Comment by 0d9eooo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0d9eooo | Hacker News Reader

These things always have a grain of truth to them, in that they describe some places some of the time, but I also think there's so many things going on in any given place it's hard to generalize.

A well-run organization will hire the right people, and then foster their development in such a way that they are productive, happy, and grow, and will compensate them sufficiently. If any of those things break down, you can run into any number of problems, and they won't necessarily take the form that seems obvious at first.

I've seen organizations take very competent people and ruin their morale and shunt them into projects that were really detrimental to them getting out, in ways that aren't obvious at the time. Or weird organizational dynamics cause changes over time that make someone look bad in ways that aren't their own fault.

There's just weird things that happen that don't simplify to simple models of "talent that is completely independent of environment and perfectly visible."

Have you ever personally had a long term career in a corporation that somehow managed the escape velocity to actually become something other than typical? i.e. typically toxic and bound to these laws?

What? You think all employees will inevitably hate working at every company if they stay awhile?

There are no great companies left and everyone of any worth evaporates and ends up "working for themselves" and employee mentality has made most corporations into dystopian surveillance states where management rules by force of mediocrity so the ones that stay are happy to wallow in their entitlements as long as they're free to dress in rags and can afford their mortgage payments yea

Out of interest, which companies do you think were great?

Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, the Medici, Nintendo and Apple in the early days, a lot of Canadian and probably American banks in the sixties and seventies and eighties.. Airlines before the economy model.. Lots of iconic hotels and restaurants, Ma Bell.. all kinds of companies have been great it's just that as people we think we're above it all somehow and our attitudes have brought us to a point where it's understood we're only trading time for money and we're selling ourselves short at every turn and all our corporations are merging into one megalocorp where it's just mediocrity and toxicity and even this forum is nothing but an echo chamber of the neurosis

Another problem is that CEO's don't understand what they're really in it for -- they're not in it for the mind state that comes with being a leader but only for the profits they can extract from the bargain it's obvious by their actions and their dress

In short a company that has high alignment and high autonomy the two are not mutually exclusive and indeed form the basis of what I'd call the American Way

So much this. Thank you. I've never heard it put more succinctly.

Well there's a lot to it -- we've been duped into thinking our work is a service when it's really an investment

Once we've been paid a generous pittance we're divorced from the fruits of our labour which are then flipped into astronomic profits while we continue to slave over features and slowly suffocate in meeting rooms similar to interrogation chambers

If we actually had ownership and took our rightful due we'd be far better off

The difficult part is that academia doesn't prepare us for these realities and let's face it the whole curriculum is a joke compared to real world professional activities

It's just that every year there's a new crop of naive youngsters willing to sign their rights away for the privilege of coming in wearing a hoodie and sweatpants

How to stop that though? You'd basically have to include contract law as a gen ed or primary education course. Or some sort of, "Business/Professional Survival" course. Which then runs you into the problem of, who curated a truly representative sample of how businesses operate, and what their rhetorical agenda is in terms of what image or philosophy of business they fancy.

I mean, I was in FBLA for a while, and it did zilch for communicating what the realities of modern business were.

> Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce

What?

Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is the name of a fictional advertising agency in the TV series "Mad Men", in case anyone is confused by this confusion

A fictional advertising firm from the television series "Mad Men." A "great" place for heterosexual men in suits to work, a not-so-great place for anyone else.

I suspect the average person would actually find that a much worse place to work than most modern white collar companies. You wouldn't want those main characters as your boss, especially not if you're a woman.

It would nearly as bad as Google's C suite!

What irks me the most is the current crop of so called white collar is populated by people who don't have a fraction of the dress sense and don't even wear white collars or when they do it's combined with something preposterous like a fleece vest or puffer jacket

I have witnessed a vice president at a danged top five bank in Canada dressing like he was going clubbing

For most Canadian financial institutions, does 'Vice President' mean anything more than someone who works in b2b sales? They seem to be a dime a dozen.

The 1960s are long past, thank god, and we have a lot more personal freedom than workers did back then. If you wanna wear a suit, be my guest, but I’m going to stick with t shirts and my weird toe shoes. They’re more comfortable.

I wear toe shoes and a tailored shirt bro

You're acting like the t shirt is the pinnacle of shirt technology it's literally two tubes of flimsy fabric aren't you even a little ashamed of your bare arms after all these years? Do you like that feeling of leaning in close and rubbing arm hair with your neighbour? Ever consider that bare arms might be rude on some level naw you likes what you likes I guess we should be grateful you wear toe socks most days

By the way you have zero freedom -- these companies are eating you from every angle and you're taking it on the chin

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/get-there/wp/2016/07/07/...

^^ contributing to falling standards since '97

I’m not ashamed of my bare arms, no. What a strange suggestion.

I'm well aware of what it is. it's just - if your example of a 'great company' is a fake company that is also intentionally terrible... what?

So, a fictional company, a family before capitalism was conceived, two startups that made it big but before they became big, and pretty much everything else defined by nostalgia for a time during which your fictional company was supposed to have existed.

I agree that the current crop of MBA CEOs are detrimental as a whole.

Perhaps it's just starting off with a fictional company but this really reminds me of someone being asked to list heroes and naming John McClane and the guy who said Nuts to the Nazis at the Battle of the Bulge. Which I got to give props to the second guy of course, but it feels like the viewpoint is limited and not securely tied to reality.

Nintendo's early days were in the nineteenth century (1890's, if I'm not mistaken). Not quite a startup.

thanks, I didn't know that.

Touché my dude! I'm trying to describe companies that were hardcore about branding and would retain people aggressively under penalty of death for dishonor

Look it may be idealized but what makes us think that we can grow complacent all of a sudden what happened to the cold war and the arms race?

Just because we declared peace and came from a generation of acid heads doesn't mean that we're not operating in a war zone

The most dangerous weapon is intelligence and intelligence operative is another word for knowledge worker

To give another fantastical yet limited viewpoint, the extremely short period of time in human history where

A) large scale production and innovation were required

B) but globalization hadn't arrived so there was an extreme lack of supply of educated and experienced individuals to deliver the objectives of A

Produced a lot of "great" companies in the sense that they offered for both labor and knowledge workers good jobs with upward mobility, and a strong sense of self-identity and orderly progress.

As soon as point A was subsumed by corporatism (patent and copyright wars, debt servicing) and B faded away (so labor lost its seat at the table) companies have become "commoditized" - there's absolutely zero point in establishing or aboding by a corporate identity today when you may have new masters tomorrow.

It reminds me of the Gervais Principle https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Your view on this is far more negative than average. There are plenty of people who have been working at companies for a long time and are content there.

Hey CydeWeys my good fellow I appreciate your opinion very much and I'll tell you why I'm cynical

Maybe there are a few epic companies but for 80% of devs at a guess they'll grow up grow old and grow decrepit in an open concept office reeking of pizza and microwave popcorn surrounded by a bunch of distressed disrespectful and discounted directors and managers treating them like cannibalistic humanoid underground developers while preparing them to be eaten by the machine like a rabid pack of Morlocks

I wasn't put on this earth to be turned into Soylent Green for a feature factory that chews up people and spits out machine code and Alan Turing sure as hell didn't give his life so we could wear house shoes to the office

Compared to what we're missing out on the free granola tastes like bitter bile and all ever managed to do was get drunk on great quality booze I'll admit and barf up artisanal pizza and salads

No, but they will eventually become overburdened with ever more rules, regulations, and lose the cohesive team which existed at the beginning.

I work for myself, but I have quite a few friends who have worked for large companies for 10-20 years.

Some companies just know how to treat their employees well, and they benefit from that.

Yes but only due to near 100% turnover of management and toxic coworkers in a short amount of time. It was weird the day I realized I was essentially working at a different job.

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