Philip Greenspun Reviews “Lean In”
blogs.law.harvard.edu
blogs.law.harvard.edu
If you want to learn the names of every person who ever worked at GE during Jack Welch's 40 years there, you'll find this book invaluable. If you want to learn something about what made GE successful, however, good luck picking out the few saplings of wisdom from the thick forest of names. Golf and tennis fans will also find the book fascinating for its endless catalog of golf and tennis resorts nationwide. Apparently being anywhere near the top at GE requires moving to Fairfield, Connecticut and aping the Lifestyles of the Bland and WASPy.
One interesting thing I learned is that GE went from 0 percent employee ownership to 31 percent during Jack Welch's tenure as CEO, primarily through granting of stock options to top managers such as Jack himself. Jack doesn't talk about this except to say that he's proud of the number. He doesn't get into the question of whether the investors from 1980 are happy now that they own less than 70 percent of the company. Nor does he talk about what would have happened to GE's earnings if they'd accounted for all of these stock options at time of issue.
The useful and interesting content in this book could have been presented in 75 pages if the editors and ghostwriter had been doing their jobs. But they weren't doing their jobs. So the readers all have to "give 110 percent" or "give 1000 percent". Maybe this is what Jack Welch wanted because he uses these expressions numerous times throughout Straight from the Gut.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Jack-Straight-Gut-Welch/dp/0446690686
http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1TNG2A1GAG14B/ref=cm_c...
>He doesn't get into the question of whether the investors from 1980 are happy now that they own less than 70 percent of the company.
They should be happy considering GE's value rose 4000% during Jack Welch's tenure at GE.[1]
When Jack Welch became General Electric’s CEO in 1981, the company was worth about $14 billion. When he retired 20 years later, GE was worth nearly $500 billion.[2]
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch
[2]http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/jack-welch-and-...
I also remember than in the hot days of early October 2008 there were talks of GE the entire company going down on behalf of its subsidiary, GE Capital. Those were indeed some crazy days.
On the other hand, it's famously uncertain as to whether that's his fault: http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/ . I haven't seen a compelling rebuttal of this narrative.
Maybe they could have used that as a launching pad for something that would have survived the trough, or maybe they could have been acquired at the perfect time a la Mark Cuban and our gracious host, but the fact that they didn't doesn't much point to any fatal failures of judgment. A lot of people got swept up in the bubble and subsequent crash (just as a lot of people are getting swept up in dotcom 2.0 and will cry bitter tears when it too crashes.)
But even Greenspan is prevented by polite convention from making the obvious point: women and men have different chromosomal structures, lifespans, organs, and hormone levels. There's also substantial evidence[1,2] that they differ in average levels of spatial, verbal, and mathematical reasoning ability (with women generally having an advantage in verbal and men in visuospatial/mathematical). We should not expect them to have the same outcomes on average.
Women also can only have at most 10-20 children over their lifespan, whereas men like Genghis Khan[3] can have a virtually unbounded number. This is why males have a greater evolutionary payoff for high-risk, high-reward behavior: intrinsically higher reproductive variance.
But hey. That's evolution, and even though it provides a consilient explanation for a variety of allied phenomena, everyone knows that doesn't and couldn't apply to human beings (we all well know what happens to people who propose that a behavior has genetic influences). It is instead easier to pretend that humans aren't biological creatures with hard biological constraints.
Yet if your premises are wrong, one is simply practicing fashionable creationism. And that is where we are today, presented with the spectacle of a privileged billionairess who lashes out at phantasms rather than wrestling with the realities of molecular biology. Why not lean in to a publication on behavioral neuroendocrinology, for a change?
[1]: http://www2.nau.edu/~bio372-c/class/behavior/sexdif1.htm
[2]: http://www.amazon.com/Female-Brain-Louann-Brizendine/dp/0767...
[3]: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0214_030214_...
[4]: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-how-and-why-sex-diff...
Males and females are treated extremely differently from birth. Literally, in the very first day. Thus, it is nearly impossible to actually prove scientifically that a significant difference comes from genetic and biological factors. The socialization is a confounding factor that's impossible to separate out unless you're willing to do a study where you raise kids in isolation from society so you can treat them identically.
And even "inherent" differences are often easily overcome with social solutions. There's research to suggest that the difference in spatial reasoning is societal.[1] Furthermore, I believe I saw a study suggesting that even in our society, if you put everyone through a proper course teaching them spatial reasoning, the women catch up to the men. So society can choose to eliminate "inherent" differences by devoting a few resources to something that helps one group catch up to the other.
Furthermore, it ultimately doesn't matter that much. Western society has decided that we want equality between men and women. If that's not happening, then we've committed ourselves to make it happen. There are currently differences between men and women, largely from socialization. Since our society was largely built by men, it unsurprisingly is oriented toward having successful men in it. That doesn't mean we throw up our hands and say, "well, this is how our society is structured, and our society socializes men to win in that structure. I guess equality is inherently impossible." No. We find ways to reduce gender socialization (see: radical schools in Sweden). We find ways to restructure society so that there are fewer barriers to some groups' success.
1: http://lesswrong.com/lw/7fk/gender_differences_in_spatial_re...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/15/science/studying-recent-hu...
Gaining a deep insight into human evolution, researchers
have identified a mutation in a critical human gene as the
source of several distinctive traits that make East Asians
different from other races.
The traits — thicker hair shafts, more sweat glands,
characteristically identified teeth and smaller breasts —
are the result of a gene mutation that occurred about
35,000 years ago, the researchers have concluded.
http://mathildasanthropologyblog.files.wordpress.com/2008/10...
Wow! Across species, you can actually see that a single variant makes the mouse hair look East Asian. It's so crazily reductionist, it looks like what a troglodyte like Strom Thurmond might sketch if you had him draw an "Asian-looking mouse". Here's another great one, Fruitless:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruitless_(gene)#Function
Although many genes are known to be involved in male
courtship behavior, the fruitless gene has been considered
noteworthy because it exhibits sex-specific alternative
splicing. When females produce the male-spliced gene
product, they behave as males. Males that do not produce
the male-specific product do not court females and are
infertile.[1] ... The fruitless gene locus also controls
the expression of hundreds of other genes,[6] any subset of
which may actually regulate behavior.
Point: it's not all super-complex gene-environment interactionism that we'll never understand[1]. Indeed, as Fruitless or the EDAR story show, the genetic origins of complex gender differences and/or behavioral traits can be almost cartoonishly reductionist, attributable to a single master upstream regulator!
So: do you really want to bet it all on black, bet that genetics researchers aren't going to find governing loci for human gender differences and/or sexual orientation, bet that it's 100% social construction? Because if you know anything about where genomics is going, that is a bet you are going to lose.
[1] PS: I love it when people bring up epistasis, for god's sake, as a sort of catch-all neo-Lamarckianism, reached for like a drowning sailor flailing for a life preserver. Methylome much? Didn't think so.
EDIT: You know what? Let's actually go line by line on this thing.
Males and females are treated extremely differently from
birth. Literally, in the very first day. Thus, it is nearly
impossible to actually prove scientifically that a
significant difference comes from genetic and biological
factors.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/10/031022062408.ht...
Using two genetic testing methods, they compared the
production of genes in male and female brains in embryonic
mice — long before the animals developed sex organs.
To their surprise, the researchers found 54 genes produced
in different amounts in male and female mouse brains, prior
to hormonal influence. Eighteen of the genes were produced
at higher levels in the male brains; 36 were produced at
higher levels in the female brains.
“We didn’t expect to find genetic differences between the
sexes’ brains,” Vilain said. “But we discovered that the
male and female brains differed in many measurable ways,
including anatomy and function.”
There's research to suggest that the difference in spatial
reasoning is societal.
This is almost a caricature of academia. To come to the conclusion that gender differences in spatial rotation ability are "culturally influenced"...they analyze two tribes in Northeast India on a "spatial puzzle" that has never been administered to anyone before (Figure 1). And in Table 1 the mean puzzle solving time for men in the "matrilineal" society is still actually lower than that for females, even though the medians point the other way.
Forget about the crimes against psychometry that such a test perpetrates. It goes without saying that they did not compute test-retest reliabilities or do a proper battery of spatial tests, let alone estimate IRT parameters for their single idiosyncratic "spatial" item. And this innocence of all aspects of item-response theory is confirmed by their supplementary information (http://goo.gl/ltysD).
The more fundamental point is the lack of thinking. Not only does this study cut against the grain of literally hundreds of other datasets, it is intentionally designed to not be reproducible. Among other things, why else would one use such an obscure population? And why not use the standard Shepard/Metzler test, in which one is actually mentally rotating two objects and seeing if they correspond? One can programmatically vary the rotation parameter to increase the difficulty, and Shepard famously even observed that reaction time varies linearly with rotation angle (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-imagery/mental-rota...), as if people were actually rotating the objects slowly in their heads.
Anyway. You know what is reproducible? Let's consult this handy meta-analysis of 70 studies...
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10648-012-9215-x
It shows a huge and reproducible spatial rotation ability difference between men and women. Don't believe me? Put up a web-based test with WebGL, pay participants, and reproduce the result for yourself. But something tells me that you may not really be interested in such studies. Instead:
Furthermore, it ultimately doesn't matter that much.
Western society has decided that we want equality between
men and women. If that's not happening, then we've
committed ourselves to make it happen.
Because there can be no obligation to do that which cannot be done.
Are you seriously suggesting its a Sisyphean task to teach women maths or business on the basis that - on average - these have historically been male dominated careers? If not, can you please explain further. Are you aware that 50 years ago women faced massive discrimination and that this may still be having a lag effect today? Have you heard of stereotype threat enough to convince someone who believes in it?
You are being condescending and rude and seem to expect your audience to share your conviction in a fringe view of genetic determinism. Nobody is disputing men and women are genetically different. That this change extends to neurological changes should hardly be surprising. Different machinery require different control structures. The scientific debate is on exactly how significant these differences are compared to other factors that have significant influence including the culture. I don't think the parent was even suggesting it was 100% cultural effect either. Whereas you seem to suggest its 100% genetic, which would preclude the possibility of any woman having better spatial abilities than any man - which I hope sounds as ridiculous to you as it does me.
Have you heard of stereotype threat enough to convince
someone who believes in it?
http://www.asc.upenn.edu/usr/ogandy/C45405%20resources/Sacke...
I find people as confident and dismissive
I don't think the parent was even suggesting it was 100%
cultural effect either.
Who knows what the split is? How can we know? Gene-culture environment interaction is so complex. And what about _epistasis_.
But "we don't know" is not the position that Sandberg takes. And of course, if the position is actually not 100/0 then these gaps can never be fully closed [even if this were desirable], and this resilient inequality is not the fault of men but of Nature itself. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think "the gap can never be closed" is a position you would subscribe to (let alone jackowayed or Sandberg herself). So yeah, I think it's fair to characterize the conventional wisdom as a 100% social constructionist position, which executes a tactical rhetorical fallback when confronted with overwhelming fact...changing not one iota in its policy prescriptions, which are still in the main comprised of struggle sessions at places like Facebook HQ.
Whereas you seem to suggest its 100% genetic, which would
preclude the possibility of any woman having better spatial
abilities than any man
But overlap isn't equality.
On the other hand, if there were no difference in the distribution of intelligence, but cultural factors held women back, then the current "one-tenth to one-third" fraction of women in jobs needing high intelligence is naturally explained.
A recent PNAS paper showed that International Mathematics Olympiad teams from countries with high gender equality contain more women. http://www.pnas.org/content/106/22/8801.abstract IMO team members are one-in-a-hundred-thousand people - deep into the exponential tail of any Bell curve.
A study in 1999 showed 70% of psychology professors hiring Robert, and 45% hiring Ruth, on the basis of an identical CV. The waters of geek sexism run deep.
Cordelia Fine wrote a good book on the evidence. PDF: http://hagocrat.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/delusions-of-gen...
It's totally anecdotal, but the young people in the canteen at JPL are about 50/50.
Notice also the political fine-tuning of the variance argument: it doesn't dare suggest that mean female intelligence is lower (because we'd all reject that). God of the gaps, anyone?
Getting this right matters. If you must hire very good people, and you have the wrong model of how very good people are distributed among the population, you will fail.
My basic gripe with Bell-curve arguments against female
genius is that at the high end, in the exponential tail,
fine-tuning is needed
In this case, the underlying sum process could be a bunch of small alleles of roughly equivalent size, each contributing to high IQ (viz. a QTL model for a multifactorial trait [3]). In that case, if you cared about the tails rather than the body, the discrete chunkiness of the underlying binomial distribution becomes more crucial.
Put another way: Bell Curve arguments (aka "statistical genetics") are at the lowest level based on discrete alleles, not perfect Gaussians. Now, those in the field would love to get better models of the genetics of highly intelligent people -- but to study that kind of thing you need to move to China and work at BGI. Remember, thoughtcriminals who propose genetic explanations for behavioral phenomena are "berated" in the US [See jackowayed's wonderful admission against interest up thread].
International Mathematics Olympiad.. Notice also the
political fine-tuning of the variance argument: it doesn't
dare suggest that mean female intelligence is lower
(because we'd all reject that). God of the gaps, anyone?
I know why. All the conquests and murders in history are counted against men; but is a little odd that every male invention is counted in the demerits column too! I think the idea is that said ancient men ostensibly discriminated against women, shoving them out of the way before they could figure out the value of pi. Without said invidious discrimination women - biologically, neurologically, hormonally, genetically different women - would have been tearing it up on the math tip at the same rate. Just as they have been dunking from the free throw line ever since we started the WNBA.
Bottom line: you can't have it both ways. If achievement in science and engineering is to be a signal, if you are to cite any stats related to IMOs and whatnot, you need to take on board the enormous imbalance in the favor of men on historical measures of sci/eng aptitude and achievement. All due respect to Noether, Daubechies, and Curie -- but the prior probabilities of achievement are not equal.
If you must hire very good people, and you have the wrong
model of how very good people are distributed among the
population, you will fail.
The logically equivalent contrapositive is: if you succeed, you didn't have the wrong model.
So given that Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube succeeded with highly male software engineering staffs, logically they did not have the wrong model of how very good people are distributed among the population.
[1] http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/314659/central-limit...
[2] http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~yuvalf/CLT.pdf (see page 2)
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_trait_locus#Multif...
But what do you find about the cites? The evidence, and the arguments?
> [...] your conviction in a fringe view of genetic determinism.
Oh, that's easy then. It's easy to disprove perpetual motion crackpots, or infinite compression weirdos, the homeopathic fringe, etc. So trot out a few choice articles.
> You are being condescending and rude [...]
Okay, once is enough - now you're just playing for sympathy. If you don't like someone's tone, don't answer it.
And because it "cannot be done," we are to close the doors on anyone who cares to try?
But there's a difference too in how they do it. I don't think we should try to make people equal, but to make people equally represented by society.
Somebody give me a Nobel for thinking of this. Obviously, since no one's doing it, I am a genius.
Wait, are you saying it isn't/wasn't?
I never noticed before that in the vast majority of societies throughout history and today men are effectively second class citizens. Remember how long it took for men to get the vote! And how in some cultures men are effectively the property of their wives! And there are those religious courts where they simply state that a man's statement doesn't count for as much as a woman's statement!
I've got a million of these. It doesn't matter how many long-winded, carefully constructed points to the contrary are raised; every day I see women ignored, overlooked, and unconsciously stepped around in a way that happens far, far less frequently to men. The very fact that the counter-argument has to be carefully constructed is itself damning when compared to the simplicity and ease of verifying what it opposes.
Either that or the need to carefully construct arises when you know how snarky and dismissive the fine folks on the other side tend to be. They are, after all, invested in their beliefs to a greater degree, as they serve as an "out" for personal career failings. And given the extreme correlation between insane beliefs and self-flattery ("God says I should be king!", etc), that in and of itself is, what's the word....damning.
About women being the "property" of their husbands, that's because the husband was liable for the wife's crimes, due to Coverture, which she covers here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=J...
About the vote: some men had it, men didn't have it, in Anglo countries. Then it was given to all men as a sop because men could be press-ganged. So going to war and dying in a filthy trench based on some politician's whim became the "price of citizenship".
But women got the vote without getting the draft that came with it. Yeah and she covers that here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHvcFzzUues
She's got logic and facts. You've got ... sarcasm and assertions. Good luck with that.
Now if you still think men have such a good deal, I suggest you try going through a nasty divorce and then get back to me.
Though admittedly a little long-winded, she raises some very interesting points.
[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/FeMRA/comments/y0nod/jto_brought_up_...
You should test it, instead of intentionally mischaracterizing her argument, and then labeling that argument as tripe.
He discredits one of Sandberg's scientifically verified claims that women take criticism worse than men, by referencing "as John Ioannidis notes, “Most Published Research Findings are False.”
Yet he begins his review with a US News report:
"This US News article describes research that found that, among college graduates, left-handed men earned 20 percent more than right-handed men."
Talk about a bayesian paradox here. It's easy to prove people wrong (and right) when you believe A and ~A.
I could go on, it gets much worse. Does he really think Harvard uses the same internet bandwidth for their particle physics dept and the dorms? Ugh...
Sandberg confirms that “A is Average” at Harvard. Her brother David, a neurosurgeon whom Sandberg admires because currently “he splits child care duties with his wife fifty-fifty”, was also a Harvard undergrad. He takes “a class in European intellectual history”, skips all but two lectures and all but one book, gets tutored for three hours and receives an A for the semester (p32-33). The guy’s success is attributed to the general confidence of men. Sandberg does not consider how likely it is that her brother’s confidence would have resulted in an A in a physics class at Caltech.
I should have understood that this kind of self-doubt was more common from females from growing up with my brother. David is two years younger than I am and one of the people in the world whom I respect and love the most. At home, he splits child care duties with his wife fifty-fifty; at work, he's a pediatric neurosurgeon whose days are filled with heart wrenching life-and-death decisions…
With Greenspun's logic, you could equivalently claim Sandberg admires her brother because he is a neurosurgeon.
would have resulted in an A in a physics class at Caltech.I don't know about the "scientifically verified claim". In general, scientific claims made in scientific journals are nuanced, and context sensitive. I would be wary of a lay person with a particular position weaving attributions to journal papers indiscriminately in their essays. Furthermore, Humanities research is notoriously error-prone and lacking in rigor. In this respect, I'd say Greenspun is probably close to the truth.
you can't argue that someone's references are possibly fabricated, and then support your own point with your own "scientific" reference.
really it comes down to: if you ever find yourself arguing that someone's references are likely wrong because they are in the humanities... well...that's a conversation ender.
and i have a phd in math. believe me sometimes humanities people rub me the wrong way. but i would never make a general statement like that, and especially not to "prove a point."
it's the refuge of a scoundrel.
That was his point! Sheryl Sandberg has a particular thesis and cherry picked some numbers from some study to support her assertion. He mocked this by cherry picking another. I'm pretty sure he doesn't particularly know (or care) if right-handed people are more successful in their careers.
This may be fair or it may be unfair criticism, but the fact that Sandberg threw a whole bunch of references in doesn't automatically mean her assertions are supported by science.
>if you ever find yourself arguing that someone's references are likely wrong because they are in the humanities... well I just want to punch you in the face really..
Your reading comprehension is suspect. I certainly didn't argue this, and neither did Greenspun.
The sentence before that is "Hardly anybody knows anything about why some workers succeed more than others." His citation of the US News report is meant as an example that there is a lot of confusion on the subject. He is using it specifically to illustrate that dubious claims are flying around.
Easy exercise for readers: go through this post and a few previous posts, and count every use of 'meta' points like Ioannidis's paper against a claim. Notice any patterns?
And then there are the gratuitous digs...
> Sandberg identifies the same tendencies for underlings in a bureaucracy to hold their tongues that Max Weber noticed 100+ years ago (p85; no reference to Weber).
And why should there be any reference at all, Phil? Most people never read a page of Weber, and it's not an observation which requires uniquely keen insight or experience...
Apropos: Monty Python's "Piranha Brothers" sketch, specifically, @ 1:35 of part 2 (but watch it all):
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64aVHzoSdaI
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aihjThGabYY
(Or you can just read it:
Of course there are exceptions, Fog Creek's articles about their compensation policy comes to mind, but very little of the egalitarian ethos that made hacking so cool survives in the way people talk and write about working in tech.
Corporate long-hours and ladder climbing ambition? Where every dating site [or other product] presumes fixed gender, sexual preferences, and monogamous behavior. Happily pouring your earnings in to high rents and overpriced 401ks, quibbling over the .02% equity versus the extra $5k a year at the next job while recreating the hierarchy and wage slavery which characterized the 19th and 20th centuries. To the point where even the feminism seems regressive. And the "art" is airbrushed illustrations and all the music is power pop.
Did I wander too far? Well it is one lens to view it through.
It's getting very close to flipping my switch for, "Burn it all down and start over."
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/03/dont_hate_her_because...
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/01/no_self-respecting_wo...
"Sandberg’s personal experience, however, contradicts this. She says that she has never worked for a woman. All of the mentors and sponsors she describes are men. When she was 27 years old, a man hired her to be Chief of Staff for the United States Secretary of the Treasury. Would a woman have been willing to hire her for the same job at age 17?"
When she was 27 years old, a man hired her to be Chief of Staff for the United States Secretary of the Treasury. What, if women were in charge, she'd have not been biased against and gotten that job when she was 17 instead?
It makes me think there must be something to this book.
It's valuable because it shows a career track to women in technology, which is undoubtedly a male-dominated field. It also repackages a lot of existing knowledge into a format that is accessible to ambitious young women.
It's valuable because it allows me to talk to my sister about how she perceives gender issues. She is a mechanical engineer, and without having a common language it would be difficult for me to relate my career to hers.
It's valuable because my girlfriend can pick it up and use it to develop an understanding of how she fits in the workplace. Having a reference text allows her to interface with peers and build a dialogue.
When I first started editing inside investing, I realized something about two days into the job: we commonly conceive writing as the pursuit of truth through argumentation. In many cases, that is patently wrong. Most writing serves to stoke conversation.
All of this discussion--whether it suggests males are intrinsically different or that there is more to women's pay and achievement gap in terms of social dynamics--is the point of the book.
All of this criticism is valid, but guess what--did the book get you to think about women in the workplace? Have you considered how you behave in relation to your female colleagues and employees as a result of reading this book? If so, it's done its job.
Kudos on stirring the pot.
Sheryl's book - and the important topics it addresses - were at risk of being a bit forgotten.
Your review could help change that.
> When government cannot impose right-thinking via new regulations it must be imposed by our social and intellectual superiors bullying us: “Everyone needs to get more comfortable with female leaders”
I'm having a lot of trouble finding the implication of Greenspun's summary in the quote he uses from Sandberg's book.
Doesn't this strike anyone else as rather a lot?
Yes, the bolts of which the bridge is assembled are rusted, but where, if anywhere, does it lead?
The title alone is enough to give me pause. "Lean In" refers to the antiquated idea that the reason why so few women succeed in the workplace is because they "lean back" instead of "in" during meetings. Right, because all you need to do to wring a few more dollars out of a stingy, psychopathic billionaire institution that would throw you out on the street if it saw profit in it, is a little more work on your posturing. Keep an acute angle between your spine and your pelvis and everything else will follow.
Reality: most people who are successful have no insight into how they got there, and the system's supposed to work that way; the elevator up is made of glass, but the people allowed into it were deliberately picked not to look anywhere but at the digital red numbers that say what floor they are on. Of course, most people who fail (and that's most people) have little insight either, which is why these books sell so well.
Also, let's talk about Small Data, the realm not of normal distributions but of Poisson distributions on discrete events. Reputations are a Small Data problem. So are introductions, resumes, and all of the other mechanical rat-traps that make up the career game. You can control serendipity to some degree. If you know a disgusting secret on a Harvard MBA alumnus (which is not that hard, because as unethical people become increasingly arrogant, they get worse at hiding it) you can use it to get a powerful recommendation, get in to Harvard Business School, and make influential friends. Sure, there are things like that that you can control. Then there are things that you can't.
Filthy secret: the workplace is full of extortionist thugs, bullies, and generally horrible people. I'd estimate that horrid people are 1-in-10 in the general population (but you rarely see them in daily life, because there isn't money involved) but they are 1-in-5 co-workers at the most competitive companies, and 1-in-3 bosses. Okay. Let's just get that on the table. Unless you have extreme luck that makes you independent in your first 5 years, you will meet horrible people who will fuck up your career, damage your reputation, gaslight you until you embarrass yourself in a major way, steal credit that you needed to get out of corporate hell, possibly even give you PTSD (that's rare, but if you have the condition pre-existing, it can flare up again). One such encounter takes you out of the running for those COO/Facebook jobs that require a flawless career history, but you can still be modestly successful. Two hits and you will never raise VC. You're too damaged for that. Three and you're barely holding on to the upper-middle-class. Four, and you're lucky to stay in the middle class. Now, some people manage to get hit zero times. Look up Poisson distributions if you don't believe me. It's not many of them, but it happens. Good for them.
Why do so few women succeed in the workplace? This "they stop leaning in!!!111" bullshit is useless, because it glosses over the real problem. It's because bullies (including workplace bullies) prey on the people they consider to be weakest, and those are disproportionately going to be women. It's not that they're sexist. Not all bad people are everything bad (i.e. not all psychopaths are sexist or racist). They're just opportunists. They hit women disproportionately because they presume them to be weak.
You can really tell what kind of career (in a corporate context, and VC-istan is corporate because of the king-making around funding) someone will have based on one integer number: how many times that person has been attacked by a workplace thug. You will never be a Sheryl Sandberg if you've dealt with a true workplace bully, and at least 90% of people get hit at least once in the first 10 years. Your reputation and career history are too damaged, and you really can't "start over" because every achievement is age-graded.
It's great that some people like Sandberg are able to enjoy legitimate careers, but the fact of never having been bullied or attacked (they might have been laid off once or twice, but never robbed or extorted) makes them extreme statistical anomalies. They end up with these rosy-eyed half-picture views of the workplace, and they're able to sell it in business books and TED talks, because most of the proles want to believe there's something different out there, and that they're just missing one easy insight (i.e. just "lean in" during meetings!)
Success Crack presents a view of the workplace that is so non-repeatable and often self-serving as to be indistinguishable from a fantasy novel-- but with a less inspiring setting and worse writing.
So do you really believe that workplace bullies are so universally powerful that it is quite nearly impossible to prevent them from ruining one's career?
I recognize your posts immediately and appreciate your iconoclasm, but this assertion seems quite at odds with what I've seen. I've worked with, for and around a few bullies/assholes (though certainly not at every job). I've seen literally one or two people get caught in the maelstrom and be unable to escape, but most people either work around the jerks. Sometimes if it gets bad enough people change jobs (probably getting a raise to boot)
The boss who loses his temper a lot but doesn't engage in prolonged campaigns of harassment is the archetypical "asshole" boss, but not a bully. People realize he's a "Volcano" (see here: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/gervais-macle... ) and his credibility drops, so he is really only a danger to himself after a while. As long as you can tolerate superficial verbal abuse (and not everyone can, but I can deal with it at this point in my life) you're not at major risk of long-term career harm from the Volcano/Cartoon Asshole.
The asshole wants, out of work, things that normal people want (money, prestige, accomplishment, progress) and just goes about getting them in an emotionally retarded way. He can't persuade people or lead, so he falls back on abuse, but he doesn't actually enjoy hurting people (he might not care much about others' emotions, or he might be utterly blind to his effects on other people, but he's not sadistic). Bullies are different; they actually enjoy destroying people. They like abusing power even more than they like getting rich or climbing the ranks.
Assholes can be worked around. Even if one gets you fired, your reputation will usually be intact. In fact, you're likely to get sympathy because people who know their reputations are impressed that you held out for that long. "Really? You worked for him for 15 months?" Bullies are different, in that they deliberately ruin your reputation, and because they're selective in their choices of whom to attack, they keep their credibility intact. Workplace bullies know that they can only target a small number of people, and only the socially weak (new guys, young people, women) and they're superficially nice to everyone else, so they end up with sterling reputations.
Bullies are nice to everyone except the people they perceive as being weak. The danger is that most people will have moments of (usually transient) weakness. A bully boss can turn transient weakness (a health problem, a failed startup, child-raising complications) into a permanent career smear.
I worked for one of these at Google. He was superficially very nice, but he sabotaged people. I investigated him quite a bit while I was there, and after I left, got access to a bunch of shit I shouldn't have been able to see. He had an HR record as long as my forearm of using fake performance problems to tease out reports' health problems, rescheduling meetings to conflict with peoples' medical appointments; but HR did nothing because he had a superb reputation for "delivery" on projects (mostly because he was a great blame-shifter). I was weak at the time because I was coming off of a failed startup. Had it not been for that, I doubt I would have been his target.
Also, it's a misconception that a workplace bully is only going to do typical boss things in the nastiest way. They deliberately interfere with work performance. Bully bosses don't let you go off and do great things but give negative reviews. (That's an asshole boss having a shitty day.) They actively make it impossible for you to perform, so it looks like you melted down and that they had nothing to do with it.
Yes, if you're attacked by one of these, you're off the Sheryl Sandberg track for good. It doesn't mean that you'll never have a decent career. It does mean that you're out of the running for CxO implants into existing enterprises-- you need a smear-free career history for that, unless you go full-on Don Draper-- and now that VC-istan is fully corporate, you're probably not fundable either.
I just want to remind anyone reading this that there are many sides to any story. I am truly impressed by how much mileage the parent poster has gotten from his negative experience at Google, but I think it would be a grave mistake to take his claims at face value.
Are you fucking kidding me? I would be far ahead of where I am right now if I hadn't had that misadventure. That spell (and its aftermath, including the horrible startup where I landed afterward) took 3 years off my career, easily.
HN karma doesn't come close to buying that back. I'm still owed.
Then I looked at the comment author.
Despite this pessimism I think you make some great points, but I do feel that your persistent negative bias towards corporations (and people in general) can detract from what are often great insights within your comments.
[citation needed]
No doubt this is true in an abstract sense, but is there any recorded data on this (reports of scandals, etc) or is this just speculation.
In the real world, it's so much more likely to be "he's a cool guy, we went to the same prep school, why not?" Which renders the same result, but in less of a movie-script dramatic way.
Wrong. It's extremely common, but it's also subtle.
It's best if the target doesn't know what you have on him. That's the beauty of business school. You were out drinking with him 25 times and he doesn't remember half of them, so you don't have to mention "the dirt". (Also: you shouldn't. Explicit extortion will put you in jail.) He has no memory of what specific episodes you have on him, and there might not even be any. He just knows that if you say, "introduce me to <Y>" or "invite me to your winter party" that he has no choice.
(I was there in that capstone project where you had a bug in the excel spreadsheet and we just pasted value over it!)
There are apartments selling for $100 million. Who lives in those? How did they get there? What are their stories? The answers are not what middle-class Americans think (hard work! pure luck!) but you don't exactly have to become one of them (almost impossible) to learn how they do things. They don't even bother to hide it anymore.
After about 5 years, you'll realize that most of the "effortless" rises are cases of people who learn something damning about a powerful person and leverage it into all kinds of social currencies.
Stupid extortion: "Give me $10 million or I'll reveal <X>." That's far too direct and really dumb. You go to jail for that.
Smarter (if still evil) extortion: "Hi. You may not remember me but I was with you on January 24, 2007 in New York when <X>. Those were fun times, no? I heard that a lot of venture capitalists attend your winter party in Aspen. I'd like to attend, because I'm looking to start my own company." That's how 90+ percent of the most successful people got where they are.
In a lot of ways, frats and university clubs do similar things, formally and informally. When people do embarrassing, dangerous, illegal, or immature things together, it bonds them in interesting and tight ways.
One can imagine that if it was 1999 and you had been one of GWB's close Yale or MBA buddies who had blown a snowstorm of cocaine together, and you called him up for a little favor or consideration, that such a thing might come through rather quickly and discreetly.
http://www.littlespeck.com/content/economy/CTrendsEconomy-06...
I am however greatly annoyed whenever someone thinks they are doing everyone else a favour by trying to dissuade others from reading an opinion (especially through vague ad hominem attacks). I don't think you need to protect anyone here from uncomfortable opinions.
Surely every article/essay has the potential to be read differently in the context of who wrote it. If it was on the subject of, for example, Israel/Palestine, would you not want to know that it was a Palestinian campaigner who wrote about their suffering, or a Zionist who wrote about their acts of terrorism? Whether you agree or disagree with one side or the other, context is often relevant.
Is it really, in this case? If Greenspun was a Neo-Nazi who was serving time for killing 12 people, would it really have changed the content of this review?
I understand it would probably colour your perception of him, and certainly that's what the OP was going for, but I still think that this review stands on its own.
That's getting to be a pretty rare thing these days, but it's hardly fanatical.
I'm no fan of Sandberg, but this review is so overburdened by the author's ideological baggage that it is nearly unreadable.
Only in America can this kind of crap not be considered extremist ideology.