The Cult of Microsoft
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wheresyoured.at
You cannot run a cloud business with long term success without a growth mindset. You cannot finger point, blame, and fire, for outages. Instead you need a cult like practice of everyone sitting around a table and figuring out wtf went wrong along the entire chain of events, and that includes a culture that says "hey these other components are lacking early alerts" without being seen as finger pointing or trying to pass blame around.
I do not currently work at Microsoft, but was there for a few years and enjoyed my time there.
I feel like there's a story there that I'd love to read if you're willing to share (or have already written about it elsewhere).
For this late 90s graduate, a position at Microsoft was the holy grail of programming jobs. Hard to imagine taking a job there grudgingly just to pay the bills.
That's the entire point of the elaboration that TFA goes into on the research in this area: while the idea feels like it "makes sense", it actually doesn't, and the research appears to confirm that it is just junk science.
The larger point is that it's just C-suite grift, and they're just shoveling bull to appear as if they're knowledgeable leaders.
But the reason a multinational like Microsoft might promote a growth mindset are different. Employees who are open minded are able to work with others and collaborate more effectively. Employees who actively seek new data and try to invalidate their preconceptions can be more successful in large sprawling organisations.
"The theory is that..."
Yeah, we know. But the theory is false. Facts don't care about your feelings, and the replicability crisis doesn't care whether you "think the idea makes sense".
After reading books like Sapiens (Harari) and other evolutionary psychology books, it seems humans will always form religious frameworks in order to collaborate in large numbers. Combine this with the void left behind by the increasing secularization of civilization, and you get a fertile ground for any large organization to sprout their own religion, which in its initial form looks like a cult.
Nietzsche has been proven right in this regard, getting rid of God (or monotheism) just gave way to a void that is now being filled in by pantheism and paganism, in which civilizations become fragmented by a multiplicity of gods. Perhaps the solution is to have explicit religions that are designed with explicit goals in mind... however I feel this is what the ancient civilizations have already done, and the oldest religions that have survived the "natural selection" of history are the ones that have been perfected and do not lead to a cult-like dystopia.
The collapse of religion and its close-knit communities has created a vacuum that gets filled with (checks notes) -- vapid corporate culture BS, identity politics (actually, politics of all kinds), consumerism, and much more.
You don't have to believe that religion is good or right (how can they all be right?) to believe that humanity in the West is in the throes of a profound crisis of meaning despite significantly better quality of life than ever before.
I can't help but picture our grandparent's generation. Imagine your grandad -- a WW2 vet, provider for his family, guy who tried his best to build his community -- coming home in the 50's from his job at the factory fawning over some pseudo-inspirational new take on management that the plant manager is promoting.
One gets the sense that we're unmoored as a people, and will cling to almost anything that provides a meta-narrative and set of values... because we no longer get one from a close-knit community of people joined together with a set of values.
And tribalism can be organic or inorganic in terms of the coalesced value system around which the tribe "worships", be it cult of personality, organized religion, YouTube personalities, ethnicity, bands, etc. etc.
It’d just be the end state of any human society to be just awful.
This is an EQ thing. If you see something stupid happening that leadership is excited about, you don't stand in opposition to it, instead, if appropriate you prepare a contingency, or at least get docs covering your ass, and then you try to remove yourself from the situation.
That's what I did =/
Well, the first part is true for any large company and the second is just an example of equivalent culty behaviour at those other companies.
It's like that with any ideology, however good or bad it may be. A lot of people will learn the holy books just so they can use sophistry effectively in their political schemes.
Whenever you hear "it means whatever it has to mean at a given time", they're approaching a Wittgensteinian truth: language _always means_ whatever it has to mean at a given time. We do not judge each other by measuring a persons understanding of our words: it's immeasurable. We judge each other by the outcomes of their actions. Microsoft's revenue and valuations are up, thus the ideas "work" in the darwinian sense. Nothing else matters. Words are fundamentally meaningless, and communication of truth is fundamentally impossible.
It's all malarkey and a waste of people's precious time and oxygen. But if you want to succeed in the corporate world, as Leah Remini's mother told her when she read the OT III materials in Scientology, "you don't have to believe in it, you just have to do it."
Sigh. Something always creeped me out about Satya, especially when he hit the interview circuit after the first Recall drop. With Ballmer, at least you knew what he was just by looking at him. He was fantastic at one thing: being Bill's bulldog. Everything he did was continuing Bill's initiatives because he sincerely believed in them. The Ballmer Strategy was "Windows, Windows, Windows" (yes, and "developers, developers, developers"). He believed that if you put Windows on a thing or made it require Windows, developers would come because they loved Windows. But Windows was popular because it was on every PC, because of Bill's aggressive OEM licensing strategy, not because of intrinsic properties of Windows itself.
Satya is... different. He's like that smiling guy from the first Deadpool movie. He will get you to commit to things with serious bite-you-in-the-ass-later properties, with a smile on his face, whether it be Recall or this "growth mindset" stuff.
I had one CEO at a past company I worked at when asked about a pointed anonymous question he received a while before, responded, "That person no longer is with the company".
Organizational and economic growth can be unbounded like cancer. This so-called “growth mindset” is about personal growth. A person is limited by the hours in the day, they can’t grow indefinitely.
You can find the same criticism in Wikipedia:
"Timothy Bates, a psychology professor at Edinburgh University, has been trying for several years to replicate Dweck’s findings, each time without success, and his colleagues haven’t been able to either."
"In July 2019, a large randomized controlled trial of growth mindset training by the Education Endowment Foundation in England, involved 101 schools and 5018 pupils across the country. After the trial they found that pupils in schools receiving the intervention showed no additional progress in literacy or numeracy relative to pupils in the control group."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck
"A 2024 study showed that growth mindset scales by Carol Dweck have psychometric comparability, however this study showed no connection between growth mindset and goal achievement."
But I can't, because Zitron's not a CEO of a multi-trillion dollar tech company, and guys like Nadella or Pichai are. I'm not sure what that means - is Zitron full of BS, or is the world?
- Nadella is pushing for "Growth Mindset", which is academically unsound and possibly incorrect. He is using his position to force people to read it.
- Microsoft have twice-a-year performance reviews called "Connect" where the employee have to explain how they satisfy unclearly-defined and company values. Those can only be evaluated subjectively by managers, but decide very important things like will this person be fired, or will they get a raise. Because of that, they are very stressful and many people hate them.
- Microsoft is teaching people to use AI for performance reviews. As all AI's do, it hallucinates and provides outright wrong information. And yet, it is used for critical things.
The first point is a curious anecdote, but it's hard for me to feel outraged about it. I've worked for big companies, and the top-level company mission never seemed like anything useful to me, it's just some random words that CEO likes to put on the slides.
I agree with the second point - semi-annual self-reviews suck. I've had to do them in the past - they can potentially have a huge impact, so you have to take them seriously. But at the same time, _most_ of the time they have no effect, so after you've spent all this time writing it, it just goes to waste. I just don't see what it has to do with "Growth Mindset" - it could have been anything else, even "community identity stability". Those reviews often have a vague question that let managers exercise their judgement, and it does not matter if they are called "Demonstrate your Growth Mindset" or "Demonstrate your Customer Excellence".
As for AI part.. yeah... this sounds crazy (but somewhat predictable, given all the corporate attention to AI). My regrets to MS employees. Again, I see no connection to Nadella's book here.
This reminds me so much of the experience I had at an early stage start up. I didn't have a degree, and I needed the job, so I really made it clear I would buy in %100.
I am not sure I would want to join a 40+ year old company that still demands that level of commitment.
This is a basic implementation of interpellation and anyone in this position who isn't familiar with the term is subject to being influenced by this very gap in knowledge.
A lot of anecdata in the article, so I guess I'll add mine here: I don't think the Connect process is too onerous, and I don't think any of my managers have ever really brought up the subject of growth mindset except for as it relates to our twice-yearly or sometimes quarterly Connects. YMMV depending on the group and team you're in, but growth mindset is very much in the background for me. And while I do have my copy of Hit Refresh on my bookshelf that I was given, no one has ever used it to push any talking points or corporate agenda. It was really just kind of a PR push.
This article feels like it's making a mountain out of a molehill to push an agenda. Maybe all the people this author interviewed have a particular angle, but the overall "culty" message here does not ring true to me at all.
Also, to be picky:
> Over the coming decades, [Carol Dweck] further refined and defined her ideas, coining the terms “growth mindset” and “fixed mindset” in 2012, a mere five years before Nadella took over at Microsoft.
Nadella became CEO in 2014. At least get the objective facts right, please.
The article makes mountains out of molehills. Every large company has its own culture and its own BS. Having worked at many over my career, Microsoft’s was better than most (actually, I’d say it was better than all of them).
Obviously this is a little 'out-there,' but I find interesting something like the idea of -- Microsoft, at one time the biggest tech company ever by far, "evolved itself" into something that could control human minds.
In fields like physics (which I taught) or computer science, there's an underlying mathematical formalism that ties the whole thing together and gives it structure. Do an image search for 'map of physics' and there'll be a fair few interpretations of that structure. But in the humanities and the social sciences, there's none of that. My friends who did physics PhDs were told by their supervisors what they would research; when I did my Masters of Education, I was expected to decide on my own research question. Everyone in the humanities is building their own little hovel, whereas in the mathematised sciences, everyone is working together to build a magnificent castle.
As a physicist, if I were doing serious research in psychology, the first thing I would do is try to work out everything about how a neuron works: how it takes input, how it produces output, what information storage capability it has, and so on. Having done that, the next thing would be to study two neurons working in connection, and then gradually increase the complexity of the system until it's an actual brain. This bottom-up approach is key to the success of the mathematised sciences.
But in the real world of psychology, everyone comes in with their top-down questions and tries to answer those. Studies tell us we can only keep seven things in working memory, but what does that even mean? How can we be sure of that - how is that information stored, where can we find it in the brain? No one is building any knowledge of how the brain actually functions; it's just an expensive game using (often inappropriate) statistical techniques to extract (or manufacture) correlations from noise. Any explanatory theories, like Schema Theory, are 'just-so' stories - none of these theories have been subjected to any real attempts to experimentally refute them, because there's nothing falsifiable about them.
Dweck's Growth Mindset is particularly attractive to teachers because it's ruthlessly pragmatic with respect to the work of teachers. Intelligence used to be regarded as a fixed, innate quality of a pupil, so there was no point in teachers engaging with it. On the other hand, teachers can affect a pupil's effort, so it makes sense to encourage teachers to do just that. But thanks to Dweck, intelligence has been demoted from 'useless' to 'non-concept'. When a teacher tells you a pupil is 'good', they're talking about behaviour and attitude, never aptitude.
But for Microsoft, none of this really matters. Microsoft is a huge organisation, which means the people have to do a lot of work to force the organisation into a structure that they can make sense of (because humans have limited cognitive capacity). They've chosen Dweck's Growth Mindset, but it could have been anything.
In 2016, when Dweck came out with her 'False Growth Mindset', I was in my first full-year teaching job. (Previously I'd just been employed one term at a time to cover teachers on leave.) At the end of the year, I was let go, alongside twenty other teachers. That was nothing to do with Dweck - the school had its own, long-standing cult. I still don't know what you had to do to be part of the 'in crowd', but it doesn't matter now. You can blame any management practice you want, but in the end, it's just managers punishing and rewarding according to inappropriate criteria.
The problem is that it is easy to construct stories like that that aren't true. Arguably, until there is strong confirmation of the research, we should assume it is all bullshit. But that is not what the press (or others) do. It is an infectious meme.
Sounds a bit like agile with its vaguely defined commandments / principles arguing things like "you should prioritize getting coffee with the customer over writing a manual".
Yeah, you're going to do better if you actively try to better yourself as opposed to sitting like a lump. Yeah, you're going to do better if you try to understand your customer's real needs as opposed to being the software equivalent of a short-order cook. Yeah, you're going to do better if you prove theories early instead of trucking along for six months only to find out you lit half your annual budget on fire. This is not rocket science.
That's why this kind of vague inspirational garbage is written. It resonates emotionally with some people who lack the cognitive ability to see through it.
>This is not rocket science.
Religious texts are not any kind of science. The lack of disprovability is one of their core features.
>Yeah, you're going to do better if you actively try to better yourself as opposed to sitting like a lump.
This seems like projection rather than anything based on something I said.
Growth mindset has problems, and he's correct that it's way too easy to make it mean anything one wants to to justify grievances or the granting of low performance ratings or whatever, but people aren't chanting it in the hallways, it's just an attempt at a concrete statement about values and behavior that's distinct from "your job is to make the company money."
When I read Dweck's work the first time (after coming across it in an Inc. interview with Nadella), it was not that I learned something new. It was more like she put a label on something that I think we can all intuit when we work with peers, manage others, sift through applicants for a job.
But: HN probably has a lot of loyal Microsofties who might be taking a kind of personal offence to Zitron's caricaturization of their company culture, a lot of folks who work at similar large-corps with similar cultures who feel attacked by proxy, and probably a fair number of MBA/founder-types who've similarly bought into the "growth mindset" Kool-Aid. So the argument (I guess) is that it's probably a little bit too polemical to make for meaningful discussion: if you're insulting the personal values of a large segment of the commenterati, it's probably going to make things too heated to ask everyone to remain level-headed and thoughtful.