> “Employees are wising up to the fact that you can have a mission statement on your website, but when you’re looking at how the company creates new products or makes decisions, the correlation between the two is not so tightly aligned,” said David Chie, the head of Palo Alto Staffing, a tech job placement service in Silicon Valley. “Everyone’s having this conversation.”
I call these anodyne mission statements, false mission. Mission that feels good, but that doesn't have teeth in incentives — or selectively ignores inconvenient facts.
Beware False Mission
"Move fast and break things" isn't just a feel-good truism like most values that companies come up with are. It's something that at least some people are going to disagree with, and it's something that can actually be instructive when making a decision at that company.
I don't personally agree with it, but I respect that at least in the past Facebook was willing to take a stance on how they developed products that wasn't some saccharine feel-good BS that values usually are.
(source: my brother, who worked there for a few years following acquisition)
Most businesses have an official mission statement to the effect of: "Help people do {x} at a competitive price."
Only a 23 year old CEO says things like "Changing the world by connecting people."
A real one does have a _huge_ effect on the culture of the organisation, above and beyond what is achievable otherwise. I've seen one be transformative at a former workplace. I hope you have the opportunity as part of your career.
That outlier quality is why they are seen as important, even if they get cargo-culted in most instances.
Maybe it's the flip side of the hustle mentality that the mission statement is used to manipulate rather than a genuine expression of shared values and goals?
In my experience they are concocted by a dozen people from across the company sitting in a room all day filling white boards with feel good, businessy words that only vaguely relate to their employer.
Agreement on the mission statement has to be unanimous within this group as well as being signed off on by several execs who will not be present during its drafting. The requirement for consensus ensures that only something incredibly tepid can get over the line.
Hiring? Every interviewer is trying to gain insight into one or two of those specific leadership principles. Promotions? Better have demonstrated them and have documentation to prove it.
It's not perfect, but the company tries really hard to make them not be bullshit.
What is Google's mission nowadays? I don't see them following a lot of "Organize the world's information and make it open". There's a ton of closed walls, they even acquired companies like freebase and then their stuff went behind closed doors.
To be clear, I prefer the first interpretation, but I realize open data geeks (and those who would use the raw data if granted access) are far fewer than ML geeks (and those who enjoy the automagic suggestions) and the gap is only widening.
In the early days of Google, I assumed that to organize and make accessible meant to index and link to information presented by others - and not to ‘own’ the data.
It saddens me that that interpretation is no longer correct - and perhaps never was?
But the wording is certainly neutral on who houses and owns the data.
I'm guessing that you're right as to the early interpretation, since that's what makes sense for web search.
But other interpretations are the logical thing to think of first for some of their more recent ML-powered assist/suggest products, and the wording of the mission statement leaves product managers and architects/designers free to apply whatever interpretation makes natural sense in context.
...except when helping the Chinese government oppress and spy on its citizens.
"Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis."
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22155.Let_My_People_Go_S...
Powerful read that also happens to be interesting.
Recommended.
Plus they're actively working on the microplastics problem: https://www.patagonia.com/blog/2017/02/an-update-on-microfib...
In regards to their product, they make high quality clothing that lasts longer (reducing consumption) and sheds less.
For example, I value pacifism. I think non-violence is almost always the right choice, and feel we should work towards a world of peace.
However, if I saw someone attacking my daughter, I might use violence to stop them if I felt it was the only way to protect her.
This doesn't mean that I don't value non-violence, or that my non-violence stance is meaningless. It just means that my value of keeping my daughter safe is more important to me than non-violence.
Google sees "organising information" as its mission. My desk would currently make an excellent opportunity to organise some information. Are they going to pay someone to sort all these papers? Probably not. Does that mean they have sold out their values? Unlikely...
You're hiding some of that range in the phrase:
> push comes to shove,..
...which makes the idea rather meaningless. I've shown one side above, the other is equally trivial: When Google has few billion dollars it can invest either into wearable sensors for health tech, or opening a Pizza chain, they are more likely to go with the former, even if they have similar expected returns.
If "push coming to shove" is intended to mean a situation where the very existence of Google is at stake, then they'll choose to live another day, even if they have to scale back their ambitions. I doubt anybody would expect them to behave differently.
As for examples: it seems that Apple is forgoing some profits by not participating in the big data grab. Yes, it might also be a good business decision. But it takes some commitment to values to be motivated enough, and to have the courage, to make a decision so markedly different than what the competition does.
Google leaving China is another example. Yes, they may soon return. But in the meantime they left a few billion on the table.
Anthropomorphizing publicly held companies is quite a bit more silly. Just because I have values and goals besides money doesn't mean that companies do; I also go to the restroom and breathe oxygen.
It's often impossible to say conclusively whether money is being left on the table in the cases that you've mentioned, because there's a PR hit taken when certain things are done that could ultimately reduce revenue. In the case of Apple, the fact that the flipside of fairly tyrannical possessiveness over their customers is a vigorous defense of their customers from outside entities makes the lock-in and intentional incompatibility and obfuscation seem almost like a hug. Without that defense, it would just feel like a snare - being known to give anyone access to anything willingly would definitely affect Apple's sales in a big way. Courage in that case would be to exploit that data, figure out a way to sell that idea to the users or to conceal it from the users, and risk a lot of users abandoning the platform.
Also, Google doing what it takes to make it in China might endanger their increasing integration in the US government. The brave thing would be to try to work both at the same time.
That's because we are people, not organizations.
>Google leaving China is another example. Yes, they may soon return. But in the meantime they left a few billion on the table.
Just because of bad PR/backslash. They were perfectly OK to work there.
Where this fails is when a company actually achieves its mission. At that point, its original mission is taken for granted, but all of the negative consequences of that mission are suddenly on everyone's mind.
For example, Microsoft's original mission was "A computer on every desk, all running Microsoft software." Throughout the 80s and early 90s, that meant making MS-DOS and Windows easier to use, making Office handle more of the tasks needed for a modern office, and getting distribution deals so that all of these came pre-loaded. Customers benefitted from the increasing computerization, they forked over lots of money, Bill Gates became the richest man on earth. But after around 1998, Microsoft basically succeeded in that, people already had a computer on their desk running Microsoft software, and the biggest problem on their minds was that Microsoft had a stranglehold on PC software and was unfairly killing off new innovations in software.
Google's initial mission statement was "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." When search sucked, email sucked, online maps weren't a thing, finding a book meant going to a library, finding an academic paper meant forking over hundreds to Elsevier, and "web browser" meant IE6, this was a huge service to humanity. But then around 2010, they succeeded at all of these, the baseline became "I can find anything I want now", and the huge questions were what kind of information does Google have on us and what sort of nefarious purposes could they use it for?
Facebook's mission was "Make the world a more open and connected place." The world is now a more open and connected place. The result is that people are routinely put in contact with folks whose views they find abhorrent, and that you can influence an election from the other side of the world, and that Facebook has all our personal data. While the world was still cut off from each other, everyone was happy to sign up; now that we're all on one big social network, they're miserable.
Once the mission statement is no longer a problem that needs solving, then the bullshit starts. Without an actual reason for the company to exist or for anyone to do the work they're ostensibly doing, people fall back on "Well, might as well make as much money as we can."
when these huge companies have succeeded what they set out to achieve, they are ultimately left without direction
in theory, that means the company would disband. mission accomplished, let's all go home -- right?
however, large organizations and all those who depend on them for pay cannot disappear overnight -- which leads to the type of ethically gray decisionmaking that creates this issue
https://www.economist.com/business/2018/08/02/mission-implau...
Their public mission statement is a bit more innocuous: At Frito-Lay, delighting our consumers is job No. 1. To us, that means putting consumers first in every decision we make - from the quality and care that goes into making our snacks to the ways in which we give back to the community and care for our environment.
This can be seen in politics as well. How often do electees follow what they were promising constituents while in the running. Then they'll do the same thing again and make a big fuss for the week or 2 prior to reelection, then go back to business as normal.
Likewise with products. Get the customer to come into the store, visit your website, or call a number. Then by the time they see it, or in some cases have already made a purchase, and find out thing aren't as advertised it's either already too late with s purchase made or they've "come too far" and the shortfalls are close enough to where they shrug and purchase anyways.
https://medium.com/@wtfmitchel/the-political-nature-of-indus...
I guess I would read some of his books: Profit over People and the one on Media. He has a 1997 talk at northeastern on youtube where he addresses it a bit during question time.
There are countless examples. Of course Walmart is known for both nepotism, and brainwashing their employees about union membership. And of course they are also close with the top-echelon of politicians at state and federal levels.
Like the article mentions, companies say they are progressive, and for an example， promote gender equality, but their engineering divisions tell a completely different story. And then if you really take a moment to stop and look around the world we live in, we are in a society full of propaganda. Of course the War on Drugs, War on Terror, and War on Poverty all increased poverty, poor outcomes related to drugs, and removal of liberties and prosperity that terrorists sought for.
Over the last year, MSNBC covered Stormy Daniels on average >1/day. War in Yemen? 0 times. Or, here is Wolf Blitzer saying that arms sales to Saudis is a "moral issue" because defense contractors will "lose jobs."
Propaganda is part of our daily lives. My favorite Einstein quote is: "Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions."
This was very insightful for me. I enjoyed how he interpreted Manufacturing Consent and pointed out that the obvious interpretation is mistaken i.e. that the media peddles lies. The thesis is more subtle than that.
There's a decent body of literature in economics on this. This falls under labor economics.
Different strokes for different folks and all that.
It's because you love your job, you have to pay for that.
In reality, there are plenty of jobs that have garbage pay and suck. As well as jobs that are both lucrative and “easy”. Consider the average CEO: not the exceptional visionaries but the type that loses the shareholders money for years and then exits on a golden parachute. These jobs are hard only in the sense that you have to know the right people, (being born to the right people helps) to even be considered.
On the other side of the ledger, you have immigrants with medical degrees, who are driving cabs for minimum wage (or now, Uber, for below minimum wage).
The free market is not fair, and it is not a meritocracy. It is subject to all the same tribal impulses and inequalities that have persisted in humans throughout history. In western societies, no job should pay less than a living wage, no matter how enjoyable it is. That’s just an excuse for exploitation.
Pay is determined chiefly by supply and demand in the labor market. Jobs that are more fun pay less because the supply of workers is higher. Fairness is literally not part of this equation.
> On the other side of the ledger, you have immigrants with medical degrees, who are driving cabs for minimum wage.
Medical licenses are controlled by the government, not the free market.
> [The free market] is subject to all the same tribal impulses and inequalities that have persisted in humans throughout history.
... and also the Civil Rights Act of 1964. All snark aside, why should we pay a high school paperboy a living wage? What does a living wage even mean - the ability to live in a single bedroom apartment? That runs ~3K/month in SF which is roughly commensurate to $50/hour.
The definition of living wage is fairly established. It is the minimum income necessary for a worker to meet their basic needs. Needs are defined to include food, housing, and other essentials such as clothing. This definition is why, in the United States, at least, every few years Minimum Wage (used interchangeably here with Living Wage) would be raised, to keep up with inflation. It allowed the average American to start saving for a down-payment for a house even if all they had was a high school education and nothing else (so, the paperboy you mention). Until, for some reason, we stopped doing that as much.
Instead of looking at one of the most inflated rental markets in the country (SF), let's look at somewhere like Idaho - you'll find that inflation has still affected that place, but minimum wage (living wage) to be able to provide those basic needs has not kept up. This is why, countrywide, 40% of non-elderly adults report difficulty meeting basic needs such as food, housing, health care and utilities [1].
But let's consider that paperboy, for a minute. Do you really believe that the only people who deserve the most basic income to be able to live (living wage) are those that are capable of getting a higher education? What about all the other members of a functional society that we rely on?
[1] - https://www.urban.org/research/publication/well-being-and-ba...
>why should we pay a high school paperboy a living wage?
My opinion is that it is everyone responsibility to create a society were were abject poverty and marginalization is minimized. There are many tools to our disposal, paying a living wage is one.
The point is do you have a problem of people working as paperboy and not being able to live properly? Then you either pay them more or try to make other jobs possible for them. We should be careful not to do it immorally, we should not just "give" to the poor, but we should make sure that they have always a chance to rise.
I do not think of this as a moral obligation to help other, it is simply my answer to the question: Do you want an entire demographic to be hopeless and disillusioned? I do not and I believe sorta high living wages are a good tool often.
ps: this is not meant to be an argumentation for anything, there are no proof or facts in this comments, just heartfelt personal opinions. I find those pretty useful sometimes and hope mines can help too.
edit: the parent was referring to non-adults paperboy, my answer completely ignores the very important concept of families which are particularly important for non-adults
I think the implication is that society and technology have advanced to the point where, ostensibly, work that can't be automated away should be work that would demand a living wage. If it's tenable for my job to still exist, it's tenable for it to pay me enough to live. If it doesn't... well, that would be less a function of higher level characterizations of the economy or any individual job and more a function of the basic availability of food and housing, anyway. If there isn't enough food and housing, people start dying, but since there does seem to be enough of those, what is happening?
I work retail full-time. It's definitely not "fun," and I definitely can't afford to carry my own weight; I have to rely on family to make ends meet, and I know people who rely on welfare. In regards to the time and opportunity cost of working that job in relation to compensation, it is unfair (imbalanced), but the situation emerges from a context defined by labor's complete lack of leverage, juxtaposed with the, perhaps, overcompensation of the people who support us, encompassed by our mutual desire for society to not collapse.
I think it's funny that you mention $50/hr for delivering papers as if we should be aghast at the mere thought. If it's a job that needs to be done to secure the solvency of the overall business, and that's what it costs to live in the area where whoever holds that job must live, then... that's the going rate. If someone can live on less, they get the job and are paid less. If the business can't afford to pay a full time wage for a full-time paperboy (or a commensurate wage for a part-time one), maybe we don't need or can't afford paperboys. But as a society, at some point it would be prudent to look around and see whether the way people are living is sustainable, or if, say, the inopportune removal of a welfare or familial wealth Jenga brick would cause the entire tower to collapse into, like, tent cities or whatever.
$50/hr for delivering papers would most likely cause the prompt and total collapse of the local economy. If you think otherwise, why stop at merely $50/hour? I'm only aghast that the proposed cure is actually much worse than the disease!
> But as a society, at some point it would be prudent to look around and see whether the way people are living is sustainable, or if, say, the inopportune removal of a welfare or familial wealth Jenga brick would cause the entire tower to collapse into, like, tent cities or whatever.
I agree wholeheartedly, but I'd guess we probably disagree on the remedy. I'd defer to the market which would of course require a free market to exist in the first place for things like housing.
I imagine it would merely cause the prompt and total collapse of the paperboy position, until efficiencies were created to support it (e.x., there's only one paperboy for n square miles, they oversee a swarm of paper-delivering drones, and the number of papers they deliver justifies a $50/hr salary); people simply decided that physical paper delivery wasn't worth the cost; or they decided that it was worth it, and had their pay and expenses adjusted commensurately.
>I'm only aghast that the proposed cure is actually much worse than the disease!
I'm not sure you've proven that.
>I agree wholeheartedly, but I'd guess we probably disagree on the remedy. I'd defer to the market which would of course require a free market to exist in the first place for things like housing.
The laissez-faire approach to market management is what "innovated" tent cities into existence in the first place, man.
Can you expand further on the logical basis for that belief?
I don't think this weak "gotcha" rhetoric is conducive to good discussion. You're trying to disarm their point by putting words in their mouth. And you're taking it off topic.
For example, since you only mention banks and large corporations, can we assume you're okay with every other possible way economies can be collapsed? No, that would have no "logical basis."
Because we, as a society, are paying that paperboy* a living wage one way or another. The alternative is to let him starve to freeze to death. So, we build robust safety nets to catch these people - food stamps, housing assistance, etc.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to simply pay the person a living wage vs pumping the money through government programs?
* I'm assuming we're talking about an adult employee here, and not a literal paperboy as in the video game. I haven't seen one of those in decades.
Yes. Thankfully. Somewhat irrelevant though.
This seems to capture the current intellectual zeitgeist very well. Once we name something, we can dismiss it without engaging it.
I was going to read the rest of your comment, but I decided it was "Jacobin whinging" so I realized I didn't have to.
In the internet age, this is a necessity because the other pattern is the same claims repeated over and over again with the expectation that a comprehensive rebuttal must be provided each time. At some point you have to name the thing so it can be added as an entry to Wikipedia and move on. See also: how global warming denialists have an evergreen grab bag of false claims to pull from and expect a thesis-length answer to each one.
Also, this is nothing new. Commonly referenced fallacies like tu quoque are a way of saying that the other person is arguing from shaky ground, and their argument does not need a complete rebuttal until they refine it a bit. In fact, the comment I was replying to can be considered a derivative of the just-world fallacy[1], substituting the hand of the free market for the kind of ephemeral karma that the original just-world fallacy implies.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence
(This is why I don't think labeling is a rebuttal.)
I find simply reminding myself that duty doesn't actually call[0] to be a very easy way to walk away from any debate that isn't going anywhere productive
But the rest of the comment supports the first part, which you seem to agree with.
Plus, "Jacobin whinging", seriously? Advocating for a living wage is "Jacobin" now?
If it weren't for the money you'd have a heck of a time recruiting VPs
It's fair, but not based on effort like people mistakenly think it should be. It's silly to think "I should be paid X because it was really hard work" or to try to interfere with the market to force that price.
A big part of the issue is ignorance of economics among most of the population. People don't realize they are always participating in markets, even when it's a regulated market.
>Consider the average CEO: not the exceptional visionaries but the type that loses the shareholders money for years and then exits on a golden parachute.
I don't think you know what the word "average" means, because that's very far from the truth. There are hundreds of thousands of people with the title "CEO". Only a tiny fraction are of companies with publicly traded shares and only a fraction of those get large golden parachute deals (<1000).
There are more professional football players becoming millionaires for playing a game than there are CEOs who lose companies tons of money and get a golden parachute.
>On the other side of the ledger, you have immigrants with medical degrees, who are driving cabs for minimum wage (or now, Uber, for below minimum wage).
So what? Their medical degree obvious isn't qualifying them to be a doctor in the new country.
I never understood this, even while in the medical industry myself. Perhaps this might be a little true for an immigrant from Venezuela with a medical degree. But for an immigrant from England, Why not?
I'm talking about, for instance: being an orthopedic surgeon in England (or even France, or Russia). I operate on human bodies. Those human bodies work the same way in the United States, do they not?
Maybe there are some discrepancies in established best practices, country to country. But there is no necessity to go through the entirety of relearning fundamental medical knowledge just to demonstrate you didn't go to a "worse" medical school. Even if you did - what should be looked at is your medical practice, not school, and your patient track record.
For software jobs, and for jobs with garbage pay and which also suck, it's mostly true. People who can competently write software aren't that common, and there's tons of jobs and demand for them, so the pay goes up, and companies compete with each other for them by offering better pay, better perks, etc. Jobs which both suck and have horrible pay are that way because there's desperate people willing to do them, and because those jobs generally have a very low barrier to entry.
CEO jobs aren't very common, and are largely a factor of "who you know". Going to the right fraternity in college is more important than how competently you can run a company, so obviously it's not a merit-based job.
As for immigrants with medical degrees, here again there's a barrier to entry: you can't just immigrate here and get a medical license by taking a test; the industry actively limits how many licenses they allow.
>In western societies, no job should pay less than a living wage, no matter how enjoyable it is.
Software jobs that pay poorly DO pay "living wages"; they surely pay far better than any random horrible minimum-wage job. You're not going to get any sympathy from me about not getting paid "enough" for some software job that doesn't pay median pay, but is more "fun". If you want more money, go find a big-corporate job that's boring as hell but pays well. Nothing is stopping you.
For actual shitty jobs, this sounds good, but how do we enforce it, besides simply raising the minimum wage? And there is an argument to be made that raising the minimum wage will simply cause many of these jobs to go away (increasing unemployment), and also cause the prices of products and services to raise, increasing inflation so that poor peoples' purchasing power isn't any better than it was before.
IMO, what we really need is more automation, plus a Basic Income so that people forced out of work by the automation can still enjoy the fruits of society's success without having to toil in some pointless bullshit job, and perhaps use their free time and efforts to do something more productive (like start an innovative new business, write a best-selling book like Harry Potter's author, etc.). Automation is going to put more and more people out of work by rendering so many jobs obsolete, as machines can do them faster and more efficiently, and as a society we need to prepare for that. Remember, a century ago people thought that in the 2000s, we'd all be working 10 hours a week.
How do you decide what is a pointless bullshit job? How do you decide what it means to be productive? How much of the success of a business relies on its innovation, or the success of a book on how well written it is? How many people have the drive and self-discipline for self employment?
On the face of it, what it sounds like you're contrasting isn't "pointless bullshit" and innovative productivity, but "what bores me" and "what excites me" or "what fulfills me."
It's easy to confuse the good-in-itself of work with the goods-in-themselves that work facilitates (paying the bills, feeding a family, giving to the less fortunate, et c). If we prioritize the former over the latter, we're going to have a crummy society in whatever regime we use to try to solve the thorny issues of automation and living wages.
Market forces: if you have a universal basic income in place (so people don't have to work to avoid starvation), coupled with ever-increasing automation, then there's going to be fewer and fewer pointless bullshit jobs. Businesses aren't going to be able to afford to employ people to do bullshit when they have to pay enough to make them want to come to work, and when they can get a computer/robot to do it instead for next to nothing.
Non-"pointless bullshit" jobs aren't necessarily exciting or fulfilling either. They're jobs that provide real value to the employer, and which they can't just automate away.
"Pointless" and "bullshit" seem like value judgments, not economic judgments. Why not simply say they are "cheaper to automate than to pay a human for"?
Suppose, though, that they are economic judgments. If the market were persuaded that working was a good whose value outweighed the cost savings of automation, then wouldn't said jobs be perforce, uh, "pointful" and smell better?
> They're jobs that provide real value to the employer, and which they can't just automate away.
In that vein, why should it be that employers should determine the value of a job? I'm genuinely curious in your opinion here, not trying to beg the question.
At smaller scales, we do use other systems. Within a company, essentially nobody uses a free market system.
I agree that it is the right pattern to organize into as in "freedom for private enterprise to provide goods and services" but it not necessarily the right way to handle retirements funds. Overall I am quite far on the side of regulations, claiming that free market needs to be constantly beaten into shape to keep it a meritocracy.
you could say that this is the free market greatest strength: private enterprise and public government can have a dynamic dialogue trough regulations often with an almost symmetric power structure (when things run smoothly).
Based on context, I suspect you mean merit as in moral merit. Economic merit is defined as the economic value add in a free market, so free markets are tautologically a meritocracy, because success in a free market is basically a definition of economic merit.
It certainly isn't fair, but nearly nothing is. Life is profoundly unfair.
> In western societies, no job should pay less than a living wage, no matter how enjoyable it is. That’s just an excuse for exploitation.
A debatable point - it is easy to justify making it as easy as possible for a worker to leave a job that isn't paying a living wage and find something else. However there are a lot of people out there and not all of them are working to live. Eg, maybe someone has a stead source of income (spouse, parents or investment money) and wants to get involved in something worthwhile but low value add. It isn't at all obvious why we should prevent that as a society because nobody thinks it is worth a living wage worth of money per hour.
A minimum wage is basically a declaration that work with less value add than some number is not worth doing. From an incentives point of view, it is really weird and there are probably better ways of helping people with nothing to offer their community.
Maybe this is true when you consider not just the job itself, but acquiring the job. How many minimum wage jobs offer minimum entry requirements? How many offer secondary benefits that are worth a lot, but only to a very small percent of the population (such as internships offering access to important people).
Of courses, none of this means fair. Some people are unfairly born with advantages or disadvantages, many of which have no solution that I've ever seen.
I don't buy that. I don't think enjoying your job and being paid well need to be mutually exclusive. I think it's in an employer's best interest that their employees enjoy their job. Part of that is that an employee has to not feel the stress of being underpaid or overworked.
If there is a job, say museum docent, that the majority of qualified people would love to do then the salary of that job will approach $0. Museum docents are usually volunteers, but the chance for an art history major to practice their craft is valuable to the worker even at $0
Sure. But then you are assuming that what I love is what other people love.
If there's only very few people who want to do those job, and I'm one of them. Should the pay be less only because I happen to love the job?
If you love a job that only very few people love, you can still make demands and request a high salary.
The more enjoyable a job is, the lower the salary the boss can offer before people balk at taking it. It isn't something you can suss out in individual cases, but statistically speaking it holds up.
When I sysadminned in the turn of the millenium, I could definitely see the pay gap between running systems for corporate America and doing it for scientists in academia.
This is not in line what I saw when I worked as a contractor. The higher the pay was, the better people got treated. The worst places were non-profits where people took really low salaries. They not only didn't make money but were also treated like sh.t.
Balk:
Hesitate or be unwilling to accept an idea or proposal.
> The more enjoyable a job is, the lower the salary the boss can offer before people [hesitate to] take it.
Or do the kids just think that's how it is/has to be these days?
The data against open plans is abundant and solid, but firms just won't abandon a clearly failed design experiment <beats head against desk ... in our new open office>.
I just don't think that's the defining feature of a job for most people, and most people don't care so much. All of my schooling happened in "open office" plans, like studying at the uni library. I also learned to cope with an eight hour workday. Why are more people not demanding four hour workdays?
Open plans are less stifling/depressing to me than cubicles, and I don't watch enough Mad Men to be fixated on having my own office.
To me, it's like being fixated on any office perk. You could die on the hill of demanding catered food. And that may be worthwhile to you. But I think I'd be at a worse position in life if I suddenly needed catered food to tolerate my job.
If we're ranking job perks, floor plan just isn't in my top 5, and I reckon it's the same for most people. Pay, how interesting the day-to-day, how cool are my coworkers, how long is my commute, is it slave labor, is there a culture of people interrupting me regardless of floor plan, etc.
Finding a good job just isn't Build-a-Bear workshop, so you have to pick your battles. Keep that in mind when you look around and assume "I guess other people aren't up in arms over $thing because they know no better."
The five following are the principal circumstances which, so far as I have been able to observe, make up for a small pecuniary gain in some employments, and counterbalance a great one in others: first, the agreeableness or disagreeableness of the employments themselves; secondly, the easiness and cheapness, or the difficulty and expense of learning them; thirdly, the constancy or inconstancy of employment in them; fourthly, the small or great trust which must be reposed in those who exercise them; and, fifthly, the probability or improbability of success in them.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...
https://www.recode.net/2017/8/4/16090758/facebook-google-pro...
Income per employee (as of 2017 according to the article) is about three times as high as it is for Microsoft.
Unfortunately, I don't know if those new grads realize, when they work in a "sexy" industry, that they are basically paying, with either salary or working conditions, for the privilege. It seems like many don't realize this until a couple of years in, when the shine wears off...
At least at Facebook, you're starting out with your eyes open and know what you're getting into.
But yes, 2016 is when it hit home.
What did you read about Google? I have never seen an article stating that they overwork their employees, but I have seen articles saying that they encourage people to work less.
I don't see myself (not debt-laden, have a great job) compromising mine just to work for them.
What's the long term effect of that trend? Will FB be chock full of juniors with an ever depleting number of seniors?
Doubtless some of those junior devs will be willing to stick around. In for a penny, in for a pound — very few people want to suddenly take a pay cut; your lifestyle has a way of keeping you hooked on a paycheck of a certain amount, once you get used to it.
And assuming the organization follows a standard "pyramid" model, you don't need that many people to stick around to give a good balance of junior to senior people, and have opportunities for promotion for high-performing/interested junior folks. Lots of companies have to create that attrition artificially; if they get it naturally as a result of people parting ways when their school loans are paid, it's probably solving a problem for them.
Only if everyone that has an opportunity to work there shares your moral compass. This industry is really good at marketing, and not just to customers but employees too.
I mean, look at how popular facebook still is among the public even after all of these scandals. There doesn't appear to be any serious attempt by the shareholders to demand change, and Zuck always seems to escape responsibility. I don't remember the exact number, but someone posted data on HN showing that a high percentage of current employees at FB (far more than 50%) see the company as still providing a net positive impact on the world.
1999,MS Windows was de facto, but everyone hated it. Linux/Unix/MacOS was for the cool kids.
But all business folk loved MS, still do, from shareholders to 401k holders.
FB is no different.
Developers are largely undercompensated for the utility they provide for firms, both across companies and within (compared to other roles).
In the Bay, it’s the difference between living comfortably+saving for their future and just making ends meet.
It’s a bit like blaming the scientists of the Manhattan Project for dropping the atomic bomb.
Consider Joseph Rotblat. He worked on the Manhattan Project because believed that it was needed as a deterrent against a German nuclear weapon. After he learned that Germany had given up on the bomb, he left the Manhattan Project - the only one to do so - and felt betrayed by its use in Japan.
"Rotblat believed that scientists should always be concerned with the ethical consequences of their work.[39] He became one of the most prominent critics of the nuclear arms race ... Rotblat shared, with the Pugwash Conferences, the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for efforts toward nuclear disarmament." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Rotblat .
There's a movie about him, "The Strangest Dream", at https://www.nfb.ca/film/strangest_dream/ .
Facebook on the other hand is not inevitable.
Should Facebook employees always be concerned with the ethical consequences of their work?
I think your argument is that the ethics means we really needed enough nuclear weapons to destroy the planet several times over?
And we really needed to let the government sell the lie that there was a 'missile gap' to the US population? Or was that lie in order to hide that there were U-2 overflights? Who were we hiding the knowledge of U-2s from? The Soviets, who could see them on radar and were developing ways to shoot them down? Or the US public?
It's all very odd ethics. I'm sure the Rand Corporation has some game theorists who would clear everything up.
From memory the "missile gap" wasn't a government lie to hide anything but an election campaign lie by Kennedy to attack the govt and appear tougher on the "commies".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap
> According to Robert McNamara, Kennedy was leaked the inflated US Air Force estimates by Senator Stuart Symington, the former Secretary of the Air Force. Unaware that the report was misleading, Kennedy used the numbers in the document and based some of his 1960 election campaign platform on the Republicans being "weak on defense."[5] The missile gap was a common theme.
> Eisenhower refused to refute the claims publicly for fear that public disclosure would jeopardize the secret U-2 flights. Consequently, Eisenhower was frustrated by what he conclusively knew to be Kennedy's erroneous claims that the United States was behind the USSR in its number of missiles.[6]
> In an attempt to defuse the situation, Eisenhower arranged for Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to be apprised of the information, first with a meeting by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then Strategic Air Command, and finally with the Director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, in July 1960. Still, Kennedy continued to use the same rhetoric, which modern historians have debated as likely being so useful to the campaign that he was willing to ignore the truth.
If you want an explicit lie, the Eisenhower administration lied to the US public saying that the U-2 was for high-altitude weather research. When Powers was shot down, the official US lie was that a high-altitude research flight was missing, and may have 'drifted with an incapacitated pilot across the Soviet border' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2 .
If the Manhattan Project is a useful comparison, then we have to take the totality of the people working on project, including the one person who quit, for moral reasons.
He 'believed that scientists should always be concerned with the ethical consequences of their work'.
In other words, yes, we should apportion some blame to 'the scientists of the Manhattan Project for dropping the atomic bomb'.
(For that matter, Philip Morrison was one of those scientists. He helped load the atomic bombs onto the planes that made the two bomb runs. Certainly there's direct blame there, if blame is to be placed.)
Certainly the rest of the scientific staff did not have the same views, or at least, didn't place the same weight on the different aspects of the ethics.
Even then, remember that Oppenheimer remarked that he felt he had "blood on my hands" because he and others of the scientific staff thought the bombing of Nagasaki was unnecessary. Truman later told Acheson "I don't want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again."
Regarding your point, and quoting from the WP page on Rotblat: "Rotblat continued to have strong reservations about the use of science to develop such a devastating weapon. In 1985, he related that at a private dinner at the Chadwicks' house at Los Alamos in March 1944, he was shocked to hear the director of the Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., say words to the effect that the real purpose in making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets."
I interpret that to mean that Rotblat would have considered using the bomb against the Soviets in the way you summarized it as being sufficiently unethical that he would not work on it.
I'm the last one to defend Facebook here but I don't see how designing an atomic bomb is comparable to working for Facebook, regardless of what you think about the morality of each.
However, one might argue that FB is actually worse. It is hard to quantify widespread societal effects and determine if they would have occurred through other channels. The massive privacy violations across the world through FB is another item that is hard to quantify yet 100% morally wrong.
https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/costs-us-nuclear-weapo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
I never asserted that Facebook was a positive for society, neither here nor ever in my life. I'm just saying it's a very steep uphill climb to make a convincing argument that it's worse than something that directly caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and cost trillions of dollars.
If we widen the definition slightly to include other social media firms then the most recent phase of chaos in the Middle East (post "Arab Spring") and the rise of ISIS can directly be blamed on FB and Twitter.
Perhaps, though I tend to think that developers are largely overcompensated for the benefit they provide to society as a whole. (Yes, I'm one of them.)
I can’t disagree with what you’re saying, but that would also mean other roles are also overcompensated, if not even more (heh, executives)
Hello, “Internet Research Agency”!
I disagree, we just have a favourable job market. We're a privileged slice of the population, my salary is way higher than anyone in my family, than my partner or most of my school mates. Am I smarter than them? Am I working harder than them? I don't think so.
It's sheer luck. It's not to dismiss any of the effort/creativity/perseverance it takes to get into that class of work, but devs are anything but "undercompensated". There's just not enough of us around.
Now the bay area might be a special case where the reliance on our industry completely distorted everything else.
Regarding your point about blaming students working for Facebook, I agree, I don't think they should be blamed. Everyone has their own situation to deal with.
Great.
This will most likely work to Facebooks disadvantage long term however; Facebooks workforce can’t only be motivated by money.
There was certainly a time that people would’ve took way less money to be part of FB because they believed in the product and mission, which is now a joke.
Everyone is moral and principled until they have to choose between morals/principles and temptations. That's the true test.
https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2018/05/24/i-dont-want-to...
Another way of saying, everyone has a price.
And actually it probably also means that some people competent enough to gain a salary they consider enough in ethical venues will just say no to Facebook whichever salary they are proposed.
Ethics are cheap when you've got nothing to lose...
Most people aren't bad inherently they just do what they are told and then alter their world view to justify what they've done because internally we generally don't think of ourselves as bad people.
So if you do nasty things to someone because someone else in authority tells you to, you tend to dehumanise them after the fact not before. Next time you have to do something nasty you'll find it easier because you've dehumanised the victim previously.
None of the subjects had been through the experiment before.
They were all commanded by an authority figer (man in a white coat with a clipboard) to shock an unseen but heard fellow subject with increasingly large voltages. The "victim" was an actor who begs for mercy with each shock and then suddenly goes quiet. The experiment goes on with the subject shocking the "dead" actor when it finishes.
Most did what they were told with no complaints.
Some complained that what they were doing was wrong but still did it anyway.
Only a very few said "no I won't do that, it's wrong" and left the experiment.
There's no reason to think that the people working for Facebook or Google are any different to those test subjects. They'll spread fake news, dodge taxes or compile massive amounts of data on people just because they're told to by their boss. Just like most other people would.
This describes my what I've observed perfectly. There are very few companies that make new grad offers comparable to Facebook's, and career advancement opportunities and working conditions at Facebook tend to be better than the other 'Big-n companies'. So it's hard for a new grad to say no to a Facebook offer, even if they're morally opposed to its products.