The Company Isn't a Family
m.signalvnoise.com
m.signalvnoise.com
He compares a company as a high performing "sports team". With the idea being, you're working towards a collective goal. You each have you're own role. But if you're not performing, you get cut. Just like any athlete would get cut.
The problem with the "family" analogy is it implies "unconditional love" regardless if you're messing up, failing, not performing.
Team is a much better analogy. Hell, it's not even an analogy really, every company is literally a competitive team within the game of capitalism.
That MLS isn’t of the highest quality should be obvious to anyone concerned, especially considering I’ve used it as a low paying contrast to “professional sports teams”.
- The goal of those with lots of equity, like the founders and investors, is that "collective goal" of company profit.
- The goal of one employee may be to keep their job, provide for their family, and spend as much time with their family as possible.
- The goal of another employee may be to learn as much as possible.
- The goal of another employee may be to get promoted up as high as possible (for social and/or financial gains).
- The goal of another employee may be to do as much social good as possible, regardless of what the effect is on the bottom line.
If a company is like a sports team, then I think it's like one that is thrown together in gym class where each student has a different goal.
- One student may actually be competitive and want to win.
- Another may care a lot about their grade, and only try when the teacher glances over at them.
- Another may just be concerned with not getting sweaty and ruining his/her hair.
- Another may be selfish and want to, in basketball for example, be a ball hog and take every shot.
- Another may just be having fun, and not be too concerned with winning.
I understand that executives may _want_ their employees to act as if they are on a competitive sports team - working really hard together towards a common goal, and then heading home at night to relax and recharge. But the fact that executives want it doesn't make it an accurate description of reality.
I think it's a fine analogy even when you add the nuances. Not all companies are good teams though - sometimes you have the marching band deciding what plays to run so they can play their favorite song, to mix analogies...
- If a teammate is doing something wrong, give them feedback. I don't try to improve my family.
- If a teammate is doing well, have them share what's working. I don't try to get every detail out of family.
- If a teammate is going in the wrong direction, I remind them of our shared goal. I don't try to change the goals of my family.
- If a teammate leaves, I change I relate to them. I don't try to distance myself or hide things from family deliberately.
Being part of a team is great. It's just different than family, or friends, or strangers at the bar.
"I don't try to improve my family." Don't most (family members)?
"I don't try to change the goals of my family." Again, don't most?
I don't try to improve my family as a first-order activity. I will offer help if they ask, but not everybody wants every dinner or vacation to be a discussion of the shortcomings and how to mitigate them or of their strengths and how they need to find more opportunities to use them.
I don't try to change the goals of my family. If my daughter wants to go backpack through the wilderness, or my mom wants to move to Vietnam, that's cool. At work, it's important that we all want (e.g.) the company to grow by 75%+ this year and we need to set goals on how to get there. If my coworkers want to get to profitability instead, it's not an incorrect course of action, but I will debate with them until we're all shooting for the same goal.
Families can be quite a bit more live-and-let-live. Teams need to be invested in the same general direction.
Then again, and I'm just being pedantic here, that's also the case with most companies. It's not the job of most employees to "improve" the company or talk about how its "shortcomings and how to mitigate them" etc. Usually they just have some specific tasks to do, and the other things are more for management.
>I don't try to change the goals of my family. If my daughter wants to go backpack through the wilderness, or my mom wants to move to Vietnam, that's cool.
On the other hand, most people try to influence the goals of their family, e.g. if somebody's kid is a slacker that fails at school and plays videogames all day, they try to get them to shape, etc.
>At work, it's important that we all want (e.g.) the company to grow by 75%+ this year and we need to set goals on how to get there. If my coworkers want to get to profitability instead, it's not an incorrect course of action, but I will debate with them until we're all shooting for the same goal.
I don't think this applies to most employees. It's not at all important that all are agreeing "for the same goal", as management decides those goals.
On the flip side, the family analogy is used by the companies to their advantage as well. If working for "family", we all might accept less pay (for the good of the "family") and would do shitty work (underemployment; someone has to take out the "trash").
No employee was spared if he was messing, not performing etc. because he invoked "but we said that this company is a family, so they must protect me unconditionally".
It was always the other way around: the company saying they're like family when asking to exploit employees more.
So the problem with the family analogy is exactly the inverse of what the parent says (and is precisely what TFA says).
The only reasons to have an analogy are you are 1) dealing with people who lack the acculturation to hold a professional job, or 2) you are trying to distort the notion of a company in your favor.
A company is an "idea", as Yuval Harari says it is something, fiction, a story, we invent to create a shared purpose. It can be like a sports team (some of which presumably are incorporated), it can be like a tribe, it can be like a family. We can make whatever we want of it. I think companies would do better with a more tribe-like story than with a sports team like story.
Individuals temporarily have self-interest that aligns beautifully and lends itself to pattern flying. Individual incentives and goals will inevitably change over time.
Maybe one person will veer off in a different direction if the startup doesn't get A-list funding, maybe another will get bored after the prototype is finished, maybe another will fly off in chase of a relationship, etc.
Even large companies are like this. The CEO may be putting 150% into it for two years but will rationally give up and move on if things don't turn around. Someone may have tried hard to get hired right out of school, but after two years of experience fully plans on quitting to attend a PhD program.
I like to be very upfront with would-be hires about their goals. I don't expect someone to fly with the pack out of loyalty, there has to be something about their overall life plan that makes flying in this pattern a big win for some period of time.
I do want to talk about that life plan. How can time with my company help you get where you want to get and also help us get where we want to get? My goal of course is to make the experience of working there so incredible that you change your life plan to allow more time flying in our formation.
Some people don't have kids or spouses and would rather be the best indoor soccer player they can be or the best at spoken word night at the local coffee shop. When someone is at work I want them to be focused on goals that matter to them and that are meaningful to the company, but I also want them to switch gears and live their life whatever it is, since I know that they will do that anyway if they have any sort of independent, inner drive.
Same trick used by college fraternities to do all sorts of crap.
College fraternities exist as a framework for social contracts between strangers alone in a college environment. Each member is incentivized to support/protect/uplift the other members (just like a family) as they will be able to expect it in return. You can somewhat make the argument for each chapter's national org, but I really don't think the incentives are really that out of line between them, Nationals just tend to be poorly run.
Companies, as the article discusses, don't.
e.g. The company is going through great hardship, so we will have to mistreat you. You are part of our "family" so you understand and put up with that, right?
I've been in that situation many years ago and was frustrating.
Having said that, the article is correct in that it doesn't really treat you like a family. If you did something they didn't like, they would more likely fire you than cut you a break like a family would. I mean take it for what it is, a description of a comfortable, good working environment and not a place that won't hesitate to fire you for the usual reasons.
I think calling it a family is slightly disingenuous or maybe hyperbole, but unless they are using it as power over you, I don't worry about it much. Like I said, it sure beats some alternatives.
I'm not opposed to spending time and effort - even extraordinary amounts of it - to helping the company. But as an employee, I make trades, not sacrifices. Sacrificing for the company makes my working conditions worse, and so I will look elsewhere if I'm not fairly compensated for it (which wouldn't be sacrifice now, would it?)
Different cultures prioritize different things. For example, Netflix prioritizes the individual Star culture. Zappos prioritizes the commitment culture.
So whether a company is a family or a team or business transaction depends on the founder's imprint.
A good read is: https://cmr.berkeley.edu/documents/sample_articles/2002_44_3...
I said I wouldn't commit the team to a date that I had no role in setting. They asked me when do I think it could get done, I told them I didn't know.
Then when we estimated our first sprint and based our capacity on a realistic 5 hour days per dev based on meetings, tickets, etc. they tried to push back. Agile sounds all good until you start talking about a "sustainable pace" and 40 hour work weeks.
All that to say, my job is not my family. I set the expectation of 40 hour work weeks. Even if I do end up working extra because I'm on a groove or doing something challenging or interesting, I don't let anyone know I'm working extra.
For example:
The owner is trying to make a profit (rather than a hard salary) and it's probably best if they're fairly detached or things go haywire, but a good hostel owner wants the hostel to be beneficial and enjoyable for the guests (regular employees) because it benefits everyone.
The hostel staff are management. They are much more involved with everyone, but still try to remain detached somewhat, since they might have to kick a guest out for bad behavior. Often they were previous guests, and those people often make the best staff (managers) because they know all sides of it. They get direct orders from the owners and try to make that work.
Guests are the equivalent of a company's employees. They are all there for different reasons and get all different kinds of things out of it. Some want to spend most of their day hanging out with other guests and staff. They're not in a hurry to leave and they get a lot of their satisfaction from the comfort of the hostel and the people they're with. Seeing the area is sort of tangential to them. Others are trying to see everything they can, they don't care about making friends, they have a plan and goals. On the extreme end, they might do something like cut in line to make sure they make the list for the next tour. In fact if they can't, they're probably going to another hostel.
Anyways it's a loose analogy, but everyone is there for different reasons that overlap at different points. They're not really all working towards the same goal, but again, their goals likely overlap. Nobody bats an eye that the goal of a guest isn't to make the owner the most profit, or vice versa. You can reasonably expect that most people are going to move on sooner or later. People may or may not become really socially involved, depending on what they want. Some hostels are large and less sociable, others are tightly knit and cozy. I can draw parallels for days.
I mean, obviously a hostel _is_ a type of company, but I still think it works as a helpful analogy. Most of the things I roll my eyes at or that people don't like about companies, you could try to apply to the hostel analogy and it will break the illusion of that thing being good. If people thought of their work more in that context, there might be a little less company koolaid being pushed around these days and a little more satisfaction for everyone.
The implicit assumption of capitalism is that you have a perpetual debt that cannot be repaid, much like the Christian "debt" that cannot be repaid to the Abrahamic God.
Capitalism is as much an economic system as it is a moralistic and religious system.
What? Care to clarify?
There are various equilibrium states between supply and demand, but utility is infinite. If utility is infinite, then the goal of production is to satisfy an equally infinite debt to maximizing utility.
And the culture around capitalism in different countries, gives it even more specific goals (the american dream, the rat race, etc).
>That is like claiming evolution has w goal. Don't anthropomorphize it.
Isn't this statement obviously wrong? Evolution is a process in nature. Capitalism is a human invention. One can't anthropomorphize it, because it's already anthropomorphized by the fact that it's a human endeavor.
"Liar"? This choice of wording sounds like a quasi-religious attack. Like they're blasphemers or something, that dared misinform about capitalism.
No chance they could be right, or at least just misguided, instead of "liars"? Or that the subject being more complicated than a binary like "designed/emergent"?
Now, to the gist of it. Numerous human societies existed that weren't capitalist. In fact in many countries (of the last 2-5 centuries) capitalism was imposed along with colonialism, and otherwise they continued their ancient ways of living and trading. It is widely accepted that what we call capitalism (as opposed to mere exchange and trade, which existed since forever) was born around 13-14th century in Europe.
In any case, whether it was emergent or designed doesn't mean much. It was both: it was collectively shaped (emergent), by several influences, but it also had clearly designed elements (from contract and labor law, to central banks and monetary policy).
National law for one gives a very precise framework that molds capitalism in a certain shape in different countries, and that law was designed by actual humans with specific purposes and goals in mind.
And of course, something being "emergent" and that thing having "anthropomorphic" elements (if you refer to the second part of my comment) is not contradictory -- if that something emerged by human action within human societies.
This is the goal of any economic system as far as I can tell. I don't see how ownership of the means of production matters.
If utility is infinite, then the goal of production is to satisfy an equally infinite debt to maximizing utility
Sort of. This is why we have sympathy/empathy, social mores, the rule of law, and finally the threat of Malthusian apocalypse. Each of these, in order of increasing severity, exists as a budget constraint on greed in service of utility maximization. And again, this has nothing to do with capitalism specifically -- it would be true in any economic system. Socialist and communist governments in the 20th century went to great lengths in order to remind us of that.
Fundamentally, I think it comes down to power relationships. The market economy is a proxy for power relations. Communist (and fascist) governments removed the market economy and replaced it with authoritarian servitude. God shifts from the Economy to the State.
Start with student debt, add mortgage, financed car, credit cards, ...
Combined with "at-will" employment, it's a wonderful tool for social control / keeping the serfs in their place.
But anyway, about the subject matter, from the several tech companies I've been at now I can see that this kind of "exec brainwashing" does happen, and it always seems rather on-the-nose in it's indifference and facelessness. Where I work currently we even have paragraphs like these on our toilet doors! The thing is, people work better when it's "for" something. Something bigger than themselves, such as the "family" or "team" (it's probably something to do with our hunter-gatherer evolutionary genes). Execs, or rather HR and "Worker Performance Consultants" know this, and they (ab)use it to make workers produce more wealth for the company.
I think however that both companies and workers are to blame for past-shift hours, pressures to finish, and such, and both maybe partially for the same reason - a race to the bottom. In terms of companies, this can be for example when company X pushes their workers harder than company Y to undercut their prices. You definitely see this in things like ~[UK reference warning]~ Sports Direct International Ltd, which treats workers rather poorly [1][2][3], just to make their shoes a bit cheaper than that fancy hipster shop down the road who's staff work only their shift hours. In terms of workers, you see the exact same thing, where worker X will over-propose on project A to undercut Worker Y's realistically-proposed project A. So you see that if you don't work crazy hours to finish that big project, then you can definitely bet on somebody else doing it.
In the end it's not always "the evil company and their grubby execs" who are asking too much of their workers to get that good quarter result, but workers themselves asking too much of themselves to get that freelance project, job, promotion, raise, good reference, or whatever, over their job-market or worker peers.
I think maybe the little post misses a few parts of the picture, but like I said, a good reminder of the topic.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/08/inhuma... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/dec/09/how-sports-... [3] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-36855374