The Dark Side of Resilience
hbr.org
hbr.org
And this is one of the secret sauces of startups. Excel at valuing your staff in the midst of a crap-show and they will stick with you even though you can't match the compensation packages of large corporations.
Corollary: good management is imperative within a startup, or you'll loose an important value-prop as an employer.
The secret sauce of startups is that in the very early phase there is no management. But once management becomes a necessity (a conclusion that is usually drawn at least two years too late), the shit show most startups turn into makes corporate life look attractive. Usually a mix between founders trying to manage (most entrepreneurs make bad managers) or early employees falling upward.
One of the main issues is that people who are thrive in the early stages of a startup tend to lack the #1 quality of a good manager: the drive to make other people succeed.
If you want to work for a good manager, startups are the last place to look.
Another datapoint: my own managers at startups were better by far than those at larger companies. Generally, the smaller the company, the better.
The absolute best was when it was just me and the company's owner working together. No corporate bullshit. In that instance, my manager didn't have to appease any executives above him. He just decided what had to get done and we did it. Very often I'd have meaningful contributions to make to the decision making process, and we'd decide what needed to get done together.
Try doing that in a large company where there are N levels of middle management above you, bullshit corporate policy and compliance to adhere to, people in different offices and time zones who haven't a clue about who you are or what you think making your decisions for you, and so on.
I can't even count the number of times when managers in larger companies that I've worked at have told me that they really want to do the right thing, but their hands are tied... so we do the wrong, broken thing because we don't have any choice. At startups there tends to be a lot more freedom, if we make mistakes, at least they're our mistakes, not ones forced on us by clueless/insulated upper management.
You're just reinforcing the parent's point that "[t]he secret sauce of startups is that in the very early phase there is no management."
This is what I've seen at places that just got to the 50+ dev mark. It can result in poorly planned junk systems being built and ill-prepared managers making simple mistakes (e.g. being "too nice" to properly manage poor performers or bad hires, or being so adverse to having to deal with that that the hiring process becomes overly selective so you're perpetually understaffed, or an unawareness of what to do around things like security and personal user data that it's not properly protected...).
That's not to say there's anything wrong with having the single-minded focus required to be one of the best in the world at something. But you have to accept that you'll miss out on other enjoyable aspects of life while you pursue your goal, and know if and when you should move on from it, or you'll wind up very unhappy.
Far more likely to just be regression to the mean.
That's how selection bias works.
I think the nature of this debate is such that we'll always settle on the idea that "one ideology fits all" has never worked and will never work.
A few people doing great is important for the world, and so is a lot of people doing okay-to-good. Which one is more important can be your personal POV, but it's easy to see that neither is worth discarding.
"This is my situation and what I've done about it, what worked and did not work for me."
Then it is up to the listener to learn something from it, possibly transpose, or not.
"Never quit on your dreams," said most people who never achieve anything.
Or are we suddenly supposed to not ever fail, and attempt only things that work the first time?
You might sit and plan and talk to people and make a buisness plan involving dump trucks and stay at your day job planning for ever.
You might make viable plans for digging a large hole, but they don't quite fill the great pit of your vision.
Or you might pick digging as big a hole as possible as a direction, and do the next thing.
Dig with a space until you get tired then hire a digger and learn to drive it. End up with a big pile of mud to get rid of and find out you could sell it. Who knew selling mud could pay for more diggers. Hire good diggers and drivers because you've done it yourself and know how it's done. Do the next thing, do the next thing.
Until one day out have a really big hole. Not the biggest, but pretty big.
It is happening because every company is super exploiting the workers to increase the profits, because we have a capitalist crisis
This creates corporations with terrible management for individual employees and yet no reason for the corporation to care.
Eh, the statistics are better explained by the fact that most people (adults especially) don't like being told what to do. They'll be bitter about anyone handing them orders on a daily basis, especially if their manager isn't gentle or subtle in their managing. If a manager has enough emotional intelligence and empathy then they should be able to set direction and delegate without being disliked, but that ability is reserved for an elite few. Hence the statistics.
Protip for frontline managers: The percentage of time you spend on JIRA is negatively correlated to the chance of being promoted to the director level.
If not liking your boss is a capitalist crisis I much prefer it to the current socialist crisis going on in Venezuela.
Think of physical endurance. Focusing on physical endurance could lead you to pointless ultramarathons, or even trying to fly off buildings, but this is as a defficiency in goal selection. A man with the same physical endurance may choose to do something entirely different with it.
(My physical endurance right now is so much lower than it was two years ago that I take buses for city stretches across which I used to walk briskly. It takes more time, more money and is vaguely humiliating, at least to my own eyes.)
The other character defects are the problem. You can be very resilient and empathetic and a good leader.
And we don't call a salad covered with sugary dressing "the dark side of lettuce."
I have never seen a more grandiose, idealized view used to describe the modern job market than this blurb. Even in our very hirable field in tech we see a market rife with inefficiency.
I almost spit out my coffee reading "ubiquitous access" and then had to stifle a laugh at "passive recruitment".
People will adapt to their circumstances in both directions: if things become worse, people can adapt to rationalize it as normal, whereas if things become better, people will become eventually complacent and want things to improve, even though things have already improved.