Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

> Google does a good job of building a sense of community within the organization.

That is the true test. You are supposed to pretend only to buy into it but never really believe it. Understanding that things function on two levels is critical. One level is the superficial "we are a family, community, we are not evil, making the world better". But that's the trap to catch all the naive people and extract extra work hours from them (possibly at the expense of family or personal time).

There is a second level of unspoken rules - "it really is about business and internal politics". You are supposed to discover and navigate a set of unwritten rules. And these usually don't get spelled out for you, because they are kind of ugly and often diametrically opposed the official rules from the first level.

Slavoj Zizek likes to talk about this when he talks about institutional ideology and how there are rules and meta rules. The meta rules dictate how you relate to the official rules. Which ones you are supposed to break to get ahead, for instance. The other side is that you are given permission to do something but you are not really allowed to take advantage of that or you get in trouble. For example the whole "take any vacation time you want, we don't have fixed days". But you are expected to not really take more than a few or you'll be laid off eventually.

Here is an excerpt where he talk a bit about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfO9gL28pAs (warning, he likes to use gross jokes and you might find his style unpalatable)

There is an excellent book I read recently called Developer Hegemony [0] which goes into depth on your first point. It calls the naive folks "optimists" -- unfailingly devoting themselves to the company ideal. It discusses two other factions, the pragmatists (come in, do work, get paid, go home) and the opportunists (take every opportunity to rise to the top). I recommend checking it out, and the author's blog too [1];

0: http://a.co/e22BQ4n

1: https://www.daedtech.com/blog

Sounds like a "nicer" rehash of the Gervais Principle. I haven't read Developer Hegemony, but from the looks of the author's blog, I would recommend "cutting out the middleman" and going straight to the source material: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

Not at all. Gervais Principle is a joke, though some serious research may have been done around it. It's about organizational dynamics.

https://www.daedtech.com/ blog is (by quick reading of two posts) career advice for software developers. Very thoughtful, very well written and explicit, with analogies, anecdotes, and opinionated advice.

Whether that advice is any good, I'm the wrong person to judge; I still work as a wage slave (: basically he's telling everyone to go out as independent consultant and solve customers' problems instead of being "an entry in someone else’s Gantt chart. If you can’t autonomously deliver value with your expertise, then you’re specializing in the wrong thing."

This is absolutely correct. These rules are also specifically there to self-select only those capable of understanding and navigating the meta rules, as only people with the capacity will be able to run a company like google at a senior level.

If you think a promotion committee is tough to handle, wait till you hit a real board of directors with millions of dollars at stake, shareholders, regulators, colleagues fighting for your role and a million other competing pressures.

Sounds like the Gervais theory of management: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-principle-...

Thanks for sharing that. That describes feelings I had working there. I think the idea of rules and meta-rules is a good way of explaining it.

The promotion process at google self-selects for a very important skill: you are given a certain goal and you find the optimal way to achieve it, regardless of whether you agree with it or not.

This is a crucial skill for middle managers. Their role is often making sure their team executes on executive vision without questioning the vision (imagine how messy things would become if each middle manager would start questioning executive strategy and push back on projects).

At the end, Google process worked as they designed it for. People like you, who don't like to just do what they are told to do, choose to move on. And people who accept it get promoted and go on to become effective middle managers from a Google executive standpoint.

Do you think this sort of feeling is unique to Google and just not any large-ish company?

Slavoj owes much of the theory to Hegel (which Stavoj is a follower of). This video is a very light intro to Hegel by Rick Roderick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MsNyR-epBM

You're right. Absolutely. He sort of re-digested it for the popular culture, mixed it with perverse jokes and side notes.

I feel bad for all the poor folks on the autism spectrum who never had a chance to perceive, let alone understand, these rules.

> One level is the superficial "we are a family, community, we are not evil, making the world better". But that's the trap to catch all the naive people and extract extra work hours from them

Wow, your answer also precisely describes right-wing politics. Some naive leftists talk publicly about some of these meta rules and get hated.

No, it doesn’t. It describes politics.

Assigning caricatures to the “other side” like a football rivalry also describes politics. People have opinions. Sometimes these opinions align with a broader group. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes opinions evolve, and if you respect “the other side,” yours might, or theirs might.

Extrapolating to pejorative classifications of the left or right as a group is precisely what’s wrong with politics because it caters to competitive human nature, and the attitude that the other side must be defeated, bipartisanship (remember that?) be damned. There is no middle or consensus in a knife fight. This is applicable not only to national-level politics, as you've turned the discussion, but also to corporate politics, the subject of the thread.

“Politics is broken. Because of the {left,right}.” is a self defeating approach, and it amazes me how many otherwise intelligent people fall for it. Sadly, we might be too far gone to fix this, and what I would consider a reasonable opinion, like mine, seems every day to be more and more in the minority.

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