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You can be creative and still act like a professional in a professional environment.

One example is advertising agencies, which in the last century (in spite of what you see on popular television) were very button-up places but created cultural touchstones we still know today.

(Edited to clarity I'm referencing ad agencies in the 20th century, not the SV-wannabe agencies a few have evolved into today.)

Advertising agencies are lot smaller than 100K employees. Also if there are very big agencies they are distributed and individual country/city offices are responsible for clients. Beyond corporate functions there are no business "best practices" to be enforced by headquarters.

WPP alone is 130k. There are a few at that scale, just like the vast, vast majority of tech companies aren't Google's scale.

WPP is a holding company for a number of smaller agencies - having previously worked for a holding company-owned agency (holding companies dominate the advertising agency space), no one considers themselves e.g. a WPP employee, and culture is very much set at the individual agency level.

Since when were advertising agencies button-up affairs? Crispin Porter is down the street from me and they seem to be every silly brogrammer stereotype, just in a different market.

Like their shuttle looks like a prison bus but is labeled "disruptive thinkers transport" or some such. That's Mike Judge levels of ridiculousness.

> Like their shuttle looks like a prison bus but is labeled "disruptive thinkers transport" or some such.

You're joking, right?

looks like they're not: https://static.businessinsider.com/image/4f3c01186bb3f7d71d0...

It appears to be real

http://boulderreporter.com/a-crispin-porter-bogusky-primer/

My brother worked in ad agencies, and this is the opposite of what he said. Tons of drinking and just generally bad behavior which would only be tolerated in the worst silicon valley startups. He moved to the startup world because it has a healthier work culture.

One of my first jobs out of college was for a digital agency. Shortly after I started we were bought by a very large ad agency and it was shocking how casual alcohol and drug use were at our parent company. Luckily we were insulated enough that it didn't permeant our culture until after I left.

We are surrounded by functional alcoholics (10% in the US drink most of the booze). They naturally tend toward career paths that support their behavior.

90% of people surrounded by 10% ? The word "surrounded" seems inappropriate.

Maybe a better word could have been chosen. But in perspective, almost every team on average has at least one person with an alcohol problem of some sort.

and then there's Ireland.

Surrounded =/= Majority

I work at one of the largest, oldest agencies there is and have worked before in big tech and in startups, and to be honest people in ad agencies are pretty open about controversial opinions around politics. I'd say the workers are, in general (as in, if you pick one randomly) more to the left side of the spectrum as in any arts-related organization, but as in any company there are different people from all sides - a left, liberal, atheist director hiring a right wing, conservative, Catholic worker is just normal, people don't bother too much with this kind of personal stuff. My take is that the difference comes from the business model - agencies (as consulting firms) are client-facing and don't scale as pure tech companies so there's always some big, influential clients to please, so people tend to stop personal opinions from getting in the way of business, while in pure tech where engineers are far from their customers, politics become something relevant in the workplace.

I wish I could bold this comment and pin it to the top.

It's absolutely a false dichotomy to assert that there can either be creativity or there can be constraints.

As a game developer, I look no further than the numerous game jams with artificial constraints as evidence that creativity can flourish within the confines of constraints. One might even argue that creativity is given constructive direction by way of constraints.

I didn't say constraints, I said emotions.

I don't believe it's possible to have creativity without emotions, and I've got citations to that point (which are apparently quite controversial, that comment has been fluctuating heavily in score) [1].

It's possible to put constraints on your emotions and to not immediately do something because you feel like doing it. This is the essence of emotional intelligence, and of maturity. The thing is that this is a conscious process: you are expending your limited attention on watching your behavior and ensuring it conforms to the desired norms. (If you internalize those norms such that conformance is unconscious - well, then you've internalized the existing norms, but the point of creativity is that you're trying to break out of those unconsciously-internalized customs.) That means you're not expending that attention on the details of the problem itself. Most of the problems involved in revolutionizing an industry with computer code are immensely complex and require all the attention you can give them.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21548499

That's an interesting argument: can creativity exist without emotions?

It speaks directly to the nature of creativity. Is creativity simply the discovery of the new; or is it an expression of desire for the new? Is it something else?

Hmm...

Although, to the original concern: I don't believe constraints on behaviour necessarily constrain emotions; such constraints influence emotions, but I wouldn't expect a general suppression of emotion.

I doubt I'll be the only meditator that disagrees with you, on every point, regardless of citations.

I do not believe chronic bouts of performative outrage leads to anything creative, inside or out of the workplace. If one's "whole self" cannot meaningfully function without getting constantly triggered, the problem is with the normalization of such "whole self" concepts

The problem is you don't get to pick and choose who your culture affects. If you hire people with those opinions and then tell them they need to watch what they say, other employees get the same message. You may have people who aren't political at all, but they see people being punished for expressing their opinions and decide they too better modify their behavior.

Performative outrage? Constantly triggered? Are we talking about the same company?

Paying someone $90 million to leave after allegedly assaulting someone [0] isn't something that happens "constantly", and seems like a pretty reasonable thing to have strong opinions about. And there's nothing "performative" about successfully rolling back mandatory arbitration [1], which studies have found is stacked in favor of employers and muzzles employees [2], and which the ABA now recommends against [3].

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-...

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/8/18075780/google-sexual-as...

[2]: https://www.vox.com/2018/8/1/16992362/sexual-harassment-mand...

[3]: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/law_practice/publications...

Rubin was accused by, if I recall correctly, a woman he'd been in a relationship with and then dumped? He denied her accusations and as it was all behind closed doors there's no way to ever resolve it. That shouldn't be in the public realm at all, let alone people having strong opinions about it!

Honestly if Google really kicked him out because of an unsubstantiable claim by some woman with an axe to grind, or some private sexual perversions .... after all he did for Google? $90M is probably too little for what they gave him. That's like, less than a year's CEO salary.

> He denied her accusations and as it was all behind closed doors there's no way to ever resolve it. That shouldn't be in the public realm at all, let alone people having strong opinions about it!

That's true of every accusation the Miami Herald published against Jeffrey Epstein as well. Do you believe none of that should be in the public realm, either?

I'm not arguing that you're wrong, I'm just pointing out that if you want to live in a world where such accusations stay out of the public realm, then that means you want to live in a world where Jeffrey Epstein is still raping adolescent girls, and you have to admit that's a price you're willing to pay to protect the accused.

Conversely, I have no problem admitting that if I support such he-said-she-said accusations being publicized and having consequences, then even if Al Franken and Aziz Ansari did nothing wrong whatsoever, the hits to their reputation and earnings opportunity cost that they suffered is a price I'm willing to pay to reduce sexual harassment.

I also don't fully understand what you mean but "shouldn't be in the public realm". If me and some other person are the sole eyewitnesses to something, should I be muzzled from saying what I witnessed in the public realm simply because the other eyewitness disagrees?

It's true that Google doesn't need creative all stars. It needs line workers, and there's no way its culture of whimsical creativity could have survived expanding so much and so quickly.

Your point about emotions is also good. Here is another way to put it.

The issue IMO is that they told people they were changing the world and by making information universally available etc etc. The people who went to work for them early really believed it and those people seeded their culture.

The people who just wanted to make a bunch of money went into other fields (like Wall Street or law). Those people also talk about politics and undoubtedly have political activists. But the politics of someone who just wants to make a ton of money are aligned with a company whose stated goal is to just make a ton of money.

This political alignment doesn't happen for free at Google. And since they seeded their culture with people who cared about improving the world, they have a higher than average rate of influencial employees who don't want to make money in traditionally "dirty" fields like arms dealing and private prisons.

Google has to solve this problem because their cloud division can't survive if they can't take government contracts. I see no way of solving it except that they just have to kill the old culture while attempting to minimize attrition.

They could try to split up. The separation into Alphabet seems almost a dream for regulators who can just separate them.

I mean, just think about it. Standard Oil had the same monopoly over a valuable resource (oil then, Software and Data today) that Google has today (fine, Facebook etc too... but there is no Facebook search; also they are monopolies over different kinds of digital products). They need to be broken up; their successors will probably end up becoming quite big over time; rinse, rise, repeat.

Capitalism is an amazing thing. Only the strongest survive but then they dominate everything and strangle the market itself. Fuck that, keep the markets free of such control by non state actors.

They can't break up because ads drives something like 80-90% of revenue.

> but there is no Facebook search

Ouch, don't let Facebook hear you say that :p

They tried so hard to get Search to stick, to the point of trying to juice the numbers by forcing you to go to a result page instead of directly to a group/page/profile in the live results dropdown.

Facebook could easily be told to shed Instagram, WhatsApp and everything else they bought up to dominate the social network space. Individually those companies might not survive, but they could spin them off, as a whole, if the FTC tired to step in.

Google could be asked to do the same with some of their product lines/companies.

It's very unlikely though. These companies have a lot of influence and a lot of power .. and when was the last time the Federal government broke up a company over antitrust violations? It didn't happen with Microsoft .. and for examples of really big monopolies, you'd probably have to go back to the Bell/ATT days.

> It's very unlikely though. These companies have a lot of influence and a lot of power

While that's true, just money and influence aren't sufficient for this. Congress passes laws, but its upto the Executive to interpret it. The lack of breaking up of larger corporations has indeed been due to their significant influence, but I'm interested to see how e.g. a left-learning President like Sanders or Warren would use the powers of the Federal Executive (specifically the Justice Dept) to enforce existing anti-trust laws. Probably the only thorn in their plan would be SCOTUS, and its possible that its current makeup might make it amenable to the influence of corporations (its not clear to me if it will).

Have you considered how standard oil is now ExxonMobil, Chevron, and BP. They did break up but we're hardly in a different place in terms of who controls the market and who has most influence on gov policy globally to keep it that way.

http://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-c...

Or how Bell is now ATT and plenty of other useless oligopoly companies?

It’s true they currently have enormous power. But consider how the market would look like and how they would behave, if it were still Standard Oil and ATT.

> (It turns out that it's not possible to selectively repress emotions: "I've got to watch what I say about politics" subconsciously spills over into "I've got to watch what I say" which spills over into "I've got to watch what I say about anything new and controversial", and you lose the latter well before the former.)

This was the same logic that allowed talented men to turn their workplaces into a very unwelcoming place for women by allowing them to make sexual jokes, proposition their coworkers, and have business meetings in strip clubs. If you are going with the “take your whole self to work” spiel you can argue that sexuality is a bigger part of most people’s lives than politics. So if we can ask for co-workers to not discuss their latest bedroom exploits, surely we can ask for people to not talk about politics at work.

Its ridiculous to equate talking about politics to sexual harassment. Talking politics doesn't magically turn you into a chauvinist.

Not in general. James Damore was likely a singular exception.

I don’t think they’re the same thing. It might be a generational thing, but younger workers are at ease and fluid with Gender and gender based identities. There is a culture of respect that I see in this generation that might be hidden by the absolutely pathetic situations under which many of them live today due to reasons unrelated to their talents and work ethic. But this is changing, Google embraced that change but it’s struggling with it today for uncertain reasons.

Why do you think that creativity requires emotional engagement? I haven't found that to be the case.

Personal experience, but it's also been born out by studies:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/creativity-the-art-a...

https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-emotions-that-make-us-more-creat...

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0266...

TL;DR: It's not the specific emotion that matters (indeed, there's evidence that having mixed emotions, where you can synthesize aspects of them, is crucial to creativity), it's the motivational intensity behind it.

This seems like a pretty big stretch. The realization that mixed emotions (as in happy/angry) being useful for creative thought somehow can be applied here?

> (It turns out that it's not possible to selectively repress emotions: "I've got to watch what I say about politics" subconsciously spills over into "I've got to watch what I say" which spills over into "I've got to watch what I say about anything new and controversial", and you lose the latter well before the former.)

I don't believe this. I can tune out whatever random BS my coworkers a few desks over are talking about and still be engaged in technical discussions about what we're building.

It just requires some discipline and an expectation of that discipline.

I don’t know if I could really trust the opinions of a co-worker who believed the earth is flat. I’m pretty sure that would influence my attitude towards them in technical discussions as well.

It's because these extraordinarily stupid individuals started out with the same shitty American k-12 education as the rest of us and then went out of their way to make it worse by believing things that are patently false. Someone unable to grasp the basics isn't worth getting into a technical discussion with. There aren't many of these 'basics' that I would consider an instant DQ, although Holocaust Denial, Being Superstitious, Cannibalism, Flat Earth Belief, etc. would fit the bill.

Do you mean that you wouldn’t trust any objective claims they made without verifying the claims yourself? Shouldn’t you not do that anyway, with anyone, including people with strange cosmological beliefs but also renowned experts?

Literally nobody has time for that. Take a question like “Will this tool meet requirement x?” - you want every person on the team to verify that for themselves?

If you only trust facts that you verify yourself firsthand, you can’t really live on the accumulated progress of human expertise. Your level of technological sophistication will max out at “can make a thatch hut and gather pineapples.”

> If you only trust facts that you verify yourself firsthand, you can’t really live on the accumulated progress of human expertise.

Arguably, the differentiating factor between humans and animals is our ability to organize on large scales. Monkeys and killer whales can coordinate behavior in groups of sometimes up to 50 or maybe 100 individuals. However, humans can coordinate behavior across millions of people. Building a modern automobile, a computer chip, or the social security system requires coordination across so many individuals, no one person can fully and deeply understand the entire system.

The ability of humans to believe information that they do not fully know is true, is probably one of the defining traits of humanity.

The informal "just be yourself" spirit can work quite well in a small startup team.

Google used to be just that, and they made untold billions from it, so it's not surprising that they held on to remnants of that spirit for too long.

Now they're a gigantic megacorp, and need to act the part.

...and life goes on, everything is different but also the same...

I disagree with this. This is like comedians raging against cancel culture.

It’s possible to both be funny and be conscious :: It’s possible to be creative and not fixated on political activism.

You notice basically everyone funny is raging against outrage culture

> It turns out that it's not possible to selectively repress emotions: "I've got to watch what I say about politics" subconsciously spills over into "I've got to watch what I say" which spills over into "I've got to watch what I say about anything new and controversial", and you lose the latter well before the former.

I don't have any problem keeping my non-work related opinions to myself at work, and I don't see any corresponding repression of my professional creativity.

It means that you can't make jokes, designs or decisions based on your non-work related opinions, how can that possibly not hurt your creativity? For example, it could mean that instead of using your own judgement when hiring people you remember that race and gender is political so you override your gut-feelings and go by the book to avoid problems in the future.

The same applies everywhere, and going by the book is always the least creative thing you can do. Of course often going by the book is the best solution you have, but it is hard to argue that it doesn't reduce creativity in the workplace.

> It means that you can't make jokes, designs or decisions based on your non-work related opinions, how can that possibly not hurt your creativity?

I can't imagine my being an R or a D having any connection with engineering creativity.

> it could mean that instead of using your own judgement when hiring people you remember that race and gender is political so you override your gut-feelings and go by the book to avoid problems in the future

I give an evaluation of their ability to do the job, and let the HR dept. fret about the company's social equity agenda.

I don't choose my friends based on if their politics/religion align with mine, either.

How did being assertive and bringing your whole self to work work out for James Damore?

Please don't start this flamewar for the hundredth, at least, time. It's predictable and predictably nasty, the two things we most need to avoid here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This whole thread is a dumpster fire.

Sadly most even remotely political topics have started to turn into one, even on HN.

It's getting to the point where I wish moderators would just downrank such topics to position 20+ or outright ban them front the frontpage.

Or at least slap some clear "POLITICAL" tag on it and give users a filter option.

> actively courted assertive people with opinions

Is that something that companies do on purpose? Because such an environment sounds like absolute hell.

I want to spend my time dealing with technical problems not arguing with people's egos.