Take OKRs, for example. Everyone is expected to set their target goals, publicize and discuss them with others, and follow them religiously. Otherwise you send the signal that you don't like setting goals for yourself, and thus have no desire for self-improvement, which reflects poorly on your performance review. There are company-wide ceremonies about OKRs themselves; workshops, office hours and endless discussions about best ways to plan, track and meet your objectives. The amount of time and effort spent just doing this management work makes up a large portion of working hours.

Speaking of performance reviews, they're another huge waste of time. In the ever-important self-review you're expected to present proof to your higher-ups that you're not only worthy of keeping the job, but also why you deserve that 4% raise. So you better have been taking notes of your accomplishments in the past 6 months, otherwise those OKRs might come in handy. Your work would apparently be invisible to the company if there were no performance reviews, so make sure to make the best case for yourself, and to cherry-pick peers that would leave you a positive review.

The amount of theatre and politics involved in modern work culture is exhausting. I just want to get good work done, and go home.

In a 5 person company, it is easy to sit around the table and decide what needs to be done and then have everyone "get good work done and go home". In a 5,000 person company, it is not obvious what needs to be done in the first place talk less of making sure everyone knows their part in it. Should we be going after SMBs or Enterprise customers? What do we (or more importantly I) do differently based on that decision? How do we time the next campaign push to line up with the product launch?

There are thousands of decisions that need to be made and it is impossible to do that without having these formal processes that allow people to coordinate in large groups. I would argue that >60% of work involved in a large company is coordination rather than actual building, selling, marketing, whatever. The larger the company, the greater this percentage becomes.

I would love to know if anyone has found a solution to counteract this phenomenon but it seems like an immutable law based on my experience.

What's a better approach? Every single manager, up to CEO level, trusts implicitly his or her direct reports. CEO trusts and delegates with confidence to their immediate reports. They in turn do likewise. Any missed opportunities or mis-steps are an issue between 2 levels in the org, IMO.

Fundamentally it's a people, comms, co-ordination and aptitude problem, so solve it like one.

But it is a shitty tool "downwards". Suddenly you have managers insisting that a feature must be rolled out before the 31st of March, even though rolling out 2 days later will be safer.

It creates perverse incentives such as OKRs used for "individual" performance reviews when in reality, a lot of work is team/x-team/group effort. It causes ICs to play corporate games.

This still does not solve the problem that "individuals" are scapegoated for OKRs defined by someone else. I have actually seen people getting fired for not delivering on OKRs, which were ultra ambitious in the first place. The problem was not ambitious OKRs. The problem was individual consequences for team/management ambition.

> The fact that a thing can be done badly is not an argument for not doing the thing.

Sure, but this doesn't prevent discussion and bringing the failure modes to the fore. In fact, I would suggest that Gen-z and gen-alpha will be very difficult to hire and keep because they naturally understand the BS that OKRs are, having been exposed to BS games in school, college and with friends.

Remote work has largely removed the theatrical aspect of my position. This is one of the reasons I hope to never work in an office again.

https://annehelen.substack.com/p/larping-your-job

https://www.theawl.com/2015/04/are-you-just-larping-your-job...

If I work with someone (supervising or not) I know if they are working or slacking off. And no, you don't need made up metrics or to be sitting next to them for that. If you really are in the midst of people that actually get stuff done, I should add.

On somewhat of a tangent, I'm not gonna lie: it sometimes feels like everything is a big farce in tech.

We write code for useless functionalities on mostly useless products. Product managers often don't even understand/use the product and copy competitors blindly. C-suite/founders pretend they know what they're doing but copy whatever is trending at the time (Agile, OKRs, Scrum, squads, etc). Investors give out money to people that yell the right buzzwords loud enough (and/or have the right connections). The list goes on.

The only people that really work are the ones in the lower echelons answering support tickets, keeping things running, actually committing code, etc. Everyone else sits on useless meetings adding "meeting for X" in their reports. Ironically those getting things done are the most scrutinized for "LARPing" by higher ups.

Maybe I've been really unlucky in my career but I've found this to be true in every single job.

People in the lower echelons usually don't understand what their product is for, how it works, who uses it or how it fits into their company's overall business strategy. They are only capable of understanding and working with a small part of the product. Because they don't see the "big picture", they often feel unmotivated and think their job is unimportant.

People who have a higher level of understanding- people who can intelligently talk about the product with stakeholders and make high-level executive decisions- these people are rare and extremely valuable, much more so than engineers and support people.

I’m in a position of power now, and I’m constantly fighting for the idea that we should build what delivers the most value to our users. Nothing else. Any other ‘feature’ is a waste of time, effort, and money.

So I disagree. People in the trenches seem — to me at least — to have a much better grasp of the product, what it does, what it looks like, and how it’s really used. The further up you are from the trenches, the more you’re relying on reports of reports, proxy metrics, and so on; which further detach you from reality.

I agree with you here, those are valuable. But IME those are usually not the ones in positions of power.

I've met passionate developers that understand the issues of the product and not only the tech. Support folks that know exactly why and where the product falls short. Sales folks that deeply understand what the product doesn't offer and what it probably needs. The list goes on.

You said so yourself: these people are rare and even from a statistical point of view there will be way more people that understand the product down in the trenches compared to higher ups. Most of those at the top are hired because of previous prestige/success or more commonly: connections.

> People in the lower echelons usually don't understand what their product is for, how it works, who uses it or how it fits into their company's overall business strategy.

You've just described so many people at the top that I've seen first hand. VPs of X coming in, having zero understanding of the product (sometimes they never even used it) and making decisions that hurt everyone. Even the ones with previously successful products come in and it becomes apparent that success is not easily replicated. Survivorship bias is all too real. How many come in and try to copy/paste what worked in their previous company blindly only to fail upwards after the fact?

> I don't agree about the lower levels doing all the work.

If you want to see how right I am, all we have to do is examine the bus (or submarine?) scenario. If all managers vanished in a submarine today would the company stop? Now compare that to the same scenario with devs/support/infra/sales/etc. Yes, they do all the work.

One of the few issues the lack of management causes is regarding decision making. But not because folks are incapable of deciding, it's because they are powerless to do so. When they have that power, the company continues to move forward just fine - it might even thrive if you ask me.

Yet another indicator of poor (i.e. lazy) management maybe if you have to keep track of every single accomplishment yourself. How about managers keep track of the awesome things their employees do and celebrate them for it and help them improve if they're lacking.

1. It puts them in control. If they want to leave the team, they have a handy list to hand to their new manager right away.

2. They can capture details I would miss, no matter how close to the work I am. They will capture exact why that design process was hard and what it was like dealing with those 4 external teams.

3. It improves their writing and communication skills. I spend my 1:1's going through the accomplishments and working with them on how to expand and add context to items, where to add detail, and how to be concise with the results.

So far, I receive positive feedback on this. On the flipside, I don't do this for myself :)

I'm in control, I need to make my case towards a new manager and team if I want to move (basically a new interview process), and try to improve on communication and writing even though +80% (number pulled out of empirical personal experience. YMMV) of my peers want to focus on work and be happy and introvert.

The only thing "managers" have access to is info they choose not to share, or info they're told not to share, which creates an explicit vaccuum/silo of info, and increases the power imbalance. Most of the teams I've worked on have been this way. Yeah, sure... I don't have "the big picture" you created on a corp retreat with other dept managers... but why don't I have it? Because you've chosen to only share bits and pieces... "for your own good". Makes very little sense to me.

If I know you're planning on doing "functionality A" at some point, inform us now, because that very likely has an impact on decisions I'm making today. I'm far more likely to understand the impact on my own work and my team's work than you are, given that you don't actually know how to do the work (in most cases).

I've had a couple good manager-types over the years, but only a couple.

The point is not about who strictly has access to the information, it's about whose job it is to deal with it. If you started dealing with other departments asking for information and perspectives, you'd have much less time left to actually do your tasks, and you'd run into cases where they will be very reluctant or slow to give you the information because compiling it takes time and they'd rather focus on their own tasks. Or simply because they don't like you - "people problems" are also something managers have to deal with.

And it's not about "if you're planning to do something at some point, inform us now" - if the plans are concrete enough to tell you, you'll be told, and if your input is needed you will be asked, but it makes no sense if the plans still need input from 3 other departments and may change according to that or be cancelled entirely.

It's a division of labor, plain and simple. Managers have to deal with a huge amount of small tasks that involve waiting for responses from other people and acting on incomplete information. It's not easy, and you'd probably hate it if you actually tried to do it, but it's necessary for an organization to actually achieve things.

And a very incompetent one. While there is some value in what you said i.e Engineers tracking their progress and what they did. This often results in bragging. The most competent people are generally not the best braggers. The best braggers often make a career out of it.

If I run a company and i had a manager like you, I would fire you. I really mean it.

Whatever your opinion is, it was not worded in a productive way.

2. Why do you need this details? Why you did not recieve this details in the firts place?

3. As any other writing. If you believe that this skills should be improved then why not use some training? And again, if person writing skills is already good then its ok to skip it then?

> So far, I receive positive feedback on this.

Positive honest feedback from subordinate? Did you provide any alternative they can choose?

2. I need the details because I don't look over the shoulders of my engineers. I always evaluate the end product and provide support when asked. But if a design doc required an engineer to go escalate and issue with another teams director, how would I know that? Anytime they show initiative, by definition it would be without my knowledge.

3. This part of the training.

For the positive feedback, I am the highest rated manager for manage satisfaction in my org of 400 engineers. This is from anonymous survey results. This has been consistent through my past 4 companies, including multiple FANNGs.

If someone I closely know asks me for a recommendation letter, and they are a person who (in my eyes) deserves a great letter, I just tell them the format for the specific letter (e.g., 2 paragraphs, less than 300 words, what type of content the letter is supposed to contain, etc), and ask them to write it themselves. Then I take it, review to make sure all is good, go over it with the person (in case there are any potential suggestions for improvements [based on my knowledge of them] or parts that i find questionable), edit if necessary with them, and then submit it.

Now that I am looking at it, that's a very similar process to how performance review historically went with my managers.

What I am trying to say is, just like with referral/recommendation letters, there is a large degree of how much the manager cares about your performance review, how much voice they want to give you in this, how much support and assistance they are willing to provide you, and how much work they decide to put into it on their end.

A wise manager knows that they cannot possibly know your work as well as you do. So they want to work with you on bridging that potential gap between the outer visibility/importance of your work and the true value/effort involved in it.

Saying the manager is also doing you a favor is twisting the words a bit. Sure, you can make the point that it’s nice and it benefits you. But it is a routine part of their current job. Lots of cover letters, maybe most, are being asked outside of this context. Maybe the most obvious difference is it’s within your discretion to decide to not give someone a referral. Not really the same with a performance review.

These differences makes an “okay, but write it yourself” situation fundamentally different.

I do believe them doing the work is important to point 1., putting them in-control. The most important part of my job is setting them up to succeed. If they require their manager to always positively advocate for them, they are leaving their careers up to change. Not all managers are looking out for their directs, so teaching people to look out for themselves is important to me.

Your job is to know how the team functions together. What are the skills of your team, who is better at what, who gets on with who, etc. You going to ask them each to write that down too?

I get the value of having them also do it for themselves, but if they write down total bullshit are you going to spot it? Seen that happen. Or if they miss things that you thought were valuable and they didn't? Are you planning on just remembering it six months later?

>I am a lazy manager

You will do well in corporate America or higher education, apparently.

While I joke about being a lazy manager, I do not agree I am uninformed.

I have ~20 hours of 1:1s per week. I take detailed notes of every single one (transparently, as I share my notes with the person I am doing 1:1's with).

Because I am talking with everyone across the org, constantly, I am getting a constant stream of data on accomplishments, struggles, motivations, working relationships, and performance. I can instantly name my top and bottom performers, by level, and go into detail on why they have that rating.

The accomplishment tracking that I have engineers do is more of an internal resume. It could even prove to be an external resume.

Indeed. From the sounds of that it sounds like you don't have the full picture at all.

I prefer that everybody gets the same raise, and that the company pays competitive salaries. To spend so much time justifying your own job for a company that is making a lot of profits makes little sense.

I'm not sure how you square this with promotions (the main driver of performance reviews). No company who hired me five years ago could have kept me with a constant 3% increase, that is significantly less than I achieved through promotions, the rate would no longer be competitive.

This era of CS was probably unique in the history of STEM of having high salary rewards for changing jobs quickly. This never existed in Medicine, Maths or Engineering really (unless you found your own company or such.)

Also, even without boom times top engineers will still make a lot of money because top positions are still insanely hard to fill. I know of several top companies with L8+ positions that have been sitting vacant for over a year, competition for these candidates is fierce.

Most people know when people on their team aren't pulling their weight. If it isn't addressed by management it turns into a demoralizing situation.

Yes, there are meant to be protections so you don't just fire all the minorities and women but "competent engineer" and "masterful bullshit artist" are not protected categories.

If we don't like this (I certainly don't), then we need to stop letting private companies control so much of our lives and the economy.

one side effect though is w/o equity it's easy to feel a lack of motivation to work as hard if you get the same raise as everyone else who might not be doing great work.

The ceremony starts to be introduced when people become further removed from those who are ultimately responsible. In my previous job there was a whole process, company wide, to ensure everyone got properly ranked based on performance and potential. As a management team we'd spend half a day every six months just going through this process, which was preceded by everyone in the company doing a self-assessment that would then be reviewed by your manager. It was all incredibly tedious.

Some people thrive in an environment where what you're doing is driven by whatever currently seems the most important, and value is apparent just from everyone knowing what's going on. Others want more structure to things, and a clear path to get from where they are to where they want to be. I don't see either as being invalid.

You can do that. You just may not get paid by a third party, if no one else can assess or help determine if the work you're doing is aligned with what they're trying to accomplish as a group. But as an entrepreneur this is probably great. Your payment is from customers who have agreed that you've delivered something of value.

Of course, I've learned, even with the two startups I've done -- once you get above a certain size you do need to ensure everyone is aligned on priorities and that there is a structure to talk about promotions/pay raises/bonuses. It doesn't have to be OKRs and performance reviews, but its some mechanism that ends up eventually being equally hated.

Took away all the joy I had to work in this place.

Not anywhere I've ever worked.

Yeah, such things exist. Yeah, they take a bit of time. "A large portion of working hours"? No.

If they actually do take a large portion of working hours, then you're at a company that either doesn't have enough work for people to do, or else that has work that needs done but the people aren't doing it. Either way, that's a place where layoffs are likely to show up sometime rather soon, and that's a drain to work at in the meantime.

Look around. There's better places out there - places that care more about the work, and less about the ceremony. (Don't get me wrong, there's still ceremony. It just doesn't dominate.)

There's a whole wonderful world of startups out there that don't work this way, and it sounds like you'd be a lot happier there.

You've gotta believe in the cause, which is really just a narrative used to promote extended work hours and grind.

Then you've got to evangelise and act as a missionary for this world changing product ... the business has a cult like sheen of "changing the world" and everyone is the smartest person in the room just for being smart enough to be there.

Behind the bullshit narrative, everyone is overworked and the directors so busy chasing their exit with their legs and stroking each other off with their hands that the only tool they have left is their mouths. Out of which spews thinly veiled promises of a great product to hide their greed.

It's all the same really.

I wish I didn't visualize this. This could be a Renaissance painting.

The truth is that unless you run the place you really have no control over some bigco management getting hired and trying to parrot all this stuff

I did several tour of duty in startups. There were good, bad, and ugly, just as much as in $bigCo.

In fact, you can think about OKRs as a cargo-cult magic charm to try to keep layoffs from hitting your manager.

Much less likely, and guaranteed to be with some not-unsubstantial severance. Non-RIF layoffs (aka 'firing') comes with months or years of warnings.

Enormously less likely than you are to have a startup or SME shut down.

A shift in perspective might help: instead of tying "stability" to time at a particular company, think of it in overall employment terms, and in that sense things can be extremely stable even if you work at a lot of different companies.

I think I may be less exposed to the risk of losing my job to an RIF due to belonging to an especially small but necessary niche (cryptography).

That perspective is an interesting one that I’ll need to devote more thought to. It seems particularly interesting in the light that the most lucrative and numerous employment in my field (large financial institutions) tend not to provide significant raises or internal mobility. The oft-stated workaround is to leave the company for 6 months.

I know HN is 90% software guys but if your product is physical and you're at $bigCo this happens far less often.

More likely you get spun off as a different company.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ford-latest-automaker-to...

Highly effective workers always see these measurements as a waste of time, but when you're trying to validate and steer the contributions of thousands of workers - with varying levels of skill, motivation, and accountability - you need a GPS to make sure you're still on the path.

While I think goals and metrics are necessary, I do agree that organizations tend to over-formalize the process. "The map is not the territory" etc.

Have you worked at a company where you had no idea what the plan was and where the company was headed? I have and it is frustrating. That is the kind of company that would benefit from the alignment that OKRs instill.

I'm living OKRs now and they are the biggest waste of time I've ever experienced. They encourage work that fits whatever you've nailed yourself to for the quarter. They give people who are good at dressing up their work in charts a podium. These same people are most often the people who do the least real work.

OKRs are unequivocally a disaster for productivity. Real output and its impact is not as simple as any box you can invent to hold it.

At the very least it appears that not everybody has bought into the OKRs and alignment has not been achieved.

OKRs should at least be for a period of time of one quarter. They shouldn't be changing constantly quarter over quarter. When they do change a lot, it indicates that the company is shifting strategy. Companies need to do this from time to time, but it's not a good sign if the company is doing this every quarter.

Engineering priorities shouldn't change week to week based on OKRs, because OKRs shouldn't change that frequently.

I think it is a good practice in any case to set yourself goals, and demand the same of your team or as wide a circle as you can influence. It's just shared planning.

While I’m not going to say I’m “quiet quitting” as far as my work, I quiet quit a couple of years ago as far as being concerned about promotions and raises. I do just enough bs to get through the review process knowing that real raises come from job hopping.

I once 'earned' a 4% raise at a perf review in July. Was then was told because I only started in January that year, my raise - affecting the pay going forward - was prorated to how long I'd worked already, so .. I only get 50% of the 4%, so... 2% raise.

Felt far more manipulative and shady than if I'd just been given a 2% raise.

However, I also realise its always easy to critisize the processes from down to top. Now put yourself in the shoes of the CEO or C suite. How do you organise an entire organisation to be efficient? What is a better alternative to OKRs?

Most of the proposals I see in this thread are catering towards smaller companies but quite frankly not a lot of us managed a 1000 people company. I would be curious to know from practitioners about what worked and what didn't.

At the heart of it, this is why I tend to avoid working in particular parts of the software industry. Not every company engages in this sort of thing, and I prefer working for those that don't.

Measure What Matters by John Doerr

It shows the history of how they have worked well at some companies in the Valley. You asked one question about this and now you have to read a book. That's a shame.

It's been part of netspeak since at least the late 80s

My experience is largely opposite to this. I agree that we usually need to coordinate to take action in modern organizations, but this coordination is often a formality tacked onto the more meaningful individual work that preceded it.

1. Important decisions aren't made in a meeting unless at least one person has thought through the options beforehand and come prepared to explain the pros and cons of each and why their recommendation makes sense.

2. Work doesn't get done in a meeting unless prerequisite individual work was done beforehand. There has to be some thing to discuss in the meeting. An individual has to prepare that thing.

Decisions can be made and work done with short, few, and informal meetings, but not without serious individual preparation and production.

Uh, yes. If people do not come prepared to meetings, they are a giant waste of time. (Exception - pure "information radiator" meetings) Meetings are the point where you align different well-founded opinions, not where you find a solution. But that alignment is critical to getting work done efficiently.

But note that OP didn't talk about meetings per se, just about people interacting. And in any group of people, the ultimate outcome in terms of work is always driven by interactions. If you don't collaborate, you can't build at group scope. How you collaborate depends on the group. Some groups have shared chat rooms. Some have meeting. Some angrily yell at each other. But it always shapes the work, and moves it in a defined direction.

A group without social interaction is the work equivalent of Brownian motion.

If I were to say "individual heads-down focus is how work gets done" I would be rightly criticized, even though this is somewhat closer to the truth than what the OP says.

Have you ever tried working in a job where your boss just ignores you, no one cares what you do, and you're just getting paid anyway? Obviously, some people are intrinsically extremely motivated even with no contact for years, but many people, probably most, without any social organisation or interactions, will not manage to work, even if they want to.

Even just the threat of not having anything done by the next meeting is a huge part of the "social organisations and people interacting with people" that "gets work done"

I agree that your interpretation has some truth though.

Take a company like twitter. It’s a finished product but you’ll have 10,000 employees there. You’ll have an entire department for youth engagement. You’ll have an internal theatre group putting on shows. But who actually does work? Maybe a dozen people? The rest are just there because somebody needs to be there because that’s what is done.

The problem we have as a species is that we’ve been so effective at optimisation that we have eliminated the need for anyone to exist. A few farmers can feed the country. A few automated production lines could produce the goods.

But then all the other people would starve to death. So we just keep on making jobs to put them in. It gets further and further away from reality the further down the hole we go. You’ll have someone who’s job is to read tweets and rate their suitability. Why? To make sure the suitability from the suitability committee is enforced of course!

This couldn’t be further from the truth. Human labor is still desperately needed throughout the world in order to keep things running. It’s not just farmers. You also need drivers, clerks, mechanics, accountants, etc. And that’s just to get food into your local grocery store.

Nothing in modern life is free, even though it may seem easy for most of us living in the developed world. All of this stuff exists only because people are working really hard to keep it that way.

About 2% of people in the US work in agriculture/forestry/animal handling/etc. If you include transportation workers, that's still about 5% of US workers. And if you include wholesale workers and utilities workers -- that's still < 10% of the US population.

All of this work is critical and necessary (to your point). But I think the BLS data is evidence toward OP's point that we've automated and optimized a lot of the work necessary for subsistence.

Also the regulatory apparatus which does a pretty good job of ensuring that food doesn't have dangerous chemicals or pathogens in it, and the law enforcement without which the regulatory apparatus would be toothless, and the people who maintain the communications infrastructure that the regulatory apparatus and the law enforcement rely on to be effective, and so on.

And as others mentioned, you're then ignoring all the steps between the field and the plate. I guess you see the chef at the restaurant or the person stocking the shelves as non-human?

Yes, Bangladesh is just a country of robots making jeans, and China is just a country of robots making sneakers.

Still, I'd love to see some kind of UBI and acknowledgement that working isn't completely necessary for the entire population if you just want to live.

But this assumes that they are smart enough to know how to eradicate those extra costs, but bullshit jobs might have co-evolved among labor as a defense mechanism against that sort of thing.

I understand it to be hyperbole but the point that as a rough estimate only at most 1/10th of the available work force is actually "needed" in a developed country to "function" is probably accurate. From a late 19th/early 20th century capitalist pov the optimization point was reached somewhere in the 60s/70s. The problem is we have inherited and institutionalized how to "provide for oneself" from a long gone era.

If the goal was - metaphorically speaking - to reach the West Coast from the East Coast; this kind of capitalism had done a fairly good job until the 70s or so. By no means perfect but at least somewhere in the ballpark of a right trajectory.

Atm however we are past the west coast somewhere at the edge of our outer solar system lost in the Oort cloud. Remarkable engine indeed but way off course. And because it is so confusing out here (e.g. global financial market 10x bigger than world's GDP witnessed by all in 2008) in the vast 2.7 K cold nothingness of uber-optimization, the goal of wealth distribution (participation in the market) to the levels of say the 70s seems futile and utterly romantic - a long forgotten pale blue dot of paradisiacal opportunities. Even if the propulsion system which took us way out here is proof of the exact opposite in principle. Nobody has to starve to death as in "natural law" because of a conceptual eternal idea of how a certain kind of economics which was very successful at some time period (and ultimately had won the Cold War) has to work. But people really indeed do in the millions. It is just a sad state of affairs, still.

... but yet some dream to eventually reach Alpha Centauri with this good old machine: "We are halfway there, look, you can even "see" it." When in reality it would take approx. 1000 generations at the current speed.

As humans, we have many roles that we take on for the different contexts that we live in. Me as "dad" at home with the kids, me as "husband" with my wife after the kids go to bed, and me as "employee" at work are very different roles. I use different language, have different goals, different tone, different energy level.

At the same time, none of those are any less "me". They are all authentic. They're just contextual.

And it is entirely natural that knowledge work requires social skills and performance. You may write the most beautiful efficient code in the world, but if it lands in the repo without anyone noticing, it has no effect. It must be seen and used by other humans to provide value.

The sociologists all got this from Kant as many of the 'human sciences' were deeply influenced by him. Auguste Comte, widely viewed as the founder of the discipline, was a notable Kantian.

From Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View:

"On the whole, the more civilized human beings are, the more they are actors. They adopt the illusion of affection, of respect for others, of modesty, and of unselfishness without deceiving anyone at all, because it is understood by everyone that nothing is meant sincerely by this. And it is also very good that this happens in the world. For when human beings play these roles, eventually the virtues, whose illusion they have merely affected for a considerable length of time, will gradually really be aroused and merge into the disposition."

FYI this type of code-switching is not universally present for everyone though it may be for you. Some people are their "authentic" selves the majority of the time. It is often suboptimal to be that way though.

There's a difference between overt code-switching like people do when among members of their own race versus others compared to the more basic "I don't tell dirty jokes around grandma but I do around my bros."

> Some people are their "authentic" selves the majority of the time.

I don't think of any of these roles are inauthentic. People contain multitudes.

You're right that some people deliberately collapse their roles and behave mostly the same across all contexts. I think it's usually done as a sort of power play to show that they don't have to behave differently to suit others around them. Trump is a good example.

1: https://twitter.com/bengold/status/1618589049803132931?lang=...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy

My point is, that's a characteristic of liberal (individualist, meritocratic) paradigm. In other paradigms, your value comes from something else than usefulness. In authoritarian (patriarchal) system, your value is inherent in your (or your family) social status, like your wealth. And in egalitarian (collectivist) system, you're valued (but also less so) inherently by virtue of being part of the group.

In the workplace you should consider your coworkers your teammates; not your competition. A rising tide should lift all boats. Where there is competition there is inequality. This is what the person you're replying to is most likely getting at. Unfortunately, we do not live under such a system today. We are penned against one another to compete until we retire or die.

This culture then seeps into large companies, which are trying to emulate it with things like OKRs and company-wide metrics and comparisons.

Earlier, companies were more authoritarian in the sense that understanding of your performance was more at your direct boss discretion, but that brings another problem - nepotism. This is bureacratically simpler but the boss becomes a weak link of "fairness". IOW, people "had their place" in the hierarchy, and it was changing slower (if at all) with their actual contribution.

In collectivist systems (which are distinct from authoritarian ones, and are not typical for firms, unless you have something like a cooperative), on the other hand, selfish people just tune out directly, without need to perform or schmooze with bosses, because there is too little practical repercussions for doing so. During socialism in my country, there was often little pretense that people are not making an effort - because there was little you could do about it.

The reality is always some mix of the three, but I think multi-decadal shift from authoritarian to liberal (while collectivist stagnated) explains the rise of performative work across society. Because status is now more frequently measured rather than remaining stable.

My point is, systems have trade-offs, neither is perfect. Selfish people will adapt to any of them. Although (as a leftist) I would personally prefer less liberal and more collectivist approach to status.

"We want to ship and try as many things as possible" is often the only way to survive as a small new growing company in a competitive market. But it's rarely what companies maximize for when they're big and successful. The politics and theater comes from normal human interactions in a large group with a lot of intentional overlap/redundancy and not a lot of existential pressure. The org wants to be robust against any individuals leaving, they want to have teams ready to go in case they do need to move quickly in response to something, but most of the time they're just spinning wheels and keeping the money printers going. Remote work isn't going to prevent those dynamics, or the need to make sure you appear to be valuable through all that. If you fail at the "appearing valuable" game in an org like that, you're gonna be at the top of the list to cut when growth slows and the company hits the "reorgs and layoffs" part of the script.

The more intrinsically motivated, "let's directly do impactful things!", sort of person can easily end up bouncing themselves off the wrong incentives for years in an org like this.

A notable example from my prior job:

There was a developer who during the early phase of cloud adoption, wrote some wrappers in powershell for the Azure Powershell cmdlets. They did some quality of life of stuff, and he checked into source control dozens of these wrappers. I recall it being about 80. He got talked about as the azure guy.

Some time goes by. I need to do some Azure automation, so I look into those wrappers. They don't do anything useful for most use cases; I write my own automation from scratch. I go on to have many interactions with this dev; he doesn't really know Azure particularly well, but still has the reputation of being the azure guy. I am pretty sure nobody calling him the azure guy actually ever used any of those scripts, and I'm similarly confident those scripts never got used for anything even by him.

Don't get me wrong - was a smart and nice guy, and a good dev and great at his job. But - the mythos he had built with those ~80 files checked into source control allowed him to find opportunities to work with Azure and get to know it better. I eventually left the company. Who knows, maybe he really is an Azure guru now?

For years I was "the big data/programming" guy at a small ~1k total employee company because I spent a lot of time with a lot of freshly available data sources, internal documentation and code, python, PHP and Apache

But I never studied anything close to it, just right place, right time and made some tools to help out people/part of the business that needed help.

(They were, for reasons not of their own making operating with sticks and stones. Those tools are also software sticks and stones but with ugly glue all over, but they work and that's what was needed and what was done)

I'm sure

I don't really have a good solution to this but it's really messed up.

The incentive problem started when it became better to change jobs for higher compensation. Working less intensely for the same pay while you secretly manage life problems or just play around is also appealing. Your earnings are also typically soft capped as an individual hard worker. And then there's no real security to back you up even if you decide to get invested - you can still be let go for no fault of your own.

The economy can't keep asking people to stay in these kinds of jobs while also eroding their standard of living at their mostly-static income levels. It's too easy to feel like a sucker being a hard worker and this is a recent cultural shift (within the last two decades IMO).

My first job was in an office. I became friends with someone who I’ll say mastered the “art of not working”. He was always the first one in, the last one out. When decisions needed to be made, he was the one people would consult with. However, he never did any meaningful work. It’s not like he was a people manager. He wasn’t. He was a developer. But he never developed anything. He just appeared to. That appearance of work gave him job security, raises, and eventually more power within the company. It truly was an art form as I don’t think any company would have noticed. That’s how good he was.

Sounds like a useful employee. Maybe not rushing around constantly allowed him time to actually think through problems.

Also, it’s not that he wasn’t running around. That’s actually my point. If running around and looking busy is what it took, he’d do that. Essentially he did everything he could to give the appearance of working.

Now that I’ve been in the industry for over a decade, I can say it’s a pretty common type of character. They’re usually the ones that get promoted.

”The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy's cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him."

Miyamoto Musashi, The Book Of Five Rings

That idea is also said as: "the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing". It's been a difficult thing to do in my life, and I get it when other people get distracted, as I often do myself. And, very often I need to just go along with distractions in order to accomplish things. In practice, it's not an easy skill.

I agree. Seems like an internal motivation thing. Not saying it's easy, simple, or in some instances even possible. But gotta want to do it for your own reasons when the external incentives (optics that lead to staying hired or getting promoted or building a reliable & professional reputation, and staving off the flip-sides as well) aren't there anymore.

As things stand, my incentives are to appear busy to my boss and otherwise do as little as possible. If I achieve something, there should be cash money in my pocket above having done nothing.

Currently, my incentive is to be overemployed and figure out how to seem just above mediocre. Key word being "seem." I am very dedicated to doing as little work as possible to allow for more overemployment.

Tackling a hard problem has the same pay as spending all day "consulting stakeholders" and getting bogged down in Scrum process.

There is cash money in your pocket in advance, so you do something. That's what a salary is. The problem lies with the company not firing you and instead focusing on folks who actually do work.

IBM and Accenture are masters at the bullshit of not delivering so they can keep on billing.

Further, I agree with the author that there can be issues with office bullshit and I find that the vast majority of that is due to a combination of incompetence and poor organizational culture.

For me

- work life balance suffered. I would often be found running back to my office to shoot out a quick email and then be found there working 1 hour later.

- Work life balance suffered. I would no longer enjoy after hours lab stuff/HAM/games/music/tinkering in my office at home because the office was also where i did paid work. So it became exhausting even going in there.

- office politics suffered. Which, running my infra/ops team, meant things got harder. It was harder for me to prevent shit from rolling downhill as some pushy rando would just directly bludgeon people on Teams etc.. People were generally more dickish and demanding (outside of my control in MANY cases).

- Office politics suffered - in person meetings and all staffs and such are times where little things can get communicated. Saying hi to this person or whatnot or just seeing them reminded you that you need to reach out later etc. All zoom meetings and the like suffer from this. And for some it becomes de-humanizing

- Work life balance suffered. Family expected me to immediately transition from work mode to home mode, i had little time for myself to decompress at the END of the day. I tried walking, including at the end of and begging of the day, but that was always seen as overrideable by many.

- Work life balance suffered. Many started working random hours and would ping me in those times. Setting boundaries helped a little but I got more after hours calls in that 1.5 years than I did int he 5 years prior, or the 1.5 since coming back.

- Work life balance suffered. Wife would expect chores and errands to be run while working. When at the office I spend those ebb times working on non-critical stuff, not laundry or market runs.

- Managing folks and project became harder. My rockstars did great, even excelled and many have opted to stay fully remote (and I still feel like this is a large swath of people here on HN, supremely motivated and enjoy their job etc). But my average folks had productivity tank. I ended up playing babysitter for some especially bad employees. Literally had folks not so secretly going fishing without taking the time off, only to be found out when fires started and they couldnt respond etc.

- Burnout increased across the team, including with some of my best. Partially because of the above.

Ultimately i returned to the office, and drug a few along with me. Its helped in almost all of the above. I still work a more hybrid setup, sometimes leaving at lunch and working the afternoons from home etc. But mostly its in office.

Because CPUs are the new workers.

(kind of obvious if we are knowledge workers now. At some point we had to invent the knowledge equivalent of a JCB or a steam engine)

Now this has lots of implications. Managers are there mostly to organise and supervise workers. If one tech bro can organise a thousand CPUs globally, what is his manager organising? How we treated managers was qualitatively different to how we treated workers (see Unions for example). So do we pay the tech bro what we used to pay his manager? Do we give the tech bro a key to the executive washroom? Should we pair him up with a "politician type" who can go to the meetings? Sort of like how YC funds 2 founders cos that is shown to work better?

Work theatre is still a thing, and becomes more performative the less impact your work has on any outcomes.

Twitter and Musk has been an inflection point. If firing basically anyone who did not commit code, if that works (for some definition of works) then we are in a new world.

"How do you manage a company through code?" - asking the same questions that were asked 500 years ago when we asked "how do you manage a company / state through written words?"

> If one tech bro can organise a thousand CPUs globally, what is his manager organising?

A programmer leveraging distributed compute is nothing like coordinating an organization.

When I drive a car, am I "managing" the pistons in the engine? When I'm taking a picture, am I "managing" the photosites on the sensor?

The only way to make this contorted analogy work is to fully enter the mind palace and depart any semblance of the world everyone lives in.

So the "managing pistons" comment is relevant I think. At a certain level of abstraction you are right - you don't care if the engine is poweeed by pistons and spark plugs or swans tied by ribbons. you press the pedal you go faster. Let's measure those levels of abstraction somehow - I am going to guess that you need to be 2 orders of magnitude (of some thing or other) removed before the abstraction is relevant - so if you have 1 client you really need to care bout everything about them. With 100 clients it does not matter too much and with 10,000 clients your abstraction level is enough who cares what any one client thinks. (ignoring every customer motto poster for 30 years).

Now this abstraction model of management is useful I think in explaining the difference in middle management and upper management - middle are still inside the abstraction level as the people they are managing - so for 100 people there are say 10'middle managers and one upper manager. The middle managers have to care about the 9 people they manage but the one upper manager probably does not have to worry about the behaviours of those 9.

Maybe it's 3 orders of magnitude - who knows. But there is something.

Now the upper manager (100) will have some mental model of how the work is arranged below him. And then the upper uppper manager (10,000) will have a similar mental model. But it will probably be much more "pour in money, get an expected output".

The problem is how effective the mental model is. Somewhere between the foppiest of aristocratic imbeciles and, I dunno, Steve Jobs, most upper management have mental models that are misaligned with reality.

So back to software.

When we release software we are making a chnage to, yes, an organisation. How that organisation behaves and performs. We are then managing that org. Coders manage because they are the ones making the small but consequential design decisions (see "the code is the design"). They are organising the code, which organises the compmay. They are making management decisions (at low level, less the 2 orders magnitude). But it is still managing by any sensible definition (no true scotsman would disagree)

Software offers another interesting idea - that for each release there is an expected outcome - we will see a reduction in spam by this much or a increase in revenue from left handed mechanics in Ohio or increase is latency for these queries or whatever.

The point is for a company that wants to it can build models of how it's codebase works and how chnaging some parts of it affects other parts. And test that model on every release.

in short you can build a battle tested "mental model" of your own organisation. So when upper management (4 orders of magnitude) want to make a chnage they can make expected predictions about the model and its change. Be transparent about it.

They can find that software makes implicit explicit - that if you have a company that behaves day to day via code, if it is driven by software (for example deliver these parcels to these locations) then you are a programmable company - and what you do day to day is programmable. And also modellable.

If you want to make large scale changes, you can. just look for the right piece of code. If you want to check if those changes are right ones you have a daily tested model of likely affects. That is waaay better than "CEOs gut feel" or "an excel we mocked up in two days with Bain and co"

And importantly that model can be brought up in court when you get sued for the terrible M&A decision you made that got you your second yacht.

So that's a long post and I may have lost my thread but, when the workers are ridiculously leveraged (as coders can be) the idea of managing them as previously seems foolish.

Maybe the coders building the apps that tell Amazon workers where to drive and when - are they the new managers of the drivers? Are the people deciding if those drivers should work 20'hournshidts or just 19 hours the real managers?

Somewhere along the line we have lost the need for a huge slub of "people who organise workers" and if we lose them, there is another set of "people who communicate and co-ordinate so an org with so many people are all aligned". once we get rid of those sets of people, and most other people just do what the software tells them, there is far less managing of people needed.

So that's a programmable company and coders as managers in a nutshell.

I may be crazy or above or "just don't know how the world works". But I don't think so.

It seems some of us have taken the analogy of the CPU to a brain a little bit too literally and reducing human interaction to computing flows. It might be true in a very strict sense if you wanna go hardcore materialist (which is fine philosophically), but it seems like a shitty mental model, doesn’t it?

    from bschool import mba

Advertising revenue at Twitter has halved. Year on year traffic is down by 12% down. By all metrics Twitter is not doing well, and I am not even discussing the high debts that are crippling Twitter. See links below.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66217641

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/10/twitter-traffic-is-nosedivin...

> [F]ewer and fewer people are "subordinates"--even in fairly low-level jobs. Increasingly they are "knowledge workers." And knowledge workers are not subordinates; they are "associates." For, once beyond the apprentice stage, knowledge workers must know more about their job than their boss does--or else they are no good at all. In fact, that they know more about their job than anybody else in the organization is part of the definition of knowledge workers...

> To be sure, these associates are "subordinates" in that they depend on the "boss" when it comes to being hired or fired, promoted, appraised and so on. But in his or her own job the superior can perform only if these so-called subordinates take responsibility for educating him or her... In turn, these "subordinates" depend on the superior for direction. They depend on the superior to tell them what the "score" is.

> Their relationship, in other words, is far more like that between the conductor of an orchestra and the instrumentalist than it is like the traditional superior/subordinate relationship...

We are already living as though this world were true. I don't remember the last time I saw a manager fully specifying each ticket for a developer, for example. Managers are paid what managers used to be paid. The average developer is paid like a manager; their managers are paid like a manager of managers. The average manager I have worked with spend a fraction of their time in actively telling people what to do; most of their time is managing the complexity of the coordination of work and only incidentally the people.

I wonder if it's time to ask just how many people are needed for co-ordination. My understanding is that a 1:1 ratio of "commits code" to "something co-ordination" is common (that is in ostensibly technical areas only 50% of workers code).

But great quote thank you

There are three jobs of the tech EM - support the team (be the shit umbrella - navigate the bureaucracy), get the business a condensed version of what is going on with that part of the system, and all the other rest of the work to support a human organization that no longer has secretaries and administrators to just handle it.

In a lot of other non-tech non-knowledge worker jobs, supporting the general organization is abstracted to middle management instead, and a manager gets drawn further into task breakdown and enforcement. That's the difference.

It's specifically talking about "performing" work is important, how to avoid it from sliding into bs-ing instead, and how consulting work is related to improv theatre.

My big question is: What is the base unit of work of software development. After all, 'You can only manage what you can measure'

I'm curious what other people think, so please try to come up with an answer before you read the next line.

I think the base unit is 'learn and try'. Learn something and try something.

When offices were still a thing at least one could have some alone time to focus and a sense of privacy. Open offices are awful and straight dystopian unless you're actually a startup with < 20 employees. Why employees put up with that is beyond me, but I'm glad that COVID put offices out of fashion. Just wish I could get some apology letters for the office grunts and Uncle Toms who used to make a big deal out of WFH to make themselves seem relevant.

After a few months I got some bad feedback from my manager's manager. I rarely had a need to talk to him directly so I almost never saw him or messaged him. He was convinced that however we were tracking story points said that I was less productive from home and I needed to come in more.

I came in every day for a week before returning back to my normal two days at home three in the office routine. Shortly after that the office got reorganized and that manager's desk just happened to end up near my new one. Obviously I started seeing him a lot more and he gave my manager feedback that I was doing much better work. Nothing had changed.

Work definitely feels like a theater.

Anyone who's there past series A/B of a upward trajectory company is basically deadweight.

Having worked in the past at a tech unicorn, I'll say that the quality of talent that came in later was atrocious. They came from big tech and other impressive places, but they were so rigid and inflexible to work with.. Everything needed "process" or had to be so clear (like following Lego build instructions) otherwise they couldn't operate. I don't wish to bring up a cringe military analogy, but I do believe us early folks had a operator mindset where we understood the mission end goal and executed on it. These guys need calendars, notes, a million SaaS tools, to just ship a new feature that adds a button that makes an API call.

I'm talking software "ENGINEERS" (key word) who spent more time making BS documents that nobody read or found much value in (literally never viewed by anyone else). The worst part were the big tech managers who came in later and just made the place a hellhole to work where nothing got done anymore.

I honestly believe that the future success of the company was only possible due to 90% of the work being done by the 10% who were there early. These later stage employees were just show we were growing on paper.

Honestly that experience has ruined working at companies for me. I just can't do it anymore, especially with people like that who are just bad, full stop period fin. And it sucks to just collect a check because its too easy.

- Coworkers who play politics based on shoulder surfing others

- Coworkers getting bullied and isolated because they don't do face to face social crap well enough to get in with right "office gang" as I call them.

- Having to look busy and do busy work so you don't look unproductive even though you are

- For big companies: coworkers in remote offices and different time zones don't get the same career opportunities because they can't be face to face with the right people

- Huge one for me: Having to tolerate bullshit political debate and tasteless jokes in the background (open office) and even forced participation when I just want to do my job without hearing about freaking trump or biden and shit or who random people like to have sex with and how!

I don't get it. I mean I would think the legal people would be all for remote working just because of the liability it removes.

It sure us a theatre except most participants play the role of a third rate congressman or think the story is about prison life/gangs.

I admit to exaggerating a bit on some points but I am confident that if you just want people to do office work and be productive, remote work is the best way. If you can't then either you are managing wrong or you have a lot of people whose only skill was office politics and theatrics who don't know how to bullshit remotely. I think "the great reshuffling" might be triggered largley by that. A lot of bullshitters like that can do great in roles where face to face manipulation is useful for example.

1) Depend on others to get their work done (through manipulation, etc.) 2) Play great theatrical performances

I became a contractor and that’s where I realised the true programmer dream. I just cycle between collecting requirements & analysis and writing code. I spend maybe 2-3 hours in meetings per week, just to aim the cannons, as it were.

Meanwhile here I am, with a boss who I feel values and respects me and who is absolutely critical to my job performance and happiness, I make tons of meaningful human connections and collaborate 10x better face to face in the office (not to mention like my coworkers and like doing things like go to lunch with them), have consistently tried to go above and beyond my role’s requirements and have been rewarded consistently in my career for that effort, and absolutely do real, meaningful work every day (albeit as a relatively small cog). All while working for a big company that has politics and problems and bureaucracy but still manages to achieve amazing things despite the hurdles that operating at this scale incurs.

As an extreme example - thousands of brilliant engineers would pay money to work for F1 teams. Not forever, but a little while, and certainly not just for the resume, but to say they did it. (I'd be lying if i didn't say I sometimes daydream about it.)

As a moderate example - medical technology/devices. It's certainly exploited to some degree on the most global capitalist level (e.g. you can pay people less if they have intrinsic motivation) but there is something neat about working a 12 hour day on something that will help sick people get better.

a) good luck

b) privilege (gender; ethnicity; wealth)

c) a personality that performs the "theater" authentically

d) good people around you

e) alignment on your perceived value between others and yourself

That is an envious position and one I'd love to hear more about especially since it is at a big company. How did you go about finding this opportunity? What were your interview strategies for identifying bullshit companies?

I'm just like so I'm basically in sales - all this work that I do on patient matching is so that we can sell some kind of solution to others. What do these other people need it for? Why didn't they pick another company that was better and faster? What justifies my life being a happy existence moreso that someone that fixes cars. I mean that's useful, fixing a car.

I still break down periodically and wonder why my life is justified to be so comfortable. Is it just that I've decided to sell out in specific ways that make me worth it over someone else?

There also doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason why someone that fixes cars shouldn't be paid massively more. I mean from a utility perspective, this patient matching is just doing a lot of marketing fluff about saving time. It's all a superflous industry though. If things were done differently, there would be no patient matching. And in fact, is a medical record on a computer that much more life and time saving than paper records? How often does a diabetes patient really have a digital record on file that when they come after a car wreck, unconscious, that some specific medication should NOT be given. Are those ER doctors really going to query IHE web services to find this person and know something about them?

It's all just weird to me, how we justify and move to the next thing. I guess without "progress" there will be someone complaining, so we keep changing.

So the people worth having a house are willing to keep changing with the world. But it's all wrapped up in lots of salesy stuff an feels very immoral.

And now I'm not even in healthcare anymore. So I don't even have that! I am no longer able to fake tell myself that "hey I'm saving lives - this is worth it".

Is it truly our personal greed that drives us to make our lives meaningful. It's so that we can get that bigger house and faster Xbox and new clothes.

Life is all theatre when you think about it. Maybe that's why it's easy to say "office is theatre for work" It's all theatre.

All these “I work better from home” folks never mention how they prove it to the company.

Shouldn't their company / hiring manager have KPIs for their role and track them ?

By maintaining that job they are clearly meeting whomever's opinion of good enough to keep the job.

By the same rationale, would you agree that if a company insists on workers returning to the office, the are clearly not meeting whomever's opinion?

I think it is important for employees that want to have less surveillance put forth the effort to heavily communicate to management.

How do those in the office prove it? Are you looking at their screen/output over their shoulder? The only physically noticeable measure of "productivity" in an office is time spent at your desk. Any other measure of productivity has absolutely nothing to do with being in an office or working from home.

Are you happy with my tickets solved, APIs built, etc? How does milling around attending meetings help you answer that? How does having me in excruciating team building sessions or Scrum meetings where I say nothing help you answer that?

If yes, let me work. If no, fire me.

This is appearing to be an industry trend as well[0] that WFH is on average more productive.

RTO has more to do with management "productivity paranoia"[1] than anything else, seemingly

[0]: https://www.vox.com/recode/23129752/work-from-home-productiv...

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/glebtsipursky/2022/11/03/worker...

As automation becomes more common, forming relationships with colleagues and managers will become more important. As money becomes more expensive, someone, somewhere will be looking at a spreadsheet drawing a red line for who to cut. That decision won’t be made using just # of JIRA tickets closed.

Hero/protagonist: instruction pointer; the continuation.

Antagonist: undefined behavior.

Deus ex machina: garbage collection.

Comedy: duck typing.

Tragedy: static typing.

Flashback: lexical closure.

Foreshadowing: light thrashing.

Situational irony: 90 megabyte hello world.

Props: objects.

Wings: static objects.

Aside: debug trace.

Soliloquy: verbose log.

Act: component.

Scene: module.

Script: script.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Ev...

> ... These are all ways to avoid bullshitting - but unfortunately there’s one simple way to avoid bullshit - by being critical. It’s far easier to retreat to the critical, negative position and say why things won’t or can’t work. Except… this is a mistake.

I think this article does an admirable job contexualizing itself in the very real world of "bullshit" work performance, but simultaneous not being satisfied with giving into cynicism.

The bullshit jobs critique is very good and probably does seep into material talked about here, but on an individual level it's a beautiful and worthwhile activity to unravel the parts of the "bullshit" that are actually meaningful. Signaling and performance might be hyperreal and pornographied in the current world, but they still have a valid and healthy version worth considering. The idea that "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely Players" is a beautiful part of the human condition that long predates modern capitalism.

It's refreshing to read something that acknowledges the need to "meet people where they are" in terms of how you interact, but doesn't give into the narrative that this means you're condemned to a life of bullshit. It's good to have a larger understanding of the world's ills too, but I think people who spend their whole work day just thinking about how their jobs are irredeemable bullshit are fools.

1. Machine: an organization is a series of connected parts arranged in a logical order in order to produce a repeatable output

2. Organism: an organization is a collective response to its environment and, to survive, must adapt as the environment changes

3. Brain: an organization is a set of functions designed to process information and learn over time

4. Cultural System: an organization is a mini-society, with its own culture and subcultures defined by their values, norms, beliefs, and rituals

5. Political System: an organization is a game of gaining, influencing, and coordinating power

6. Psychic Prison: an organization is a collection of myths and stories that restrict people’s thoughts, ideas, and actions

7. Instrument of Domination: an organization is a means to impose one’s will on others and exploit resources for personal gains

8. Flux and Transformation: an organization is an ever-changing system indivisible from its environment

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/196016

[2] https://academy.nobl.io/gareth-morgan-organizational-metapho...