14 ms·

Carnival Cash: The Cult of Seniority

51 points by nkurz 12y ago

jwatte 12y ago
While the caricature is entertaining, I have never worked in a corporation that works at all like what's described. At companies I've worked at, if you're checked out, you do not last. At companies I've worked at, some prodigies have very high positions at 30; some maintenance steady goers may find a good pace in the middle into senior age. A successful corporation lets every employee both contribute, and stretch. And working with experienced people who know what they are doing is the best way to learn real skills that can't be learned from reading an open source project wiki.
- UK-AL 12y ago
  That or your an idealist. And those prodigies have token seniority as described.
  - onthesideofthe 12y ago
    > That or your an idealist. And those prodigies have token seniority as described. This is what I don't like about articles like this. It provides a language to put down and dehumanize others without offering anything positive. 29y/o CEO? Sociopath. Coworker that's been promoted ahead of me? Idealist, just mere token seniority. I'll earn more money than him by job hopping a few times anyways.
- michaelochurch 12y ago
  At companies I've worked at, if you're checked out, you do not last. If you get a reputation for being checked out, it gets hard for you. There are plenty of people who check out without getting a reputation, and who do just fine. If you stop showing up for standup and you're not a top performer, you get in trouble. (You may even get in trouble if you are a top performer for "setting a bad example".) If you know how to make it look like you're a middling performer while you're actually doing very little, you can get away with it for a few years, which is long enough to figure out what you really want to do. Checked-out-ness, I'd guess, is more often a transient state than the notion is given credit. Strategic slacking while you figure out what you really want to do, network internally to find transfer options and future leads/co-founders, and build skills that are relevant to the next job if not the current one, is a necessary career-planning skill. You may not be able to carry it on for 5 years, but no one intends to. If you've been at a job for less than 4 years or held your current title for less than 1, it can make sense to stick around if you're checked out, for the sake of your CV. If neither applies, you're best to get out. You don't want to be a job hopper, but if you're 3-4 years in, then you don't really get more gain from a longer stay and slacking (beyond a few months to recharge) makes no sense from a career perspective; you should just move on. Also, I've gotten into detail about this in my Gervais/MacLeod Series (starting here: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/gervais-principle-questioned-macleods-hierarchy-the-technocrat-and-vc-startups/ https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/gervais-prin... ). Companies tend to oscillate between rank cultures and tough cultures. A rank culture is one where subordinacy is all that matters; don't piss off your boss, don't create the appearance of slacking (which will cause problems for your boss) and you'll be fine. Rank cultures tend to decay, and then the company has to bring in HR brownshirts who impose stack ranking and calibration curves and the like. That's not stable, though, and the people who figure out the system and can extend protection become the new holders of rank and, they, like their predecessors, care more about loyalty than individual performance. So you get a new rank culture after a couple years.
  - jwatte 12y ago
    Why would you, at all, stay in a place where you're checked out? True, it might work at Intel or Microsoft, but most companies are 200 people or less.
    - michaelochurch 12y ago
      The job hopper-stigma. If you've got 4 years in, there's no good reason to stay post check-out unless you absolutely can't find something better. However, the job hopper stigma can start to rape you in the ass if you have too many short jobs. Let's say that you take a new job and things are going well, but you're demoted at the 6-month mark. After you're demoted or passed over, there's really no good reason to put in high levels of effort. In an ideal world, people could just leave whenever that happened. In the real world, it can catch up with you. If you don't have any short-term jobs, you can probably start looking, because one short job isn't that bad. If your last two jobs were under a year, you should probably phone it in, do the minimum for a while, and get a 2- or 3-year job on your CV before you move along.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
rpcope1 12y ago
Wow, this is a great read; it also sums up about every company I've ever worked at with more than a couple hundred people. It's amazing how many people will pull in more time than absolutely necessary on things they don't care about, even at tech companies, just to "get ahead."
- kzhahou 12y ago
  tldr please?
  - brianwawok 12y ago
    Don't spend your entire life (i.e. lots of overtime) playing the office game for a 10% raise and a corner office, spend your life actually doing something of value... the effort:return ratio on office politics is pretty low.
- makeitsuckless 12y ago
  If you've worked for multiple companies that function like that, that probably says more about you.
  - rpcope1 12y ago
    I can't tell if that's a rather passive-aggressive ad hominem or what, but sometimes its hard to know the true inner machinations of some of our "revered" tech giants until you've seen them from the inside. Needless to say that's not somewhere I stay for long.
makeitsuckless 12y ago
I'm now over 45, and I've never, ever worked for a company like that. So ask yourself: how do bloggers that rant about such companies get this wisdom? It's always the people that play the game and fail that loudly blame the game.
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  I expect it is unfair to generalize that "people that play the game and fail" blame the game. Rather there are a number of people who do not understand how communities work, and never have, and so they don't recognize when they are being antagonistic to the very people they want to be friends with. I remember having a conversation with a relatively new programmer who was ranting they were "fed up with all the political BS and just wanted to write code and be left alone." That is a sentiment I completely resonate with, but in this case the "political BS" was folks trying to help this person become more effective in the organization. What was impairing their efficiency was that this individual wrote code in a vacuum. people trying to integrate with it were frustrated when this developer decides on Friday night that they don't like how they structured the APIs with an opaque handle and convert everything into a callbacks which appears as the new API to the rest of the organization on Monday. It wasn't "political BS" that was causing these folks to be angry with this individual, it was that this individual was actively making their job harder than needed. But when it became clear that more people where being hindered than helped, I was asked to step in and see if I could help this person see what the real issues were. I was only 50% effective, they understood the issue but decided to leave rather than slow down to listen to the needs of the other engineers. To this day they assert they were 'forced out' but nothing could be further from the truth.
  - dctoedt 12y ago
    > I was asked to ... see if I could help this person .... they understood the issue but decided to leave .... To this day they assert they were 'forced out' .... Off-topic rant: For the love of God, will everyone please STOP with the use of they as a gender-neutral singular pronoun. History shows us a better way: Decades ago, feminists coined the term Ms., which has all but totally replaced the old-fashioned Miss and Mrs. Those concerned with gender neutrality should do likewise, instead of inflicting ambiguity and inaccuracy on the rest of us by (mis)using they. </rant>
aeflash 12y ago
I think the author makes a couple flawed assumptions. First: that all people are motivated primarily by money, and second: things that have no direct monetary value have no value. Some people value the work they do, or the work their company does. Some people value their teams and the people they work with on a daily basis. Some people value working in a nice space, or their own spaces. Some people would like to look back at 65 at what they have built, rather than what they have earned, not really caring that they may have earned 20% less. I do agree that chasing seniority for title only can be a fools errand. A higher title can be a substitute for self-esteem issues, but on the other hand, it can also lead to higher pay scales. Also, I've known companies to reward those "corporate idealists" with more than just carnival tickets.... If your company doesn't reward putting in the occasional extra hour and seeing things through to completion, it's a bad company to work for.
- alexandercrohde 12y ago
  Agreed. Who says social comparison (discarded by this article as "carnival tickets") plays no role in satisfaction? Research shows that making more than peers is a better predictor of happiness than absolute income (http://e-archivo.uc3m.es/bitstream/handle/10016/15313/happiness_perez_JPE_2011_ps.pdf?sequence=1 http://e-archivo.uc3m.es/bitstream/handle/10016/15313/happin...) Great article.
- UK-AL 12y ago
  Its less about earnings, and more about time with acutally important things like family.
Gaussian 12y ago
Averaging 60 hours a week - for a career - at a corporate job as a developer? That's not something I've witnessed. Projects can ramp up and down, but sustaining that level of hours for long clips is only something I've seen at startups where the whole team is invested. If you're putting in 60 hours every week, for years, for some corporation, then you've been had.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
That is an interesting perspective. In my experience it seems a bit too narrow to generalize across companies but I know a lot of folks who have had some bad experiences at companies and then have extrapolated that to an entire industry. It has been interesting meeting folks at IBM who have 20+ years at the same company. Atypical of Silicon valley folks but not unheard of[1]. Having the experience of having been at a company for a while gives you the ability to do things that people who have not been there cannot, in part because you have a better view on where things get done or don't get done. It is apparent from Erik's response to recruiters[2] that he approaches work in a somewhat mercenary way. And while that can work it sets a tone for your relationship with the people in the company that does not work to your advantage, and can sometimes be a handicap down the road as you re-encounter people with whom you have previously worked. Companies are communities of people. Communities have norms and values and expectations. It is always uncomfortable when you don't fit in with the community, and some people are better at "finding their people" than others are. I can say though that when you and the community "click" for what ever set of reasons, it can be a wonderful thing indeed, and a real sense of loss when you lose it. [1] One of my early friends at Intel is still there 30 years later, and the same with folks at Sun I knew who are now with Oracle as part of that acquisition. [2] From the comment section Erik wrote: This is particularly valuable when talking to labor salesmen (i.e. recruiters). "They have a pool table!" "Don't care, what's the pay?" "$X" "Not enough money." "But, they have a pool table, and everyone there will be your dudebro and they'll even add rockstar to your title!" "Don't care, not enough money. Call me back if the offer changes."
- jordanb 12y ago
  Wanting good pay instead of meaningless breakroom toys makes you a "mercenary?" I'm all for working hard and leaving a position with everyone feeling like I made a difference, and I'm still close friends with many of my former colleagues and bosses. But at the end of the day my compensation for doing work others want done is my salary and the cash value of the provided benefits. The cash value of a pool table in the break room is essentially $0, and a recruiter pretending it's not is trying to pull a fast one.
  - 12y ago
michaelochurch 12y ago
The one thing I disagree with in this is the point about an office. Having an office matters. Being visible from behind sucks, and the open-plan stress means that you spend an unacceptable amount of your leisure time recovering from work instead of actually doing things. I'd gladly take a 10% pay cut not to deal with that. I don't give a shit about having a nice office. I'd be fine with 50 square feet and a small window. As a programmer, I'd want an office just to have some space where I can get work done. That's not because I'm a true believer or a corporate man. It's entirely selfish: my career will be better if I succeed than if I fail, and these terrible open-plan offices do enough damage to day-to-day performance that I'd rather not be in one. Though I'm a Sociopath/opportunist I generally find that it's usually in my interest to work hard, do my best, and play fair. In a conflict, I'll favor my interests above almost anyone else's, but I also avoid such conflicts as much as I can. Other than that, I think that the carnival cash metaphor is spot-on. Moreover, I think the spawning issue (i.e. that sociopaths/opportunists don't usually start at the top) is worth note in technology because it's such a young industry. The age discrimination and the Scrum nonsense are all about creating a permanent culture of the clueless/idealist mindset-- at all levels. The VC-funded ecosystem is one where the Sociopaths get to play multiple companies (as investors, advisors, and executives placed into successful companies after the fact) and the checked-out MacLeod Losers (pragmatists) are shut out by the time they wise up. The goal is to produce monochromatically Clueless/idealist companies that the Sociopaths/opportunists in VC can manage from a distance and discard if they become inconvenient.

51 points by nkurz 12y ago

While the caricature is entertaining, I have never worked in a corporation that works at all like what's described. At companies I've worked at, if you're checked out, you do not last. At companies I've worked at, some prodigies have very high positions at 30; some maintenance steady goers may find a good pace in the middle into senior age. A successful corporation lets every employee both contribute, and stretch. And working with experienced people who know what they are doing is the best way to learn real skills that can't be learned from reading an open source project wiki.

UK-AL 12y ago
That or your an idealist. And those prodigies have token seniority as described.
- onthesideofthe 12y ago
  > That or your an idealist. And those prodigies have token seniority as described. This is what I don't like about articles like this. It provides a language to put down and dehumanize others without offering anything positive. 29y/o CEO? Sociopath. Coworker that's been promoted ahead of me? Idealist, just mere token seniority. I'll earn more money than him by job hopping a few times anyways.
michaelochurch 12y ago
At companies I've worked at, if you're checked out, you do not last. If you get a reputation for being checked out, it gets hard for you. There are plenty of people who check out without getting a reputation, and who do just fine. If you stop showing up for standup and you're not a top performer, you get in trouble. (You may even get in trouble if you are a top performer for "setting a bad example".) If you know how to make it look like you're a middling performer while you're actually doing very little, you can get away with it for a few years, which is long enough to figure out what you really want to do. Checked-out-ness, I'd guess, is more often a transient state than the notion is given credit. Strategic slacking while you figure out what you really want to do, network internally to find transfer options and future leads/co-founders, and build skills that are relevant to the next job if not the current one, is a necessary career-planning skill. You may not be able to carry it on for 5 years, but no one intends to. If you've been at a job for less than 4 years or held your current title for less than 1, it can make sense to stick around if you're checked out, for the sake of your CV. If neither applies, you're best to get out. You don't want to be a job hopper, but if you're 3-4 years in, then you don't really get more gain from a longer stay and slacking (beyond a few months to recharge) makes no sense from a career perspective; you should just move on. Also, I've gotten into detail about this in my Gervais/MacLeod Series (starting here: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/gervais-principle-questioned-macleods-hierarchy-the-technocrat-and-vc-startups/ https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/gervais-prin... ). Companies tend to oscillate between rank cultures and tough cultures. A rank culture is one where subordinacy is all that matters; don't piss off your boss, don't create the appearance of slacking (which will cause problems for your boss) and you'll be fine. Rank cultures tend to decay, and then the company has to bring in HR brownshirts who impose stack ranking and calibration curves and the like. That's not stable, though, and the people who figure out the system and can extend protection become the new holders of rank and, they, like their predecessors, care more about loyalty than individual performance. So you get a new rank culture after a couple years.
- jwatte 12y ago
  Why would you, at all, stay in a place where you're checked out? True, it might work at Intel or Microsoft, but most companies are 200 people or less.
  - michaelochurch 12y ago
    The job hopper-stigma. If you've got 4 years in, there's no good reason to stay post check-out unless you absolutely can't find something better. However, the job hopper stigma can start to rape you in the ass if you have too many short jobs. Let's say that you take a new job and things are going well, but you're demoted at the 6-month mark. After you're demoted or passed over, there's really no good reason to put in high levels of effort. In an ideal world, people could just leave whenever that happened. In the real world, it can catch up with you. If you don't have any short-term jobs, you can probably start looking, because one short job isn't that bad. If your last two jobs were under a year, you should probably phone it in, do the minimum for a while, and get a 2- or 3-year job on your CV before you move along.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

rpcope1 12y ago

Wow, this is a great read; it also sums up about every company I've ever worked at with more than a couple hundred people. It's amazing how many people will pull in more time than absolutely necessary on things they don't care about, even at tech companies, just to "get ahead."

kzhahou 12y ago
tldr please?
- brianwawok 12y ago
  Don't spend your entire life (i.e. lots of overtime) playing the office game for a 10% raise and a corner office, spend your life actually doing something of value... the effort:return ratio on office politics is pretty low.
makeitsuckless 12y ago
If you've worked for multiple companies that function like that, that probably says more about you.
- rpcope1 12y ago
  I can't tell if that's a rather passive-aggressive ad hominem or what, but sometimes its hard to know the true inner machinations of some of our "revered" tech giants until you've seen them from the inside. Needless to say that's not somewhere I stay for long.

makeitsuckless 12y ago

I'm now over 45, and I've never, ever worked for a company like that. So ask yourself: how do bloggers that rant about such companies get this wisdom? It's always the people that play the game and fail that loudly blame the game.

ChuckMcM 12y ago
I expect it is unfair to generalize that "people that play the game and fail" blame the game. Rather there are a number of people who do not understand how communities work, and never have, and so they don't recognize when they are being antagonistic to the very people they want to be friends with. I remember having a conversation with a relatively new programmer who was ranting they were "fed up with all the political BS and just wanted to write code and be left alone." That is a sentiment I completely resonate with, but in this case the "political BS" was folks trying to help this person become more effective in the organization. What was impairing their efficiency was that this individual wrote code in a vacuum. people trying to integrate with it were frustrated when this developer decides on Friday night that they don't like how they structured the APIs with an opaque handle and convert everything into a callbacks which appears as the new API to the rest of the organization on Monday. It wasn't "political BS" that was causing these folks to be angry with this individual, it was that this individual was actively making their job harder than needed. But when it became clear that more people where being hindered than helped, I was asked to step in and see if I could help this person see what the real issues were. I was only 50% effective, they understood the issue but decided to leave rather than slow down to listen to the needs of the other engineers. To this day they assert they were 'forced out' but nothing could be further from the truth.
- dctoedt 12y ago
  > I was asked to ... see if I could help this person .... they understood the issue but decided to leave .... To this day they assert they were 'forced out' .... Off-topic rant: For the love of God, will everyone please STOP with the use of they as a gender-neutral singular pronoun. History shows us a better way: Decades ago, feminists coined the term Ms., which has all but totally replaced the old-fashioned Miss and Mrs. Those concerned with gender neutrality should do likewise, instead of inflicting ambiguity and inaccuracy on the rest of us by (mis)using they. </rant>

aeflash 12y ago

I think the author makes a couple flawed assumptions. First: that all people are motivated primarily by money, and second: things that have no direct monetary value have no value. Some people value the work they do, or the work their company does. Some people value their teams and the people they work with on a daily basis. Some people value working in a nice space, or their own spaces. Some people would like to look back at 65 at what they have built, rather than what they have earned, not really caring that they may have earned 20% less. I do agree that chasing seniority for title only can be a fools errand. A higher title can be a substitute for self-esteem issues, but on the other hand, it can also lead to higher pay scales. Also, I've known companies to reward those "corporate idealists" with more than just carnival tickets.... If your company doesn't reward putting in the occasional extra hour and seeing things through to completion, it's a bad company to work for.

alexandercrohde 12y ago
Agreed. Who says social comparison (discarded by this article as "carnival tickets") plays no role in satisfaction? Research shows that making more than peers is a better predictor of happiness than absolute income (http://e-archivo.uc3m.es/bitstream/handle/10016/15313/happiness_perez_JPE_2011_ps.pdf?sequence=1 http://e-archivo.uc3m.es/bitstream/handle/10016/15313/happin...) Great article.
UK-AL 12y ago
Its less about earnings, and more about time with acutally important things like family.

Gaussian 12y ago

Averaging 60 hours a week - for a career - at a corporate job as a developer? That's not something I've witnessed. Projects can ramp up and down, but sustaining that level of hours for long clips is only something I've seen at startups where the whole team is invested. If you're putting in 60 hours every week, for years, for some corporation, then you've been had.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

That is an interesting perspective. In my experience it seems a bit too narrow to generalize across companies but I know a lot of folks who have had some bad experiences at companies and then have extrapolated that to an entire industry. It has been interesting meeting folks at IBM who have 20+ years at the same company. Atypical of Silicon valley folks but not unheard of[1]. Having the experience of having been at a company for a while gives you the ability to do things that people who have not been there cannot, in part because you have a better view on where things get done or don't get done. It is apparent from Erik's response to recruiters[2] that he approaches work in a somewhat mercenary way. And while that can work it sets a tone for your relationship with the people in the company that does not work to your advantage, and can sometimes be a handicap down the road as you re-encounter people with whom you have previously worked. Companies are communities of people. Communities have norms and values and expectations. It is always uncomfortable when you don't fit in with the community, and some people are better at "finding their people" than others are. I can say though that when you and the community "click" for what ever set of reasons, it can be a wonderful thing indeed, and a real sense of loss when you lose it. [1] One of my early friends at Intel is still there 30 years later, and the same with folks at Sun I knew who are now with Oracle as part of that acquisition. [2] From the comment section Erik wrote: This is particularly valuable when talking to labor salesmen (i.e. recruiters). "They have a pool table!" "Don't care, what's the pay?" "$X" "Not enough money." "But, they have a pool table, and everyone there will be your dudebro and they'll even add rockstar to your title!" "Don't care, not enough money. Call me back if the offer changes."

jordanb 12y ago
Wanting good pay instead of meaningless breakroom toys makes you a "mercenary?" I'm all for working hard and leaving a position with everyone feeling like I made a difference, and I'm still close friends with many of my former colleagues and bosses. But at the end of the day my compensation for doing work others want done is my salary and the cash value of the provided benefits. The cash value of a pool table in the break room is essentially $0, and a recruiter pretending it's not is trying to pull a fast one.
- 12y ago

michaelochurch 12y ago

The one thing I disagree with in this is the point about an office. Having an office matters. Being visible from behind sucks, and the open-plan stress means that you spend an unacceptable amount of your leisure time recovering from work instead of actually doing things. I'd gladly take a 10% pay cut not to deal with that. I don't give a shit about having a nice office. I'd be fine with 50 square feet and a small window. As a programmer, I'd want an office just to have some space where I can get work done. That's not because I'm a true believer or a corporate man. It's entirely selfish: my career will be better if I succeed than if I fail, and these terrible open-plan offices do enough damage to day-to-day performance that I'd rather not be in one. Though I'm a Sociopath/opportunist I generally find that it's usually in my interest to work hard, do my best, and play fair. In a conflict, I'll favor my interests above almost anyone else's, but I also avoid such conflicts as much as I can. Other than that, I think that the carnival cash metaphor is spot-on. Moreover, I think the spawning issue (i.e. that sociopaths/opportunists don't usually start at the top) is worth note in technology because it's such a young industry. The age discrimination and the Scrum nonsense are all about creating a permanent culture of the clueless/idealist mindset-- at all levels. The VC-funded ecosystem is one where the Sociopaths get to play multiple companies (as investors, advisors, and executives placed into successful companies after the fact) and the checked-out MacLeod Losers (pragmatists) are shut out by the time they wise up. The goal is to produce monochromatically Clueless/idealist companies that the Sociopaths/opportunists in VC can manage from a distance and discard if they become inconvenient.