanimously attract people who don't find it patronizing.
- neilv 4y agoThis official cute naming of employees actually goes back to sometime before the Web, in software/hardware companies.
- baandam 4y agoStandard bubble nonsense. The kind of thing you will look back on 5 years from now and remember the good ol days and the absurdity of the bubble times. We went way beyond the dot com bubble in all regards. The hangover of this much partying sucks.
- game_the0ry 4y agoThey all hire the same consultants to coordinate their layoffs. That's why the narrative and pr sounds similar across tech companies.
- Waterluvian 4y agoDear Kaiser Permanientoid, While your time on this Earth is impermanent, your time with us will soon be permanent.
- ivalm 4y agoKaiser is actually very good at IT employee retention.
- chickenpotpie 4y agoBy tying an employees's identity to their employment, it's easier to retain them
- bombcar 4y agoSome companies would organically begin referring to themselves by a name. This was noticed as an indicator of a good corporate culture. So of course it becomes a metric and is then forced on everyone. This is why the best "employee group names" are HR-unsafe. That's how you know they're real.
- ren_engineer 4y agoit all trickles down from management consulting best practices that are basically handed out as playbooks to founders. It's based on psychology studies and is intended to create an "in-group" effect to make people more loyal to the company and thus work harder and increase employee retention
- bena 4y agoIt's a cheap way to foster common identity. Look to professional sports, it's common to refer to players and staff as a Yankee, a Brave, a Charger, a Dolphin, etc. They are not only a member of that group, but they are that group. It's a part of your identity. Even with schools, you're not just an alum, you're a Tiger, an Eagle, an Engineer, etc. So instead of "working at Google", you become a Googler. A tweep. A Metamate. A, I hope, Lyfter. The job is now part of your identity. You don't do a thing at a place, you are the company. And it costs nothing.
- dragonwriter 4y agoDemonyms are an important part of creating an artificially constructed affinity group in which employees’ (part instinctive, part learned) inclination to family/community is directed at the corporation, an entity designed to serve the interests of capital by extracting value from them. As an important audience for these messages is the remaining employees, and this is a time of particular risk of the façade cracking, it is one of the more important times to deploy every tool to reinforce it.