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What I find interesting in reading this is that it's not particularly surprising in content. And I don't mean that I expected some hugely toxic culture from a y

What I find interesting in reading this is that it's not particularly surprising in content. And I don't mean that I expected some hugely toxic culture from a youtube company and found it. I mean that the whole document is largely pretty standard "how to make it in a competitive industry" advice. The tone might be a little unprofessional for folks who are used to big corporate talk, but if you'd leaked internal Microsoft or Google documents to a bunch of long time IBM folks they would have thought the same things I'm sure. The tone might be different, but most of the points seem identical to stuff anyone should be familiar with. "Follow up when you ask someone for something", "Don't commit to giving X if you can't actually get X", "Have a backup plan", "Try to turn a failure into something useful", "Own your mistakes", "Make sure you've exhausted all the avenues for something before you decide it's impossible", "Do the hard work early so you're not cramming it all in at the end", "You are the subject matter expert on your specific project, assume everyone else doesn't know anything". Even the "A,B,C" employee thing is pretty standard stuff folks know intuitively. Fast food is garbage no matter where you go, yet somehow Chick Fil A has lines around the block at lunch time and if there's 3 cars in a Wendy's drive through, you'll go somewhere else. Why? Because Chick Fil A really tries to not have "C" employees (relative to fast food employees in general), and it shows in the customer experience. Two fast food places can have the same quality of food, and the one with the drive through attendant that acknowledges people and responds to phatic phrases, and marks the diet soda cup is going to have more traffic and customer satisfaction than the one where the attendant barely acknowledges you've arrived at the window and leaves you to figure out which was the diet coke when you get home.

naming_the_user 2y ago
Yeah, it reads as being pretty standard to me. To be honest I think there's just a bit of a bifurcation between people who do business, like really do business as a competition like an Olympic sport, and people who just sort of like turn up and do their thing for a bit and then go home. To the former camp all of this is intuitively obvious and doesn't need spelling out although the insights are generally useful.
- grogenaut 2y ago
  Reading this post at the same time as a blind post where someone is asking what people do for the resto of the week once they finish their 2 hours of sprint work. The dichotomy sometimes
  - blindluck 2y ago
    The blind poster is obviously more savvy than the "A players".
  - cezart 2y ago
    Can you please share the other post you are referring to?
bnralt 2y ago
That's the same impression I got. It's odd seeing the discussion veer off into morality, because most of it seems to be standard and non-problematic advice (IE, understanding what your product is and don't get distracted by focusing on what it's not). And though the advice isn't particularly novel, it was worth reading since a surprisingly large amount of people don't do these simple things.
- CaptainFever 2y ago
  My uncharitable guess is that a lot of people here talking about the morality of his videos (not the company culture) are mostly parents bitter about their child watching Mr Beast and wanting Feastables.
  - nothercastle 2y ago
    The company culture is extreme almost culty. I do think that probably what you need to succeed in the creative world because the competition is so insane
    - tpmoney 2y ago
      > The company culture is extreme almost culty. Is it? I know one former employee who is currently in open conflict appears to think so, but they're also a single potentially biased source. Beyond that, has there been any specific information about the culture inside? This document hardly reads as "extreme almost culty" to me.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Is this really standard management advice? Half-way through the PDF I already felt like I'm reading some insane drivel of a sweatshop boss / wannabe cult leader. Whatever illusion I had that Mr Beast videos are worth watching, I lost it entirely, having learned that they're just a factory product with Mr Beast brand on it, a corporation pretending to be a person, optimized to waste people time[0], and made by people bullied into extremely unhealthy and antisocial behaviors. Like, the part about making your co-workers feel like they're bottlenecking you; can't imagine working in an environment where everyone tries that number on everyone else. It's extremely adversarial. Is that really standard management advice? Maybe on Wall Street? This source is pure gold: techniques to manipulate people into consuming your product - which they otherwise wouldn't be. All so you can make money on poisoning their minds (advertising, which is how you convert views to money). You can easily imagine this came out from a drug cartel boss, I'd expect the best and most ruthless one to operate just like that, with same level of cultishness. And if that's who Mr Beast is, and that's how he thinks of other people - because believe it or not, viewers are other people too, not some cattle to be milked and slaughtered - then I'm glad I don't watch his videos. Not going to, and I'm happy to pass this document around to dissuade others from viewing his channel. -- [0] - I mean, that's kind of obvious in anything social media, but rarely do you get it spelled out without any qualms.

naming_the_user 2y ago

Yeah, it reads as being pretty standard to me. To be honest I think there's just a bit of a bifurcation between people who do business, like really do business as a competition like an Olympic sport, and people who just sort of like turn up and do their thing for a bit and then go home. To the former camp all of this is intuitively obvious and doesn't need spelling out although the insights are generally useful.

grogenaut 2y ago
Reading this post at the same time as a blind post where someone is asking what people do for the resto of the week once they finish their 2 hours of sprint work. The dichotomy sometimes
- blindluck 2y ago
  The blind poster is obviously more savvy than the "A players".
- cezart 2y ago
  Can you please share the other post you are referring to?

bnralt 2y ago

That's the same impression I got. It's odd seeing the discussion veer off into morality, because most of it seems to be standard and non-problematic advice (IE, understanding what your product is and don't get distracted by focusing on what it's not). And though the advice isn't particularly novel, it was worth reading since a surprisingly large amount of people don't do these simple things.

CaptainFever 2y ago
My uncharitable guess is that a lot of people here talking about the morality of his videos (not the company culture) are mostly parents bitter about their child watching Mr Beast and wanting Feastables.
- nothercastle 2y ago
  The company culture is extreme almost culty. I do think that probably what you need to succeed in the creative world because the competition is so insane
  - tpmoney 2y ago
    > The company culture is extreme almost culty. Is it? I know one former employee who is currently in open conflict appears to think so, but they're also a single potentially biased source. Beyond that, has there been any specific information about the culture inside? This document hardly reads as "extreme almost culty" to me.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
Is this really standard management advice? Half-way through the PDF I already felt like I'm reading some insane drivel of a sweatshop boss / wannabe cult leader. Whatever illusion I had that Mr Beast videos are worth watching, I lost it entirely, having learned that they're just a factory product with Mr Beast brand on it, a corporation pretending to be a person, optimized to waste people time[0], and made by people bullied into extremely unhealthy and antisocial behaviors. Like, the part about making your co-workers feel like they're bottlenecking you; can't imagine working in an environment where everyone tries that number on everyone else. It's extremely adversarial. Is that really standard management advice? Maybe on Wall Street? This source is pure gold: techniques to manipulate people into consuming your product - which they otherwise wouldn't be. All so you can make money on poisoning their minds (advertising, which is how you convert views to money). You can easily imagine this came out from a drug cartel boss, I'd expect the best and most ruthless one to operate just like that, with same level of cultishness. And if that's who Mr Beast is, and that's how he thinks of other people - because believe it or not, viewers are other people too, not some cattle to be milked and slaughtered - then I'm glad I don't watch his videos. Not going to, and I'm happy to pass this document around to dissuade others from viewing his channel. -- [0] - I mean, that's kind of obvious in anything social media, but rarely do you get it spelled out without any qualms.