Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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'm not sure why people set up such incentive structures. Is it greed?"

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 recently watched an interesting video of an austrian economy professor, who came to the conclusion that our current competition based society is in effect because in the past competition was crucial to survive, and thus people competed. Our current generation competes because we grew up in a competitive society and in order to be truly cooperative, cooperation needs to become a part of our "memes". Here's the video, unfortunately in German and no subtitles are available yet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oouoee9UvEc.

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.

"I think the main problem with group bonuses is that those who know/think they worked harder will feel treated unfairly."

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'm from Germany and bonuses and wages are something we don't talk about with many people, let alone colleagues. I even had a paragraph in my last working contracts that forbade me to do so.

I've been thinking about the same thing! It's a pity the video is in German.

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.

I have worked in three research institutions in the US - At the University of Maryland, at Harvard University and at Mass General Hospital. While there were cultural differences as well as individual differences, my main observation was that people were eager to share and teach one another. This was my main attraction to academic life. Cross-disciplinary collaboration was also very encouraged.

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 do not think it has much to do with culture as much as it has to do with the incentive structures in place. I have never studied outside Europe but even in Europe I have experienced grading systems were you are praised for your achievement with respect to your mates and others were you are praised for your achievement objectively. Honour titles are usually objective, and very hard to get while grants and scholarships are subjective, there is a quota set per year and it goes to the best that that year has to offer.

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?

"People like Japanese or Chinese"? Seriously?

Seriously what? Is it politically incorrect to mention racial differences at all now?

This is not even a racial difference, it's a cultural one.

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.

Can I raise my hand here and concede that I do tend to shun people who want to talk on HN about the "biological and cultural" differences between sexes and races? No apologies. Just wanted to confirm your suspicion.

Sure; but since you raised your hand could you also share your reasons? I don't wish to debate them. I just can think of several people could have and would like to know what are yours.

Candidly and concisely: I think the arguments about the importance of differences between sexes and races are so dumb that the only way anyone could want to introduce them into a discussion is if they are in some way broken.

Or they could be young and naive or sheltered. Unless you call that broken, too.

Thanks for the answer.

I'd put it like this: variation among members of the same sex, race, country, age, etc. are very often larger and more important than aggregate differences between these groups. Ignoring this fact isn't just bad politics, it's sloppy thinking.

I agree. One can accept this fact without ignoring that the aggregate differences between groups exist and are sometimes relevant. Otherwise we wouldn't cluster people into those groups.

One does not follow from the other, unless you are being tautological with the word relevant.

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.

I don't see how this does not follow.

> 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.

In Japan, there are large numbers of people who isolate themselves and do not interact with society, and in many Chinese cities, there is an extremely competitive capitalist environment. And the idea that Japanese and Chinese people value the state over the individual to a significantly greater degree than in the US or Europe would seem to ignore the almost religious fervor of US patriotism and the history of the European wars. Sure, you can find measurable differences, but measurability in and of itself is not a sign of significance.

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.

> Sure, you can find measurable differences, but measurability in and of itself is not a sign of significance.

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.

As far as a historical look at cultural stereotyping goes, Edward Said's book 'Orientalism' is not a bad starting point. From reading it I became far more aware that the way that a culture is described is usually far more to do with the culture that is doing the describing.

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.

Many people, it seems analogize culture to race, and making distinctions about race is (supposed to be) bad. Sociocultural differences however are huge, and information exchange is just one aspect.

So it should be fine in a university setting that one person does all the work and the rest just copy it? The reason this is frowned upon is because the people that just copy don't end up gaining the valuable skills they are there for in the first place.

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.

If we wish to remove such dysfunctions, best to drop the grading system (to the extent stamping a number on your forehead affects your future life).

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.)