https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
This is a fantastic read.
This is a fantastic read.
The things described happen at toxic organizations but the author leaves no room for honest positive and meaningful work, and at risk of pointing out the obvious, there's a lot of meaningful work to be done.
To the author of this post, finding meaning in your employment means that you're necessarily a sucker or a psychopath. Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients?
And God forbid you find the real nobility in doing your workaday job and doing a good job at it, and feel good about yourself. According to the Gervais Principle that makes you the ultimate sucker.
Adopting this philosophy is dooming oneself to a neverending feeling of being exploited and the argument that this is what is actually happening in totality is all philosophical opinion so why would I adopt a philosophy that is so personally ruinous, demoralizing, and demotivating?
Not a doctor, but a college professor. I love my job, take pride in it, and work hard at it. But I think of myself as working for my students, my collaborators, and my immediate colleagues. I pay little attention to my university as a whole, don't view it especially positively, haven't learned how to work its bureaucracy, and feel little loyalty to the institution in general.
It seems that, according to the article, I'm a "loser". As such, "it is clear that I am an idiot". Probably true lol. But a fairly happy idiot.
Thank you.
Making positive contributions to society doesn't change the fact that you're being exploited. It's become increasingly clear that Doctors (at least where I'm from) have low pay early in their careers, unsafe working conditions, and have almost no life outside of work. On top of that they have a stressful job involving interacting with members of the public.
Both me and my girlfriend were majors of our promotions and had more than enough in the way of academic achievement to become doctors, but the insane workload was a very effective deterrent.
Or if we must have them, please keep the confined to the minute clinics at the drug store and bar them from billing themselves as real GPs.
I'm in Tasmania, so here's the a PDF from the Tasmanian Department of Health Services explaining what a Nurse Practitioner can do, including prescribing some medication and interpreting diagnostic test
https://www.dhhs.tas.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/6408...
A friend of mine was an ICU nurse in Canada before moving to Australia. It was a long and painful process to get qualified again, and when she did, she found out she had been demoted from being able to meaningfully improve patient care (eg the prescriptions and diagnoses you mention) to a robot carrying out orders.
I have been down this cycle myself becoming almost nihilistic and seeing it all as a pointless game of machiavelian diplomacy.
These days I'm much more optimistic, and doing much better overall but in hindsight your explanation is exactly what I went through at my worst.
In fiction?
Back on the original topic, Erik Dietrich's "Developer Hegemony" has a less extreme view of the corporation; worth reading IMO.
The opportunists see the corporate world for what it is and do what is best for their careers, the idealists believe in the shared corporate myths and put in the hours to uphold the values they're taught, and the pragmatists value being home for dinner more than climbing the ladder. It describes the broken system without implying all the people in it are broken, and since the focus is really on the incentive systems that create this situation I think that's a better take.
I don't think the subjects of the Gervais categories are broken people so much as dangerous ones, careerwise (and possibly mental healthwise).
The research on linguistic relativity focuses on sensory perceptions that differ across languages. It's not applicable to the decision to claim that most of the managerial structure have a diagnosable mental illness when they clearly don't, by an English speaker in an essay read by other English speakers.
This cartoon prepares you for life in large-corp environments. I've seen so many (real life) scenarios play out exactly as some of Dilbert's (and the other chars) stories.
Edit: for clarity, the article does refer to "The Dilbert Principle".
Of course it is. That's what comedians do: they take something with enough basis in reality that people will recognise and identify with it, and then caricature and exaggerate it to extremes.
> leaves no room for honest positive and meaningful work, and at risk of pointing out the obvious, there's a lot of meaningful work to be done.
There's plenty of meaningful work to be done, but most of it doesn't generate profit, so it doesn't get done. That which does get done, often pays poverty wages. Raising good citizens, caring for the elderly, educating our children, producing high quality nutritious food, cleaning our streets of litter - all meaningful and vital, all pay buttons. Many more jobs pay so little, we dont even bother doing in the West anymore and give those jobs to other countries.
> Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients?
What percentage of the workers Doctors ? Bonus : why isn't everyone a doctor ?
> Adopting this philosophy is dooming oneself to a neverending feeling of being exploited and the argument that this is what is actually happening in totality is all philosophical opinion so why would I adopt a philosophy that is so personally ruinous, demoralizing, and demotivating?
Pretending you are happy and contributing to society while you are required to piss in a bottle is to concede all human dignity. To pretend that giving up 70 hours a week crunching numbers so a Corporation pays less tax that is to sell your soul and work to the detriment of society. To think anything else, means it's already too late for you.
tldr : meaningful jobs exist, but are rare as rocking horse shit and great swathes of us never get to experience meaningful jobs, because our culture needs obedient workers to make profits ahead of anything else.
the standard promotion/development path is primarily designed to maneuver the Clueless into position wherever they are needed
However it feels like a profoundly different claim to Dr Peter's.
I'm sure they'll BOTH figure it out.
But why not be discontent with your reality? That's typically a sign to enact change and willingfully settling is an acceptance of how things are.
I think the problem lies in the way that capitalism treats companies and labour. Im not proposing we abolish capitalism but selling our time at a loss* to our employer doesn't "feel" good. Maybe you feel rewarded by your work and maybe you don't but you shouldn't destroy that feeling for the sake of complacency.
*Loss is possibly controversial, but an employer does seek to get more value out of an employee than they pay them.
Most companies make 'reasonable' profits or even losses. You could say normal range for profits is -5% to +10%. When the company is people intensive, it basically means, that revenue is paid in salaries.
For better salaries to be paid, profits must grow first. For profits to grow, existing people must perform better. If profits don't grow, salaries can't follow.
Now when profits grow, we face a decision on how to split the new profits, and it does not always fall on the existing employees. Sometimes profits go into hiring new people, sometimes they go into pockets of the owners. But I have also often seen in my 25 year career, that performers are compensated.
I have also always seen the costs rise, and the costs been mostly salaries. So profits eventually go to the pockets of the employees.
So actually it is good idea for everyone to perform, because if the profit growth stops, salary growth stops as well.
Anyway, my bottom line is that this 'sociopath, clueless, loser' is flawed thinking, but probably something people genuinely believe in just like many people believe that vaccines are bad.
My company is so far down the article's referenced lifecycle that there are several large groups of people who copy information from the mainframe into Excel sheets, and then hand this over to another group who take that information, and put it back into the mainframe. And the "Clueless" have fought me, tooth and nail, to try to improve these kinds of barbarous workflows.