Almost everyone who does great work toils in relative obscurity. Performance reviews are social fiction. How do people really advance through the corporate hierarchy?
When I initially read this I was rolling my eyes at the cynicism but I also found it hard to disagree with. A second read and I found it a refreshing take on the realities of working in a startup and with “idealists”. Everyone is optimising for how they look as individuals. We may not like it but it’s true. I made the mistake to assume otherwise but I’m Wiser now 😆.
I read the Gervais Principle, and it corroborates my experience. I'm personally not a big fan of ribbonfarm writing style because it's too flowery-- I prefer these things to be short and to the point. But that aside the Gervais Principle seems accurate.
Yeah, it's a particularly cynical take on human organizations, but also quite an accurate representation of my experiences. Had to get it out of my system before I move on to more optimistic writing :)
it happened to me exactly how you write it, somehow the incompetence of my managers became my fault, I was guilty of everything and I couldn't understand how did it happen. I was one of the people caring about the product and also.. believed in company rituals. What a naive little thing I was. A dude who was doing pretty much nothing for a year but became our manager friend got the promotion and like 40% higher salary than I did tho we were the same level and I had more experience.
It's a painful lesson for sure, and is the reality of large human organizations. I think the big question is what you do with this knowledge and how you integrate it into your personality. I want to write about that at some point, would be a part II to this post. "So you know all this, now what?"
This is a great take on how corporations work. It's depressing but I want to ask if there are any theories to why this is the default equilibrium of corporations and not something meritocratic that rewards high performers for their contributions. I would imagine the latter and more fair system would make the world a better place. Perhaps it's because most people are not competent, and therefore due to majority rule, this is the system that came out of it.
I've been thinking about this a lot. I don't have a good answer. Perhaps this isn't as inefficient as it appears (or at least more efficient than other alternatives)? It gave us 4g, and macbooks, and cars, and cheap food so we never go hungry. Can't argue with the results, right?
First, CEO becoming stupid because they're having less and less honest conversations with people.
Second, the company hires new heads and managers, and you realise they have no idea why we're doing this which will discourage you to do your best. You used to work hard to pleasure your boss you respect but now the loyalty is broken as there is new one in between.
You finally decided to just observe them as you're already tired from speaking up. Whatever you speak up, only thing you got was an emptiness. Because new managers don't really care the product.
This is crushing. Have you read “Team of Teams” by General Stanley McChrystal? I don’t fetishize military lit at all. But this was an interesting model about keeping teams fluid and scrambling hierarchy. And a friend of mine who served under him attested to its effectiveness. I wonder if using a temporal team structure might do a better job airing this behavior out.
I haven't. Thanks for pointing me to it-- next time I do a batch of reading on team dynamics I'll try to include it! What else did your friend say, sounds super interesting?
The book is the story of how the joint special forces group went from getting crushed, speed-wise, by Al Qaeda in 2004 to anticipating them in 2008. The structure went from hierarchical to distributed teams, tons of re-shuffling and leadership mixing, no real time for moss to grow. Interestingly my friend was a SEALs officer and left to run HR for Steve Wynn at the Wynn casinos. So he got a chance to put some of that into practice. Mixed results. I sent him your article and he agreed with it (added that some folks get promoted by sheer luck) but was unsure if you could replicate the McChrystal method in a big corp structure. But I wonder if it's possible in a start-up. Doesn't LinkedIn use some kind of internal, project-based (vs standing org) work process?
I think there are two separate issues-- an effective organization, and one that's a joy to work at. Tons of orgs that are political nightmares from the perspective of employees are super effective. Of course the inverse is true as well. It's possible that effectiveness at scale and enjoyment of the work are mutually exclusive, but I'm not sure.
"If you ever carelessly imply that some team may be doing something poorly, you will make yourself a target for every opportunist in the company." - Can you expand on this, why does it make you a target?
Because you're making enemies with the entire chain of command from that team all the way up to the CEO. Let's say some VP is already slightly out of favor. The last two quarters didn't go so well. And now the CEO gets an extra bit of information, from you, that some team somewhere in this VP's org isn't doing well. Oh oh. The team manager doesn't like that. The VP doesn't like that. The engineers on that team definitely don't like that. You've just made enemies of all these people via your off the cuff careless comment.
When I initially read this I was rolling my eyes at the cynicism but I also found it hard to disagree with. A second read and I found it a refreshing take on the realities of working in a startup and with “idealists”. Everyone is optimising for how they look as individuals. We may not like it but it’s true. I made the mistake to assume otherwise but I’m Wiser now 😆.
Great post!
Strong complement to the Gervais Principle (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/)
I thought about the same. It would be really awesome if Slava would review it.
I read the Gervais Principle, and it corroborates my experience. I'm personally not a big fan of ribbonfarm writing style because it's too flowery-- I prefer these things to be short and to the point. But that aside the Gervais Principle seems accurate.
I fucking cried over it. Story of my life, I can relate to each sentence!
Yeah, it's a particularly cynical take on human organizations, but also quite an accurate representation of my experiences. Had to get it out of my system before I move on to more optimistic writing :)
it happened to me exactly how you write it, somehow the incompetence of my managers became my fault, I was guilty of everything and I couldn't understand how did it happen. I was one of the people caring about the product and also.. believed in company rituals. What a naive little thing I was. A dude who was doing pretty much nothing for a year but became our manager friend got the promotion and like 40% higher salary than I did tho we were the same level and I had more experience.
It's a painful lesson for sure, and is the reality of large human organizations. I think the big question is what you do with this knowledge and how you integrate it into your personality. I want to write about that at some point, would be a part II to this post. "So you know all this, now what?"
This is a great take on how corporations work. It's depressing but I want to ask if there are any theories to why this is the default equilibrium of corporations and not something meritocratic that rewards high performers for their contributions. I would imagine the latter and more fair system would make the world a better place. Perhaps it's because most people are not competent, and therefore due to majority rule, this is the system that came out of it.
I've been thinking about this a lot. I don't have a good answer. Perhaps this isn't as inefficient as it appears (or at least more efficient than other alternatives)? It gave us 4g, and macbooks, and cars, and cheap food so we never go hungry. Can't argue with the results, right?
I've been thinking quite a lot too.
First, CEO becoming stupid because they're having less and less honest conversations with people.
Second, the company hires new heads and managers, and you realise they have no idea why we're doing this which will discourage you to do your best. You used to work hard to pleasure your boss you respect but now the loyalty is broken as there is new one in between.
You finally decided to just observe them as you're already tired from speaking up. Whatever you speak up, only thing you got was an emptiness. Because new managers don't really care the product.
This is crushing. Have you read “Team of Teams” by General Stanley McChrystal? I don’t fetishize military lit at all. But this was an interesting model about keeping teams fluid and scrambling hierarchy. And a friend of mine who served under him attested to its effectiveness. I wonder if using a temporal team structure might do a better job airing this behavior out.
I haven't. Thanks for pointing me to it-- next time I do a batch of reading on team dynamics I'll try to include it! What else did your friend say, sounds super interesting?
The book is the story of how the joint special forces group went from getting crushed, speed-wise, by Al Qaeda in 2004 to anticipating them in 2008. The structure went from hierarchical to distributed teams, tons of re-shuffling and leadership mixing, no real time for moss to grow. Interestingly my friend was a SEALs officer and left to run HR for Steve Wynn at the Wynn casinos. So he got a chance to put some of that into practice. Mixed results. I sent him your article and he agreed with it (added that some folks get promoted by sheer luck) but was unsure if you could replicate the McChrystal method in a big corp structure. But I wonder if it's possible in a start-up. Doesn't LinkedIn use some kind of internal, project-based (vs standing org) work process?
I think there are two separate issues-- an effective organization, and one that's a joy to work at. Tons of orgs that are political nightmares from the perspective of employees are super effective. Of course the inverse is true as well. It's possible that effectiveness at scale and enjoyment of the work are mutually exclusive, but I'm not sure.
"If you ever carelessly imply that some team may be doing something poorly, you will make yourself a target for every opportunist in the company." - Can you expand on this, why does it make you a target?
Because you're making enemies with the entire chain of command from that team all the way up to the CEO. Let's say some VP is already slightly out of favor. The last two quarters didn't go so well. And now the CEO gets an extra bit of information, from you, that some team somewhere in this VP's org isn't doing well. Oh oh. The team manager doesn't like that. The VP doesn't like that. The engineers on that team definitely don't like that. You've just made enemies of all these people via your off the cuff careless comment.