When Those Who Know Won’t Share
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It is not the difficulty itself, as it is probably harder to study engineering in Europe or Asia, but the competitive mindset, "every man for himself".
This has advantages, like taking plagiarism very seriously, but also terrible disadvantages, like not working well in groups.
People like Japanese or Chinese are trained in working in groups with disrespect for the individual. The American culture is the polar opposite, they worship individuals disrespecting the team, e.g you wont ever hear them talking about Edison's team(of which Tesla was one of its members), or Steve Jobs'.
Americans love to believe that there is a person that does everything.
Having said that, in some companies they don't share because of fear.
If you create a community like Microsoft's four years ago in which for every team, the "least qualified"(even if all of them are great) is fired, you create a culture of threat and terror, and people are going to protect their selves.
You have also to take care, not putting too many leechers in the same place as the seeders, or the seeders won't be able to solve problems(that they love to solve) because they are babysitters of the leechers full time(something they hate to do).
Some companies do not understand the last point, then they comply about people not sharing.
If you put together a team that admire each other, they share naturally.
The level of secrecy, however, probably depends on field. I was in neurophysiology + cognitive science. Colleages in the molecular biology field complained of competition and secretiveness from colleagues.
I suspect that this extends not just to the US but to Europe as well. I knew of a researcher from Denmark in a certain field who was known to 'sit' on a certain resource and control access to it to reduce competition and further their own name.
I've worked in many group settings in school, and this is usually what ends up happening if left unchecked (1 or 2 people doing 90% of the work and the rest just copying it.
I don't know about you, but I don't want any "leechers" working with me in the workplace. Why would I do your job for you and then not get the credit?
In a work setting, I've been in groups where we had to share knowledge (each person is working on a different part and you need to combine them together). This is much different than what you are describing.
I do exactly this, and none of us "cheat". Cheating is a meaningless concept to us anyway; using someone else's work is as silly as stealing from your own wallet.
As for avoiding leechers, they're often called "managers" and "bosses". (I say that as a manager. Structurally, and in the vast majority of cases, they're leeches.)
The other side of the very same coin is when you award top X% people for performance. When you fix the reward/punishment pool, people have much less incentive to work together, because every help you give to someone else is reducing your own chance of success.
I'm not sure why people set up such incentive structures. Is it greed? Or some kind of stupid belief that a little bit of competition will help? Yes, if you let every good performer get a bonus regardless of how many others are also getting it you'll have to pay out a lot of bonuses, because you'll have a lot of good performers. But isn't it exactly what you want to have?
I think it comes down to managerial laziness and social discomfort. Giving someone a bad performance review or dealing with poor performance is inherently an uncomfortable social interaction. Once a manager acknowledges that someone isn't meeting standards organizations usually have a process by which they need to help that person improve or eventually fire them which is a lot of extra work for that manager.
In other words it is a way to force managers into dealing with bad employees instead of letting problems fester.
I think the main problem with group bonuses is that those who know/think they worked harder will feel treated unfairly. I have no information on how group bonuses are perceived or what their effects are. However, I personally think that the main problems come from teams who don't share the same spirit/culture and thus, those problems also exist in individually rewarded teams.
Individual bonuses, if they befall the wrong individuals or are percieved to be unjust can destroy the will of the entire group or organization. I would claim that for expert organizations the risks of individual rewards outweight any benefits they may have. Group bonuses or company wide profit sharing spread general goodwill. Continuous performance is what counts in the long run. Continuous performers will get their reward in the form of raises or promotion. In theory, at least. Note: I'm from an egalitarian nordic country, culture probably affects my perception.
I came to the conclusion that at a societal level, competition is almost always harmful as soon as it's outside the confines of a game (i.e. when people stand to win or lose something tangible from it).
I believe it makes all large organisations extremely inefficient and dysfunctional. As another example, it results in a lot of redundancy in the context of R&D.
But yes, it seems that people want the reality to conforms to political correctness by pretending that biological and cultural differences between sexes, races, countries, age, etc. don't exist and shunning everyone who doesn't agree.
There are plenty of examples where people are forced into groups based on colour or form, where the only relevant factor is the social perception of the colour or form. Now you could argue that this can be important culturally, such as religious rules for different sexes, but then the reasoning becomes completely circular.
> Now you could argue that this can be important culturally, such as religious rules for different sexes, but then the reasoning becomes completely circular.
Not really. People seem to confuse what is with what ought. Those are two completely different matters.
OP wrote "People like Japanese or Chinese are trained in working in groups with disrespect for the individual.", and he was challenged for the "People like Japanese or Chinese" part. You may believe that such differences ought not exist, or we ought not to have to use such categories, but the OP's statement was about what is, about the state of reality. You may agree or disagree with OP's statement, but at no point should considerations of "political correctness" enter such argument.
If you are concerned with what is, then relying on orientalist generalisations that were originally applied to people in Egypt by the French, before being reapplied to the Chinese and Japanese when the concept of the orient was moved east, are probably not going to give you an accurate picture.
I agree. The question now becomes whether in this particular case those measurable differences are in any way significant. Stereotypes are sometimes true in a statistical sense. Anyway, I don't have any data to answer this question; I was only trying to point out asserting probable cultural differences may be wrong in a factual sense, but it shouldn't automatically be treated wrong in a moral sense.
> relying on orientalist generalisations that were originally applied to people in Egypt by the French, before being reapplied to the Chinese and Japanese when the concept of the orient was moved east
I haven't thought about that (thanks to my rather small knowledge about the evolution of cultural stereotypes). Thank you for this insight, I'll keep it in mind.
edit - A good example being the British tabloid view of Japanese animation. If you were to trust the UK press, then Anime is all about sex and violence. However about half of Japanese tv is animation, and most of it is pretty innocent, but what the British buy is all the sex and violence, so then we think that is what Anime is.
But yes, sometimes the incentive structures set up are really counter productive. If the work is supposed to be a team effort then you shouldn't praise anyone less than the whole team for their achievement. Otherwise, what incentive do the team members have to work together?
This covers the problem where someone hides the very simple knowledge which keeps them employed (documentation being the enemy of job security) but the worst is having a culture where if you share something that is later found to be even slightly wrong it will be used against you. For sharing to work you have to be tolerant of the right sort of mistakes.
This. You get what you incent. If people are rewarded for working together, they will work together. If they are rewarded for individual contributions, they will optimize for that.
Now, it can be tough to measure and reward team effort, bit if that is what is important, figure it out!
In the general case, the goals of the company and the employee are not always aligned so I don't think this is an easy problem to solve.
More specifically, the goals of each team member are not always aligned either, so trying to incent an entire team of people who don't have the same goals doesn't always work.
It's more likely to do so the bigger the team. In a team of 500, someone might think "my personal contribution doesn't matter much", but they are less likely to think so in a team of 5. Furthermore, in small teams social pressures are likely to deter free riding.
> In the general case, the goals of the company and the employee are not always aligned so I don't think this is an easy problem to solve.
Yes. It's the principal-agent problem -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem
Anecdote time! When I was a student, performance scolarships at my faculty were distributed this way. There were set thresholds, and if your grade average from the previous year was above a given threshold, you got +X money in scolarship. We were all extremely cooperative. People helped each other all the time, we pooled notes, scans, bootleg textbook pdfs, previous year's exam questions, we passed this knowledge down to younger students, who in turn passed them further after adding more materials of their own. We'd happily help each other get better grades.
You bet there was a lot of us on those scolarships. And people who came from the outside were extremely surprised about how friendly and helpful everyone is.
After I left, my faculty was forced to make scolarships work the way they work at every other faculty/university - i.e. make only top X% of students eglible for rewards. This instantly killed teamwork dead. I know few people who are still studying and they say there's a clear and visible difference now. People no longer share things. They don't care about recording exam questions for others, they don't coordinate the whole year to win something. Students stick to small groups and are antagonistic to others. If they help at all, they do it to the degree it doesn't endanger their own chance for scolarships.
Incentives matter. Also greed/stupid costs savings on the part of people setting up incentive structures matter too.
That is an interesting idea and it probably works in some rare situations. But unfortunately, most of the time, we only have limited resources and so a limited prize pool. The question, for managers/politicians/capitalists, usually is how do we get maximum motivation out of a limited rewards budget.
It's OK for me if a partner discards half of a serve-yourself email, which was easier to write than doing the whole expert-system style Q&A until you narrow the answer, but there's always the worry that it will be perceived as wasteful -- from the other side's point of view that unused information may equal to days of study and research, or as confusing noise that would delay a solution if it had to be grokked.
I could see someone in a very large team eventually resorting to simple answers, just for the sake of not snagging the business flow. Maybe adding invitations to request further info about certain parts would be in order.
I got (a bit) laughed at by teammates. After I left, one thanked me because it was a huge help for trawling through the mess of stuff I left behind (which I'd inherited from someone else in an undocumented state). Did I leave it in a perfect state? Of course not, but all the external factors that played in to why things were done certain ways was searchable (meeting notes, pointers to tech articles, bug reports, etc).
> I noted that in reality, the only member of staff I could
> safely count on to stay at the company was called 'wiki'.
Plato similarly argued against literacy. He didn't tell me that face-to-face; someone wrote it down.
"Nothing that has ever been written whether in verse or prose merits much serious attention."
I also think that Plato writing it down was one of the earliest post-modern jokes.
I was non-competitive..and eventually it cost me my job.
I think such pay-it-forward behaviour is contagious, so it is a small way to make the world a better place.
Passing on knowledge and helping each other succeed is just part of the job. I'm glad I haven't had the misfortune to work with people who deliberately obstruct each other.
The natural reaction to this lack of visibility is to create process for everything, and major european telecoms company is a very process oriented company, everything has a process, and a document thereof (assuming you can find the document, remember the part about poor visibility) - they are also very very fond of one-size-fits-all solutions to problems, so everyone gets the same laptop build, no matter who your end customer is, or what your job is (from field engineers to accountants).
The key to productivity is knowing when it's best to let the process, no matter how slow moving it is - bump and grind along at its own pace and become a self resolving problem, and when to directly (and openly) short circuit it, whereas other times you might want to call on the 'good ol' boys network' to solve a problem or get information.
To defend this way of working - there is some logic to these systems, they provide stability and a largely autonomous system that (albeit slowly) will provide a resolution to most of the problems the business will run into - they fail worst when dealing with rapidly emergent problems, exigent circumstances, when expanding to a new line of business or any time you run into a problem that can't be grouped into a existing category. Even a process driven environment however has some ability to adapt, even if it does fall completely outside the system at first, and so long as you have a reasoned argument, people often won't tell you no either (even if they might sit on your request for a bit), so while I dislike the amount of red tape at times, I've also learned how to work thru it, and around it when absolutely needed.
The arguments for competence are powerful and often overshadow or mask a problem area. An example of such an argument is the comment along the lines of, "We couldn't survive without Mary. No one else can sell that thing, and it represents 30 percent of our business." This statement is often so self-evident that no one thinks to point out the cooperative effort that should be the essence of the organization has already ceased to survive. People come to work, but there is a lack of communication, commitment, and cooperation. The process of slow death has set in.
In one organization, a man of enormous technical competence was allowed to gain a lot of power, and many of his actions poisoned the climate in the workplace. People around him hated to come to work and went to great lengths to avoid dealing with him. Their bad feelings, irrationalities, and inefficiencies were costing the organization large but undocumented sums of money. Finally, the situation grew so bad that people united and demanded change. A senior person intervened in this Tyranny of Competence and tried to coach the man. The recipient found the feedback incomprehensible and argued that he was doing his "job" better than anyone else in the place. The organization was simply out to get him for personal and political reasons.
Note the accuracy of his argument. He was doing his "job" well, and the organization was out to get him for political and personal reasons. The problem was his definition of the word "job". His job did not include relating to other people. Organizational relationships, with their interactions and political processes, are as real as physical objects. Not disciplining oneself enough to maintain good relationships is, in fact, destructive behavior.
This man eventually left his job, convinced that he had been politically rejected (which was correct) for unjust reasons (which was incorrect). The day he went down the stairs for the last time, people came out of their offices, held hands, spontaneously danced, and sang, "Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead!" They discovered that this irreplaceable person was indeed replaceable. The top executives marveled at the increase in overall performance. They vowed not to make the same mistake again.
The real contradistinction is that organisations try to reduce costs of the "workforce". The employees try to maximize their income and value. It is true that the maximalization can also occure on group level and that this is not contractually or formally supported in our current economic model. But treating employees as costs individually or as a group will shift the problem.
It can be questioned that it is not such a radical zero sum game but at the other hand it feels like this is the most effective and simple behavior.
The inverted question is, what do organisations do to maximize the income of their employees?
That said, there's a difference between malicious "holding out" and being reserved with political information. I'm not going to hide something that's purely technical, but political information is (a) dangerous to share, and (b) often incomplete, meaning you could unduly bias someone with your own half-knowledge. Besides, while everyone will "listen to" a gossip, no one will ever defend one.
However, there's a certain room for reciprocity. If I trust that someone will look out for me, I'll look out for him or her. Your odds aren't good, in the long run, if you try to walk through this world alone.
I think of modern corporate life as post-apocalyptic, like in The Walking Dead. The HR drones who implement stack-ranking, the mindless backstabbers, and the self-destructively sadistic middle managers out there are the zombies. In numbers, inferior but ravenous beings like zombies can overwhelm the living and strong, and they do so, so often, that they're a primary landscape feature of this new world. (One place where this metaphor breaks down is that it's not clear, in the real world, who are the living and who are the zombies. But bear with me.) For those who haven't figured it out, zombie horror is really about "tyranny of the majority", which is a formidable enemy within an organization.
You have to know who your friends and your enemies are, and sometimes you have to make decisions quickly. While you "fight" the zombies (except, you do it by making them click on ads and mindlessly support brands you invent, not killing them) you also have to fear the living.
If our parents and grandparents knew what little politicians and fire-starters we are, as a generation, they'd be horrified. We're not actually morally any worse. In fact, we're probably better in many ways (less racist, less sexist, and unlike the Boomers we didn't cause widespread organizational failure because we were still children during the Reagan Era). We're just post-apocalyptic (and OK with that). We know that the people in power aren't looking out for us, so we don't give a shit about them. Compared to our elders, we care more about people who we actually know and can (sometimes) trust, but less about organizations and society.