All companies are fucked up

> All companies are fucked up... the trick is finding a company that's fucked up in a way that works for you

I think another way to phrase this is "No company is perfect, don't let good be the enemy of perfect, find a company that ticks as many of your boxes while triggering as few or zero of your red flags" or something like that.

Is my job "perfect"? Absolutely not but it's pretty damn close and compared to my past jobs it's by far the best (if you can't say this then you might want to shop around). I have a friend who gets every Friday off, is that nice? Sure is but I wouldn't like a number of other things about the company he works for. Life/work is a series of tradeoffs/comprimsies, just make sure you are feel like you have more positives than negatives and you'll be happy.

I'm extremely thankful that early in my career I realized that I enjoy working for smaller companies. I was "lucky" enough to essentially be contracted out to a big client and I hated almost every aspect of it (except that I loved working on a single product vs the small little projects for various clients as I had done before). I took that experience and found a job at a small company that had a couple of products that I could iterate on and improve.

It's common to say something like "If you aren't changing jobs every 2-4 years you are leaving a ton of money on the table", that's mostly true but one other big benefit of moving companies is you get to exposed to a bunch of different ways companies are run, their culture, etc. I feel like every time I've switched jobs I've moved closer and closer to my personal "perfect", in part because I've recognized the red flags from my past/current jobs and watched for them before accepting an offer at a new place.

This is a natural consequence of all people being "fucked up", although I'd phrase it as "broken".

In the first anecdote the chef is a raging alcoholic, which is a pretty obvious issue, but everybody, no matter how successful or perfect-seeming, has some kind of cross to bear that occasionally makes them act in seemingly-irrational ways at times. Maybe they have a crippling phobia of spiders, so they refuse to watch any live TV programming that might show one. Maybe they have a birthmark across their genitals so they absolutely refuse to have sex with the lights on. Maybe they had perfectionist parents, so they react really badly to criticism. Etc, etc, etc.

The author gives two examples of jobs they worked at then asserts that all companies are fucked up. I think you need better evidence or at least a more persuasive argument to claim that “all companies are fucked up”. Maybe the author didn’t literally mean that all companies are fucked up, but I’m not even convinced that more than half of companies are fucked up, based on this post.

Sorry, maybe I’m just missing the point.

I was curious about the black belt story in the opening paragraph; turns out it's just an urban legend :(

- http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/07/history-colo... - https://traditional-dojo.com/blog/88092/The-true-and-not-so-...

I've come to the same realization a while ago, but I've also come to terms with it :-)

Of course most companies are messed up, the same way that every organization of sufficient size is. The reason is simply human nature.

I used to get really angry about lots of things, but I'm relatively calm nowadays. The trick is to look at all these antipatterns, political, inefficient, toxic behavior that you see in companies as some kind of force of nature.

Sales organizations building their own IT department. Product orgas caring about the process of building a product more than the actual product. HR guarding "people and culture", but talking shit behind employees backs.

Oh well.

You can either get angry, fight pointless fights and shorten your life. Or you make your peace and try to navigate the mess.

The prolog about karate belt colors is not true. I like the story of how you start with a white belt and practice so long it turns to black, but in reality the colors do have some symbolic meaning. After reading the full article I am not sure if it's author's sense of humor or just misquoting :)

This person... must be very young. Every chef I've met is a borderline or full-on alcoholic. Bosses aren't supposed to tell you what to do, they're supposed to deal with you when you aren't doing it. Those aren't companies being fucked up, those are just... ways work is done.

But the OP also shouldn't be glorifying being fucked up or working too hard. The drunken chef thing, that needs to change. Bosses not telling you what to do? That's the ideal.

Do what you are comfortable getting paid for, that enables you to have a family life, friends, and interests outside of what you get paid for. We were never supposed to work this much anyway (see: pre-industrial labor, hunter-gatherers, etc). If you are constantly stressed at work, find another job.

All companies are pathological is the way I think of it.

But I would add that in my experience it seems to correlate to size of the organization. I.E. smaller orgs are not immune but the larger you get the more organizational pathology that creeps in.

For me its based on 30+ years consulting, with many different companies of different industries, sizes, and maturity as an organization.

The value for me in this notion is that it has stopped me from fantasizing about idealistic work scenarios / environments.

I worked at a really big tech company on a tight knit operations team. The boss quit so the put the VP of eng in charge of our team. He never once came to our team meeting, never once told any of us what to do, asked us to do anything or in any way interacted with us except to say hi and have a beer if we were hanging out on Friday. That wasn’t fucked up at all. We were all really good at what we did (with the possible exception of me, I was just trying to keep up), we identified what needed to be done, prioritized it and got it done. In other words we self-organized. That’s a sign of a good company. It was an environment that caused me to step up and take responsibility for things two levels above my pay grade. Not because I’m ambitious, but because things needed doing and I was the only one available to take care of them.

It’s funny that the author lists that as a way for a company to be fucked up. I’ve worked for a lot of fucked up companies. That’s one of the stories I tell my partners now about my hand-off management style. People will step up if given the opportunity. And if they can’t, it’ll rapidly become apparent and they’ll go find another company and somebody who wants to boss them around.

This is a thing that feels true.

I started at a company that didn't have software as a focus. Went to a consultancy and did work for quite a few companies. Eventually got hired by a division of a billionaire's conglomerate. And I get to interact with members of my profession in similar sorts of situations.

And personally, I've yet to get to the internals of a company and not find some amount of spit, glue, and rubber bands holding together critical infrastructure.

Like always, there's something somewhere that will make me go, "They do what?" and raise my eyebrows.

And while I personally have not witnessed it, I do have friends who have worked for FAANG level companies and there is some amount of cowboy-ness there too.

We're all just kinda winging it.

For whoever needs to hear this:

I think of a time when I wanted to leave a company, and people pull a line like this out. They'd accuse me of a "grass is greener" mentality and try to tell me I had it good as I could get. But they were pretty spectacularly wrong.

Yes, all companies and all humans have problems. Perfection doesn't exist.

But this is not an excuse for a shitty or abusive employer, or just one that isn't for you. If you have intuition that there is better out for you, make a plan and follow it.

"You only have white belt and black belts and you never wash them"

Old wives tale.

Things don't have to be the way they were 10,000,000 years ago because "that is the way they did it then."

If that was the case, we would still be diagnosing diseases using the 4 humors in medicine - black bile, blood, phlegm, and yellow bile.

In reality, it is good to give people feedback all the time, and it is good to give people a new belt as soon as they can do different levels of actions for each level. It's incentive to have a new belt every 2 or 3 months. It is a physical representation of progress.

I've read this a few times and don't get his analogy of martial arts belts to all companies are fucked up. It doesn't follow at all. I guess it means when you first start working after you graduate, you start at a white belt level and you keep working on getting into more fucked up companies as you go along until you find the one that is just as fucked up as you are in the same way you are, but this doesn't make sense because you also have levels of black belts - a 1st degree black belt is the same as a white belt to a 5th degree black belt. You never stop learning and getting better and higher belts. So I guess you need to keep finding more and more fucked up and worse companies for your whole life??? That fit you even better??? Because you learn to find more fucked up companies the more you practice finding fucked up companies?

I don't get what this guy is even talking about.

> MOST SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE ARE JUST A WALKING ANXIETY DISORDER HARNESSED FOR PRODUCTIVITY.

I can’t help but think of recent headlines regarding the apparent drop in worker productivity over the past year or so—-most suggest that economists are struggling to understand the cause. Yeah, it’s a gd mystery. Why aren’t people motivated to be “successful”.

I think a better way to say this is "No company is absolutely perfect"

Binary statements aren't helpful, especially when one of the two binary options is impossible (perfect companies don't exist).

The real problem with binary statements is that it opens the door to people justifying severe problems at one company because "all companies are fucked up". Some problems are very different than others, and it's not really useful to lump them all into one bucket labeled "fucked up" that every company fits into.

> lol. All companies are fucked up... the trick is finding a company that's fucked up in a way that works for you.

This almost starts to touch on the nuance, but I think it's really important to clarify that not all companies are toxic, or abusive, or have incompetent executives, or underpay people, etc. There are entire classes of companies doing things that shouldn't be tolerated, especially when there are so many companies not doing those things that would be happy to hire good employees.

this was a big realization when I jumped from a scrappy startup to FAANG for two years. Was it all ice cream and unicorn farts? Absolutely not. Everything company has bullshit. It's your job to figure out if it's bs you can tolerate, or if it's not how changing jobs will alleviate it.

Ok here's another spin you have 3 choices:

1. Figure out in which ways exactly your company is fucked up and align to that. Be a chameleon that operates like that company does.

2. Quit and find another company that more closely aligns or is acceptable.

3. Make your own company and design your own rules that resemble your way of thinking (but maybe others wouldn't jive with)

The fucked up examples he gives aren’t sustainable. Eventually that alcoholic chef isn’t going to be able to function well enough in the kitchen. Businesses can tolerate a certain amount of slacking and inefficiency, but a complete breakdown isn’t going to last forever.

On the downside, it can be particularly bad to find a place where the kind of fucked up they have and the kind of fucked up you have don't work well enough together to be happy or healthy, not bad enough to get worse, and you are all sort of locked into a slow slide of dysfunction that just gets a little worse month by month, but not enough that anyone makes a big change.

These kinds of statements are getting annoying.

Gerald Weinberg said the same thing this way: "Expect irrationality." The point he makes in that chapter has saved my sanity many times. https://geraldmweinberg.com/Site/Consulting_Secrets.html

I’m convinced that companies have have quirks due to internalized organizational traumas that occurred in the past. Some calamity happens, the corporation overreacts and says “no, never again” to the bad thing, and develops practices to avoid it. The people that remember what precipitated the practice move on, and it just becomes a self-perpetuating oddity that everyone mechanically does.

As an outsider joining a company, I find you can actually get a sense of the unspoken history of an organization by all the batshit crazy things it does. There’s always a story about how that all came to be. I’m not saying understanding that will help you fix it (you probably won’t), but it’ll at least give you a chance.

While not all companies are as pervasively fucked up as the article claims, all companies do have problems, and these problems typically correlate to the stage a company is in. There's a great book on this which is older than I am called Managing Corporate Lifecycles. What's interesting with books about people is that they age much better than books about technology. Technology changes rapidly, but groups of people trying to accomplish something go through surprisingly predictable phases, regardless of the time period. If you like the title of the article but were disappointed by the content, I would highly recommend checking out the book I mentioned.

Every company is fucked up in a different way, even though they have many similarities.

(Echoes of Anna Karenina)

Fun article/writing style, but IMO not very accurate. No company is perfect, but most are not genuinely fucked up, just a little dysfunctional here and there.

> I worked an office gig one time where my boss just stopped telling us what to do. We were just supposed to "know." For some people, this probably sounds amazing right? No corporate politics. No bullshit meetings. Just do whatever you feel like! It was great for half a heartbeat but then it turned into "Lord of the Flies" ... the inmates running the asylum sort of thing.

I see someone has worked at Valve.

When asked for advice on how to evaluate a job, I usually suggest looking at these 5 aspects: (1) Team (2) Domain the company competes in (3) Technology used (4) Commute (5) Compensation

Most people focus too much on the "name" of the company and/or the compensation, and do not weight the other factors enough and often later regret their choices.

All humans are fucked up.

All human collectives are fucked up.

Yet in spite of this, we persevere, and we have been able to achieve incredible things.

Companies are just human collectives within a parameterized template of constraints under the current structure of human society.

And they're more or less fucked up on some degree, just like every group of humans from 1 to 1.5Billion

A few minutes research showed the black belt thing to be a myth. This is only one source: https://fullcirclejujitsu.com/the-black-belt-myth/

This seems emblematic of so much business writing.

To borrow a quote:

All companies are fucked up but, but each fucked up company is messed up in its own way...

A company can be f*cked up if it has a lot of money coming in.

Huh? This was a really weird article/post in my opinion. I agree with the sentiment and really enjoyed the message of "turn your belt black". "Fucked up" to me means things more like fraud and indentured servitude.

Maybe I wouldn't have clicked with another title but it just left me scratching my head being "yeah that's bad but why does that make 'all companies' anything"

Twitter more so than others - having an insecure ego driven mercurial boss micromanaging everything is a recipe for disaster.

> All companies are fucked up... the trick is finding a company that's fucked up in a way that works for you.

Love this.

When you're young you need to work in a restaurant because restaurants a hub of booze, drugs, parties, and people.

New to a city? Work in a restaurant. And if it's a good place the money is pretty good.

Well. It begins with a fake anecdote on karate belts - they were invented in France by Mikinosuke Kawaishi, so I am not really willing to read further han the first few lines.

This was a lot less anti capitalist than I was hoping lol

If we assume that all companies are imperfect, then what is the right mental model to navigate this world?

I think Wabi-Sabi helps us deal with this reality. Here's a cool explainer video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M759yNSOTMs

"Wabi-sabi rejects the pursuit of perfection and embraces the reality of imperfection. The philosophy behind wabi-sabi can help us escape the hamster wheel of chasing an ideal life and teaches us to appreciate existence as it is: perfectly imperfect."

Not my company though

Not my experience at all. I have worked for two really fucked up companies. But the rest were OK and my current job is pretty good.

This reads as though it were written by a teen, and the core argument isn’t remotely true.

basically like people. we compare our inner lives with others' outer lives.

There's a similar saying in Chinese 草台班子

it means organizations are basically makeshift.

Flagged for triteness.

... all families are dysfunctional ... all people have [different] problems ... nothing is perfect ... perfect is the enemy of good\ ... life is hard.

The same applies to everybody.

...but some more than others?

oh yeah