Higher-ups look for these suck-ups, of course, but I see now that the "real" ones are the ones that really advance because of it. The process optimizes for what I call the "true believers." They wind up in positions where they can, and often do, impede the progress of people who want to make significant contributions to the bottom line.

The remaining open question in my mind is to what percentage the "true believers" actually occupy positions of serious power in a Fortune 500 -- say, at the highest 3 levels -- and how many people promoting them are just knowingly using them and their precious lack of objectivity.

This is a fantastic read.

The things described happen at toxic organizations but the author leaves no room for honest positive and meaningful work, and at risk of pointing out the obvious, there's a lot of meaningful work to be done.

To the author of this post, finding meaning in your employment means that you're necessarily a sucker or a psychopath. Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients?

And God forbid you find the real nobility in doing your workaday job and doing a good job at it, and feel good about yourself. According to the Gervais Principle that makes you the ultimate sucker.

Adopting this philosophy is dooming oneself to a neverending feeling of being exploited and the argument that this is what is actually happening in totality is all philosophical opinion so why would I adopt a philosophy that is so personally ruinous, demoralizing, and demotivating?

Not a doctor, but a college professor. I love my job, take pride in it, and work hard at it. But I think of myself as working for my students, my collaborators, and my immediate colleagues. I pay little attention to my university as a whole, don't view it especially positively, haven't learned how to work its bureaucracy, and feel little loyalty to the institution in general.

It seems that, according to the article, I'm a "loser". As such, "it is clear that I am an idiot". Probably true lol. But a fairly happy idiot.

Thank you.

Making positive contributions to society doesn't change the fact that you're being exploited. It's become increasingly clear that Doctors (at least where I'm from) have low pay early in their careers, unsafe working conditions, and have almost no life outside of work. On top of that they have a stressful job involving interacting with members of the public.

Both me and my girlfriend were majors of our promotions and had more than enough in the way of academic achievement to become doctors, but the insane workload was a very effective deterrent.

Or if we must have them, please keep the confined to the minute clinics at the drug store and bar them from billing themselves as real GPs.

I'm in Tasmania, so here's the a PDF from the Tasmanian Department of Health Services explaining what a Nurse Practitioner can do, including prescribing some medication and interpreting diagnostic test

https://www.dhhs.tas.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/6408...

A friend of mine was an ICU nurse in Canada before moving to Australia. It was a long and painful process to get qualified again, and when she did, she found out she had been demoted from being able to meaningfully improve patient care (eg the prescriptions and diagnoses you mention) to a robot carrying out orders.

I have been down this cycle myself becoming almost nihilistic and seeing it all as a pointless game of machiavelian diplomacy.

These days I'm much more optimistic, and doing much better overall but in hindsight your explanation is exactly what I went through at my worst.

In fiction?

Back on the original topic, Erik Dietrich's "Developer Hegemony" has a less extreme view of the corporation; worth reading IMO.

The opportunists see the corporate world for what it is and do what is best for their careers, the idealists believe in the shared corporate myths and put in the hours to uphold the values they're taught, and the pragmatists value being home for dinner more than climbing the ladder. It describes the broken system without implying all the people in it are broken, and since the focus is really on the incentive systems that create this situation I think that's a better take.

I don't think the subjects of the Gervais categories are broken people so much as dangerous ones, careerwise (and possibly mental healthwise).

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

2. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/euphemism_treadmill

The research on linguistic relativity focuses on sensory perceptions that differ across languages. It's not applicable to the decision to claim that most of the managerial structure have a diagnosable mental illness when they clearly don't, by an English speaker in an essay read by other English speakers.

This cartoon prepares you for life in large-corp environments. I've seen so many (real life) scenarios play out exactly as some of Dilbert's (and the other chars) stories.

Edit: for clarity, the article does refer to "The Dilbert Principle".

Of course it is. That's what comedians do: they take something with enough basis in reality that people will recognise and identify with it, and then caricature and exaggerate it to extremes.

> leaves no room for honest positive and meaningful work, and at risk of pointing out the obvious, there's a lot of meaningful work to be done.

There's plenty of meaningful work to be done, but most of it doesn't generate profit, so it doesn't get done. That which does get done, often pays poverty wages. Raising good citizens, caring for the elderly, educating our children, producing high quality nutritious food, cleaning our streets of litter - all meaningful and vital, all pay buttons. Many more jobs pay so little, we dont even bother doing in the West anymore and give those jobs to other countries.

> Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients?

What percentage of the workers Doctors ? Bonus : why isn't everyone a doctor ?

> Adopting this philosophy is dooming oneself to a neverending feeling of being exploited and the argument that this is what is actually happening in totality is all philosophical opinion so why would I adopt a philosophy that is so personally ruinous, demoralizing, and demotivating?

Pretending you are happy and contributing to society while you are required to piss in a bottle is to concede all human dignity. To pretend that giving up 70 hours a week crunching numbers so a Corporation pays less tax that is to sell your soul and work to the detriment of society. To think anything else, means it's already too late for you.

tldr : meaningful jobs exist, but are rare as rocking horse shit and great swathes of us never get to experience meaningful jobs, because our culture needs obedient workers to make profits ahead of anything else.

the standard promotion/development path is primarily designed to maneuver the Clueless into position wherever they are needed

However it feels like a profoundly different claim to Dr Peter's.

I'm sure they'll BOTH figure it out.

But why not be discontent with your reality? That's typically a sign to enact change and willingfully settling is an acceptance of how things are.

I think the problem lies in the way that capitalism treats companies and labour. Im not proposing we abolish capitalism but selling our time at a loss* to our employer doesn't "feel" good. Maybe you feel rewarded by your work and maybe you don't but you shouldn't destroy that feeling for the sake of complacency.

*Loss is possibly controversial, but an employer does seek to get more value out of an employee than they pay them.

Most companies make 'reasonable' profits or even losses. You could say normal range for profits is -5% to +10%. When the company is people intensive, it basically means, that revenue is paid in salaries.

For better salaries to be paid, profits must grow first. For profits to grow, existing people must perform better. If profits don't grow, salaries can't follow.

Now when profits grow, we face a decision on how to split the new profits, and it does not always fall on the existing employees. Sometimes profits go into hiring new people, sometimes they go into pockets of the owners. But I have also often seen in my 25 year career, that performers are compensated.

I have also always seen the costs rise, and the costs been mostly salaries. So profits eventually go to the pockets of the employees.

So actually it is good idea for everyone to perform, because if the profit growth stops, salary growth stops as well.

Anyway, my bottom line is that this 'sociopath, clueless, loser' is flawed thinking, but probably something people genuinely believe in just like many people believe that vaccines are bad.

My company is so far down the article's referenced lifecycle that there are several large groups of people who copy information from the mainframe into Excel sheets, and then hand this over to another group who take that information, and put it back into the mainframe. And the "Clueless" have fought me, tooth and nail, to try to improve these kinds of barbarous workflows.

Gamers find it easier to be up in arms about journalists being bad at video games and women having too many opinions on their hobby than the fact that they are getting actively screwed over by the hyper-predatory monetisation tactics of the game publishers and the fact that a company like Activision let go of more than a hundred employees on the same week as they gave Bobby Kotick a $200 million bonus.

There is also no actual objective problem that feminism has caused to gaming that gamers can point to and I would argue that the vehement backlash against it is as driven by the "invasion of political activists into the hobby" as Anita Sarkeesean and other feminist pundits.

Activists have an incentive to be as incendiary as possible to gain media attention, smaller PR departments if any, and little to no control over what other activists say.

It's an unfortunate reality that if my local supermarket fires a bunch of workers for trying to unionise, but my neighbour gets in a screaming match with me because he thinks I scratched his car's paint, then I'll be mildly disappointed by the supermarket but frothing mad about my neighbour. It doesn't even matter what the confrontation is about: I'll be frothing mad about any topic that my neighbour brings up if he's screaming it at me, the medium is the message.

It's not about the medium or even the message here. It's all about the product. As long as you control the product, it doesn't matter how much grumbling gamers do under their breath, they will still fork over their cash.

Activists on the other hand do not have a product to offer. Instead they make you think uncomfortable thoughts and try to get you to reconsider or reflect on your viewpoints or biases. That's a lot harder than buy and consume product. That's a difference that even god-tier PR is not going to easily be able to overcome.

Gamer care about opportunistic women's study majors who know nothing about gaming insulting their favorite pastime to try and justify their wasted lives.

Why lump real concerns in with blatant sexism?

Yes, it's pretty pathetic that somebody who's job involves playing video games got stuck on the tutorial of Cuphead but then again, who cares? I don't consider it a real concern simply because outlets like IGN are waning in influence anyway.

A far more insidious concern that bears barely no attention is the fact that publishers practice shady shit like deliberately withholding review copies to overly critical reviewers or how journalists are incentivised to prioritise officially mandated press releases over reports of abuse. Notice how the very recent case of the rampant sexual and racial abuse in Ubisoft has been nearly forgotten by video game journalism.

Movements like Gamergate failed because aside from the rampant sexism within their ranks, their focus was narrowly on individual bad actors in video game journalism when the real problem is more systematic than that.

Besides, you're comparing apples and oranges. It would be a better comparison if there were loads of attack articles on specific employees of Amazon instead of a giant multi-national company engaging in aggressive union busting behavior that is one of the largest employers in the world.

The incentives for each layer are geared towards maximizing shareholder value. First layer managers aren't trying to soley optimize box throughput, else they could give raises to incentivize employees better. They are trying to get as many boxes through as possible while keeping costs low. They cut hours to avoid paying OT and sometimes Healthcare. They rule with fear. This forces employees to fight for scraps and do other things they normally wouldn't do like become an ambassador to try to better provide for their families. The moral managers don't advance their careers while the ones good at exploitation do and are promoted. It's a darwinian survival of the most vicious and cunning.

https://youtu.be/lLcpcytUnWU?t=173

"If you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you are sitting"

As you say, there are exceptions, but a lot of managers are there because they've "played the game" well - they're good at networking, know the right people, say the right things at the right times, and when they think it will help them, they don't hesitate to throw other people under a bus.

The poor or middleclass aren't the only ones mind you. You find willing lackeys at every paygrade.

As Joel Spolsky puts it, The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

Now it's gotten much weirder. There are fake accounts that, looking at them, you're not sure who they actually benefit. I think a bunch just got purged. No one took them seriously anyway, so navigating the motivations in the space is super difficult. It's fascinating in some ways but in others I just want to ignore the whole thing.

(edit: It was wrong of me to evoke Nazism due to its emotional connotations. I was reminded of the psychological systems of coercion that have been used all through history to efficiently keep oppressed people in line--which Amazon's actions reek of--but could have more effectively expressed my thoughts by saying "that sounds like a psychologically abusive system", or something of the sort.

I don’t think it’s fair to compare this to genocide camps.