Comment by seren | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seren | Hacker News Reader

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An anecdata on that topic.

I am working for a subsidiary of big company.

Six months ago, while other parts of the company were divested, the plan was to keep us. Evey internal communications from the top management were saying basically "we are proud to be a strong pillar of BigCo going forward"

Now, it seems the plan have changed and we are going to be divested as well. Now the same top managers have all the same discourse (literally copy paste): "This is a new chapter opening, we are all very excited, and this will open new opportunities".

I don't blame top management or internal communication, but really you cannot have two opposite strategies in six months, and in both case think that is the best thing since sliced bread because it is basically meaningless.

So, top management knows they are repeating the empty official party line, employees knows that it is essentially a smokescreen, but everyone pretends everything is planned and this is working as intended, and everything's going to be great. The reality is that no one as the slightest idea of what is going on. If you step back, this is actually quite comical.

Apropos of simply chatting around the topic, I always (well, for the last five years or so - took me many years to get to this point) say out loud in such meetings that if there's no budget for it, the company doesn't really care.

In the last year, after the powers-that-be said they believed in training, saying that out loud has won my team 5% of their time and some capital expenditure for training (works out to a little over a day every month that can be spent on the company dime explicitly reading, watching training materials or other such), and when those same powers said they believed in continuous improvement of the product, on the order of 15% of the team's time can now be booked to just that; working on things that don't provide new features or bugfixes for customers, but just make the software better in general. I was surprised at just how much it turned out that the company really did believe in continuous improvement of the product, when I challenged the powers-that-be to put their money where their mouth is; I am a little worried that if I hadn't opened my mouth, we wouldn't be doing it, but then I suppose that's why people like me are employed - to open our mouths.

I'm not sure know I would spend budget in support of "being proud to be part of BigCo going forwards", but I'd still ask for it and still say that if there wasn't any, it wasn't true. Money seems to sharpen the corporate mind very effectively and force people to actually confront the values they espouse.

If your in frontline management isn't that basically your job? To translate company goals to on the ground action?

I suppose its a little surprising to hear upper management is not spouting BS, but I now also wonder how much of that is frontline management simply not acting on the vision.

If your in frontline management isn't that basically your job? To translate company goals to on the ground action?

Surely that's everyone's job? To know and understand the company's goals and ensure that their actions are in support. I certainly try to ensure that everyone on my team (is "software team lead", one among many, considered frontline management? I honestly don't know where people draw the lines) knows what the bigger goals are, and I routinely push questions and comment about those goals back up.

I try to advocate that it is never wrong to pursue the company's goals, and demand from directors that people who come a cropper while, in good faith pursuing the direction that the directors have set, will not suffer for it. We are quite a small company so it's quite easy to badger directors to provide direction. Don't know how this would go in a larger company.

That’s an inspiring story. Awesome how you compelled them to put their money where there mouth is.

It’s equally frustrating to listen to them speak in person, going on and on about how enthusiastic they are and about our incredible growth potential, and knowing that every word is entirely disconnected from base reality or indeed anything that anyone in the room cares about. Then they fire a bunch of people, issue some stock buybacks, and quit.

> and quit

I can't stress enough how big of a factor this is in this whole thing. If they were forced to go down with the ship, this kind of nonsense would disappear very quickly by simple natural selection.

It's like with diseases: the more viral, the more lethal[0]. And to be clear: I am not accusing these people of being evil in their intentions. I am saying that the system itself is selecting for exploitation.

[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_ewald_asks_can_we_domesticate...

Problem is, your average employee has no power to make a change to the rules. Maybe if there was a union involved. Typically though the people who abuse the rules and the people who make the rules are the same people.

Sounds right to me. All you can do is collect paychecks and find another pirate ship to climb aboard to repeat the process in hopes of continued/better gains.

Corporate communications get auto trashed in my inboxes. These emails are nothing more than propaganda. The only CCs that I’ve seen to be somewhat useful were Q&A sessions. I guess it’s harder to lie directly to someone face without the help an editor.

Sidenote: At least with PizzaCo’s daily email spam I get a $8 supreme pizza if I’m ever in the mood for some delivery style pies.

Sometimes I wonder if the cheerleaders really notice that they said exactly the opposite a few months ago. Some people seem to be wired to enthusiastically go with the flow without thinking too much about it. Maybe they really believe what they are saying?

You see the same in politics. Example: People strongly believe that deficits are destroying the country while the "other" side is in power. Then "their" side comes in, increases deficits and these people immediately forget what they thought about deficits before.

Maybe Orwell's "doublethink" in 1984 was just an observation, not fiction.

Iron Law of Oligarchies (...Institutions, Companies, etc.):

"...the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution "fail" while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to "succeed" if that requires them to lose power within the institution."

http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/001705.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy

People think you need to be living under a cartoonish totalitarian dictatorship in order to be brainwashed. Liberal capitalist democracies have arguably figured out a more effective way.

Specifically this concept is known as 'inverted totalitarianism' for those Googling along at home.

Amen to that. I remember the first time I listened to Chris Hedges, with his weird round glasses, going on about this and thinking .... well, go read the wiki entry while you still can. It's good.

This is not a new phenomenon though. It has existed since liberal democracies formed. Think of the robber barons and yellow journalism in the 19th century.

If your society allows a minority of people to amass great power or wealth - whether through monarchy, fascism, socialist bureaucracy, or representative democracy and capitalist accumulation - you will find those people abusing their power.

I'm in the same situation and it's even more ridiculous since there are only weeks between "we want to grow to 5000 people (from several hundred)" but now they start with firing people.

I understand what they think they are doing. Replacing older people with young folks but the company has already a bad reputation for doing this in the recent decade. So...there will be no growth and the reputation will be even worse when they are done with the purge all this while those employees take away experience necessary to acquire new jobs or even direct client relations.

Mad corporate world.

They're taught to build narratives and stories because it sounds sincere and they think their employees are looking for assurance. In most cases they are probably right on both counts.

It is all bullshit of course, but if you want to earn you have to learn how the game is played.

We have always been at war with Eastasia.

The singular of (anec)data is surely (anec)datum.

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