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I keep thinking about this article and the recent Google one as well. And I wonder, is this sort of moral decay necessarily part of the current corporate world

I keep thinking about this article and the recent Google one as well. And I wonder, is this sort of moral decay necessarily part of the current corporate world? Is it possible, over the long run, to have a tech firm, or any other firm, that empowers employees to do what is best for everyone and to hell with the rules? Or is this merely a matter of a few good leaders who get it, and everyone else eventually overcoming them? When I worked at Microsoft in Product Support Services, our general director "got it" and encouraged us to break any rule if it helped the customer out, so long as we did so reasonably responsibly, something I took him up on to the point it seriously annoyed my direct manager. He left, and the group I worked with ended up getting shipped off to India. And given more recent discussions with Microsoft customer service, the question of "how do we deliver quality customer service" has become far less important. I guess my musings lead me to the thinking that being good requires a level of confidence that is easy to lose as an organization, and that as it is lost, the organization can turn toxic fast. But we can't succeed all the time. We will face huge challenges. So how do we resist the urge to turn and focus only on the immediate challenge, whether a competitor or the bottom line?

nostrademons 15y ago
Currently work at Google, obviously speaking for myself and not my employer. In my experience - yes, this moral decay is a necessary part of the current corporate world. Or any corporate world. Or really, any world without the possibility of failure baked into it. I've seen a lot of idiotic decisions made at Google, many of which have been complained about on Hacker News, many more of which are hidden causes of things that are complained about on Hacker News. In every case, when I looked at the chain of decisions that led to things being the way they are, every single decision was rational, given the information that all participants had at the time. There's no vast conspiracy dedicated to turning Google evil, no influx of incompetent new PMs & designers. Some of the most questionable decisions have come straight from old timers like Marissa, or even from Larry Page. Instead, it's an information problem. Running any enterprise the size of Google or Goldman Sachs requires trading off many competing factors. To make the tradeoff, someone has to keep all that information in their head at once. There's no other way to balance competing demands; if you keep only part of the information in your head, your decision will be biased towards the part that you've loaded into your brain. If you try to spread decision making across multiple people, the decisions will be biased towards the part that the person who screams the loudest can hold in his head (which is usually a smaller subset than optimal; it takes mental effort to scream loudly). I often see mystified posters on HN wondering why Google did something or other, and a good amount of the time, I know (but can't say) exactly why we did it. The userbase does not have all the information. Unfortunately, they don't care that they don't have all the information; they want Google to work as expected, and the fact that there may be internal systems that don't quite behave according to their mental model is irrelevant. And so the fact that decision makers make decisions based on information that users can't have becomes a liability in this case, biasing them away from what's "good" for the user. I remember Paul Buchheit writing here, several years ago, "A system's participants don't have to be rational for the system itself to be rational", referring to market economies. I'd posit that the inverse also holds: a system with completely rational participants can still be irrational, if information flow between participants is not organized in a rational way.
- jfoster 15y ago
  Completely agree on the effect you are describing. I've encountered it, too. I think it can be easily countered through regularly context switching, though. That is, switching your thinking over to that of an end user.
- einhverfr 15y ago
  I am not denying that corporate culture takes on a life of its own, and that the system's rationality and the participants are not closely linked. What I am asking is whether great places to work inevitable decay as the company gets large, and if that is the case, what is the point of a startup? Why not seek to make an idea that scales down rather than scales up? Is it all about personal wealth? But for those of us who want to build great businesses, in every sense of the word 'great,' how do we get around this problem? I have my own ideas but they are largely untested.....
  - ticks 15y ago
    Presumably it has something to do with external stakeholders. The more influence they get, the more they can drive the company towards short-termism and potential destruction. You either need an incisive leader, or a bootstrapped business.
  - lrobb 15y ago
    What I am asking is whether great places to work inevitable decay as the company gets large Odds are you will definitely lose that personal connection as you go from working for "the owner" to working for a manager that reports to a VP that reports to the CEO that reports to the Board that reports to the shareholders. But what I've seen in a lot of these "leaving" posts isn't quite that... It's more of a "the king has no clothes" epiphany: They go to work at a place thinking it's a thing-in-itself then wake up one day and realize how the sausage is being made. So GOOG isn't a post-grad research lab: It's a company that sells ads. So GS isn't the equivalent of a fee only financial planner. They never were more than that.. only the people involved thought they were something more.
    - 15y ago
Create 15y ago
And I wonder, is this sort of moral decay necessarily part of the current corporate world? by construction: The documentary is critical of the modern-day corporation, considering its legal status as a class of person and evaluating its behaviour towards society and the world at large as a psychiatrist might evaluate an ordinary person. [...] corporations are systematically compelled to behave with the DSM-IV's symptoms of psychopathy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_%28film%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_%28film%29
lmkg 15y ago
> And I wonder, is this sort of moral decay necessarily part of the current corporate world? I think it's as mundane as simple, Darwinian selective pressure. The ruthless ones perform better[1]. The people who have ethical constraints, or who consider the long-term, find themselves under-performing by comparison. They can choose to either mimic this destructive behavior or get marginalized as they are seen as ineffective and stubborn. So basically, ethical behavior is unstable, and having one sociopath on a team will tend to make others act the same way. It's not exactly inevitable, but it's the natural tendency. If you want to stop it from happening, you have to work very hard and be very diligent. [1] Or rather, they perform better in more visible ways, i.e. by more objective metrics and over a shorter time period.

nostrademons 15y ago

Currently work at Google, obviously speaking for myself and not my employer. In my experience - yes, this moral decay is a necessary part of the current corporate world. Or any corporate world. Or really, any world without the possibility of failure baked into it. I've seen a lot of idiotic decisions made at Google, many of which have been complained about on Hacker News, many more of which are hidden causes of things that are complained about on Hacker News. In every case, when I looked at the chain of decisions that led to things being the way they are, every single decision was rational, given the information that all participants had at the time. There's no vast conspiracy dedicated to turning Google evil, no influx of incompetent new PMs & designers. Some of the most questionable decisions have come straight from old timers like Marissa, or even from Larry Page. Instead, it's an information problem. Running any enterprise the size of Google or Goldman Sachs requires trading off many competing factors. To make the tradeoff, someone has to keep all that information in their head at once. There's no other way to balance competing demands; if you keep only part of the information in your head, your decision will be biased towards the part that you've loaded into your brain. If you try to spread decision making across multiple people, the decisions will be biased towards the part that the person who screams the loudest can hold in his head (which is usually a smaller subset than optimal; it takes mental effort to scream loudly). I often see mystified posters on HN wondering why Google did something or other, and a good amount of the time, I know (but can't say) exactly why we did it. The userbase does not have all the information. Unfortunately, they don't care that they don't have all the information; they want Google to work as expected, and the fact that there may be internal systems that don't quite behave according to their mental model is irrelevant. And so the fact that decision makers make decisions based on information that users can't have becomes a liability in this case, biasing them away from what's "good" for the user. I remember Paul Buchheit writing here, several years ago, "A system's participants don't have to be rational for the system itself to be rational", referring to market economies. I'd posit that the inverse also holds: a system with completely rational participants can still be irrational, if information flow between participants is not organized in a rational way.

jfoster 15y ago
Completely agree on the effect you are describing. I've encountered it, too. I think it can be easily countered through regularly context switching, though. That is, switching your thinking over to that of an end user.
einhverfr 15y ago
I am not denying that corporate culture takes on a life of its own, and that the system's rationality and the participants are not closely linked. What I am asking is whether great places to work inevitable decay as the company gets large, and if that is the case, what is the point of a startup? Why not seek to make an idea that scales down rather than scales up? Is it all about personal wealth? But for those of us who want to build great businesses, in every sense of the word 'great,' how do we get around this problem? I have my own ideas but they are largely untested.....
- ticks 15y ago
  Presumably it has something to do with external stakeholders. The more influence they get, the more they can drive the company towards short-termism and potential destruction. You either need an incisive leader, or a bootstrapped business.
- lrobb 15y ago
  What I am asking is whether great places to work inevitable decay as the company gets large Odds are you will definitely lose that personal connection as you go from working for "the owner" to working for a manager that reports to a VP that reports to the CEO that reports to the Board that reports to the shareholders. But what I've seen in a lot of these "leaving" posts isn't quite that... It's more of a "the king has no clothes" epiphany: They go to work at a place thinking it's a thing-in-itself then wake up one day and realize how the sausage is being made. So GOOG isn't a post-grad research lab: It's a company that sells ads. So GS isn't the equivalent of a fee only financial planner. They never were more than that.. only the people involved thought they were something more.
  - 15y ago

Create 15y ago

And I wonder, is this sort of moral decay necessarily part of the current corporate world? by construction: The documentary is critical of the modern-day corporation, considering its legal status as a class of person and evaluating its behaviour towards society and the world at large as a psychiatrist might evaluate an ordinary person. [...] corporations are systematically compelled to behave with the DSM-IV's symptoms of psychopathy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_%28film%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_%28film%29

lmkg 15y ago

> And I wonder, is this sort of moral decay necessarily part of the current corporate world? I think it's as mundane as simple, Darwinian selective pressure. The ruthless ones perform better[1]. The people who have ethical constraints, or who consider the long-term, find themselves under-performing by comparison. They can choose to either mimic this destructive behavior or get marginalized as they are seen as ineffective and stubborn. So basically, ethical behavior is unstable, and having one sociopath on a team will tend to make others act the same way. It's not exactly inevitable, but it's the natural tendency. If you want to stop it from happening, you have to work very hard and be very diligent. [1] Or rather, they perform better in more visible ways, i.e. by more objective metrics and over a shorter time period.