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Note the subtle shift - in much of SV and the corporate world - from employees as high-return investments that we want to maximize, as human beings we believe i
by wolverine876 3y ago
Note the subtle shift - in much of SV and the corporate world - from employees as high-return investments that we want to maximize, as human beings we believe in, as agents that would change the world and be the source of our future growth and success; to employees as costs we want to minimize, as a drag on this quarter's profits, as adversaries in a low-margin power struggle fought without any higher purpose or moral. Where will the world-changing, paradigm-disrupting ideas come from? Have we given up on that?
Remember game rooms, 20% personal projects, sushi, etc.? Maybe some of that is still there, but it is a product of an attitude of a former time.
Now in business and elsewhere there is the tidal wave of a new zeitgeist. Working together; believing in, having compassion for, and doing good for others are all outré, often depicted as humanly impossible and ridiculed. Corporate leaders are humans and are swept along too, perhaps more easily because it flatters and enhances their power (also, SV corporate leaders are perhaps more versed in the power of CPUs than the power of zeitgeist, which requires understanding Shakespeare (et al) not LLMs).
The good news in this story is that the corrupt and misguided are easy to compete with, just like then-newer SV companies ran circles around corrupt, miguided incumbants that didn't invest in the future. You just need the courage of your convictions. Believe that people can change the world, and (with lots and lots of work and risk) they will.
- asylteltine 3y agoPlenty of companies still have stuff like game rooms including meta. Band rooms too. It’s mostly Amazon that’s an absolutely awful, terrible, horrendous company.
- belter 3y agoThe managerial way to say it...The company is frugal
- senderista 3y agoI couldn't care less about those ridiculous perks; I can do all that on my own time. All I want is good work, good pay, good colleagues, and good management.
- asylteltine 3y agoWell in big tech I have good news for you, you get both!
- wyclif 3y agoMore like, "Congratulations, pick two!"
- asylteltine 3y agoI have all of those and most people I know do also. Big tech is awesome. There are some bad apples but it’s very easy to move around.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dinvlad 3y agoAre you talking about Meta, by any chance?
- chihuahua 3y agoAs far as I can remember, Amazon never had perks for employees. Except for free coffee and tea in the kitchens. That's it. I remember back in 2002 (?) when the 2-pizza team idea was introduced. My manager said he would find out how we could expense the pizza. It turns out that the pizza was merely theoretical: the team should be sized so that, if there were pizza, then 2 pizzas would be enough for the team. But that doesn't mean that pizza would ever be ordered or expensed.
- spenczar5 3y agoTwitch did the free food and snacks thing. When acquired by Amazon, Twitch opened a Seattle office, on a floor of an existing Amazon building. We got to keep getting free food! Every day around lunchtime, hungry Amazon workers from adjacent floors would quietly try to slip in to get a sandwich or a kebab or whatever, or would surreptitiously attempt to get a bag of chips. Eventually the Twitch side started to complain: there was never enough food to go around at lunch time. If you were more than ten minutes late, all the food would be gone. The Amazon management’s response? Lock off the Twitch floor so it required special badges for access. Let the Amazonians starve!
- chihuahua 3y agoThat is exactly what I expected to happen.
- Rebelgecko 3y agoTBH I expected that everyone would lose the free food
- closeparen 3y agoOffice amenities were the carrot, attendance policies are the stick. Both are aimed at increasing the share of time employees spend at the office/thinking about work/immersed physically and socially in work-based networks. Employees who interpreted these amenities as a spirit of generosity that would just change with the times into a full remote culture were badly mistaken. If anything, it's the companies that never put any thought or care into their office environments, teambuilding, etc. who would be most amenable to going remote.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ejb999 3y agoand for anyone that actually believed companies cared about those things when they said them, I have a bridge in NY I'd like to sell you.
- concordDance 3y agoA company is controlled by people. If those people care about those things (and aren't in a system that pressurises them not to or selects for people who do) then the "company" will also care about those things.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoIf the company is controlled by distant, diffuse, anonymous investors indirectly, they are much more likely to demand instant profits and encourage rich leadership to screw the workers. Wealth invariably (but not always) makes people less humane and more arrogant. The solution to avoid this Kafkaesque trap multitudes are willing to saddle around their necks is worker-owned co-ops.
- wolverine876 3y agoThat's exactly the 'zeitgeist' I'm talking about: > Working together; believing in, having compassion for, and doing good for others are all outré, often depicted as humanly impossible and ridiculed. We all have better angels and worse; there's nothing special about the our worse ones that means they are somehow more fundamental or necessary. We actually can do much better - not perfectly, of course, that is a strawperson; but we can do much better.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoBased on what reasoning...? You sound really confident so I'm assuming there is some substance here.
- wolverine876 3y agoBased on overwhelming evidence. Based on people I know and interact with all the time; based on thousands of years of history, philosophy, stories, religion that embody it and talk about it. Based on our reality: We were born into a world built by it, free and prosperous and safe far beyond any of our ancestors. Generations before us actually built that (and what are we building for the next?). Look what King and Einstein and Keynes (and Friedman) and Steinum and all those people built - none profiting much from it. Do you really doubt that humans have better angels and worse - inside every one of us, and that we have a choice? It's hardly a novel idea, though I can see that it's outre, it's disruptive and outside the pale, in this (uber-reactionary?) moment. Otherwise, who would want to deny that reality?
- losteric 3y agoMost SDEs have grown up in a severe labor deficit. It's so interesting seeing the idealism smack in to reality. 1. Those "employee-appreciations" were a cost-saving measure to retain talent. 20% time towards projects that benefit the employer vs getting paid 20% more, or free food at an incremental cost of $100/mo/employee instead of paying $2000/mo/employee for equivalent comp-based retention. 2. We are no longer in a severe labor demand deficit. Quality of life will converge on the American norm - treating employees like disposable cogs, under layers of brutal middle-management politics. 3. "Believe that people can change the world", or caring for and investing in employees... Can you point to any industry that was sustainably disrupted by a company following such a mindset? The only examples that come to my mind are niche companies that market based on such an ethos, like Patagonia. Of course there are stable European companies, and US union shops, but those aren't disruptive. WeWork had that ethos for a little while I guess.
- bornfreddy 3y ago> Can you point to any industry that was sustainably disrupted by a company following such a mindset? "Don't do evil" comes to mind, though the company ethos changed a lot since then.
- SlightlyLeftPad 3y agoIt’s interesting to me how important simply having that written down was to both the perception of the company from the outside and the products that it delivered. Since it was removed from writing both are similarly impacted negatively. Could it be a coincidence? Perhaps, but I suspect not.
- wolverine876 3y agoEvery industry disrupted by SV, at least up to a point? How about all the FOSS projects?
- StopTheWorld 3y ago> "Believe that people can change the world", or caring for and investing in employees... Can you point to any industry that was sustainably disrupted by a company following such a mindset? The company with the largest market cap in the world, Apple. Steve Jobs believed in recruiting great people, and he entrusted in them and expected of them to create sustainably disruptive products. From Steve Wozniak all the way to Jony Ive. I don't know if I'd say Jobs was caring for all people working at Apple in my conception of things, but he did not look at the people working on an important Apple project as disposable cogs, and he didn't look at the products they were making as junk commodities to raise next quarter's revenue. Whatever it boils down to, and whether it can continue creating things like the M2, there is a reason the company with the largest market cap in the world is Apple.
- alberth 3y ago> ”Note the subtle shift” It’s not subtle. It’s overt & being externally communicated. Wall Street this past year began crushing non-profitable companies. The pendulum has swung back from the years where growth was all that mattered. It’s now back to focus on profitability. The pendulum will swing back again at some point as well. It’s cyclical.
- isignal 3y agoMicrosoft, Facebook, google, Apple, Amazon etc are all hugely profitable companies. If anyone can afford to ride out wall streets short term thinking, it is them.
- throwup238 3y agoThe executives running the companies can't afford it. Their bonuses depend on meeting certain expectations.
- nova22033 3y agoWall Street this past year began crushing non-profitable companies. i.e. people stopped buying shares in non-profitable companies.. would you want stock in non-profitable companies in your retirement account? I wouldn't
- x86x87 3y agoDo you want stocks in companies that are profitable but do so at the expense of their own future?
- poulpy123 3y agoI don't know what is surprising, it's just capitalism being capitalism. There were game rooms because they thought it would be useful for making money, they don't have game room anymore because they think its' useful for making money now