John Dvorak: “Yesterday I was fired from PC Magazine”
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I ran into him in the bathroom, tears in his eyes, asking me what he was going to do now? That this is how they reward decades of loyalty?
Ironically that magazine, dedicated to predicting future technology trends, would go down the toilet some years later because they didn't see technology trends like Google and internet advertising coming.
Companies have no loyalty folks...neither should you.
It's not an uncommon story, true. But it's a pretty shitty one.
That's a broad brush to paint with; companies are just a group of people, not some inhuman construct. People make the decisions and just like every other aspect of life, some people care don't put their impact on others first, or can't because of circumstances. Not every company discards employees like garbage, and it's a lousy narrative to propagate.
Since you can’t know that these possibilities won’t occur it’s best to keep the mindset that the company is not your friend. They do not have loyalty to you in perpetuity. It’s a business and not a person. It’s run by people but the more people it is being run by the easier it is for them emotionally to treat everything in business terms.
Do not have loyalty to a company. It’s just business and not personal.
Depending on which industry you are in or nations. But generally speaking there are less than 10% chance of this so call Good company, so I argue this is not a broad brush at all.
Companies are a group of people hired to make money for shareholders. They owe loyalty to shareholders, not their workers. It's actually the fiduciary duty of the board and the execs.
> Not every company discards employees like garbage, and it's a lousy narrative to propagate.
Of course not. But the point is they will if they have to.
Companies exist to generate value for shareholders. Not to be nice to their workers. When times are good, you have nothing to worry about. But when things get tough, all bets are off.
IBM, Oracle, Apple, Microsoft, you name it. All of those have done large cycles of layoffs.
And the coding industry is infamous for its Ageism.
Unless you have a contract with a golden parachute, anything could happen in a moments notice. Very few people outside of senior management have such parachutes, and even then not all of them negotiated for a good one.
If nothing else, keep your resume and linkedin up to date.
And HR isn't your friend either. Many young people misunderstand the role of HR and believe it is a shoulder to cry on. Think of HR as just another company product or tool.
Viruses need animal hosts in order to survive. That isn't evil either. But if you're the host it's bad for you.
Companies as embodied in capitalism are generally bad for most humans in the long term. They are an irrational and little understood mechanism receiving un-critical, near-religious adulation.
Completely right about HR, though. Their mission is to push paper and ensure the company doesn't get sued.
Ironically I wasn’t actually being dishonest (I just can’t do that) but I was very careful in what I said, and I was very careful not to be overly negative. And I did this when I had no other choice... it’s not something I would have done if I could have avoided it!
I agree, but don't confide in them like a life long friend either. Keep it neutral like a job interview be professional and unemotional. Only state what you did, you said.
And ask HR for a follow up e-mail of any conversation you have with them asap.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/rethinkin...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/famous-milgram-el...
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2012/s3489337.htm
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23731691-000-the-shoc...
https://www.vox.com/2018/6/13/17449118/stanford-prison-exper...
In terms of a meta-analysis, try this one:
This one in particular argues: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/bjso.12074 (1) willingness to perform unpleasant tasks is contingent upon identification with collective goals and (2) leaders cultivate identification with those goals by making them seem virtuous rather than vicious and thereby ameliorating the stress that achieving them entails.
Quite interesting perspective on leadership. I suspect it's a bit of both.
However, from your first link:
"But many psychologists argue that even with methodological holes and moral lapses, the basic finding of Milgram’s work, the rate of obedience, still holds up. "
Doesn't seem thoroughly discredited to me.
There's definitely far more to Milgram's than I knew. Many insights.
Knowledge is power.
It might mean that at PC Mag, but it definitely does not mean that on other magazines. In fact, at most publications it refers to someone who is not an employee. For more, see [1]
Then again, maybe not. I guess it'll become more clear once we find out the status of their other outside columnists.
He wasn't always wrong.
On a side note, I had always assumed 'Dvorak' was a penname --however, I've learned he's actually related to the actual Dvorak Keyboard creator.
He got so used to it he legally changed his name so his middle name was 'X'.
So confusion is to be expected. :)
Each show also has crowd-sourced, listener produced podcast album art that's generated about an hour after the show airs live.
Try listening to the noagendashow at 2X speed to start.
That classic Hilary is really a lizard person balanced take on the news.
Often wrong, often hilariously so. Continually confusing personal and tribal loyalty with patriotism and idealism. For example, criticism of Trump means criticising the office of the presidency, or disrespecting the US if you are not American; or a republican showing some independence of thought is letting the team down. I don't think they understand idealism at all, they can only conceptualise self-seeking behaviour, everything is framed as that, in part because that's what sells the show as a reveal of the hidden motives.
Dvorak in particular gets extremely agitated when foreigners criticise the US, or express an opinion on US politics. He seems unaware of how much US politics directly affects other countries. He is also almost as ignorant as Trump in understanding how critical the US hegemon has been to peace (albeit on US favourable terms) after WWII.
They had no problems imputing a link between Bill Clinton as president setting the morals for the nation (and making blowjobs ok!), but completely fail to do the same for Trump. Balanced, nope.
They do some interesting analysis and some digging and often paint a pretty poor picture of typical news outlets but there's a fair amount of chaff with the wheat.
[0] https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_update.s...
Also the audio production on the show is absolutely top notch for being done by one dude, the co-host, co-inventor of podcasting, and former MTV VJ, Adam Curry.
Plus the “morning zoo” bit is just a hilarious ruse; don’t let the “light tone” distract too much from the serious media deconstruction happening.
Twice weekly on Thursdays. ;)
To me, a reader of his since the very beginning, Dvorak has been wrong about a lot of things - but him being wrong has prompted much discussion in the broader world of things, and he is truly one of the very first 'social media influencers' of the tech world. I spent many a day in the 80's and 90's discussing mag articles with colleagues, in the ops centres, the desktops, the laptop and now the pocket era's, and .. it seems .. whatever Dvorak has to say about something, is going to get a rise.
But if there is some other standard by which such a rabble-rouser might be judged, I'd like to know. I seem to have missed something.
I mean, in the case of war journalism the standards are pretty high. But for computer tech .. its really more just an industrial mob being led by a malcontent loud-mouth boldly corralling the in-cognoscenti with his megaphone de-jour held high and proud? Or, at least it was.
I mean, I think Dvorak played a role in managing peoples expectations. Its interesting that for some its high, and others low in terms of journalistic decrepitude. 36 years is a long time to be wrong about it.
If a journalist is wrong it can have very bad results. Write a story claiming someone is a murderer when the person is totally innocent for example could ruin lives.
Plot twist: they don’t care about anyone holding mere common stock. That’s why “preferred stock” became a thing.
This is stuff every generation learns during every major recession. During the boom times, when business is good, the company treats its employees well and everyone thinks the company will always take care of them. Recession hits and reality smacks you right across the face.
In fact all freelancers are disposable in magazine writing. It was always one of the original zero hours gig economy gigs.
The real value was in building a brand that could translate to book sales, consultancy, and so on.
Does not in any way whatsoever justify the asshat fashion of the firing.
It might be better to say he was ahead of the curve on many of his statements.
All those trips up and down the Valley, like was a spread out Guangzhou JDR Microdevices, NCA Peripherals, WierdStuff, Central Computers, MicroCenter, Halted, Egghead, mom&pop shareware and even the "evil" Fry's and CompUSA.
IIRC I spend somewhere on the order of $5k on basically a homebuilt workstation... Adaptec U2W, IBM Ultrastar whopping 9 GB drive, Plextor CD burner, PC Power & Coolng PSU, GUS and a Courier modem. IIRC i got tired of hearing the 7000 RPM fan droning like a 1U server and made a fanless water-cooling setup with an RV heater core and CPU cooling block. Oh and UPSes since 1986.. south San Jose had frequent power outages.
IIRc we had back issues of PC Magazines for at least the previous year. I had C++ PJ and DDJ.
Is still kicking. I think their business model is you a pay a small premium for retail service and stuff that works reliably.
I got to work with John a bit over the years. He is many things, but I have never known him to lie, or get his facts wrong when reporting. If what he says about PCMag unlinking from his columns about 5G is true, it's even more rude and insidious than the way he was fired.
John argues that it's more evidence that advertising drives much if not all supposed "journalism" these days. I hope he's wrong, but fear he's more right than most of us know or suspect most of the time...
Interesting exchange in the comments…
"nephew of sociologist and creator of the Dvorak keyboard, August Dvorak"
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/03/glenn-greenwal...
Apparently questioning the party status quo is the worst thing that you can do.
"Greenwald’s political writing, which focusses on dramas of strength and weakness, and on the corruptions of empires. Greenwald writes aggressively about perceived aggression. His instinct is to identify, in any conflict, the side that is claiming authority or incumbency, and then to throw his weight against that claim, in favor of the unauthorized or the unlicensed—the intruder. Invariably, the body with authority is malign and corrupt; any criticisms of the intruder are vilifications or “smears.” He rarely weighs counter-arguments in public, and his policy goals are more often implied than spoken."
It's worth being extremely careful paying any attention to American media on the topic of Glenn Greenwald. He is essentially the only journalist in the world who routinely and strongly criticises other journalists and points out their lying and manipulations. In recent times he's written a series of articles showing how frequently US media's stories related to Russia collapse, are retracted or turn out to be fraudulent.
He also got the scoop of the decade when Snowden went directly to him and Poitras, news non-entities, because he simply didn't trust other journalists at all.
I suspect by now most Washington/New York based journalists hate his guts.
Not so - he is a regular guest on Fox News.
He's become very partisan over the years, and you can guess the slant based on the media where he chooses to appear.
I wouldn't say he is so much pro-Republican as anti-Democrat but it's getting really hard to say. Pro-Russian and pro-Republican politics have gotten all mixed up together since 2016.
I wouldn't say he is outwardly pro-trump, but he certainly doesn't seem to criticize him to anywhere near the extent he lavishes on the Democrats. Nor does he seem to be particularly concerned with criticizing American foreign policy now that Republicans are in the drivers' seat, which was his fig-leaf back in the early teens.
And in fact, he spends most of his time justifying the exact same types of behavior from the Russians. So much for "questioning the politics of the status quo and the corruption of empires".
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
So the anti-war, anti-domestic spying, gay progressive duck is a conservative Trump-lover?
What ducks are you looking at?
Poltics makes for strange bedfellows. The enemy of my enemy can easily become my friend. There is a certain segment of the left that seamlessly transitioned from criticizing Democrats and American foreign policy into cheering Russian propagandizing and backing Russian foreign policy goals ("as a counterweight to American power" or similar). Greenwald is one of them.
If his critical of the power of empire, now would be a good time to start criticizing the other side too. Democrats haven't held power for almost 2 years now and spending all his breath criticizing them isn't really helpful. It is, however, revealing about his agenda.
Again, I don't think he was always like this. He used to be doing legitimate journalism, deep dives into American abuses of power that nobody else was doing. It was good work, regardless of whether the expose happened under a Democratic administration.
That journalism is still happening, while Greenwald is off doing Fox News segments on how bad Democrats are. He's just not involved in it.
His decline from investigative journalist into partisan shill is very, very blatant. And I do feel from him, there is no question the media gave him a very rough go after Showden. But it doesn't excuse his "activism" since 2016. One good expose doesn't beatify everything you do for the rest of your life.
I think it's probably mostly him burying his head in the sand about the consequences of his activism. I don't think he consciously wants to trade American empire for Russian empire, he just can't get past the whole "enemy of my enemy is my friend" thing, or viewing Russia as a counterbalance to American power, however you want to put it.
I hope he gets back on the horse, but right now he's definitely kinda broke-brained. C'mon, the guy spends his time on his farm caring for the 40 dogs he's rescued, nobody does that who's not at least a little broke-brained. I wish him a speedy recovery (dogs help with that!), but right now you really shouldn't be taking him overly seriously.
When it comes to specific policies and what the best policies are, Greenwald is mostly silent, except for his open dislike of mass surveillance and wars.
Journalists make for an easy target for such a guy because they claim (implicitly or explicitly) to be neutrally documenting events, but then try to actively change the course of those events through manipulating their coverage.
He also targets the Democrats in some stories yes, but usually from the angle "they claim they support X but here they are doing not X". Is this partisan?
You could say that Republicans have the same issues, but I don't see them talk about fiscal conservatism anymore, Trump certainly didn't run on such a platform. Trump is many questionable things but most people I've heard express opinions on him say something like "I disagree with policy X but huh, it's weird to see a politician actually doing what he said he'd do for once". That is, labelling him a hypocrite is tougher than perhaps with other politicians.
Maybe that's why he's hard to pigeon-hole. His latest article on the Intercept is about Michael Moore's new movie. In it he says things like:
Moore’s film is highly worthwhile regardless of where one falls on the political spectrum. The single most significant defect in U.S. political discourse is the monomaniacal focus on Trump himself, as though he is the cause – rather than the by-product and symptom – of decades-old systemic American pathologies
He then goes on to criticise the narrative that America was "good" until Trump was elected, whereupon it became "bad". He criticises a swathe of US policy stretching from the Bush era to the Obama era.
That doesn't sound like he's particularly partisan to me. Instead Greenwald argues for a systems-oriented take on politics. In Greenwald's world, Trump is merely a symptom or byproduct of deeper issues, and it's those issues that are the most interesting to study. This is probably why I like his writing.
The New Yorker article is actually very interesting and pretty generous towards Glenn.
Whatever you think of the Democrats or American foreign policy, there really is no call for actually defending Russia and their foreign policy, or downplaying their attempts to subvert our election system, and that's where Greenwald has been for the last couple years. He generally views Russia as a countervailing force to American/Democratic power and thus a necessary evil. Which, yuck.
There is still important work being done on exposing American mass surveillance and other such topics, but it's not being done by Greenwald, who mostly seems concerned with sniping on Twitter at this point.
For example - and I'm saying this as a liberal - it is becoming standard fare to dismiss any criticism of any left-wing policy as "Russian bots". Does someone calling it out means that they reject the general notion that Russia employs paid shill accounts and bots for propaganda purposes? Of course not.
(Just to be clear, this is about the subthread, not just the root comment.)
Looks like a de-platforming may have happened.
That's just how it appears anyway.
Still, firing over email is still sucky.
Try getting a job or a promotion with any VC backed SV company while having a Twitter bio that indicates you voted for or support Trump. Not quite willing to do that? A bridge too far? No prob. Instead, just put that you support the 2nd Amendment. Or the military. Or law enforcement. Or smaller government.
I dare you...
Firing your star columnist by email citing budget concerns doesn't fit the MO.
De-platforming is also not usually deployed in service of mere political disagreement (staunch conservatives speak at institutions that perform no-platforms all the time). It's reserved for positions that are perceived to be outside the bounds of what should be accepted by society such as white supremacy, blatant homophobia, etc.
As far as I'm aware, Dvorak didn't publicly hold any such positions. So even if (and that's a HUGE what-if given the facts) he were let go for ideological concerns, it wouldn't count as a no-platforming move.
I read over his tweets for the past couple weeks and while he comes off as your typical conservative blowhard, there's nothing worthy of public outcry and therefore worthy of a de-platforming event.
Look. I almost feel bad about myself for engaging with you on this level. But this is important. Progressives actually don't oppose the right of people to believe differently. The idea behind no-platforming is that it's not acceptable to amplify someone spewing hate. You may not agree with that, but if you can't understand that that's the motivation, then you're tilting at windmills here.
I'm pretty sure that many progressives consider employing someone in your organization who posts hateful content online _is_ amplifying them. Look at the internal messages of Google employees in the John Damore lawsuit documents if you don't believe me.
Breitbart fired Milo over the same shit.
I am purely speaking about the content of the internal messaging included in the court documents. It's a good read if you haven't gone through it yet.
Point of order: Regardless of Damore's thoughts, he posted them on an internal message board didn't he? It was the leaker who made it a national issue, and that person remains anonymous.
> @MrNoysSky Replying to @THErealDVORAK @dancosta "Probably cuz you're a Trump supporter. Good for them"
Right, he did re-tweet Greenwald apparently and something about Keith Ellison's victim's abuse medical records. Well fire him on the spot and maybe even burn him at the stake, I guess. /s
It sounds like the magazine is dead or dying.
Nope.
Just budget issues which suddenly pop up after 36 years without any problems.
Sure...
Do the people involved really think John and his fanbase are THAT stupid?