4 ms·

Things in the US up till about 10 years ago were much more like the German way of doing things. The excessive positivity and no one being accountable for anyth

Things in the US up till about 10 years ago were much more like the German way of doing things. The excessive positivity and no one being accountable for anything were conscious adaptations US management brought in around 2010 or so after there was so much press and academic pressure that everything had to be changed or millenials would refuse to work at any company that didn't change. It's possible the whole thing was a charade and that none of it was necessary to attract millenials or a more diverse/equitable employee mix. Things in software are utterly unrecognizable compared to the 90s and early 2000s when people would yell at people for failures and there was far more accountability around failures and analysis of why things weren't working. It used to be a very "tell it like it is" culture. The way it is now there's pressure to sweep everything under the rug because of a fear that low performing employees will be offended. Everything is hush hush and weird and the low performing employees are allowed to skate until they suddenly disappear. The weirdness IME has even extended to where you're not allowed to talk about someone making a colossal mistake even if everyone knows who made the mistake due to a git blame or something. Not talking about it just leads to the mistake being made again and again till management makes the offender mysteriously disappear. I'd somewhat suspect this trend in the US is probably not as prevalent in some sectors like maybe defense, though I have heard some crazy stories about useless employees being allowed to skate in that sector as well. Those are often huge companies where lots of this stuff happens. A lot of Elon Musk's antics at twitter are basically just clumsy attempts to roll things back to the way they used to be. A lot of the excess of modern tech companies would have been unimaginable before the first .com boom. My early experiences were almost nothing was free in the office except coffee. When the team had a massive success there would be a big party, but other than that the company wasn't giving away all the free stuff all the time.

kridsdale1 4y ago
Look up the memo from the founder of Waze that he wrote to list all the reasons Google culture of babysitting people changed his employees in to nonproductive weaklings.
checkonetwo 4y ago
> when people would yell at people for failures How does this solve problems more effectively, aside from making a few people feel bad? > there was far more accountability Do you have a source or any kind of metric for this, or is this based on gut feel? > you're not allowed to talk about someone making a colossal mistake even if everyone knows who made the mistake IME why are mistakes allowed to get through the codebase in the first place? The whole idea is that we should now have processes to catch and deal with these mistakes (code reviews, pull requests, automated tests, different environments). If your co-workers are cowboy coding and committing, then sure, have at them.
triceratops 4y ago
If the only lever you have to keep people from slacking off is "yell at them", you're a bad manager. The free stuff in the office isn't meant just to coddle employees. At scale, perks are cheaper than higher comp. It becomes hard for smaller companies to compete on them. It also improves productivity. Free lunches mean people are back their desk within 30 minutes, instead of taking an hour to drive off-campus. If you have the profit margins to fund this stuff, and a scarcity of talent, it's a no-brainer.
JohnFen 4y ago
You must be speaking about some specific subset of the US. Very little of what you've said here describes anywhere I've worked, including in the last 10 years.

kridsdale1 4y ago

Look up the memo from the founder of Waze that he wrote to list all the reasons Google culture of babysitting people changed his employees in to nonproductive weaklings.

checkonetwo 4y ago

> when people would yell at people for failures How does this solve problems more effectively, aside from making a few people feel bad? > there was far more accountability Do you have a source or any kind of metric for this, or is this based on gut feel? > you're not allowed to talk about someone making a colossal mistake even if everyone knows who made the mistake IME why are mistakes allowed to get through the codebase in the first place? The whole idea is that we should now have processes to catch and deal with these mistakes (code reviews, pull requests, automated tests, different environments). If your co-workers are cowboy coding and committing, then sure, have at them.

triceratops 4y ago

If the only lever you have to keep people from slacking off is "yell at them", you're a bad manager. The free stuff in the office isn't meant just to coddle employees. At scale, perks are cheaper than higher comp. It becomes hard for smaller companies to compete on them. It also improves productivity. Free lunches mean people are back their desk within 30 minutes, instead of taking an hour to drive off-campus. If you have the profit margins to fund this stuff, and a scarcity of talent, it's a no-brainer.

JohnFen 4y ago

You must be speaking about some specific subset of the US. Very little of what you've said here describes anywhere I've worked, including in the last 10 years.