Comment by blagie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blagie | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Companies aren't people. The set of people in Microsoft is completely different in 2022 than it was in 1995. A quarter-century has passed. It's not the same organization as it was back then. It has very little relationship to it.

I've been consistently surprised by Microsoft doing non-evil things over the past decade, until I accepted that I no longer had reason to hate it.

Conversely, for a while, I was surprised by Google doing evil things, until I realized that the Google of 15 years ago no longer existed. The company has over 10x the employees of the old Google of "don't be evil" days. Even if no one had left, it's over 90% of people who don't know how to not be evil, and don't know they're not supposed to be evil. In practice, most non-evil people I knew at the old Google have long since left (although far from everyone, but enough that it's probably <1% pre-evil).

Microsoft was evil in the nineties. In 2022, it's not a saint, but it's pretty good.

Google was genuinely good in the early '00s. Today, it's pretty evil.

The same has happened to many of my non-profits. Open source was started to strip ethics out of free software, and many genuinely nasty organizations from back then now behave like the FSF of the nineties. Conversely, some of my favorite non-profits went woke, and stopped doing what they were created to do. A few of my favorite academic institutions turned into Enron, while others moved up. Etc.

Organizations are abstractions. Swap out the people and incentives, and it's a new thing under an old name.

Second the people selected for a company are selected based on their conformance to that companies culture. So even if not a single human in Microsoft is the same, the company culture is the there.

This reminds me of an old story, might be fiction, that conveys the idea. five chimpanzees were put in a cage, bananas in the center everytime one tried to get a banana they would get cold water untill they simply stoped trying. Then one by one they replaced the chimpanzees do one one of the new ones, tried to take one of the bananas the old ones would stop him. Slowly they replaced all of them and none of the new chimpanzees, who had never received a cold shower, took the bananas.

The same with corporations.

As a point of experience, I know of only a handful of corporations from my childhood which preserved the same culture. The vast majority are entirely different.

Most software engineering and executives jobs have a tenure of three years, and I think culture is definitely preserved for longer than that. However, it's very rarely preserved over decades.

You're citing a classic joke. The experiment doesn't replicate when people tried to test it:

https://www.answers.com/Q/Did_the_monkey_banana_and_water_sp...

So we could define the medium live of culture as 3 times the average executive tenure?

So if in the company the average tenure is 3 years, then the culture is what has been practiced in the last 9 years... Even if the company itself is 20 years old.

In another company with tenures of average 5 years then company culture is what has been going on the last 15 years.

What do you think? Does this idea mire closely match your experience?

As a child you were familiar with the internal company culture of multiple corporations?

Oddly enough, yes. Don't judge; nerds come in all types.

I can't say I was intimately familiar, but at the level of reading books and trade press as good enough for the statements I'm making.

You don't need a lot of depth of knowledge to know when a culture completely changed. If you go outside and see a Toyota Camry and another Toyota Camry a week later, you can't tell whether the car is the same one. On the other hand, if one day, it's a Porsche, and the next week, and 18-wheeler, you can be pretty sure something changed....

> Second the people selected for a company are selected based on their conformance to that companies culture.

I would agree for most companies and it's probably true for Microsoft but that doesn't really apply to Google. Google is 23 years old. 20 years ago the people who wanted to work at Google were looking for a young fast-growing company shaking things up with its search engine, a heavy focus in engineering and opportunites everywhere. Nowadays, the people who want to work at Google want to work for one of the most prestigious tech company. That tends to attract a completely different kind of person.

IMO the margins for selection can be pretty big w.r.t culture.

Also that last point probably only work if the punishment is incredibly big, and I doubt something like that exists for the scale MS operates at.

Exactly. Corporations are Ships of Theseus. Even if you change top leadership, the Board is still the same, and looking for the basically same kind of people.

That's... not the analogy.

The Ship of Theseus is a question about the nature of identity, not an answer.

That's just not true and it's plain to see if you stretch out the timeline. Is the Hudson Bay Company basically the same at it was in 17th century?

Video illustration of the 5 monkeys experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-PvBo75PDo

That would be true if everyone were replaced at once. Culture lingers on otherwise.

>Swap out the people and incentives, and it's a new thing under an old name.

And according to you, the incentives of this new Microsoft are...?

The culture is still there. They just learned to do better PR and how to make money in this new environment (which they couldn't entirely control).

According to the Supreme Court companies are people

https://www.npr.org/2014/07/28/335288388/when-did-companies-...

It amazes me that literal generations can pass and people assume the tone and nature of a company won't change. Honestly, at this time Microsoft is doing some pretty great stuff with embarrassing the open source community and free solutions. That could change but right now I like it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com