Keep in mind that in practice this classification is not perfect, as in you cannot just bucketize people into three categories and declare perfect understanding. You should treat the roles described in the article as archetypes of human behavior.
You would be surprised, but companies actually pay hard money to consultants to do these astrology readings and present them to shareholders as a "measure of workforce compatibility".
I think it was more popular before that book ("The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing") came out. Not that I ever believed it before that, but I assumed it was created by actual social scientists rather than two untrained amateurs as is the case.
Meyers briggs is not “astrology” - it doesn’t claim to predict anything. It categorizes how people already consciously see themselves with Carl Jungs archetypes. The main point of the archetype concept is to then explore the part of you that is different from how you see yourself- your “shadow” for the purpose of personal development.
It’s not mysterious, mystical, or claiming to be science- it’s just a very simple set of arbitrary categories to give you a different perspective on yourself, and point you in a direction of dealing with things you would otherwise avoid because it’s uncomfortable to think about. For example if you see yourself as “rational” and reject “emotional” thinking, it can be helpful to actually explore your emotional side rather than push it away.
The concept itself is a useful and simple thing, but is mostly misunderstood and misused… I don’t see how an employer testing employees would be useful.
As someone who has read Carl Jungs books, but has not encountered it in the workplace, it annoys me to see people talking derisively about it from a place of misunderstanding.
It’s astrology because it takes unimodal distributions and splits them into two groups above and below the mean. This is a cardinal sin in statistics because it implies the existence of distinct populations that don’t really exist and so any predictions you try to make are no better than a coinflip.
I attempted to explain what it is useful for above, but will elaborate.
The valuable result is the extreme opposite of your result- it is a therapy or personal development tool that directs you to explore and understand parts of yourself you reject or disapprove of (your “shadow”).
It simply quantifies something obvious that you already know: how you consciously see yourself- in a way that guides you to explore aspects of yourself that you otherwise would choose to avoid because it’s difficult and possibly even painful to do so.
What it measures is actually pretty banal and obvious if you are familiar with Jungian archetypes- one can easily guess the result for yourself and other people without using the test.
> The valuable result is the extreme opposite of your result- it is a therapy or personal development tool that directs you to explore and understand parts of yourself you reject or disapprove of (your “shadow”).
Look, I too have read Jung and agree with what you're saying here, but this is emphatically NOT how MBTI tends to be used in corporate settings, which is what everyone else in this thread is talking about.
I agree, it is being misunderstood and misused. Instead of using it as a tool for deep introspection, it seems to be used for the condescending purpose of “fabricating a mystical 3rd party authority get our idiot employees to notice that people have different personalities and everyone else isn’t just a carbon copy of them.” Which sounds like an irredeemably awful workplace situation, and I don’t envy people in it.
It actually does not do that- each dimension which represents two opposite archetypes (e.g. introvert vs extrovert) is a continuum, and the output of the test isn’t actually a single category but a point on that line for each dimension. The full output is actually a 4 dimensional vector. Importantly- everyone has both traits, it is only telling you which you more consciously identify with. Many people will be near the middle and not strongly on one end of a dimension.
Again, astrology claims to predict the future based on nonsense. MTBI makes no such claims, it predicts nothing, and it’s chosen dimensions are very transparently arbitrary value judgements, among limitless possible archetypes that one could choose.
I think you may have missed my point so I’ll give an example:
Suppose you take a random sample of adult humans and sort them by height. What you’ll see is a bimodal distribution which reflects the fact that there are actually two distinct populations represented in the sample: men and women. The sexes can be considered types and you will get reasonably accurate results for predicting height from sex and vice versa.
However, if you instead take a sample of only men and sort them by height you will see a unimodal distribution. If you then try to split this sample into two types above and below the mean, you will find that it doesn’t tell you anything!
This is what I mean when I say MBTI astrology. The archetypes are meaningless! Someone who is at 51% on the extroversion scale will get labeled an Extrovert and someone at 49% will get labeled an Introvert, but in practice these two are virtually indistinguishable and fall squarely within the margin of error. Since the distribution is unimodal the majority of the population clusters around the means, exactly what you would expect to find with the hypothesis that personality archetypes do not exist.
I don’t think I missed your point but you missed mine. If someone is 51% or 49% it is misleading to classify- which is why the test actually outputs a vector.
Archetypes are fairly arbitrary concepts that isolate individual aspects among thousands that could potentially explain personality traits- they don’t claim to exist in real people.
It is critical to realize that in the dimensions on MBTI everyone is actually both, but some people strongly identify with one and reject or despise the part of themselves that represents the other.
To follow on: why does the MBTI focus on 8 specific archetypes when there are limitless others?
It is indeed a totally arbitrary choice, and a value judgement. These are ones that Carl Jung thought particularly important based on his philosophy of personal development, and experience as a clinical psychologist. Of the ones Jung talked about MBTI further selected an even more limited set.
Personally, I think it is more useful to skip the MTBI and just use Jungs original text.
I went through mbti at a workplace and it was used to give us an understanding of our co-workers.
Your point that it's a self assessment and thus only "how you see yourself" and not.. y'know, how you actually behave, is in retrospect "no shit" but I missed this crucial point.
It kind of changes every conversation with anyone I've ever had about our result.
It sounds like it is being misused and misunderstood in a way that is actually BS.
The way it relates to others is more subtle than that:
Say someone is strongly extroverted and sees introversion as a negative thing… and dislikes and disapproves of their more introverted co-workers. If they come to explore, understand, and accept their own introverted aspects it will also take the steam out of their dislike for others who show those traits.
This part also seems like it was intended to be predictive:
>Briggs and Myers began creating their indicator during World War II (1939–1945)[7] in the belief that a knowledge of personality preferences would help women entering the industrial workforce for the first time to identify the sorts of war-time jobs that would be the "most comfortable and effective" for them
You are correct- what used to be considered scientific psychology is not up to the standards of rigor that we would still call it science nowadays.
It was at one point used as a psychology research tool, but it does not work well for e.g. predicting mental health outcome differences in different groups of people, and has been superseded by things like the Big Five personality traits, which are slightly better but also probably not that useful. MBTI is probably inappropriate and useless in the workplace as other people on here are complaining about.
Nowadays, I don't think it is appropriate to use it for anything except "for fun" or as a simplified tool for making sense of and using some of Carl Jungs ideas and techniques.
Carl Jung himself has had a lot of pushback in modern times for not using scientific methodology, and having ideas and methods that aren't even testable with modern scientific methods. I've heard people even say he "set psychology back 50 years with pseudoscience."
I disagree with that, because his methods and ideas work very well for myself and a lot of people. I think he was way ahead of his time in finding "hacks" that work to improve mental health, and overcome psychological challenges... however his ideas and methods were so far ahead of his time it will be a very long time still before they could potentially be connected to any sort of mechanistic or biological psychology, or neuroscience. They should probably be regarded more as spiritual or psychotherapy tools, in the same vein as things like meditation- but still not totally worthless nonsense like astrology.
This is true for any kind of generalization. Having said that, I can really see this at my company.
At the beginning I was a high-perfoming loser. Then I realized how things work, and since then I do bare minimum. I wish I could be a sociopath, but I don't have the brains nor the lack of morals to do so. I passionately hate the clueless ones because they stand against everything I believe in. My dream is to save enough money not to have to take part in this circus anymore.
You don’t really need to be a clinical sociopath for that - you need to know enough to employ the characteristics in order to reach your own goal, which might not be a selfish one at all.
Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves."
You can't really grow in business without exploitation.
Whether that's using "contractors" to deliver your packages, using monopoly to slurp people's data, sourcing minerals from african blood mines or using asian sweatshops to build your phones and clothes.
To me, corporate life has always been a race to see who gets exploited the most and who the least.
Sociopaths don't care about exploiting others. I would say the same for most people. We can usually rationalize the worst kind of things to ourselves when it suits us.
There's quite a difference between deliberately exploiting people you interact with in the real world all day every day for your own benefit and what you're mentioning.
Buying an iPhone, not knowing that it was built using Chinese (semi-)slave labour is not quite the same as a manager who promotes easily exploitable (loser) over-achievers and uses "devide and conquer" on the rest of his underlings to make himself feel safe and comfy. All in the same office that everybody goes to every day. For decades.
The default state of humanity for thousands of years has been a lot of people living in mud houses and working all day to do subsistence farming and tending to livestock. Doesn’t sound like a great life, but they aren’t being “exploited” there either. It’s just people versus Mother Nature. However, many would gladly take 9-5 jobs in an air conditioned building instead, and live in nicer homes with utilities. It’s voluntary labor.
I read this long ago, and it poses itself as dark knowledge. The triage of 'sociopath', 'clueless', and 'losers', even if it bears out this neatly in reality – it doesn't – isn't very actionable. I did come away with one useful part of it, and that's 'The Curse of Development'. Which basically states, that if you go out of your comfort zone to try something new, you'll look foolish to outsiders. And it's useful to know this, and then correct for it when receiving judgement from people who haven't walked that path.
I’ve read this before, and while an entertaining thought experiment, I’m not sure there is anything really actionable here. Maybe just be mindful that people are trying to exploit you.
As you say, it's worth knowing what shit can happen but that doesn't mean everyone in
leadership is a sociopath or that it's unwise or losing to accept a paycheck.
It can be unwise to start a business and lose all your money which does happen to people.
The terminology on the three groups is used very loosely. The “psychopaths” put their own interests on top, the “clueless” put the company on top and the “losers” are the ones who opt for a low-risk, low-reward strategy. Risk goes up as you move up on the pyramid as well, but lots of current C-levels use the company to buffer the downsides while keeping the upsides for themselves. It’s a bit sociopathic, but there are endless layers of self-delusion happening on all levels.
This is also an “average” company set in a specific culture. Outliers exist and different cultures will also reflect in the power dynamics.
Not true! This was actually a life-changing read for me. I stopped being the rock-star developer and turned to quiet quitting before quiet quitting became a thing thanks to this. I'm not joking. No more over-time, far less stress, more time with family, and no more burn out. I have no regrets.
To be read in conjunction with the Babbler hypothesis - The amount of time some people spend talking gets them into leadership positions. It doesn't matter what they say, just how much they rant on. I read that, and realised how insanely true it is
Well these observations have nothing with to do with the main conundrum -
How do you keep a group of chimps who all have different interests, personalities, needs, beliefs, values, upbringings, culture, religion, language, history etc etc in sync?
And these days groups grow quite large quite fast.
Historically, if you take rewards, bribery, force, domination and manipulation out of the story, the babblers/non threatening people can bridge differences as groups grow larger and larger in size.
No solution is perfect, cause its quite an unnatural thing for groups to form around anything. Given all the differences.
Just try to work with your entire extended family on a project, and watch what kind of strange rituals, stories and behaviors keep the group from breaking apart.
I think you missed the point of the GP: Venkatesh Rao has written so much posts around this idea that he's now positioned himself as an authority on the topic of workplace power dynamics, regardless of if what he wrote is actually accurate or not.
He is also quite fond of using poorly defined (in this context) words like "dialectical" and "illegibility" that makes the reader doubt whether he's actually full of shit or that he is actually so brilliant that the reader simply doesn't comprehend him.
I think the main point of his principle is roughly correct. Classic companies are started by sociopaths and an initial amount of losers. Then the clueless come in the middle of the pyramid. The clueless section expands as the company grows until the company implodes.
I do not agree with his idea of promotion of overachievers into middle management and many other things. Some of his points are self-contradictory.
There are many variations on the main principle like Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
there's over 170mil people in those 2 countries. maybe a majority wishes buy a one-way ticket to Disneyland but a non-irrelevant numbers of people decides to live their dreams and struggles with those nearby in that group. again: not everyone needs to be ANY given group
Most people in those countries are part of small groups. Humans are a social species. That doesn’t require anyone to be part of a group. But it’s a bit ridiculous to try and manage a society by assuming it away.
Right but I don't need to successfully get along with everyone else in the US for the US to be a successful country.
Lower the sizes of groups and increase async communication, and the burden/overhead of management goes down. Groups small enough can manage themselves, in fact.
Modern management theory says you put the one that throws the most shit and chimps the loudest in charge; give them 90% of the banannas and tell all the others they should be more like that one if they want nice things.
> How do you keep a group of chimps who all have different interests, personalities, needs, beliefs, values, upbringings, culture, religion, language, history etc etc in sync?
This is because extraversion is partially composed of assertiveness (big five), which directly indicates your influence on your nearby human environment
This is because extraversion is partially composed of assertiveness (big five), which directly indicates your influence on your nearby human environment
Is there? Was an insight provided that you didn’t already know?
It doesn’t make any sense at all to me as an outsider.
It might make perfect sense to an insider, as an expression that says something obvious in the lingo.
In between there are statements which require some lingo, but also present a novel argument. It might be one of these. But it very short. So, I conclude that it must be either very trite and surface level, or extremely clever (how far from the definitions can one get in once sentence? Not far unless they are very good)
To raise others up, and provide an environment where they can do their jobs effectively. Occasionally, to perform coordination tasks, such as deciding on overall strategy, or resolving disputes; more often, a leader delegates but is otherwise hands-off, since most well-functioning teams are largely autonomous. (This is, of course, from the subordinates' perspective: from the leader's perspective, it might look like a lot of putting out fires all of the time.) A leader's job is rarely to self-promote.
shh, don't explain the correlation. this isn't about understanding, its about pseudo-intellectual envy. "obviously!" the more people speak, regardless of what they say, the more those Other dumb apes will elect them leader. I mean, why, any old fool could read every word from the dictionary and end up CEO!
The Dumb Ape Hypothesis: we are at our most dumb when declaring others so.
I would say it's more because companies and other organisations are social systems, and your ability to succeed in a social system comes down largely to your social skills. I think people with poor social skills don't understand the importance of them, and therefor don't understand why the people with better social skills are succeeding, and subsequently come up with these post hoc rationalizations that allow them to explain these outcomes without confronting any of their own issues.
I'm not the parent commenter but I like your point.
People who have a reason to form a group will cooperate/collaborate best when they have some confidence in one another. People share ideas, projects, and skills, and "read" one another and form bonds. This is a social system. It could be a brief association or have a long duration. It could have a formal context, such as a business or a governmental entity.
Social interactions build people's confidence and sense of value in the group, in the individuals, and the work at hand. The challenge grows exponentially as the population of the group scales. Communication is hard.
An individual's discernment and connectedness (a confidence/value score) within the group will reflect potential for success. Communication matters.
The human plot twist is that there can be dysfunctional social systems as well as dysfunctional individuals.
You’re reading an awful lot into that person’s question. Social skills are a very basic concept, the wikipedia page for them gives a decent overview. But I’m skeptical that the parent commenter actually misunderstood what I meant, and instead wanted to engage in some debate about organisations valuing the wrong skills or something like that. A debate about the causes of social maladaptation is also not especially relevant to my initial point.
Goes with my reply to OP [0]. I have a colleague that is a total waste of space. Never finished a project, never wanted to take on advice, always fought on really shady grounds, but he fought everything, almost like it was either his idea of what was on-point or nothing... But he was constantly talking, he was always talking, he is always talking, most of the time about things he doesn't have a clue about... and just a week ago, he got bumped... I don't get it... I honestly do not get what the fuck is wrong with this world.
You can provide a lot of value to an organization (or a leader) without finishing a single coding project. As an engineer I hate it, but I have worked for good directors and awful directors and usually the good directors do a ton of talking and bitching and moaning. But they also are fortune tellers and crystal balls and expert C-suite anthropologists that make the work valuable rather than just busy.
It's not just normal, it's desirable. You do not want your director / C-suite guy reviewing pull requests, filing bugs, or being obsessed with code library choices. That's what you get when you endlessly promote your busy/productive code-loving IC types.
You want someone who is a naturally fluent speaker, strongly outspoken, who holds strong opinions, and wants to focus on processes and long-term roadmaps and so on. All the stuff a dilligent IC disdains.
That's all worthless if they don't actually have good ideas, though. And I don't believe someone who is all talk actually has good ideas. You have to be rooted in good practice.
If you're free to define "all talk" as "not useful" then yeah - you've created a tautology. All I'm saying is some folks that are awful to work with side by side as technologists are super useful to an org in other places.
One person's 'all talk' is another person's 'all walk'.
Do recall that the reference for "all talk" in this conversation was
> never wanted to take on advice, always fought on really shady grounds, but he fought everything, almost like it was either his idea of what was on-point or nothing
Yes, you can be productive through communication, but if that's the kind of "talk" you want in your C-suite then I don't want to work in any company where you have influence.
It's almost like communicating effectively requires detailed knowledge of the real world, knowledge most often and most effectively gained by... doing things.
I think there is a different power play at work, if politics are important in a workplace then it benefits you to promote the less competent as they are both less threading at a peer level and they owe their position to you so can be expected to be loyal. A competent person might think they got there on their own and may not be relied on as strongly to take your side in office politics. Of course repeating this process many times rapidly erodes management competence.
This simple process is from an emergent behavior of rational actors acting in accordance to the incentives of the structure. Unlike other theories it does not necessitate irrational actors, morons, or sociopaths. Where you have people you have politics so it almost always occurs just at different speeds, hence the pervasiveness and the inevitability of the cycle of collapse and rebirth. It appears to me that only a highly competent king (someone whose position cannot be threatened by a peer) can stop this process and maybe reverse it.
"Traded freedom for a paycheck in short." or to quote Pink Floyd, "Did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?" -- Wish You Were Here.
A lot of these "organisational models" treat organisational behaviour as a kind of game; you can get ahead by exploiting game masters' mistakes, by cheating, or possibly by knowing and playing the rules really well. And just like poker, there's always a supply of those who believe in luck and just go all-in with no plan.
While I get that "as such", and therefore can follow a classification sociopath/clueless/loser, what is always missing in such models are the people who don't care to play. Those who go to the casino for free food and drinks in order to watch the show, but not to take a stake of their own. Are they "losers" because if you don't bet you can't win ? All of those who play, though, actually want these spectators - after all, winning if there's noone looking, is that a win?
Personally, I think you have this "fourth column" in all organisations. They take their paycheck and deliver something of what's asked for, but else don't care; what they see as "success" is not related to organisational structure or behaviour at all. With all the focus on "success" and "promotion" (or, opposite, "losers"), I wonder how much the theorists are missing. The non-voters can be the majority, you know ...
> The Losers like to feel good about their lives. They are the happiness seekers, rather than will-to-power players, and enter and exit reactively, in response to the meta-Darwinian trends in the economy. But they have no more loyalty to the firm than the Sociopaths. They do have a loyalty to individual people, and a commitment to finding fulfillment through work when they can, and coasting when they cannot.
This is the main annoyance I had that turned me off this theory. Not playing a game may be technically "losing" the game, but empathizing that part gives the game undue importance in the big picture, instead of looking for what actually is important.
Not only that; but also, by virtue of the "promo pool" being the "losers" in this theory, it subclasses them without saying so (into at least three types - losers that will avoid promotion at almost all cost, losers that seek promotion through "hard work" and loosers that trick their promotion through sociopathic scheming). This is basically what I meant ... at the very very minimum, the "unafflicted losers" that don't care about the game are missing.
This writing explained nearly everything I saw in the corporate world.
One thing I do disagree with is the promotion of enlightened underperformers. Those guys seemed to always end up leaving and starting their own companies.
> Those guys seemed to always end up leaving and starting their own companies
The “enlightened underperformer” path is high-risk/high-reward. Only a minority will be promoted up, and most will end up either doing a lateral move to another company or being promoted out.
Most of my good thinking is done like this. Walking around the house talking out loud to myself about a topic without knowing where it's going. Over the years I've trained myself to try and speak more and more in this mode and I find it has good outcomes. It's not how it works but to myself I call it "putting my brain in analog mode". I also try to write like this for all my first passes. I also found it works for drawing, I will start drawing a random line and see where the hand takes me. I believe there's a term for art done in this way but I can't recall it now. I think Michael Scott was on to something.
This is actually a very practical way of creating stories - set up the stage and see what the characters go about doing. The writer needs to be aware of the larger stage in order to keep the reader interested in understanding what’s actually going on and why.
I remember Stephen King writing in his book On Writing that he once deviated from this approach (Maximum Overdrive, perhaps?) and it really didn't go well. At the time, I thought creating characters, a scenario, and setting and then seeing what happened was nuts, but it's essentially how D&D works (albeit in a group setting) and that's always fun.
You are getting -- I think -- reflexively downvoted, but I genuinely think you are onto something. German grammar has strict word order rules as opposed to say Polish, where syntax is much more permissive ( for that one aspect of it ). I wonder to what extent native language changes how brain functions over the course of one's life.
Nah, spoken German can handle that just fine. Spoken German has different rules from written German (and, of course, people have quite a bit more tolerance for minor breaks of grammatical rules in ad-hoc spoken language anyway.)
To give an example: a bog standard German sentence puts the verb in second place. Everything else is fairly flexible, eg you can either put object or subject first (unlike in written English, where the place of the subject is much more constrained).
Now, when you have a subordinate clause, written German puts the finite at the end. Like "Barbara besuchte das Restaurant, weil sie Hunger hatte."
In spoken German, you can get away with "Barbara besucht das Restaurant, weil.. sie hatte ja Hunger." Especially if you pause to think at the place marked by the two dots.
> In spoken German, you can get away with "Barbara besucht das Restaurant, weil.. sie hatte ja Hunger." Especially if you pause to think at the place marked by the two dots.
Native German speaker: When I hear such a wrong placing of the finite verb in a subclause, I immediately think that the respective speaker is either uneducated (when the person is a native speaker) or (if the person is a foreign speaker) had a really bad German teacher who did not correct this mistake.
Thus: No, don't do this. Speak the sentence as you would write it.
I suspect your memory is correcting things. As an experiment, you can try to record some spontaneous speech and really carefully listen to that.
(It's also crazy how many 'uhm' and 'äh' are in there, but you barely remember them just a few seconds later.)
Compare also the tenses in written Germany vs spoken German. Spoken German essentially only has two tenses: 'Perfekt' (perfect) and 'Präsenz' (present)
Written German: Gestern kaufte ich ein. Spoken German: Gestern habe ich eingekauft. (Though there's also the variant "Gestern war ich einkaufen." which doesn't really exist in written German.)
Written German: Mergen werde ich in den Urlaub fahren. Spoken German: Morgen fahre ich in den Urlaub.
You can occasionally hear more tenses in spoken German, but these two account for the majority of uses.
> When I hear such a wrong placing of the finite verb in a subclause, I immediately think that the respective speaker is either uneducated [...]
Yes, there's a huge class component involved here; some of these rules can be used as a shibboleth for social class. Btw for something similar in English compare http://fine.me.uk/Emonds/
Yes, different people have different idiolects, but I'm glad you can see that the constructions I gave as examples are common in spoken German.
> Something that I am annoyed of.
It's easier to see these things with more distance and objectivity in a foreign language.
Eg think of all the English speakers who complain when people mix up its, it's, they're, their, there in writing and accuse them of 'muddled thinking' or at least of 'bad grammar'.
Of course, that's mostly just people being protective of class markers. If there's a villain in this story, it's English poorly 'designed' orthography.
>
It's easier to see these things with more distance and objectivity in a foreign language.
I have a similar opinion about such topics in foreign languages. It's just that I am much less knowledgeable concerning their subtle parts, so I as a non-native speaker can often not be sure whether I am right or I'm not aware of some subtle part of the respective language. Thus I am much more cautious concerning expressing such points for foreign languages.
But your argument
> Eg think of all the English speakers who complain when people mix up its, it's, they're, their, there in writing and accuse them of 'muddled thinking' or at least of 'bad grammar'.
which is about topics that you learn about in your first weeks of English lessons could indeed come from me.
So: I see things with the same "objectivity" in all languages (that I know or am learning); I'm just much more knowledgeable and thus outspoken concerning my native language.
> The Brits often assume that Germans have no sense of humour. In truth, writes comedian Stewart Lee, it's a language problem. The peculiarities of German sentence construction simply rule out the lazy set-ups that British comics rely on ...
My native language is Dutch, not German, but the word order restrictions are similar. But note that these word orders apply to subsentences: units of subject, object and verb, with additional stuff like prepositional phrases around it. Nothing at all is strict about how you combine these subsentences together into an argument: if this, then that, but maybe such, and perhaps so, thus something else — at least in informal speech.
This just reeks of bitterness. Sounds like someone trying to get to the top, failed somewhere along the way and constructed this model to funnel frustration and sorta explain away their failure.
The judgment permeates the model, apparently the only desirable position js at the top (but then you're a sociopath), second best is a checked-out loser.
To me, being a "clueless" or "over-performing loser" is preferable to a "checked-out loser" (I've been all of those at times), at minimum because the former like their job. Micheal, Andy and Dwight enjoy their job and even find some fulfillment there. Meanwhile for e. g. Stanley the work seems to be only necessary suffering. I'd rather make my work enjoyable than having to suffer 8 hours a day.
> I'd rather make my work enjoyable than having to suffer 8 hours a day.
And you're making an irrational decision because it makes you feel better. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't really contradict the essence of the article. If you look at work from the economic point of view, it's just an economic transaction, we are selling our time for money. Selling more of my time for more money or selling less of it for the same money are both rational things to do, selling more time and effort for the same money is not very rational.
I agree with the parent poster, the author sounds very bitter. Might not be true, they might be trying at humour and I haven't got it.
But I think doing the minimum you can get away with is playing with fire.
Your colleagues will resent you. You're also sending a signal to everyone that will be remembered. Maybe a colleague will start a business or move to another place one day. Are they going to employ the minimum effort person they used to work with? No.
Even just viewing a job purely as an economic transaction is short-sighted. You are at least making social transactions, and likely also meaning transactions.
Hell, even a commute to work where you're spending time, gas, and risk on the road can serve as a quiet time to process and integrate life's experiences.
Why would they? We're all adults and all more or less understand the rules of the game. And in rare cases in my career when the company culture was all about working long hours and living at work, I just tend not to stick in such places for long
It depends where you draw the line of "enough to get by". There are two cases: case A is where the expectations exceed what you're really being paid for, i.e. those cases you mention where the company culture is long hours. This isn't what I'm on about, but for completeness, these places are awful to work at and I definitely agree escaping them is the most rational thing to do.
Case B is different. Case B is where you work somewhere with reasonable work-life balance, but where you have a colleague who persistently under-performs. They won't do the essential documentation, follow the process correctly and they will quite happily sit through meetings and not volunteer a solution they know the answer to unless explicitly asked in just the right way and they happen to feel like it that day. This can take a few different forms - my list is not exclusive but it boils down to "quiet quitting" - but, as you say we are all adults, and we know who these people are.
> And you're making an irrational decision because it makes you feel better.
By the same approach, it's irrational to provide anything more than the bare minimum to my kids to not get social services on my back. Doing any volunteering is irrational, contributing to charities is irrational. In all of these examples, you will also find other parties (financially) benefitting from my "stupidity". If your worldview is constrained to a cynical Homo Oeconomicus, that is.
Let's make a model example: I work in a dead-end job. Prospects of advancement or significant pay raise is small, no matter the performance. I have two options:
* checked-out loser - do the bare minimum to not get fired. I'm not producing a lot of value to the executives. I don't see meaning in the job, no fulfillment, I need to slog through the 8-hour days.
* over-performing loser - I try to find meaning and enjoyment in the work I do. My productivity grows (for the same pay), but you know, doing things well is actually kinda enjoyable, and I become to like my work, even see some fulfillment. Sometimes I even identify a bit with my job, and I'm willing to work some overtime to e.g. finish a project on time.
The crazy thing is to say that the former is more "rational" than the "latter". Your first instinct is to look for places where I might accidentally create too much value for some other parties and cut that out even if I'm hurt (subjectively, not financially) in the process. My first instinct is to ask - which one is better for me and the people I like? If someone else benefits too, that's very secondary for me.
> The Losers are not social losers (as in the opposite of “cool”), but people who have struck bad bargains economically – giving up capitalist striving for steady paychecks.
Both Michael and Dwight are excellent salesmen, but both struck bad (financial) deals for a steady paycheck.
If you've been a loser in previous jobs you gave up much better money for the benefit of executive and shareholders.
> Both Michael and Dwight are excellent salesmen, but both struck bad (financial) deals for a steady paycheck.
This model suggests that the only way you can strike a good financial deal is to be an executive (for which you need to be a sociopath). It's a circular proof by definition.
> If you've been a loser in previous jobs you gave up much better money for the benefit of executive and shareholders.
Did I? This model just assumes it without bothering to substantiate it. There's no accepted way to calculate value one is producing in an organization. How much value is an HR person, logistics worker, production worker really producing?
This model isn't concerned with value produced for the company, but value produced for the employee, and the only relevant metrics in that regard are profit and power. To do anything less than ruthlessly maximize for both makes you a loser in capitalist terms because that's the game of capitalism and you're choosing not to play. To believe in ideals other than profit and power makes you clueless, because those ideals are just levers of control meant to keep the losers in line and you can't see it. To be capable of playing the game and winning requires a sociopathic personality who understands the nature of capitalism and the true purpose of any corporation (amassing wealth and power) and is willing and able exploit both the losers and the clueless.
In any case doesn't actually matter what the company actually does.
The key ingredients of successful memetic corporate organizational theory are cynicism, detachment and disparagement. By describing executives as sociopaths and the middle management as losers this article allows the reader to feel superior to those alongside, above, and below them in the org chart, while the generally cynical tone allows the reader to feel aloof and acts to enhance the already established sense of superiority. Finally the article is written from the point of view of an external observer allowing the reader to imagine themselves as separate and somehow external to the organisation rather than a part of it. This explains why people love to post it to hacker news.
To an extent, sure, there is definitely an element of that. It certainly is interesting that it ends up on HN as often as it does though tbh until now I assumed it had more to do with the theory of office that managed to capture a plausible explanation why "The Office" felt as close to the real thing than most of us felt comfortable with.
edit: Just the explanation of 'stakes' made me realize that ribbonfarm was onto something there.
The Office is triggering to me. Not as much the UK version, but the American one (a lot of Brazilian companies cargo-cult American ones) rings too many bells.
The article is rife with references to a mediocre tv show, but it doesn’t contain a single example of the principle as applied to a firm. The author is an expert in something, but it isn’t business.
(I know that Scott Adams got chastised for some views/tweets/whatever and I don't care)
Now, to the cartoons. I was introduced to them back in 2000 or 2001 by a colleague. We both loved the Monty Pythons, so we had that in common to begin with. Once I read the first few strips, I got hooked. I starting 'seeing' these chars to my colleagues (and to myself).
Dilbert has taught me A LOT about psychology and operating in large corporations. My all-time favorite cartoon is (and will most likely forever be):
https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1998-04-10
Late stage Scott Adams has some pretty icky views, but that doesn’t change the fact that he had some spot on insights about modern office culture. “Spot on” may not be a strong enough term - “timeless” may be a more appropriate one.
My wife, a trained clinical psychologist, rebooted her career into corporate consulting. After her first assignment, she came back and all she had to say was “I didn’t know. I thought it was a joke. It’s all true. Dilbert is true”.
As much as I love Dilbert, I'd have preferred if it had ended around 2016-ish. The later Dilberts may have been "timeless" (in the sense that the belief system where minorities are out to get you and kindness is a sin is over a hundred years old), but they certainly weren't "spot on".
Some of them had valid points about how corporate "inclusivity" is often nothing of the sort – a trend dating back to the US civil rights era (see: Letter from Birmingham Jail), which I expect to continue for a hundred years yet – but surrounded by panels and panels of the characters smirking at each other about woke liberal madness as fantastical caricatures play out in front of them, that insight was… somewhat obscured.
Earlier Dilbert, though? Many of the stories were sent in by readers and fans, but wow did Scott Adams adapt them well to the comic medium. It's a real shame how he ended up, and I hope he gets better soon.
I love The Office (UK version). It is one of my all time favorites, and crudely enough, after so many years of being a fan, I got a taste of what having David Brent as a boss is like... My Boss is so much like Gervais' character, that it is almost like God is taking a piss on me.
I absolutely hate my current work environment, and it is all fueled by the archetype of boss caricatured in The Office. It is real, then again, where else would they find so much comedy gold? it had to come from real life...
Not the person you asked but I can give you my reasons:
1. Job market being overly picky makes it hard to jump ship, especially if you're early-mid level
2. There's a general notion that "everywhere's the same deal" so people just learn to cope with it
3. "Golden handcuffs" - compensation so good you're willing to tolerate the downsides.
Market is WILD! I had a super good interview just 2 days ago, just to get a "sorry, maybe we'll call you later". I guess my stack is too crap. No one seems to, really, be hiring.
---- edit
Also, I am making good money, and I can do my job with my hands tied behind my back...
> Also, I am making good money, and I can do my job with my hands tied behind my back...
Some unsolicited advice from the internet: take some time to learn a skill or decorate your house or something. If you have slack in your schedule and can't see a way to utilise it at work towards a promotion, then maybe investing in things outside of work might be fun?
Organizations have adopted clear Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies stating that you need to be a certain oppressed race and gender to get ahead regardless of other qualifications. So if you are an Asian or white male, you need not apply.
this was an insanely entertaining and informative read that gave me (a corporate outsider) a massive learning on the psychology of these orgs. It felt like I
m reading a very informative management book but using pop culture analogies I can follow, thank you so much for the time to put it and looking forward to pt2 about Jim.
Also on another note, are startup founders then in that realm sociopaths or the clueless (with the vcs then being the sopciopaths, employees the ls etc.)? asking for a friend.
I read this a decade ago, and really didn't want to believe it. Surely this is just a joke, riffing on the office. But no, a lot of CEO's are psychopaths, and this has held up with test of time.
> Today, any time an organization grows too brittle, bureaucratic and disconnected from reality, it is simply killed, torn apart and cannibalized, rather than reformed.
I actually think the overall argument of the essay makes more sense when you realize the above comment actually isn't true for the large majority of organizations. Universities, government agencies, big tech monopolies, public sector unions, complacent companies in industries that haven't changed in 50 years, etc. Most sectors of the economy just don't experience that much competitive pressure, and that's why there are so many zombie institutions, whose activities resemble a kind of mindless shambling rather than any kind of rational constructive motion.
He did:
> Universities, government agencies, big tech monopolies, public sector unions, complacent companies in industries that haven't changed in 50 years
so: Harvard, FDA, Google, American Postal Workers Union, State Farm. Also banks, I would say.
That often doesn't seem to be a result of competitive pressure, but of hubris. I think in many of those cases, in the framework set out by the article, the sociopaths would still be in charge of the company.
> often doesn't seem to be a result of competitive pressure, but of hubris
Column A / Column B. If hubris is the root, the less hubristic competitor takes it over on failure. If competition causes excessive risk taking, the better-managed bank wins. The system really only loses when competitive pressure causes everyone to lower their guard, which happens, which is why banking has to be tightly regulated. (And this is true with or without fractional reserves.)
Boeing? Id look at old school defense and enterprise b2b corps. In a lot of cases they sell out of date products and if they somehow lost all blueprints / source code they probably wouldn’t be able to even reproduce it because no one there even knows how it works
From the outside organisations appear functional and like they mostly have it together. When you are sitting inside, practically every organisation and particularly those at scale, feels like a zombie.
If you look at the composition and charters of these old “institutions” like governments, universities etc… the scope and function, the amount of resources put towards them etc… is very much not static.
In fact, they are exceptionally different than they were at their founding, and this is specifically true for universities with how they were funded at the beginning versus how they are funded now as well as what their role in the social organization of society is
So this concept that there are these big monolithic things - by function of simply not changing names - haven’t changed, is silly at best
Bottom line, all of these institutions have been captured by moneyed interests and that’s the cycle
Public goods get privatized by dominating financiers and used to benefit the in group they serve while passing all externalities to the out group
Aka “capitalism” - and yes, this applies to the Soviet Union perfectly because the Bolshevik coopted all of the land in Soviet territories on behalf of the bosheviks and had nothing to do with individual labor power - so please save your communist complaints for somebody who is promoting communism because that’s not me
My brother is an executive at a small private college, where he graduated from and has worked most of his adult life, and in the last two decades it’s leadership, overarching vision and identity, and strategies for securing enrollments have gone through a few fairly major shifts in response to changing economic, political, and social pressures. It has had to be exceptionally agile and adaptable to keep itself relevant and competitive. I think the parent post has a point with regards to the risks of a sclerotic bureaucracy, but the level of no-effort confidence in one’s own survival I think is vanishingly rare in all but the most entrenched institutions.
are you a sociopath because the inner struggles of your food delivery guy don't register to you, or have you just instrumentalized someone to achieve an end and you just relate with a transactional distance? no matter what you think you do, to someone you work for, you are the food delivery guy represented by a little dot whose progress to your destination someone is watching on their screen. maybe they're even racing you against another one, but it doesn't matter.
I don' think the gervais principle enlightens anymore. I remember thinking it was amazing to see my suspicions laid out like this, but with some time and distance I don't know that I would share it with someone now. why demoralize them.
I can see how it's demeaning and feels like punishment to take orders or show deference to someone who lacks heroic qualities, and really we should make a better class of managers, but it is the duty of all prisoners to escape, and they probably won't miss you anyway. there's an aspect of humility that comes from simple competence where all work is "we make a thing here so our families can eat," and if you're on an existential quest for belonging, you're probably not going to provide the value to others that yields the rewards of the business.
Sure, money and power flows to some of the least interesting people doing the dullest things, but the dinner party they're boring at isn't the reconciliation or taking account of their course through life either. they do the thing and then eat at drive thrus and watch some tv. meaning for them comes from somewhere else. articles raging against them are dumb and misleading. trying to grind out meaning from every experience is exhausting and ephemeral because meaning is beautiful, but it's rarely shared and doesn't persist.
this life is only what we actually do, so do something different.
This is incredibly insightful - I've never analyzed people in organizations in this way, except "people who can do the work" and "others who ride on their coattails".
I think there are some insightful gems in there, but it doesn't add up to a grand unified theory of management.
One company I worked at was ran by a narcissist, who promoted anyone who sucked up to him - the harder the suck, the higher the office. Not because they were underachieving losers or whatnot. And as a result most people he promoted were the Clueless, who genuinely sucked up the nonsense he spewed. The company was, somehow, very successful.
Anther company was all sociopath going at 100 mph flat out, hoping to make enough dosh before it all explodes. No losers or clueless on board beyond probation.
Another had a great guy at the top, who was seriously nice, competent at the subject matter, and fair and concerned with the well-being of his people, we're all in this together etc. If anything, he was the Clueless. His lieutenants in turn were incompetent sociopaths, busy with keeping him happy while flailing their arms to appear like they are trying to control the chaos, all the time sucking at the teat of the Really Nice CEO. He didn't promote them because they were sociopath, but he promoted them for some reason and didn't have the heart to fire them.
As much as I love the cynicism, I think reality is more complicated. But for sure, being a psycho and not actually caring about the work or people is a great boost to a successful career.
"The Office" analogies are a bit convoluted to me as well. Jim's climbing the greasy pole of company management isn't, to me, embracing Sociopathy, but if anything, trying to make his Loser life more comfortable. Swallow a few stupid company slogans, toe a line, and in return have less work and more money. Not really his opening up to screwing other people or relentlessly jumping ship to a higher position with the competitors.
189 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 244 ms ] threadThose who know base-2 numerals and those who don't.
Gosh that's such an INFJ thing to say!
/s[ubtle]
EDIT: also an hour long group meeting after the interviews to be presented your collective results?
It’s not mysterious, mystical, or claiming to be science- it’s just a very simple set of arbitrary categories to give you a different perspective on yourself, and point you in a direction of dealing with things you would otherwise avoid because it’s uncomfortable to think about. For example if you see yourself as “rational” and reject “emotional” thinking, it can be helpful to actually explore your emotional side rather than push it away.
The concept itself is a useful and simple thing, but is mostly misunderstood and misused… I don’t see how an employer testing employees would be useful.
As someone who has read Carl Jungs books, but has not encountered it in the workplace, it annoys me to see people talking derisively about it from a place of misunderstanding.
Much like an IQ test, or a having or not a PhD, it doesn’t hold much predictive power.
The valuable result is the extreme opposite of your result- it is a therapy or personal development tool that directs you to explore and understand parts of yourself you reject or disapprove of (your “shadow”).
It simply quantifies something obvious that you already know: how you consciously see yourself- in a way that guides you to explore aspects of yourself that you otherwise would choose to avoid because it’s difficult and possibly even painful to do so.
What it measures is actually pretty banal and obvious if you are familiar with Jungian archetypes- one can easily guess the result for yourself and other people without using the test.
Look, I too have read Jung and agree with what you're saying here, but this is emphatically NOT how MBTI tends to be used in corporate settings, which is what everyone else in this thread is talking about.
Again, astrology claims to predict the future based on nonsense. MTBI makes no such claims, it predicts nothing, and it’s chosen dimensions are very transparently arbitrary value judgements, among limitless possible archetypes that one could choose.
Suppose you take a random sample of adult humans and sort them by height. What you’ll see is a bimodal distribution which reflects the fact that there are actually two distinct populations represented in the sample: men and women. The sexes can be considered types and you will get reasonably accurate results for predicting height from sex and vice versa.
However, if you instead take a sample of only men and sort them by height you will see a unimodal distribution. If you then try to split this sample into two types above and below the mean, you will find that it doesn’t tell you anything!
This is what I mean when I say MBTI astrology. The archetypes are meaningless! Someone who is at 51% on the extroversion scale will get labeled an Extrovert and someone at 49% will get labeled an Introvert, but in practice these two are virtually indistinguishable and fall squarely within the margin of error. Since the distribution is unimodal the majority of the population clusters around the means, exactly what you would expect to find with the hypothesis that personality archetypes do not exist.
Archetypes are fairly arbitrary concepts that isolate individual aspects among thousands that could potentially explain personality traits- they don’t claim to exist in real people.
It is critical to realize that in the dimensions on MBTI everyone is actually both, but some people strongly identify with one and reject or despise the part of themselves that represents the other.
It is indeed a totally arbitrary choice, and a value judgement. These are ones that Carl Jung thought particularly important based on his philosophy of personal development, and experience as a clinical psychologist. Of the ones Jung talked about MBTI further selected an even more limited set.
Personally, I think it is more useful to skip the MTBI and just use Jungs original text.
I went through mbti at a workplace and it was used to give us an understanding of our co-workers.
Your point that it's a self assessment and thus only "how you see yourself" and not.. y'know, how you actually behave, is in retrospect "no shit" but I missed this crucial point.
It kind of changes every conversation with anyone I've ever had about our result.
The way it relates to others is more subtle than that:
Say someone is strongly extroverted and sees introversion as a negative thing… and dislikes and disapproves of their more introverted co-workers. If they come to explore, understand, and accept their own introverted aspects it will also take the steam out of their dislike for others who show those traits.
The history section of the Wikipedia page reads like an awful lot of effort went into making it seem scientific.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers–Briggs_Type_Indicator
This part also seems like it was intended to be predictive:
>Briggs and Myers began creating their indicator during World War II (1939–1945)[7] in the belief that a knowledge of personality preferences would help women entering the industrial workforce for the first time to identify the sorts of war-time jobs that would be the "most comfortable and effective" for them
It was at one point used as a psychology research tool, but it does not work well for e.g. predicting mental health outcome differences in different groups of people, and has been superseded by things like the Big Five personality traits, which are slightly better but also probably not that useful. MBTI is probably inappropriate and useless in the workplace as other people on here are complaining about.
Nowadays, I don't think it is appropriate to use it for anything except "for fun" or as a simplified tool for making sense of and using some of Carl Jungs ideas and techniques.
Carl Jung himself has had a lot of pushback in modern times for not using scientific methodology, and having ideas and methods that aren't even testable with modern scientific methods. I've heard people even say he "set psychology back 50 years with pseudoscience."
I disagree with that, because his methods and ideas work very well for myself and a lot of people. I think he was way ahead of his time in finding "hacks" that work to improve mental health, and overcome psychological challenges... however his ideas and methods were so far ahead of his time it will be a very long time still before they could potentially be connected to any sort of mechanistic or biological psychology, or neuroscience. They should probably be regarded more as spiritual or psychotherapy tools, in the same vein as things like meditation- but still not totally worthless nonsense like astrology.
Whether or not that's what it is in the books it's described in or elsewhere is immaterial to me.
At the beginning I was a high-perfoming loser. Then I realized how things work, and since then I do bare minimum. I wish I could be a sociopath, but I don't have the brains nor the lack of morals to do so. I passionately hate the clueless ones because they stand against everything I believe in. My dream is to save enough money not to have to take part in this circus anymore.
You don’t really need to be a clinical sociopath for that - you need to know enough to employ the characteristics in order to reach your own goal, which might not be a selfish one at all.
It’s a fun sport if you think about it that way.
Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves."
You can't really grow in business without exploitation.
Whether that's using "contractors" to deliver your packages, using monopoly to slurp people's data, sourcing minerals from african blood mines or using asian sweatshops to build your phones and clothes.
To me, corporate life has always been a race to see who gets exploited the most and who the least.
Sociopaths don't care about exploiting others. I would say the same for most people. We can usually rationalize the worst kind of things to ourselves when it suits us.
Buying an iPhone, not knowing that it was built using Chinese (semi-)slave labour is not quite the same as a manager who promotes easily exploitable (loser) over-achievers and uses "devide and conquer" on the rest of his underlings to make himself feel safe and comfy. All in the same office that everybody goes to every day. For decades.
The default state of humanity for thousands of years has been a lot of people living in mud houses and working all day to do subsistence farming and tending to livestock. Doesn’t sound like a great life, but they aren’t being “exploited” there either. It’s just people versus Mother Nature. However, many would gladly take 9-5 jobs in an air conditioned building instead, and live in nicer homes with utilities. It’s voluntary labor.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296 (63 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33298158 (149 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25486869 (90 comments)
And a lot more which were less popular: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=gervais%20principle%20the%20of...
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/04/14/the-gervais-principle-...
It can be unwise to start a business and lose all your money which does happen to people.
This is also an “average” company set in a specific culture. Outliers exist and different cultures will also reflect in the power dynamics.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-principle-...
How do you keep a group of chimps who all have different interests, personalities, needs, beliefs, values, upbringings, culture, religion, language, history etc etc in sync?
And these days groups grow quite large quite fast.
Historically, if you take rewards, bribery, force, domination and manipulation out of the story, the babblers/non threatening people can bridge differences as groups grow larger and larger in size.
No solution is perfect, cause its quite an unnatural thing for groups to form around anything. Given all the differences.
Just try to work with your entire extended family on a project, and watch what kind of strange rituals, stories and behaviors keep the group from breaking apart.
He is also quite fond of using poorly defined (in this context) words like "dialectical" and "illegibility" that makes the reader doubt whether he's actually full of shit or that he is actually so brilliant that the reader simply doesn't comprehend him.
I do not agree with his idea of promotion of overachievers into middle management and many other things. Some of his points are self-contradictory.
There are many variations on the main principle like Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
(None of this applies applies to startups that are founded by actual programmers.)
That is a big "if". It works on the family level, but in the real world babbling is coupled with dominance, coercion, blackmail, exploitation etc.
It is easy to see in any average company that no one believes the babbler but is forced to listen to them and applaud.
not everyone needs to be in a group.
not everyone in a group needs to be in sync with interests AND personalities AND needs AND beliefs AND...
but I see the paradox here: we need to believe the above is true to live happier and more meaningfully
Not everyone is in a civilisation. Few people in a civilisation would rather be in e.g. Sudan or Ethiopia.
Lower the sizes of groups and increase async communication, and the burden/overhead of management goes down. Groups small enough can manage themselves, in fact.
Modern management theory says you put the one that throws the most shit and chimps the loudest in charge; give them 90% of the banannas and tell all the others they should be more like that one if they want nice things.
Humans aren't chimps. Our closest animal relative is the Bonobo, and the corporate world would be a much more interesting place if we solved our conflicts the way they do: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bonobo-sex-and-so...
It doesn’t make any sense at all to me as an outsider.
It might make perfect sense to an insider, as an expression that says something obvious in the lingo.
In between there are statements which require some lingo, but also present a novel argument. It might be one of these. But it very short. So, I conclude that it must be either very trite and surface level, or extremely clever (how far from the definitions can one get in once sentence? Not far unless they are very good)
What do you think a leader’s job is?
You mean: to influence them?
The Dumb Ape Hypothesis: we are at our most dumb when declaring others so.
People who have a reason to form a group will cooperate/collaborate best when they have some confidence in one another. People share ideas, projects, and skills, and "read" one another and form bonds. This is a social system. It could be a brief association or have a long duration. It could have a formal context, such as a business or a governmental entity.
Social interactions build people's confidence and sense of value in the group, in the individuals, and the work at hand. The challenge grows exponentially as the population of the group scales. Communication is hard.
An individual's discernment and connectedness (a confidence/value score) within the group will reflect potential for success. Communication matters.
The human plot twist is that there can be dysfunctional social systems as well as dysfunctional individuals.
For a very serious discussion, the great writer Primo Levi published his reflections on his harrowing experiences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primo_Levi
This related article about social systems and connectedness was also recently discussed on HN with much interest: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-upstream-cause-of-the-youth...
Your initial point is the simplest explanation for how groups of people self-organise... and meta-organise.
I realise that I went far in explaining and gave far more than I will receive in this case.
But then again, you responded and that's a connection. ^_^
Management has to collect information, disseminate information, coordinate, make decisions and propagate them.
All of that requires a lot of communication, aka talking.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41215788
You want someone who is a naturally fluent speaker, strongly outspoken, who holds strong opinions, and wants to focus on processes and long-term roadmaps and so on. All the stuff a dilligent IC disdains.
One person's 'all talk' is another person's 'all walk'.
> never wanted to take on advice, always fought on really shady grounds, but he fought everything, almost like it was either his idea of what was on-point or nothing
Yes, you can be productive through communication, but if that's the kind of "talk" you want in your C-suite then I don't want to work in any company where you have influence.
It's almost like communicating effectively requires detailed knowledge of the real world, knowledge most often and most effectively gained by... doing things.
This simple process is from an emergent behavior of rational actors acting in accordance to the incentives of the structure. Unlike other theories it does not necessitate irrational actors, morons, or sociopaths. Where you have people you have politics so it almost always occurs just at different speeds, hence the pervasiveness and the inevitability of the cycle of collapse and rebirth. It appears to me that only a highly competent king (someone whose position cannot be threatened by a peer) can stop this process and maybe reverse it.
You might be inverting cause and effect.
While I get that "as such", and therefore can follow a classification sociopath/clueless/loser, what is always missing in such models are the people who don't care to play. Those who go to the casino for free food and drinks in order to watch the show, but not to take a stake of their own. Are they "losers" because if you don't bet you can't win ? All of those who play, though, actually want these spectators - after all, winning if there's noone looking, is that a win?
Personally, I think you have this "fourth column" in all organisations. They take their paycheck and deliver something of what's asked for, but else don't care; what they see as "success" is not related to organisational structure or behaviour at all. With all the focus on "success" and "promotion" (or, opposite, "losers"), I wonder how much the theorists are missing. The non-voters can be the majority, you know ...
(agree - looks like reality is more complex)
One thing I do disagree with is the promotion of enlightened underperformers. Those guys seemed to always end up leaving and starting their own companies.
The “enlightened underperformer” path is high-risk/high-reward. Only a minority will be promoted up, and most will end up either doing a lateral move to another company or being promoted out.
— Michael Scott, the first LLM.
To give an example: a bog standard German sentence puts the verb in second place. Everything else is fairly flexible, eg you can either put object or subject first (unlike in written English, where the place of the subject is much more constrained).
Now, when you have a subordinate clause, written German puts the finite at the end. Like "Barbara besuchte das Restaurant, weil sie Hunger hatte."
In spoken German, you can get away with "Barbara besucht das Restaurant, weil.. sie hatte ja Hunger." Especially if you pause to think at the place marked by the two dots.
Native German speaker: When I hear such a wrong placing of the finite verb in a subclause, I immediately think that the respective speaker is either uneducated (when the person is a native speaker) or (if the person is a foreign speaker) had a really bad German teacher who did not correct this mistake.
Thus: No, don't do this. Speak the sentence as you would write it.
(It's also crazy how many 'uhm' and 'äh' are in there, but you barely remember them just a few seconds later.)
Compare also the tenses in written Germany vs spoken German. Spoken German essentially only has two tenses: 'Perfekt' (perfect) and 'Präsenz' (present)
Written German: Gestern kaufte ich ein. Spoken German: Gestern habe ich eingekauft. (Though there's also the variant "Gestern war ich einkaufen." which doesn't really exist in written German.)
Written German: Mergen werde ich in den Urlaub fahren. Spoken German: Morgen fahre ich in den Urlaub.
You can occasionally hear more tenses in spoken German, but these two account for the majority of uses.
> When I hear such a wrong placing of the finite verb in a subclause, I immediately think that the respective speaker is either uneducated [...]
Yes, there's a huge class component involved here; some of these rules can be used as a shibboleth for social class. Btw for something similar in English compare http://fine.me.uk/Emonds/
> Spoken German essentially only has two tenses: 'Perfekt' (perfect) and 'Präsenz' (present)
I typically indeed use Präteritum consciously in spoken German.
> Written German: Mergen werde ich in den Urlaub fahren. Spoken German: Morgen fahre ich in den Urlaub.
Something that I am annoyed of.
> Something that I am annoyed of.
It's easier to see these things with more distance and objectivity in a foreign language.
Eg think of all the English speakers who complain when people mix up its, it's, they're, their, there in writing and accuse them of 'muddled thinking' or at least of 'bad grammar'.
Of course, that's mostly just people being protective of class markers. If there's a villain in this story, it's English poorly 'designed' orthography.
Please do have a look at the Emonds paper at http://fine.me.uk/Emonds/ It's a great read!
I have a similar opinion about such topics in foreign languages. It's just that I am much less knowledgeable concerning their subtle parts, so I as a non-native speaker can often not be sure whether I am right or I'm not aware of some subtle part of the respective language. Thus I am much more cautious concerning expressing such points for foreign languages.
But your argument
> Eg think of all the English speakers who complain when people mix up its, it's, they're, their, there in writing and accuse them of 'muddled thinking' or at least of 'bad grammar'.
which is about topics that you learn about in your first weeks of English lessons could indeed come from me.
So: I see things with the same "objectivity" in all languages (that I know or am learning); I'm just much more knowledgeable and thus outspoken concerning my native language.
There's a difference between prescriptivism and descriptivism. Languages are something people, not what grammarians make up in their books.
Please do have a look at the Emonds paper. It's interesting, I promise.
> The Brits often assume that Germans have no sense of humour. In truth, writes comedian Stewart Lee, it's a language problem. The peculiarities of German sentence construction simply rule out the lazy set-ups that British comics rely on ...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/may/23/germany.featur...
Even ranker-- doesn't German have the same kinds of filibuster phrases as English? Stuff like this:
"Look,"
"The point is this--"
"I think what the average American wants is..."
"If I've said it once I've said it a thousands times--"
There's a character Fred Armisen did on SNL news that eats the entire segment with these phrases. I'm sure the same can be done in German.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealist_automatism
The judgment permeates the model, apparently the only desirable position js at the top (but then you're a sociopath), second best is a checked-out loser.
To me, being a "clueless" or "over-performing loser" is preferable to a "checked-out loser" (I've been all of those at times), at minimum because the former like their job. Micheal, Andy and Dwight enjoy their job and even find some fulfillment there. Meanwhile for e. g. Stanley the work seems to be only necessary suffering. I'd rather make my work enjoyable than having to suffer 8 hours a day.
And you're making an irrational decision because it makes you feel better. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't really contradict the essence of the article. If you look at work from the economic point of view, it's just an economic transaction, we are selling our time for money. Selling more of my time for more money or selling less of it for the same money are both rational things to do, selling more time and effort for the same money is not very rational.
But I think doing the minimum you can get away with is playing with fire.
Your colleagues will resent you. You're also sending a signal to everyone that will be remembered. Maybe a colleague will start a business or move to another place one day. Are they going to employ the minimum effort person they used to work with? No.
Hell, even a commute to work where you're spending time, gas, and risk on the road can serve as a quiet time to process and integrate life's experiences.
Why would they? We're all adults and all more or less understand the rules of the game. And in rare cases in my career when the company culture was all about working long hours and living at work, I just tend not to stick in such places for long
Case B is different. Case B is where you work somewhere with reasonable work-life balance, but where you have a colleague who persistently under-performs. They won't do the essential documentation, follow the process correctly and they will quite happily sit through meetings and not volunteer a solution they know the answer to unless explicitly asked in just the right way and they happen to feel like it that day. This can take a few different forms - my list is not exclusive but it boils down to "quiet quitting" - but, as you say we are all adults, and we know who these people are.
By the same approach, it's irrational to provide anything more than the bare minimum to my kids to not get social services on my back. Doing any volunteering is irrational, contributing to charities is irrational. In all of these examples, you will also find other parties (financially) benefitting from my "stupidity". If your worldview is constrained to a cynical Homo Oeconomicus, that is.
Let's make a model example: I work in a dead-end job. Prospects of advancement or significant pay raise is small, no matter the performance. I have two options:
* checked-out loser - do the bare minimum to not get fired. I'm not producing a lot of value to the executives. I don't see meaning in the job, no fulfillment, I need to slog through the 8-hour days.
* over-performing loser - I try to find meaning and enjoyment in the work I do. My productivity grows (for the same pay), but you know, doing things well is actually kinda enjoyable, and I become to like my work, even see some fulfillment. Sometimes I even identify a bit with my job, and I'm willing to work some overtime to e.g. finish a project on time.
The crazy thing is to say that the former is more "rational" than the "latter". Your first instinct is to look for places where I might accidentally create too much value for some other parties and cut that out even if I'm hurt (subjectively, not financially) in the process. My first instinct is to ask - which one is better for me and the people I like? If someone else benefits too, that's very secondary for me.
Both Michael and Dwight are excellent salesmen, but both struck bad (financial) deals for a steady paycheck.
If you've been a loser in previous jobs you gave up much better money for the benefit of executive and shareholders.
This model suggests that the only way you can strike a good financial deal is to be an executive (for which you need to be a sociopath). It's a circular proof by definition.
> If you've been a loser in previous jobs you gave up much better money for the benefit of executive and shareholders.
Did I? This model just assumes it without bothering to substantiate it. There's no accepted way to calculate value one is producing in an organization. How much value is an HR person, logistics worker, production worker really producing?
In any case doesn't actually matter what the company actually does.
edit: Just the explanation of 'stakes' made me realize that ribbonfarm was onto something there.
Also, Silicon Valley has triggering moments.
(I know that Scott Adams got chastised for some views/tweets/whatever and I don't care)
Now, to the cartoons. I was introduced to them back in 2000 or 2001 by a colleague. We both loved the Monty Pythons, so we had that in common to begin with. Once I read the first few strips, I got hooked. I starting 'seeing' these chars to my colleagues (and to myself).
Dilbert has taught me A LOT about psychology and operating in large corporations. My all-time favorite cartoon is (and will most likely forever be): https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1998-04-10
Some of them had valid points about how corporate "inclusivity" is often nothing of the sort – a trend dating back to the US civil rights era (see: Letter from Birmingham Jail), which I expect to continue for a hundred years yet – but surrounded by panels and panels of the characters smirking at each other about woke liberal madness as fantastical caricatures play out in front of them, that insight was… somewhat obscured.
Earlier Dilbert, though? Many of the stories were sent in by readers and fans, but wow did Scott Adams adapt them well to the comic medium. It's a real shame how he ended up, and I hope he gets better soon.
I absolutely hate my current work environment, and it is all fueled by the archetype of boss caricatured in The Office. It is real, then again, where else would they find so much comedy gold? it had to come from real life...
1. Job market being overly picky makes it hard to jump ship, especially if you're early-mid level 2. There's a general notion that "everywhere's the same deal" so people just learn to cope with it 3. "Golden handcuffs" - compensation so good you're willing to tolerate the downsides.
Some unsolicited advice from the internet: take some time to learn a skill or decorate your house or something. If you have slack in your schedule and can't see a way to utilise it at work towards a promotion, then maybe investing in things outside of work might be fun?
Also on another note, are startup founders then in that realm sociopaths or the clueless (with the vcs then being the sopciopaths, employees the ls etc.)? asking for a friend.
I actually think the overall argument of the essay makes more sense when you realize the above comment actually isn't true for the large majority of organizations. Universities, government agencies, big tech monopolies, public sector unions, complacent companies in industries that haven't changed in 50 years, etc. Most sectors of the economy just don't experience that much competitive pressure, and that's why there are so many zombie institutions, whose activities resemble a kind of mindless shambling rather than any kind of rational constructive motion.
so: Harvard, FDA, Google, American Postal Workers Union, State Farm. Also banks, I would say.
Banks get “torn apart and cannibalized” more frequently than industrials.
Column A / Column B. If hubris is the root, the less hubristic competitor takes it over on failure. If competition causes excessive risk taking, the better-managed bank wins. The system really only loses when competitive pressure causes everyone to lower their guard, which happens, which is why banking has to be tightly regulated. (And this is true with or without fractional reserves.)
If you look at the composition and charters of these old “institutions” like governments, universities etc… the scope and function, the amount of resources put towards them etc… is very much not static.
In fact, they are exceptionally different than they were at their founding, and this is specifically true for universities with how they were funded at the beginning versus how they are funded now as well as what their role in the social organization of society is
So this concept that there are these big monolithic things - by function of simply not changing names - haven’t changed, is silly at best
The Crimson even did a huge writeup of this:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/5/22/yir-college-adm...
Bottom line, all of these institutions have been captured by moneyed interests and that’s the cycle
Public goods get privatized by dominating financiers and used to benefit the in group they serve while passing all externalities to the out group
Aka “capitalism” - and yes, this applies to the Soviet Union perfectly because the Bolshevik coopted all of the land in Soviet territories on behalf of the bosheviks and had nothing to do with individual labor power - so please save your communist complaints for somebody who is promoting communism because that’s not me
I don' think the gervais principle enlightens anymore. I remember thinking it was amazing to see my suspicions laid out like this, but with some time and distance I don't know that I would share it with someone now. why demoralize them.
I can see how it's demeaning and feels like punishment to take orders or show deference to someone who lacks heroic qualities, and really we should make a better class of managers, but it is the duty of all prisoners to escape, and they probably won't miss you anyway. there's an aspect of humility that comes from simple competence where all work is "we make a thing here so our families can eat," and if you're on an existential quest for belonging, you're probably not going to provide the value to others that yields the rewards of the business.
Sure, money and power flows to some of the least interesting people doing the dullest things, but the dinner party they're boring at isn't the reconciliation or taking account of their course through life either. they do the thing and then eat at drive thrus and watch some tv. meaning for them comes from somewhere else. articles raging against them are dumb and misleading. trying to grind out meaning from every experience is exhausting and ephemeral because meaning is beautiful, but it's rarely shared and doesn't persist.
this life is only what we actually do, so do something different.
You spend most of your time with customers and so you just kind of navigate their politics without actually involving yourself.
The money can be better so it’s a better deal and you’re mostly shut out from the politics of the organisation you work for anyway.
One company I worked at was ran by a narcissist, who promoted anyone who sucked up to him - the harder the suck, the higher the office. Not because they were underachieving losers or whatnot. And as a result most people he promoted were the Clueless, who genuinely sucked up the nonsense he spewed. The company was, somehow, very successful.
Anther company was all sociopath going at 100 mph flat out, hoping to make enough dosh before it all explodes. No losers or clueless on board beyond probation.
Another had a great guy at the top, who was seriously nice, competent at the subject matter, and fair and concerned with the well-being of his people, we're all in this together etc. If anything, he was the Clueless. His lieutenants in turn were incompetent sociopaths, busy with keeping him happy while flailing their arms to appear like they are trying to control the chaos, all the time sucking at the teat of the Really Nice CEO. He didn't promote them because they were sociopath, but he promoted them for some reason and didn't have the heart to fire them.
As much as I love the cynicism, I think reality is more complicated. But for sure, being a psycho and not actually caring about the work or people is a great boost to a successful career.
"The Office" analogies are a bit convoluted to me as well. Jim's climbing the greasy pole of company management isn't, to me, embracing Sociopathy, but if anything, trying to make his Loser life more comfortable. Swallow a few stupid company slogans, toe a line, and in return have less work and more money. Not really his opening up to screwing other people or relentlessly jumping ship to a higher position with the competitors.