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I think often company spin like this is more targeted towards internal employees than the outside world. Employees on the inside are always going to have a dece

• voidfunc 2y ago
  This. Stuff like mission statements and that kind of crap is for these type of employees who need to delude themselves that they're not just part of a profit making exercise or manufacturing weapons to suppress minorities / kill brown people. Every company has one.
  • DSingularity 2y ago
    I feel that Gaza has shown us that there aren’t as many of these types of employees as we think. Most people don’t care. OpenAI is doing this show because if they don’t they are more vulnerable to law-suits. They need to manufacture a narrative without this exact structure they cannot fulfill their original mission.
    • zombiwoof 2y ago
      Agreed. The question every employee cares about is “will this make my RSU go up”
  • benterix 2y ago
    Really? I mean, I don't know a single person in real life who believes all this corporate bs. We know there must be a mission because this is the current business culture taught during MBA courses and everybody accepted it as a matter of course but I'm not even sure the CEOs themselves believe there is even one employee who is fascinated by its mission - say, a FedEx driver who admires the slogan "FedEx Corporation will produce superior financial returns for its shareowners by providing high value-added logistics, transportation and related business services".
• ninth_ant 2y ago
  I think this underestimates the degree to which the people on these companies legitimately believe what they’re saying. I’ve worked at one of these companies and absolutely would fall into your category of being a true believer at the time. People of all stripes are extremely willing to embrace ideas that justify their own personal benefit. A rich person might be more likely to believe in trickle-down economics because ultimately it enriches them — but that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily a false belief. An American might sincerely believe that gun proliferation is safe, because the information they process is filtered by their biases as it’s important to their cultural identity. So when your stock options will pay out big from the company’s success, or even just if your paycheque depends on it — you’re more likely to process information and ideas though the lens of your bias. It’s not just being a gullible true believer tricked by the company’s elite — you’re also just willing to interpret it the same way in no small part because it benefits you.
  • soulofmischief 2y ago
    And a non-American may think the right to bear arms is antiquated and that a trained, armed populace isn't instrumental to a functioning democracy. What's your point? How have you established that this is the biased viewpoint and not your own?
  • dgfitz 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • ska 2y ago
    > It’s not just being a gullible true believer ... “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” - Upton Sinclair (1930's ?)
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • TrainedMonkey 2y ago
    Modern hiring process, esp culture fit, is designed to ensure that fraction of true believers inside the company is meaningfully higher compared to the outside.
• rvz 2y ago
  It's quite frankly more than that. They think we are all idiots into believing that so-called "AGI" is going to make the world a better place, whilst investors, employees are laughing all the way to the bank with every new fundraising round. First being a non-profit, then taking Microsoft's money, then ditching non-profit status to a for-profit organization and now changing definitions of "Open" and "AGI" to raise more money. It is a massive scam, with a new level of newspeak.
  • dgfitz 2y ago
    I’m not sure why this was down-modded, it is quite accurate.
  • sourcepluck 2y ago
    Yes, yes, yes and yes. I hadn't explicitly said to myself that even for a modern company OpenAI maybe has a particularly fond relationship with this Orwellian use of language to mean its opposite. I wonder if we could go so far as to say it's a defining feature of the company (and our age).
• notatoad 2y ago
  Even the employees, I think, would probably be fine with being told “we just want to make shitloads of money”. I usually feel like these statements are more about the board members and C-suite trying to fool themselves.
  • Spivak 2y ago
    Yes but when that statement doesn't come with "and we're doubling all your salaries" then as an employee it doesn't really matter. The double edge of most companies insulating employees from the actual business is that beyond the maintenance cost employees don't care that the business is doing well because, well, it doesn't affect them. But what does affect them is abandoning the company's values that made them sign on in the first place.
    • paxys 2y ago
      Employees have equity. They all directly benefit from the company being worth more.
  • sangnoir 2y ago
    Those employees revolted to bring Sam back after he was dismissed by the board. They know what's up.
• benterix 2y ago
  Come one, people are not that stupid.
• thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > Employees on the inside are always going to have a decent percentage of “true believers” who have cognitive dissonance if they don’t believe they’re making the world better. No, this is an artifact of insisting that people pretend to be true believers during interviews. After I was fired from a position doing bug bounty triage on HackerOne, I applied to be a bug triager on HackerOne. And they rejected me, stating that my description of why I applied, "this is identical to the job I was already doing", didn't make them feel that I saw their company as a calling rather than a place of employment.
  • notatoad 2y ago
    wait, what? you applied for a job you had just gotten fired from?
    • thaumasiotes 2y ago
      No, I applied for a job involving exactly the same duties as a job I had just been fired from. I was not originally (or ever) employed by HackerOne.
• zitterbewegung 2y ago
  If your employees actually believe this spin that’s a big stretch especially the behavior of the CEO and the board being dissolved recently … I was a employee at a large company and I could see when the CEO was actually taking a stand that meant something and wasn’t some type of action trying to mislead employees .
• zombiwoof 2y ago
  I agree. It’s for internal employees who are probably being heavily recruited for real RSU money from Meta and Google. Having spend the better part of my life in Silicon Valley my view has been gone are the days of mission. Everybody just wants RSU You could tell employees they will build software to track lock up immigrants, deplete the world of natural resources, cause harm to other countries and if their RSUs go up 99% will be on board, especially if their H1b is renewed :)
• dragonwriter 2y ago
  > I think often company spin like this is more targeted towards internal employees than the outside world. Probably is more ti employees than the general public, but it is even more targeted to the growing number of lawsuts against the conversion, since the charity nonprofit’s board is required to act in the interest of its charitable purpose even in a decision like this. It is directed at defeating the idea, expressed quite effectively in the opening of Musk’s suit, that “Never before has a corporation gone from tax-exempt charity to a $157 billion for-profit, market-paralyzing gorgon—and in just eight years. Never before has it happened, because doing so violates almost every principle of law governing economic activity. It requires lying to donors, lying to members, lying to markets, lying to regulators, and lying to the public.”
  • gunian 2y ago
    [dead]
  • rvba 2y ago
    There are tons of examples of non profit that are run for profit (mostly profit / career advancement of those in charge and their families and friends). Firefox spend a ton on pet projects to boost careers. Now the core product lost most matketshare and is not what people want. Wikipedia collects a ton of money and wastes it on everything bar wikipedia (mostly salaries and pet proje ts). There are those charities where 95% of collected money is spent on own costs and only 5% reaches those in need / the topics that they should solve. Control over non profits is a joke. People in charge respond to nobody.
    • droopyEyelids 2y ago
      None of your examples are legally profit though.
    • jokethrowaway 2y ago
      We should abolish taxes, so real companies won't need to hide behind the non-profit status and real non-profits could shine.