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I've played sports my entire life (father was a basketball coach), and in that world these sorts of "rites of passage" are common place. I've also seen a bit of

by mrrrgn 12y ago

I've played sports my entire life (father was a basketball coach), and in that world these sorts of "rites of passage" are common place. I've also seen a bit of this at software companies -- for instance at Facebook I got the feeling that a lot of engineers felt simpatico as a result of the shared "suffering" that went into the tedious interview process. My experiences led me to believe that, while this can be effective, it only works on certain classes of people. That is, I think a person needs a certain amount of naïveté to be drawn in by schemes like this. They need to already be willing to buy into some litany of conquest and glory. To be young and/or dumb. Perhaps it is an innate human tendency to form stronger bonds under these conditions; but it's certainly not expressed equally throughout all phases of life, circumstances, and the population at large. I'd be very wary of attempting to exploit it by constructing rituals for a software team.

RangerScience 12y ago
I think you're reacting to the fake-ness in catered/fabricated bonding experiences. There's no way classic corporate training will match, say, skydiving, or a survivalist weekend. There's a reason Burning Man is considered a year's worth of relationship. I want to say that the dividing line is whether or not the experience is as likely to break bonds as it is to create them. I don't expect to burn a bridge at a company retreat... but I would expect to burn some doing Survivor with my team. Basically, yeah, I agree with you that it takes naivete to be drawn into /schemes/... but you can have these experiences without them being machinations. Or, at least, machinations of the sort that "when friends use you, it makes you stronger."
Florin_Andrei 12y ago
> My experiences led me to believe that, while this can be effective, it only works on certain classes of people. That is, I think a person needs a certain amount of naïveté to be drawn in by schemes like this. They need to already be willing to buy into some litany of conquest and glory. To be young and/or dumb. Only if the ritual is superficial. When we're talking self-flagellation, or hunting elephants as a group, things operate on a quite different level.

by mrrrgn 12y ago

RangerScience 12y ago

I think you're reacting to the fake-ness in catered/fabricated bonding experiences. There's no way classic corporate training will match, say, skydiving, or a survivalist weekend. There's a reason Burning Man is considered a year's worth of relationship. I want to say that the dividing line is whether or not the experience is as likely to break bonds as it is to create them. I don't expect to burn a bridge at a company retreat... but I would expect to burn some doing Survivor with my team. Basically, yeah, I agree with you that it takes naivete to be drawn into /schemes/... but you can have these experiences without them being machinations. Or, at least, machinations of the sort that "when friends use you, it makes you stronger."

Florin_Andrei 12y ago

> My experiences led me to believe that, while this can be effective, it only works on certain classes of people. That is, I think a person needs a certain amount of naïveté to be drawn in by schemes like this. They need to already be willing to buy into some litany of conquest and glory. To be young and/or dumb. Only if the ritual is superficial. When we're talking self-flagellation, or hunting elephants as a group, things operate on a quite different level.