The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)
ribbonfarm.com
ribbonfarm.com
I actually think the overall argument of the essay makes more sense when you realize the above comment actually isn't true for the large majority of organizations. Universities, government agencies, big tech monopolies, public sector unions, complacent companies in industries that haven't changed in 50 years, etc. Most sectors of the economy just don't experience that much competitive pressure, and that's why there are so many zombie institutions, whose activities resemble a kind of mindless shambling rather than any kind of rational constructive motion.
so: Harvard, FDA, Google, American Postal Workers Union, State Farm. Also banks, I would say.
Banks get “torn apart and cannibalized” more frequently than industrials.
Column A / Column B. If hubris is the root, the less hubristic competitor takes it over on failure. If competition causes excessive risk taking, the better-managed bank wins. The system really only loses when competitive pressure causes everyone to lower their guard, which happens, which is why banking has to be tightly regulated. (And this is true with or without fractional reserves.)
If you look at the composition and charters of these old “institutions” like governments, universities etc… the scope and function, the amount of resources put towards them etc… is very much not static.
In fact, they are exceptionally different than they were at their founding, and this is specifically true for universities with how they were funded at the beginning versus how they are funded now as well as what their role in the social organization of society is
So this concept that there are these big monolithic things - by function of simply not changing names - haven’t changed, is silly at best
The Crimson even did a huge writeup of this:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/5/22/yir-college-adm...
Bottom line, all of these institutions have been captured by moneyed interests and that’s the cycle
Public goods get privatized by dominating financiers and used to benefit the in group they serve while passing all externalities to the out group
Aka “capitalism” - and yes, this applies to the Soviet Union perfectly because the Bolshevik coopted all of the land in Soviet territories on behalf of the bosheviks and had nothing to do with individual labor power - so please save your communist complaints for somebody who is promoting communism because that’s not me
How do you keep a group of chimps who all have different interests, personalities, needs, beliefs, values, upbringings, culture, religion, language, history etc etc in sync?
And these days groups grow quite large quite fast.
Historically, if you take rewards, bribery, force, domination and manipulation out of the story, the babblers/non threatening people can bridge differences as groups grow larger and larger in size.
No solution is perfect, cause its quite an unnatural thing for groups to form around anything. Given all the differences.
Just try to work with your entire extended family on a project, and watch what kind of strange rituals, stories and behaviors keep the group from breaking apart.
He is also quite fond of using poorly defined (in this context) words like "dialectical" and "illegibility" that makes the reader doubt whether he's actually full of shit or that he is actually so brilliant that the reader simply doesn't comprehend him.
I do not agree with his idea of promotion of overachievers into middle management and many other things. Some of his points are self-contradictory.
There are many variations on the main principle like Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
(None of this applies applies to startups that are founded by actual programmers.)
That is a big "if". It works on the family level, but in the real world babbling is coupled with dominance, coercion, blackmail, exploitation etc.
It is easy to see in any average company that no one believes the babbler but is forced to listen to them and applaud.
not everyone needs to be in a group.
not everyone in a group needs to be in sync with interests AND personalities AND needs AND beliefs AND...
but I see the paradox here: we need to believe the above is true to live happier and more meaningfully
Not everyone is in a civilisation. Few people in a civilisation would rather be in e.g. Sudan or Ethiopia.
Lower the sizes of groups and increase async communication, and the burden/overhead of management goes down. Groups small enough can manage themselves, in fact.
Modern management theory says you put the one that throws the most shit and chimps the loudest in charge; give them 90% of the banannas and tell all the others they should be more like that one if they want nice things.
Humans aren't chimps. Our closest animal relative is the Bonobo, and the corporate world would be a much more interesting place if we solved our conflicts the way they do: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bonobo-sex-and-so...
What do you think a leader’s job is?
You mean: to influence them?
The Dumb Ape Hypothesis: we are at our most dumb when declaring others so.
People who have a reason to form a group will cooperate/collaborate best when they have some confidence in one another. People share ideas, projects, and skills, and "read" one another and form bonds. This is a social system. It could be a brief association or have a long duration. It could have a formal context, such as a business or a governmental entity.
Social interactions build people's confidence and sense of value in the group, in the individuals, and the work at hand. The challenge grows exponentially as the population of the group scales. Communication is hard.
An individual's discernment and connectedness (a confidence/value score) within the group will reflect potential for success. Communication matters.
The human plot twist is that there can be dysfunctional social systems as well as dysfunctional individuals.
For a very serious discussion, the great writer Primo Levi published his reflections on his harrowing experiences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primo_Levi
This related article about social systems and connectedness was also recently discussed on HN with much interest: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-upstream-cause-of-the-youth...
Your initial point is the simplest explanation for how groups of people self-organise... and meta-organise.
I realise that I went far in explaining and gave far more than I will receive in this case.
But then again, you responded and that's a connection. ^_^
Management has to collect information, disseminate information, coordinate, make decisions and propagate them.
All of that requires a lot of communication, aka talking.
You want someone who is a naturally fluent speaker, strongly outspoken, who holds strong opinions, and wants to focus on processes and long-term roadmaps and so on. All the stuff a dilligent IC disdains.
One person's 'all talk' is another person's 'all walk'.
> never wanted to take on advice, always fought on really shady grounds, but he fought everything, almost like it was either his idea of what was on-point or nothing
Yes, you can be productive through communication, but if that's the kind of "talk" you want in your C-suite then I don't want to work in any company where you have influence.
It's almost like communicating effectively requires detailed knowledge of the real world, knowledge most often and most effectively gained by... doing things.
This simple process is from an emergent behavior of rational actors acting in accordance to the incentives of the structure. Unlike other theories it does not necessitate irrational actors, morons, or sociopaths. Where you have people you have politics so it almost always occurs just at different speeds, hence the pervasiveness and the inevitability of the cycle of collapse and rebirth. It appears to me that only a highly competent king (someone whose position cannot be threatened by a peer) can stop this process and maybe reverse it.
You might be inverting cause and effect.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296 (63 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33298158 (149 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25486869 (90 comments)
And a lot more which were less popular: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=gervais%20principle%20the%20of...
I absolutely hate my current work environment, and it is all fueled by the archetype of boss caricatured in The Office. It is real, then again, where else would they find so much comedy gold? it had to come from real life...
1. Job market being overly picky makes it hard to jump ship, especially if you're early-mid level 2. There's a general notion that "everywhere's the same deal" so people just learn to cope with it 3. "Golden handcuffs" - compensation so good you're willing to tolerate the downsides.
Some unsolicited advice from the internet: take some time to learn a skill or decorate your house or something. If you have slack in your schedule and can't see a way to utilise it at work towards a promotion, then maybe investing in things outside of work might be fun?
It can be unwise to start a business and lose all your money which does happen to people.
This is also an “average” company set in a specific culture. Outliers exist and different cultures will also reflect in the power dynamics.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-principle-...
Those who know base-2 numerals and those who don't.
Gosh that's such an INFJ thing to say!
/s[ubtle]
EDIT: also an hour long group meeting after the interviews to be presented your collective results?
It’s not mysterious, mystical, or claiming to be science- it’s just a very simple set of arbitrary categories to give you a different perspective on yourself, and point you in a direction of dealing with things you would otherwise avoid because it’s uncomfortable to think about. For example if you see yourself as “rational” and reject “emotional” thinking, it can be helpful to actually explore your emotional side rather than push it away.
The concept itself is a useful and simple thing, but is mostly misunderstood and misused… I don’t see how an employer testing employees would be useful.
As someone who has read Carl Jungs books, but has not encountered it in the workplace, it annoys me to see people talking derisively about it from a place of misunderstanding.
Much like an IQ test, or a having or not a PhD, it doesn’t hold much predictive power.
The valuable result is the extreme opposite of your result- it is a therapy or personal development tool that directs you to explore and understand parts of yourself you reject or disapprove of (your “shadow”).
It simply quantifies something obvious that you already know: how you consciously see yourself- in a way that guides you to explore aspects of yourself that you otherwise would choose to avoid because it’s difficult and possibly even painful to do so.
What it measures is actually pretty banal and obvious if you are familiar with Jungian archetypes- one can easily guess the result for yourself and other people without using the test.
Look, I too have read Jung and agree with what you're saying here, but this is emphatically NOT how MBTI tends to be used in corporate settings, which is what everyone else in this thread is talking about.
Again, astrology claims to predict the future based on nonsense. MTBI makes no such claims, it predicts nothing, and it’s chosen dimensions are very transparently arbitrary value judgements, among limitless possible archetypes that one could choose.
Suppose you take a random sample of adult humans and sort them by height. What you’ll see is a bimodal distribution which reflects the fact that there are actually two distinct populations represented in the sample: men and women. The sexes can be considered types and you will get reasonably accurate results for predicting height from sex and vice versa.
However, if you instead take a sample of only men and sort them by height you will see a unimodal distribution. If you then try to split this sample into two types above and below the mean, you will find that it doesn’t tell you anything!
This is what I mean when I say MBTI astrology. The archetypes are meaningless! Someone who is at 51% on the extroversion scale will get labeled an Extrovert and someone at 49% will get labeled an Introvert, but in practice these two are virtually indistinguishable and fall squarely within the margin of error. Since the distribution is unimodal the majority of the population clusters around the means, exactly what you would expect to find with the hypothesis that personality archetypes do not exist.
Archetypes are fairly arbitrary concepts that isolate individual aspects among thousands that could potentially explain personality traits- they don’t claim to exist in real people.
It is critical to realize that in the dimensions on MBTI everyone is actually both, but some people strongly identify with one and reject or despise the part of themselves that represents the other.
It is indeed a totally arbitrary choice, and a value judgement. These are ones that Carl Jung thought particularly important based on his philosophy of personal development, and experience as a clinical psychologist. Of the ones Jung talked about MBTI further selected an even more limited set.
Personally, I think it is more useful to skip the MTBI and just use Jungs original text.
I went through mbti at a workplace and it was used to give us an understanding of our co-workers.
Your point that it's a self assessment and thus only "how you see yourself" and not.. y'know, how you actually behave, is in retrospect "no shit" but I missed this crucial point.
It kind of changes every conversation with anyone I've ever had about our result.
The way it relates to others is more subtle than that:
Say someone is strongly extroverted and sees introversion as a negative thing… and dislikes and disapproves of their more introverted co-workers. If they come to explore, understand, and accept their own introverted aspects it will also take the steam out of their dislike for others who show those traits.
The history section of the Wikipedia page reads like an awful lot of effort went into making it seem scientific.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers–Briggs_Type_Indicator
This part also seems like it was intended to be predictive:
>Briggs and Myers began creating their indicator during World War II (1939–1945)[7] in the belief that a knowledge of personality preferences would help women entering the industrial workforce for the first time to identify the sorts of war-time jobs that would be the "most comfortable and effective" for them
It was at one point used as a psychology research tool, but it does not work well for e.g. predicting mental health outcome differences in different groups of people, and has been superseded by things like the Big Five personality traits, which are slightly better but also probably not that useful. MBTI is probably inappropriate and useless in the workplace as other people on here are complaining about.
Nowadays, I don't think it is appropriate to use it for anything except "for fun" or as a simplified tool for making sense of and using some of Carl Jungs ideas and techniques.
Carl Jung himself has had a lot of pushback in modern times for not using scientific methodology, and having ideas and methods that aren't even testable with modern scientific methods. I've heard people even say he "set psychology back 50 years with pseudoscience."
I disagree with that, because his methods and ideas work very well for myself and a lot of people. I think he was way ahead of his time in finding "hacks" that work to improve mental health, and overcome psychological challenges... however his ideas and methods were so far ahead of his time it will be a very long time still before they could potentially be connected to any sort of mechanistic or biological psychology, or neuroscience. They should probably be regarded more as spiritual or psychotherapy tools, in the same vein as things like meditation- but still not totally worthless nonsense like astrology.
Whether or not that's what it is in the books it's described in or elsewhere is immaterial to me.
At the beginning I was a high-perfoming loser. Then I realized how things work, and since then I do bare minimum. I wish I could be a sociopath, but I don't have the brains nor the lack of morals to do so. I passionately hate the clueless ones because they stand against everything I believe in. My dream is to save enough money not to have to take part in this circus anymore.
You don’t really need to be a clinical sociopath for that - you need to know enough to employ the characteristics in order to reach your own goal, which might not be a selfish one at all.
It’s a fun sport if you think about it that way.
(I know that Scott Adams got chastised for some views/tweets/whatever and I don't care)
Now, to the cartoons. I was introduced to them back in 2000 or 2001 by a colleague. We both loved the Monty Pythons, so we had that in common to begin with. Once I read the first few strips, I got hooked. I starting 'seeing' these chars to my colleagues (and to myself).
Dilbert has taught me A LOT about psychology and operating in large corporations. My all-time favorite cartoon is (and will most likely forever be): https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1998-04-10
Some of them had valid points about how corporate "inclusivity" is often nothing of the sort – a trend dating back to the US civil rights era (see: Letter from Birmingham Jail), which I expect to continue for a hundred years yet – but surrounded by panels and panels of the characters smirking at each other about woke liberal madness as fantastical caricatures play out in front of them, that insight was… somewhat obscured.
Earlier Dilbert, though? Many of the stories were sent in by readers and fans, but wow did Scott Adams adapt them well to the comic medium. It's a real shame how he ended up, and I hope he gets better soon.
— Michael Scott, the first LLM.
To give an example: a bog standard German sentence puts the verb in second place. Everything else is fairly flexible, eg you can either put object or subject first (unlike in written English, where the place of the subject is much more constrained).
Now, when you have a subordinate clause, written German puts the finite at the end. Like "Barbara besuchte das Restaurant, weil sie Hunger hatte."
In spoken German, you can get away with "Barbara besucht das Restaurant, weil.. sie hatte ja Hunger." Especially if you pause to think at the place marked by the two dots.
Native German speaker: When I hear such a wrong placing of the finite verb in a subclause, I immediately think that the respective speaker is either uneducated (when the person is a native speaker) or (if the person is a foreign speaker) had a really bad German teacher who did not correct this mistake.
Thus: No, don't do this. Speak the sentence as you would write it.
(It's also crazy how many 'uhm' and 'äh' are in there, but you barely remember them just a few seconds later.)
Compare also the tenses in written Germany vs spoken German. Spoken German essentially only has two tenses: 'Perfekt' (perfect) and 'Präsenz' (present)
Written German: Gestern kaufte ich ein. Spoken German: Gestern habe ich eingekauft. (Though there's also the variant "Gestern war ich einkaufen." which doesn't really exist in written German.)
Written German: Mergen werde ich in den Urlaub fahren. Spoken German: Morgen fahre ich in den Urlaub.
You can occasionally hear more tenses in spoken German, but these two account for the majority of uses.
> When I hear such a wrong placing of the finite verb in a subclause, I immediately think that the respective speaker is either uneducated [...]
Yes, there's a huge class component involved here; some of these rules can be used as a shibboleth for social class. Btw for something similar in English compare http://fine.me.uk/Emonds/
> Spoken German essentially only has two tenses: 'Perfekt' (perfect) and 'Präsenz' (present)
I typically indeed use Präteritum consciously in spoken German.
> Written German: Mergen werde ich in den Urlaub fahren. Spoken German: Morgen fahre ich in den Urlaub.
Something that I am annoyed of.
> Something that I am annoyed of.
It's easier to see these things with more distance and objectivity in a foreign language.
Eg think of all the English speakers who complain when people mix up its, it's, they're, their, there in writing and accuse them of 'muddled thinking' or at least of 'bad grammar'.
Of course, that's mostly just people being protective of class markers. If there's a villain in this story, it's English poorly 'designed' orthography.
Please do have a look at the Emonds paper at http://fine.me.uk/Emonds/ It's a great read!
I have a similar opinion about such topics in foreign languages. It's just that I am much less knowledgeable concerning their subtle parts, so I as a non-native speaker can often not be sure whether I am right or I'm not aware of some subtle part of the respective language. Thus I am much more cautious concerning expressing such points for foreign languages.
But your argument
> Eg think of all the English speakers who complain when people mix up its, it's, they're, their, there in writing and accuse them of 'muddled thinking' or at least of 'bad grammar'.
which is about topics that you learn about in your first weeks of English lessons could indeed come from me.
So: I see things with the same "objectivity" in all languages (that I know or am learning); I'm just much more knowledgeable and thus outspoken concerning my native language.
There's a difference between prescriptivism and descriptivism. Languages are something people, not what grammarians make up in their books.
Please do have a look at the Emonds paper. It's interesting, I promise.
> The Brits often assume that Germans have no sense of humour. In truth, writes comedian Stewart Lee, it's a language problem. The peculiarities of German sentence construction simply rule out the lazy set-ups that British comics rely on ...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/may/23/germany.featur...
Even ranker-- doesn't German have the same kinds of filibuster phrases as English? Stuff like this:
"Look,"
"The point is this--"
"I think what the average American wants is..."
"If I've said it once I've said it a thousands times--"
There's a character Fred Armisen did on SNL news that eats the entire segment with these phrases. I'm sure the same can be done in German.
One thing I do disagree with is the promotion of enlightened underperformers. Those guys seemed to always end up leaving and starting their own companies.
The “enlightened underperformer” path is high-risk/high-reward. Only a minority will be promoted up, and most will end up either doing a lateral move to another company or being promoted out.
For example, there are people who work as value producers who overperform not because they are "clueless" -- they are well aware that the company is not loyal to them, and they got a "bad deal" -- but because they enjoy the work they do, or they have an internal drive to do a good job at whatever they do, or they believe doing a good job makes a difference in the world, etc. And at least some of such people are unlikely to accept a "promotion" to a managerial position.
You spend most of your time with customers and so you just kind of navigate their politics without actually involving yourself.
The money can be better so it’s a better deal and you’re mostly shut out from the politics of the organisation you work for anyway.
edit: Just the explanation of 'stakes' made me realize that ribbonfarm was onto something there.
Also, Silicon Valley has triggering moments.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/04/14/the-gervais-principle-...
The judgment permeates the model, apparently the only desirable position js at the top (but then you're a sociopath), second best is a checked-out loser.
To me, being a "clueless" or "over-performing loser" is preferable to a "checked-out loser" (I've been all of those at times), at minimum because the former like their job. Micheal, Andy and Dwight enjoy their job and even find some fulfillment there. Meanwhile for e. g. Stanley the work seems to be only necessary suffering. I'd rather make my work enjoyable than having to suffer 8 hours a day.
And you're making an irrational decision because it makes you feel better. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't really contradict the essence of the article. If you look at work from the economic point of view, it's just an economic transaction, we are selling our time for money. Selling more of my time for more money or selling less of it for the same money are both rational things to do, selling more time and effort for the same money is not very rational.
But I think doing the minimum you can get away with is playing with fire.
Your colleagues will resent you. You're also sending a signal to everyone that will be remembered. Maybe a colleague will start a business or move to another place one day. Are they going to employ the minimum effort person they used to work with? No.
Hell, even a commute to work where you're spending time, gas, and risk on the road can serve as a quiet time to process and integrate life's experiences.
Why would they? We're all adults and all more or less understand the rules of the game. And in rare cases in my career when the company culture was all about working long hours and living at work, I just tend not to stick in such places for long
Case B is different. Case B is where you work somewhere with reasonable work-life balance, but where you have a colleague who persistently under-performs. They won't do the essential documentation, follow the process correctly and they will quite happily sit through meetings and not volunteer a solution they know the answer to unless explicitly asked in just the right way and they happen to feel like it that day. This can take a few different forms - my list is not exclusive but it boils down to "quiet quitting" - but, as you say we are all adults, and we know who these people are.
By the same approach, it's irrational to provide anything more than the bare minimum to my kids to not get social services on my back. Doing any volunteering is irrational, contributing to charities is irrational. In all of these examples, you will also find other parties (financially) benefitting from my "stupidity". If your worldview is constrained to a cynical Homo Oeconomicus, that is.
Let's make a model example: I work in a dead-end job. Prospects of advancement or significant pay raise is small, no matter the performance. I have two options:
* checked-out loser - do the bare minimum to not get fired. I'm not producing a lot of value to the executives. I don't see meaning in the job, no fulfillment, I need to slog through the 8-hour days.
* over-performing loser - I try to find meaning and enjoyment in the work I do. My productivity grows (for the same pay), but you know, doing things well is actually kinda enjoyable, and I become to like my work, even see some fulfillment. Sometimes I even identify a bit with my job, and I'm willing to work some overtime to e.g. finish a project on time.
The crazy thing is to say that the former is more "rational" than the "latter". Your first instinct is to look for places where I might accidentally create too much value for some other parties and cut that out even if I'm hurt (subjectively, not financially) in the process. My first instinct is to ask - which one is better for me and the people I like? If someone else benefits too, that's very secondary for me.
Both Michael and Dwight are excellent salesmen, but both struck bad (financial) deals for a steady paycheck.
If you've been a loser in previous jobs you gave up much better money for the benefit of executive and shareholders.
This model suggests that the only way you can strike a good financial deal is to be an executive (for which you need to be a sociopath). It's a circular proof by definition.
> If you've been a loser in previous jobs you gave up much better money for the benefit of executive and shareholders.
Did I? This model just assumes it without bothering to substantiate it. There's no accepted way to calculate value one is producing in an organization. How much value is an HR person, logistics worker, production worker really producing?
In any case doesn't actually matter what the company actually does.
You can't really grow in business without exploitation.
Whether that's using "contractors" to deliver your packages, using monopoly to slurp people's data, sourcing minerals from african blood mines or using asian sweatshops to build your phones and clothes.
To me, corporate life has always been a race to see who gets exploited the most and who the least.
Sociopaths don't care about exploiting others. I would say the same for most people. We can usually rationalize the worst kind of things to ourselves when it suits us.
Buying an iPhone, not knowing that it was built using Chinese (semi-)slave labour is not quite the same as a manager who promotes easily exploitable (loser) over-achievers and uses "devide and conquer" on the rest of his underlings to make himself feel safe and comfy. All in the same office that everybody goes to every day. For decades.
The default state of humanity for thousands of years has been a lot of people living in mud houses and working all day to do subsistence farming and tending to livestock. Doesn’t sound like a great life, but they aren’t being “exploited” there either. It’s just people versus Mother Nature. However, many would gladly take 9-5 jobs in an air conditioned building instead, and live in nicer homes with utilities. It’s voluntary labor.
While I get that "as such", and therefore can follow a classification sociopath/clueless/loser, what is always missing in such models are the people who don't care to play. Those who go to the casino for free food and drinks in order to watch the show, but not to take a stake of their own. Are they "losers" because if you don't bet you can't win ? All of those who play, though, actually want these spectators - after all, winning if there's noone looking, is that a win?
Personally, I think you have this "fourth column" in all organisations. They take their paycheck and deliver something of what's asked for, but else don't care; what they see as "success" is not related to organisational structure or behaviour at all. With all the focus on "success" and "promotion" (or, opposite, "losers"), I wonder how much the theorists are missing. The non-voters can be the majority, you know ...
(agree - looks like reality is more complex)
One company I worked at was ran by a narcissist, who promoted anyone who sucked up to him - the harder the suck, the higher the office. Not because they were underachieving losers or whatnot. And as a result most people he promoted were the Clueless, who genuinely sucked up the nonsense he spewed. The company was, somehow, very successful.
Anther company was all sociopath going at 100 mph flat out, hoping to make enough dosh before it all explodes. No losers or clueless on board beyond probation.
Another had a great guy at the top, who was seriously nice, competent at the subject matter, and fair and concerned with the well-being of his people, we're all in this together etc. If anything, he was the Clueless. His lieutenants in turn were incompetent sociopaths, busy with keeping him happy while flailing their arms to appear like they are trying to control the chaos, all the time sucking at the teat of the Really Nice CEO. He didn't promote them because they were sociopath, but he promoted them for some reason and didn't have the heart to fire them.
As much as I love the cynicism, I think reality is more complicated. But for sure, being a psycho and not actually caring about the work or people is a great boost to a successful career.
"The Office" analogies are a bit convoluted to me as well. Jim's climbing the greasy pole of company management isn't, to me, embracing Sociopathy, but if anything, trying to make his Loser life more comfortable. Swallow a few stupid company slogans, toe a line, and in return have less work and more money. Not really his opening up to screwing other people or relentlessly jumping ship to a higher position with the competitors.
I don' think the gervais principle enlightens anymore. I remember thinking it was amazing to see my suspicions laid out like this, but with some time and distance I don't know that I would share it with someone now. why demoralize them.
I can see how it's demeaning and feels like punishment to take orders or show deference to someone who lacks heroic qualities, and really we should make a better class of managers, but it is the duty of all prisoners to escape, and they probably won't miss you anyway. there's an aspect of humility that comes from simple competence where all work is "we make a thing here so our families can eat," and if you're on an existential quest for belonging, you're probably not going to provide the value to others that yields the rewards of the business.
Sure, money and power flows to some of the least interesting people doing the dullest things, but the dinner party they're boring at isn't the reconciliation or taking account of their course through life either. they do the thing and then eat at drive thrus and watch some tv. meaning for them comes from somewhere else. articles raging against them are dumb and misleading. trying to grind out meaning from every experience is exhausting and ephemeral because meaning is beautiful, but it's rarely shared and doesn't persist.
this life is only what we actually do, so do something different.
Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves."
Also on another note, are startup founders then in that realm sociopaths or the clueless (with the vcs then being the sopciopaths, employees the ls etc.)? asking for a friend.