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I recently sat through one of those company/product mission presentations at work. It was one of those "am I the only sane person working here?" moments. I like our product, I want to see it succeed, but I really can't stand the religious fervor marketing departments and managers give off. And the amazing part is that my co-workers seem to completely buy into it. Everyone talks like what we're doing is going to change the world and yadda yadda yadda, like there's some kind of prophesy about our social media app.

How about lets make the thing and see if it's successful before we start singing its praises, okay?

I think deep down, a lot of people have a low hum of awareness that they don't believe what is being said, but it's a survival mechanism to repress this in order to maintain a sense of worth in the work being done/not get fired for not being a team player.

My personal perspective is cynical like yours - that it's generally a scam to try and extract more "value" out of workers - but my wife works at a large corporation where they seem to genuinely try to make it an enjoyable place to work and the people involved, all the way up the ladder, are committed to that ideal.

Praise flows freely, they do a ton of charity work, and it's not a thin veneer over a corporate machine. Perhaps the difference is that it's over 100 years old in a very established worldwide business, so there's room in the budget and schedule to be a lot more flexible and provide home/work balance.

All I know is I'm kind of jealous - I've only ever worked in the soul-sucking companies.

Do you mind sharing the domain in which your wife's company is involved in (assuming you don't want to share the name of the company)?

Appliances.

Why is it a scam to try and extract more value out of workers?

They're going to spend that time on earth somehow, and if they're not actually working when they're at work, it'll just be Facebook or Zynga or YCombinator or Reddit that's extracting value out of them. Actually caring about the work just means that they'll actually learn some skills and develop a good professional reputation, which'll set them up for a better next job.

(I'm assuming a company with reasonable working hours but a strong mission alignment, not one that works their employees 24/7 for dubious returns.)

Its a scam because its often used to justify paying below-market salaries.

Went through this exactly. My guess is because founders select for overconfidence (necessary for pitching investors maybe?) It also ties into founder worship which seems really common (people always dropping reasons founder is some uberhuman).

I just felt like my intelligence was insulted. I also found out a lot of the other people who "bought into" the "mission" were really just playing along.

We also did a lot of "agile" that wasn't agile at all. Make "MVPs" that weren't shippable, do work in 2 week "sprints" but never talk to customers for months etc

Like you said, I'm much happier at a place that takes a critical eye at its own projects, is actually willing to change the plan according to feedback rather than assume we're building the founder's "vision", actually dont' take ourselves too seriously, etc

Sounds like your agile process was actually "flacid agile", this is very common. Suffering this at my current workplace too.

Agile implies flexibility and strength.

If you don't have "strong" - i.e. skilled and disciplined - people, or you can't allow things to happen outside "just because ok?"-rules, it's flaccid agile.

Like jelly in a glove, it's flexible but not in a useful way.

It's likely your co-workers are just covering their butts.

At most companies it is more useful to your long-term employment prospects to outwardly support your company's mission than to be neutral or a critic. Whether that behavior is sane or in the best interest of the company is different.

This rings so true! Those all-hands meetings are typically a bunch of business people getting excited telling us about the trips they were on and some milestones they reached and how excited we should be and I'm just sitting there trying to stay awake thinking about how it really doesn't affect my life and I really don't care beyond what I need to meet my contractual obligations.

Usually, I feel those meetings have the opposite effect on me. They talk about how exciting it is and I leave the meeting wondering if maybe I should become a farmer or something instead and feel disillusioned and deflated. Sigh.

Although, I think part of it for me is that I've done some startups in the past and would much rather work hard soul crushing hours on something that 1) I actually care about and 2) something where the pay off is mine and not some rich guy who I've never even met and really don't care if he gets richer or not.

I have hope that some companies are starting to understand this and we'll have –hopefully– a course correction. What has become common is unsustainable.

A few companies are starting to understand this, I think what DHH and Basecamp are doing is more the future. Giving people's lives outside of work as seemingly a first class priority, which sounds weird to say as a new notion, but yet here we are - https://basecamp.com/about/jobs

Yeah this is great - I think a course correction is going to be necessary to keep people sane. Most people aren't wired to work 12 hour days 6 days a week.

More than anything, I just think it's kind of gross that if I don't go to the after work happy hour, or don't send emails on the weekend, that I'm not perceived as being on-board. Can't stand that line of thinking.

That's only possible if your business model doesn't depend on extracting "more work out of young, impressionable 20somethings who didn't know any better without paying them for this extra effort".

I doubt very few of them depend on it, but that was just a way to get a higher profit margin. It's the reverse when developers try to negotiate higher salaries for themselves. Some portion of the population is not going to be good at negotiating and so will be underpaid.

I'm quite interested in fully worker-owned cooperatives, with necessary management hired in by and accountable to the collective (think: CFOs). I'm thinking of the kind of structure of the Martian cooperatives that Kim Stanley Robinson writes about.

These organizations are likely extremely hard to get off the ground and certainly would be virtually impossible to grow beyond a certain small size, but the software industry has unique aspects allowing it to deliver enormous returns on the efforts of a handful of specialists.

These already exist and are much larger and more successful than most people realise. Start here and follow the links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

I had certainly heard of those (they're referenced in the books, by name and fleetingly, directly), but I had no idea of the scale. Very interesting, thank you.

Edit: how could I have forgotten John Lewis, a solidly middle class British department store and supermarket chain not a million miles away from Mondragon in structure.

> no company wants to present its relationship with its workforce as entirely trasnactional

You may like working for big consulting firms then, where it's up or out.

The only payoff is the IPO. Sad but true. You can work in a world changing place but you also want it to change your world.

Given how few startups actually make it to IPO, and with the way equity for the workers gets watered down heavily, it's naive at best to mistake that equity as anything meaningful.

Need to view that equity as icing on the cake, that's all. Highly likely to lead to a meaningful cashout, unless you were a founder.

There are recruitment firms who can find you these transational contracts. They're full time generally and pay well.

Thanks for this story. I believe a lot of people would love to work on some greater good. I, for one, would love to work for a aggressive non-profit, if there is such a thing. Software and automation is the way to the future - why let just a few profit from it?

This is me. May I suggested contracting. You provide your value then you get the hell out of there, no need to deal with the workplace politics, its great.

The Soul of a New Machine gives a very good depiction of the moral ambiguities of that crusading spirit in the context of (most) computer-industry work.

> The mushroom philosophy of management: keep 'em in the dark, feed 'em shit, and watch things grow.

Read up on Netflix, it's a very Kool-Aid-free culture.

This is one of the reasons I like consulting.