The author refers to michael o church who had much clearer takes on the subject, not-withstanding a lot of other craziness that undermined some of his interesting opinions. He certainly was one of the first people to publicly call out that companies like Google and VC-backed startups spend a LOT of effort on PR that they are "social good" despite being as ruthlessly money-making oriented as any conventional companies they claimed not to be. He coined one of my favorite sayings that "Silicon Valley is just Wall St for people who can't wake up early." Those takes are a little less novel in 2021 now that everyone realizes how morally bankrupt companies like Google are but credit's due where it's due so I'd recommend checking out his old blog posts.
There was also Sun's business model, of free software (eg java) to sell hardware.
It's not that they were selfless... but their interests were aligned with others.
Of course, looking back, MS's open platform seems positively benign today, yet te were habitually vilified at the time... maybe today's corporations will seem similarly benign in hindsight? After all, you can't make money without some alignment with customers.
Or, maybe it's just "power corrupts".
(Incidentally I noticed a similar tendency in myself to think I had policing and Baltimore local politics figured out after watching The Wire. Did that show really teach me as much as I feel? Or do I have a false sensation of being informed, steming from my enjoyment of the show?)
The office is basically a documentary about white collar work places, once again, with all the shenanigans happening more rapidly.
I don't know any city cops so I can't speak to the accuracy of Brooklyn Nine Nine.
I think one thing The Wire does is show you how bad equilibria can arise from mostly rational people making mostly rational decisions in response to the incentives around them, and seeing it play out in compelling dramatic form is a good way to cement the idea. So now it's pretty easy for me to come up with a plausible reason why bad thing x happens in my city y.
I think my main takeaway from watching The Wire in college was various ways of arriving at the conclusion that things are pretty complex. Except for the war on drugs, which should mostly end.
As someone on the spectrum, this actually expanded on some of my own observations. For a large portion of society, much of what they do and say is driven by posturing. This posturing is driven by insecurity. It is especially predominant in the upper-middle class.
Spock said it best, humans are highly illogical. They don't say what they mean. They spend significant resources on posturing, trying to reassure themselves of their standing by convincing their peers.
This article probably isn't going to lead to epiphanies in many of the groups mentioned. It seems intentionally inflammatory, which will cause individuals with the described behaviour to become defensive.
Instead, I'm just left wondering which ladder I'm actually climbing at the moment (in this model).
On the other hand the middle ladder description the nail on the head which is why it makes people around here so uncomfortable.
The non software people climbed the hierarchy not because they are competent at their jobs, in fact a highly competent person will often be passed over for promotion because they are useful where they are - but because of how they negotiated very complex social networks.
A senior manager, my manager at the time felt that with very little skill to separate the people working at the company, ascendancy was about positioning yourself in bullying networks, and he described this this kind of 'baby talk' as a subservience signal in which you were surrendering to and accepting a manager as your patron and any further advancement you made was by their grace.
If you chose to do the 'honest talk' with someone senior to you, it came with a risk and a potential reward, you had to do it well enough to convince them you were a worthy formidable peer and an ally. If you did it unconvincingly you would be struck down.
This seemed to be a widely held worldview and therefore more or less the social reality in the non software parts of the business. I was free to do 'honest talk' because as a software person, I was clearly to the side of the game, it wasn't really possible for me to fall or climb too far.
I would love to hear more about what you think the difference is.
It's not that there's no insight in what the guy says. Some of it is quite accurate. I think I would say that (nearly all) the insight was delivered by The Office in the first place. I never saw the US variant, but I LOVE the UK version. We like shows like that because they do speak to us - we do recognize the appalling awfulness of middle managers, or how decent people get stuck in dead ends.
The problem is the attempt to systematize and generalize and make some deep "theory" out of all this. It just isn't worthwhile. There's no sensible theory where everyone at the top is a sociopath, and everyone at the bottom is a realist, and every middle manager is an idiot. I mean, come on. And this "theory" isn't meant to be tested, and never will be... at best, it'll be written down in some kind of fun, pseudoscientific book like Bullshit Jobs.
To sum up, this guy mistakes ∃ for ∀.
How do we allow for work like that to be done? I would hate for this kind of silliness to be lost because it isn’t rigorous enough.
Besides, the very people who would take this seriously are the same people who aren’t actively thinking and applying insights on how society interacts in their daily lives anyway.