Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

My first job out of law school was at a 176 year old law firm. New lawyers were socialized to identify with the past achievements of the firm, like helping J.P. Morgan build the railroads. There was a good reason for that: it socializes people to adhere to a culture and practices that have proven to be effective.

You’re right that, if overdone, it can lead to complacency. But if you treat every generation as a blank slate, you abandon the valuable capital of experience.

View on HN

Relevant Mitchell and Webb sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AeCo3AD1cM

> you abandon the valuable capital of experience.

it has nothing to do with how you treat each generation. it's whether or not you have a continuous shared work experience from the elders to the youngsters over and over.

if your company abandoned big projects for small local stuff and then a few generations later suddenly decided to go big again, you'd suck at it.

if you're good at it, it's because the people right before you were doing it already and passed on their experience.

(this doesn't mean something can't be done the first time - it just means if you don't have institutional knowledge, you have to suck at it first and then get better).

The first thing Steve Jobs did when he arrived back at Apple is he got rid of the little “Apple museum” they had in the building. A bunch of old machines. I believe he thought Apple shouldn’t live off its past.

Apple was failing so their current culture wasn't working and should not be passed on. He wanted a clean break. Plus Apple's past experience was traumatic for him personally. Even if they had been successful without him he'd not want the reminder for that reason alone.

He just canceled the project, at a time when Apple was hemorrhaging money. It didn't already exist. It was going to exist.

He killed a lot of things to save Apple.

I wouldn't read too much into it.

> I believe he thought Apple shouldn’t live off its past.

For the same reason, Apple doesn't celebrate anniversaries.

Do you have a source for that. Would be nice to have that in my list :)

>Shortly after Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he canceled plans to create a corporate museum and gave Stanford all of the archives in 1997.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidcoursey/2012/03/31/more-th...

This fact was included in Walter Isaacson's bio, describing his return to Apple.

Totally agree: esp when films are old and ongoing there's got to be some good there to be lifted and internalized. Why start at zero and relearn burning out customers or staff. And I like how you are wary because complacency is the net normal background drift for orgs.

It's not a dichotomy. Stand on the shoulders of giants, sure, but don't pretend you're one of them.

Presumably that also works as a sort of “these are the standards we want to meet, to continue striving for this kind of work/impact/ethics/whatever”. In that sense the past is being used as reference and inspiration for the future. It’s done in a sense of (as your parent comment put it) “we’ve done it before, we can do it again”. Which is fine if you’re truly achieving that goal.

The trouble arises when it’s 2025 and the last great achievement you can point to was 150 years ago. Then you have a problem and referencing the past becomes a misguided attempt to rest on old laurels. Like (to use popular American movie tropes) a popular high school captain of the team, boyfriend to the head cheerleader, who has been out of high school for 30 years and still talks about a goal in a game as the best moment of his life. That’s the “we already won!” attitude.

Ah, yeah definitely! Tradition can be powerful in that way. “We’ve always done the hard things because they’re hard.”

> if overdone, it can lead to complacency.

Oh boy we're already there

The problem is - a lot of the achievements over the past decades were the result of investments of foreign nations in terms of education and capital. And now the one key capital of experience namely the integration of foreigners is deliberately destroyed.

Established on 176 years of lying cheating and graft. That’s definitely a legacy. Rail was AI and dot com of the 1800s.

I expected that comment for J.P. Morgan, not rail… so upvote for you.

Rail pioneered modern financial scams. I say modern because before that there were similar schemes in other areas like trade expeditions but the historical and written records on those are less complete and recent

Valdez, AK railroad history is interesting. Also violent.

The South Sea Bubble would like a word.

Yep just more limited written and legal record there

Reply on news.ycombinator.com