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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

A poetic summary.

Toxic work culture is a very serious thing. It's both a cause and symptom of a dysfunctional economy and we need to fix it with the same urgency as problems of transport, environment and health (and it relates to all).

Every small company starts out "like a family", full of good intentions, and then ends up in a psychological race to the bottom of naked exploitation, greed and systemetised ignorance.

Modern HR selects primarily for desperation and compliance. Management is essentially an activity of self-preservation. Qualities like duty, loyalty, initiative and industriousness are deemed weaknesses.

There is no way we can build globally competitive and innovative business in this milieu. How do you do full hard-reset and reboot on an entire culture?

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“Modern HR” (aka in-house commissar) is a top-down legally mandated entity to 1) exert regulatory control on all but the tiniest companies and 2) reward the useless-nagger constituency of the party with jobs.

There is no system-wide hard-reset, not in our lifetimes. There is retreat & regroup, away from the eye of sauron, while the parasite devours the host.

You know I always joked about getting a goat farm.

Now it’s looking more and more likely every day.

do it before they force Beyond Goat!

Don’t get me started

> There is retreat & regroup, away from the eye of sauron, while the parasite devours the host.

Especially when the CEO publicly brags about being called the Eye of Sauron by employees, as Mark Zuckerberg did.

> There is retreat & regroup, away from the eye of sauron, while the parasite devours the host.

This is a great way to put it.

“ Qualities like duty, loyalty, initiative and industriousness are deemed weaknesses.”

Wherever you look, loyalty is for suckers. Be it as employee, car insurance or cell phone plans. Only the new guy gets respect.

Everybody is hoping to acquire lazy and complacent suckers, who won't switch to another employer or cell phone/insurance provider even though the terms they're getting are no longer on par with what the market offers. This strategy largely works too, as I've worked with some exceptional developers working for really meh salaries. They don't think about leaving, too.

>who won't switch to another employer or cell phone/insurance provider even though the terms they're getting are no longer on par with what the market offers. This strategy largely works too, as I've worked with some.

Acquiring competitive market rates and competing in market rates isn't always easy or even reasonable. Sometimes it takes significant effort due to barriers and some of these barriers were erected by companies. Take the modern interview process. Weeks of evening prep time, lots of applications/artificial networking/cold calling/recruiter responding, the time/emotional/ mental energy to step through several hoops, etc. and all this for a chance to compete at a position that probably isn't all that great anyways beyond TC.

Do you have friends?

That sounds a little rude as a bare question. But it's a good one. Because friends (real ones that would drive to to the hospital) are where we start to rebuild this mess.

I'd drive pretty much anyone to the hospital if they asked. I also ask rude questions ¯\_(0.0)_/¯.

Well done. Rude questions are good. If anything there aren't enough of them.

Not the OP, but mixing employment with friendship can be difficult to navigate.

I know from personal experience that is is possible for a friendship to survive adverse shocks involving money. But it is difficult, it does change things permanently, and it seems rare that it survives at all.

> mixing employment with friendship can be difficult to navigate.

This is only true if you both dont either have eachother as a priority or act hypocritically in light of that stated value.

Losing $100 to a false friend is a great way to pay your enemies to get lost.

I'm thinking specifically of a situation where things were much less clear-cut, and involved far more than $100.

It is easy to make grand declarations. But when ethical considerations are not very clear-cut and you're talking real pain, you really figure out what a friendship is worth.

> There is no way we can build globally competitive and innovative business in this milieu. How do you do full hard-reset and reboot on an entire culture?

Leave and build lifestyle businesses. Not every business has to be globally competitive. Create more opportunities for freelancers. Basically, there need to be attractive options for employees outside of working at globally competitive companies in order to force the change. After all, from the already existing global businesses' point of view, the current methods are working fine.

> we need to fix it with the same urgency as problems of transport, environment and health

So do nothing and ignore it, especially if the person is poor.

>Modern HR selects primarily for desperation and compliance. Management is essentially an activity of self-preservation. Qualities like duty, loyalty, initiative and industriousness are deemed weaknesses.

This is true for the white collar world - the entire point of which is to put restraints on the actual skilled workers, so they don't start changing the world quicker than psychopaths can adapt. Otherwise the idiots will just drop off the gene pool, and then who's gonna start our wars for us, eh?

>How do you do full hard-reset and reboot on an entire culture?

You ask this rhetorically, as if it's some sort of intractable question, but the 20th century is full of examples of the West "rebooting" the cultures and economies of non-aligned states, and it sure ain't pretty. Takes about a generation of chaotic violent struggle, give or take. Then, a new local optimum emerges as power inevitably consolidates into the same externality-blind primate hierarchy, "but different".

> You ask this rhetorically, as if it's some sort of intractable question

Sorry if it came over that way. I certainly didn't mean it to sound rhetorical. I'm all about actually changing things.

> 20th century is full of examples of the West "rebooting" the cultures and economies of non-aligned states

And Britain long, long before that. All have been failures, since all were looting presented as benvolent reform and aid. People help themselves, which can generally happen only once the boot is romoved from their faces. So perhaps "rebooting" is clumsy language, if you're suggesting that a new boot will simply take its place :)

Maybe de-booting is what we're after?

One cannot impose a culture. But there's no reason it need take "a generation of chaotic violent struggle". That seems a little pessimistic. Historically, "blind primate hierarchies" [1] have civilised themselves rapidly under the right conditions. It would be nice to think we could reason our way into a better place before it comes to the point W. James's "Moral Equivalent of War", as climate change, inevitably brings us to our senses.

[1] Do you think of Western culture as a blind primate hierarchy? Is not that very perspective part of the problem?

> I'm all about actually changing things.

Me too.

Where I am from there is a lot of bullying. All the way.. from small kids and up to the political representatives.

What I am doing (and I do not recommend this btw) is to exit every norm, so I do everything superficial poorly. I never edit anything I write, I just post the first draft, I don't cut my hair, I don't wear shoes, my clothes I've just found, I can't remember when I last bought clothes, I don't own a phone, I don't use any social media. Basically I set myself up for being bullied.

However! I also work on the most important problem; the idea being that the absurdity may wake people up to the idea that maybe it's better to help me (by editing things or contributing things) than it is to bully me when what they are doing is nonsense and what I am doing is necessary... The point is that if you cannot use violence then you've got to use humor and poke fun at the holes in the opponents argument.

Are you a hermit?

People who care about you, care about you.

The rest is trapping(s).

I thought our individualistic culture was based on the shared understanding that, the more value you provide to others' lives, the more your nonconformities are accepted.

Aint much you can do for your fellows when your hands are in handcuffs though, golden or otherwise, so we better keep up with 'em Joneses and don't dare imagine freedom, or else.

I'm not quite sure how to parse this or if this was even meant for me, but I do hope that this isn't some pretense to dispair or annihilation (the bad kind)

I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but I'm basically responsding to the implications I perceived in the "are you a hermit" question, which I feel are quite disheartening in their own right: that meeting society on one's own terms is impossible without imposing on oneself the near-total isolation usually associated with hermitdom.

In another recent comment thread, the refusal to use the conveniences of Big Tech was compared to "self-flagellation" - another quaint association with the atrocities of Western religion - while the fact remains that entrusting contemporary connected technology with stewardship over one's social life is the actual self-harmful approach.

Yes I'm starting to understand a little more and I agree with you in broad strokes. But I guess to parley with 'society' requires some degree of compromise. Casting your own ego into the mix might be self correcting on societies part (maybe not formally); if you impose yourself without effacing anything, like a hapless lover in a one-sided relationship, you stand to lose all of it, if you're pushing and pulling without giving. That's how I see it, as a matter of practicality.

However the more nuanced point, something maybe deeper, about society, reminds me of Weil's 'Great Beast'. In a way I'm offering a redemptive hermitdom, and that's why I thought your response was hard to parse (blame me, because my question could either be seen as childishly naive or a handshake from one acolyte to another).

My conception of hermitdom isn't cursed or evil or self-destructive necessarily, and I was poking at the parent commentor a little to see if they might think the same way. Weil is probably hitting at the core of the issue with more resolution that I could ever hope to achieve:

> Relationship breaks its way out of the social. It is the monopoly of the individual. Society is the cave. The way out is solitude. ... To relate belongs to the solitary spirit. No crowd can conceive relationship: "This is good or bad in relation to..." "in so far as ..." That escapes the crowd. A crowd cannot add things together. One who is above social life returns to it when he wishes; not so one who is below. It is the same with everything.

I look up to you.

>Do you think of Western culture as a blind primate hierarchy?

Honestly? I used to think of it as an edifice of enlightened human thought... HAHAHAHAHA.

>Is not that very perspective part of the problem?

Don't think so. I'm not even sure there is a problem.

>I'm all about actually changing things

Oh, I wish things were different, too. But IMHO all I can possibly ever change are my local circumstances, and even that is not always particularly tractable. Intentionally "changing the world for the better" kinda sounds like a single cell of your body arbitrarily changing the laws of physics under which it operates. (Stretch that metaphor a bit and you get cancerous ideologies. We saw how well that worked...)

The world can evolve, though. Over feedback loops that take generations.

>So perhaps "rebooting" is clumsy language, if you're suggesting that a new boot will simply take its place :) Maybe de-booting is what we're after?

Now that's some pretty cool wordplay - the world needs more of that, so you made a positive change right there :) The Butlerian debooting :D

Tiny changes with a smile. Now there are two of us. :) Pass it on.

> How do you do full hard-reset and reboot on an entire culture?

easy, hire management consultants

>How do you do full hard-reset and reboot on an entire culture?

One way would be for people to team up and form cooperatives. A cooperative is owned by all the workers and all the workers share the profits and have a saying.

It goes in hand with monopoly culture in society.

When you have so many mergers/aq. that build de facto monopolies there's no incentive for companies to care about their employees and the emphasis becomes on the image of caring vs actual caring.

As the employee has a small selection of companies to work for and jobs become about bureaucracy and politics instead of actual `work` and there's not much you as employee can do about it.

The companies not caring about customers but pretending to is another story tangential to this one.

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