I would explain this as commitment signaling. I don’t know if they really believe it, but they want to show they are part of the team and the talking points.
Adults use language in a less literal way than introverted engineers may be comfortable with.
But most of the people I've worked with who wanted feel "part of something" had been 10+ years younger than me.
So your sample size is 1 company? That's very anecdotal. And you're younger than 30, so you probably haven't worked at many companies. There are plenty of people in plenty of other companies that you've never met.
Most of that didn't happen of course (although Khan academy has helped tons of people), but we were raised to believe that the software we wrote was going to help people.
It is sad that Gen Z doesn't believe that, it signifies a large cultural shift in the computer geek culture.
Fwiw I have written software that saved lives, and I still believe software can do a lot of good in this world. We should aim to create things throughout our life, using the skills that we have, that make the world a better place.
To my fellow Australians; when you go for the big tech job interview you often have to memorize the company mission statement and values. Yes it's a complete wank. You'll never use it internally. But i have seriously been asked about the companies mission statement for Meta, Google, Amazon in those respective interviews.
Utterly insane from an Australian point of view - you'd get pass and a mark for directness for saying "i don't bloody well know".
I have heard of mission statements being asked by international companies operating in Australia but again you'd pass if the interviewer themselves was Australian since it's 100% seen as bullshit by every level of Australians from management to employees on the ground.
eg. Wtf is a mission statement and why am i being asked thread on the Australia subreddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/australian/comments/1f7srnw/what_is...
I've worked in tech in the US as an immigrant for over 40 years, and never been quizzed on a mission statement.
I agree this kind of thing is performative, but let’s steel man the other side. You are looking for a place to spend 8 hours a day doing your most skillful craft, and you don’t want to know what the organization is trying to achieve?
Yes I understand it’s performative, but why wouldn’t you take 10 minutes to indicate you are doing that kind of serious thinking?
It’s like asking a boss for guidance without doing groundwork to make a recommendation.
I do believe in the "When in Rome do as the Romans do" mindset though so i'll happily memorize it 2 mins before the interview. It's just that i 100% openly refuse to accept they are anything other than virtue signalling.
You’re basically saying “i don’t know how to present myself and I’m going to cause problems for your organization”.
It’s like “why can’t I show up at 2 PM and work until 11. I get my work done”. You just have no awareness and are a liability for your boss.
Put another way, how does reciting the mission statement differ from a loyalty dance for chairman Mao? I get that many have an economic (or life) imperative to go along with what the clownsuite orders, but these same people make fun of island savages in the Pacific for "cargo culting".
It’s extremely bizarre and cult-like when viewed from other cultures and comes across as insincere (which it is) and the very opposite of serious thinking - it is performative loyalty of the type that kings used to ask of their subjects.
American mission statements often have very little to do with what the company does, or even the values they actually hold (as opposed to profess to hold). They do not usually describe the work to be done.
Master/servant is a relationship as old as time. You can acknowledge and navigate it or pretend it doesn't exist.
Managers are just people like everybody else and have a job with different tasks.
I find this thread so ridiculous. I've traveled all over and lived all over. I rarely find that peoples' perceived cultural distinctions are in line with reality. I think instead it's often just lip service to their own sense of identity.
Above, someone mentioned that Americans have an idea that there is a master and servant relation with your boss. As an American I find that shocking. I have never felt that way about my bosses nor have I ever treated an employee that way. As a lowly sys admin many years ago, I went to bars and lunches with CEOs of companies of hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm still friends with them. I'm not worth millions but we still go out for drinks and enjoy dinners together. I'm not just talking about one person. This is not rare.
We respond to people the way we think they want us to respond. Your own stereotypes about another culture will be self fulfilling because of that.
Additionally any assumption you can make, about American culture specifically, would miss the fact of American culture. We have none because we have all cultures. My kid probably hears more Hindi than English in the classroom.
To make any statement about culture in America you'd need to specify. Americans from where have a master/slave mentality? Americans from Australia? India? Pakistan? China? Japan?
Which of those are the "Americans" you're referring to? Surely you wouldn't assume each of those groups have just one culture.
You can refuse to enable such a system.
Other non-feudal relationships are possible based on mutual respect and honesty.
> sycophantic servant
The misunderstanding is that you believe a servant is someone held in chains and beaten with a whip. A master is someone with power and authority, and servant is someone who works for them.
There is zero serious thinking involved in learning them. It is all pretensions, you know it, management knows it, employees know it.
OP understands organizational politics well - they learned them and they understand it was for passing the interview.
Genuine LOL!
> you don’t want to know what the organization is trying to achieve?
You <------> The point
A 'mission statement' is a load of wank. They have nothing whatsoever to do with what a company is trying to achieve. Indeed, they were satirised as such in the USA by Dilbert cartoons 30 years ago!
In Australia and Blighty (and no doubt many other places with a similar culture) "I haven't memorised the mission statement, because it is wank" will get you points for being honest and direct...... We don't like to play at fakery.
To accomplish this, and Microsoft did pull it off, they worked to commoditize every aspect of PCs, and they slowly drove the profits of PC OEMs down to almost zero. To ensure software existed on those PCs, Microsoft ran a massive training and certification program for engineers and IT.
Google used to live by its mission statement to organize all the world's information. They started up a program to scan almost every book in the world! There wasn't even a profit motive for it, it was something they did because it aligned with their mission statement.
Software company mission statements used to mean something.
Other things like 360 degree feedback are also borrowed from that culture.
There was a very old article in Fortune about this, it's preserved but there is no formatting.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240415121234/https://money.cnn...
Work with some Chicagoans (or Midwesterners in general) and you'll get a lot less BS.
Obviously this is painting with broad strokes, as different types of people live everywhere.
How condescending. "Adults" in other regions often do not have the facade of overenthusiasm that America/SV specifically has. It is a cultural quirk, not something specific to if someone's an introverted engineer or not.
I've worked for SV companies as an outsider as well, and it was immediately noticeable. It was like everyone had a gun to their back and were being asked to say "I love the company!". It reminded me of a Japanese company, except without the deeper authenticity granted by older social protocols.
As a european working in a US company, my experience is a lot of this is just hypocritical corporate bullshit.
The difference can be incredible between the public communication which usually sounds like a huge parody and the opinion people really share behind the curtain in more private meetings.
Also being european you are usually used to be able to swear quite easily at work. What we perceive from the US culture that comes to us through movies/series would make us think it would be the same in the USA. However it is the opposite. People swear a lot less at work in the USA in my experience. At least online.
In the US it's generally considered rude or "uncouth" to swear in the workplace, unless it's in a private conversation with another coworker who's okay with it.
This is more of a Silicon Valley thing, isn't it? I've worked for or interacted with plenty of non-tech large enterprises where that's certainly not true.