Years ago when Google still maintained a facade that they weren't a Corporate America defense contractor, theyconducted a 2 year study study into what made a te

Years ago when Google still maintained a facade that they weren't a Corporate America defense contractor, theyconducted a 2 year study study into what made a team effective: Project Aristotle [1]. The key factor? Psychological safety. Fast forward to the present day and we are in permanent layoff culture. The maverick facade from Big Tech was dropped long ago. Employees are graded on a curve and 5-10% of those regardless of their actual performance will be deemed substandard just to fit the curve. A good portion of those will end up on PIPs or just be laid off. But even those on PIPs are more likely than not to be working there 6 months later. This is an inherently cutthroat environment. Any pretense of psychological safety has been abandoned in favor of short-term profit seeking. While this is sold as a way of weeding out low performers and cutting costs (despite record high profits that's somehow still necessary), it's really a method of suppressing labor costs. But having experienced this kind of toxic environment, it doesn't select high-performers, it selects the people who are most liked by management. People who are neurodivergent suffer disproportionately (IME). My point is that in general nobbody is your friend at work. Not your colleagues, not your manager and not HR> They are to varying degrees protecting their own asses and you will be shocked how quickly someone who is nice to you at work will throw you under the bus to protect themselves ot simply to get ahead. In a desperate bid to cut and suppress labor costs, managemen thas ramped up the toxicity and further undermined and destroyed any social connections you may make at work. But they've also destroyed the psychological safety that allowed them to do great things. Stack-ranking employees for likability on a curve and OKRs are not what drives success. Those things destroy success. [1]: https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/ https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/