c***z
发帖数: 6348 | 1 【 以下文字转载自 JobHunting 讨论区 】
发信人: chaoz (晨钟暮鼓), 信区: JobHunting
标 题: 强烈推荐大家去看看Mike Church的博客
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Mon Nov 10 13:44:20 2014, 美东)
这哥们简直是神一样的存在。他的文章非常有洞见，回答了很多困扰我很久的职场问题。
http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com | e**p
发帖数: 4259 | | c***z
发帖数: 6348 | 3 节选自http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/gervais-macleod-21-why-does-work-suck/
[Companies] have several phases, each deserving its own moral stance:
Financial risk transfer. Entrepreneurs put capital and their reputations at
risk to amass the resources necessary to start a project whose returns are (
macroscopically, at least) convex. This pool of resources is used to pay
bills and wages, therefore allowing workers to get a reliable, recurring
monthly wage that is somewhat less than the expected value of their
contribution. Again, there’s nothing morally wrong here. Workers are
getting a risk-free income (so long as the business continues to exist)
while participating in the profits of industrial macro-convexity.
De-risking, entrenchment, and convex fraud. As the business becomes more
established, its people stop viewing it as a risk transfer between
entrepreneurs and workers, and start seeing it (after the company’s success
is obvious) as a pool of “free” resources to gain control over. Such
resources are often economic (“this place has millions of dollars to fund
my ideas”) but reputation (“imagine what I could do as a representative of
X”) is also a factor. People begin making self-divination (convex fraud)
gambits to establish themselves as top performers and vault into the
increasingly complacent, rent-seeking, executive tier. This is a red-ocean
feeding frenzy for the pile of surplus value that the organization’s
success has created.
Credibility emerges, and becomes the internal currency. Successful convex
fraudsters are almost always people who weren’t part of the original
founding team. They didn’t get their equity when it was cheap, so now they
’re in an unstable positions. They’re high-ranking managers, but haven’t
yet entwined themselves with the business or won a significant share of the
rewards/equity. Knowing that their success is a direct output of self-
divination (that is, arrogation) they use their purloined social standing to
create official credibility in the forms of titles (public statements of
credibility), closed allocation (credibility as a project-maker and priority
-setter), and performance reviews (periodic credibility recalibrations).
This turns the unofficial credibility they’ve stolen into an official,
secure kind.
Panic trading, and credibility risk transfer. Newly formed businesses, given
their recent memory of existential risk, generally have a cavalier attitude
toward firing and a tough culture, which I’ll explain below. This means
that a person can be terminated not because of doing anything wrong or being
incompetent, but just because of an unlucky break in credibility
fluctuations (e.g. a sponsor who changes jobs, a performance-review “
vitality curve”). In role-playing games, this is the “killed by the dice”
question: should the GM (game coordinator who functions as a neutral party,
creating and directing the game world) allow characters, played well, to
die– really die, in the “create a new character” sense, not in the “
miraculously resurrected by a level-18 healer” sense– because of bad rolls
of the dice? In role-playing games, it’s a matter of taste. Some people
hate games where they can lose a character by random chance; others like the
tension that it creates. At work, though, “killed by the dice” is always
bad. Tough-culture credibility markets allow good employees to be killed by
the dice. In fact, when stack-ranking and “low performer” witch hunts set
in, they encourage it. This creates a lot of panic trading and there’s a
new risk transfer in town. It’s not the morally acceptable and socially-
positive transfer of financial risk we saw in Stage 1. Rather, it’s the
degenerate black-market credibility trading that enables the worst sorts of
people (true psychopaths) to rise.
Collapse into feudalistic rank culture. No one wants a job where she can be
fired “for performance” because of bad luck, so tough cultures don’t last
very wrong; they turn into rank cultures. People (Losers) panic-trade their
credibility, and would rather subordinate to get some credibility (“
protection”) from a feudal lord (Sociopath) than risk having none and being
flushed out. The people who control the review process become very powerful
and, eventually, can manufacture enough of an image of high performance to
become official managers. You’re no longer going to be killed by the dice
in a rank culture, but you can be killed by a manager because he can
unilaterally reduce your credibility to zero.
Macroscopic underperformance and decline. Full-on rank culture is terribly
inefficient, because it generates so much fourth-quadrant work that serves
the need of local extortionists (usually, middle managers and their
favorites) but does not help the business. Eventually, this leads to
underperformance of the business as a whole. Rank culture fosters so much
incompetence that trust breaks down within the organization, and it’s often
permanent. Firing bad apples is no longer possible, because the process of
flushing them away would require firing a substantial fraction of the
organization, and that would become so politicized and disruptive as to
break the company outright. Such companies regularly lapse into brief
episodes of “tough culture”, when new executives (usually, people who buy
it as its market value tanks) decide that it’s time to flush out the low
performers, but they usually do it in a heavy-handed, McKinsey-esque way
that creates a new and equally toxic credibility market. But… like
clockwork, those who control said black markets become the new holders of
rank and, soon enough, the official bosses. These mid-level rank-holders
start out as the mean-spirited witch-hunters (proto-Sociopaths) who
implement the “low performer initiative” but they eventually rise and
leave a residue of strategically-unaware, soft, complacent and generally
harmless mid-ranking “useful idiots” (new Clueless). Clueless are the
middle managers who get some power when the company lurches into a new rank
culture, but don’t know how to use it and don’t know the main rule of the
game of thrones: you win or you die.
Obsolescence and death. Self-explanatory. Some combination of rank-culture
complacency and tough-culture moral decay turn the company into a shell of
what it once was. The bad guys have taken out their millions and are driving
up house prices in the area and their wives with too much plastic surgery
are on zoning committees keeping those prices high; everyone else who worked
at the firm is properly fucked. Sell off the pieces that still have value,
close the shop.
That cycle, in the industrial era, used to play out over decades. If you
joined a company in Stage 1 in 1945, you might start to see the Stage 4
midlife when you retired in 1975. Now, it happens much more quickly: it goes
down over years, and sometimes months for fast-changing startups. It’s
much more of an immediate threat to personal job security than it has ever
been before. Cultural decay used to be a long-term existential risk to
companies not taken seriously because calamity was decades away; now, it’s
often ongoing and rapid thanks to the “build to flip” mentality.
To tell the truth about it, the MacLeod rank culture wasn’t such a bad fit
for the industrial era. Industrial enterprises had a minimal amount of
convex work (choosing the business model, setting strategies) that could be
delegated to a small, elite, executive nerve-center. Clueless middle
managers and rationally-disengaged (Loser) wage earners could implement
ideas delivered from the top without too much introspection or insight, and
that was fine because individual work was concave. Additionally, that small
set of executives could be kept close to the owners of the company (if they
weren’t the same set of people).
In the technological era, individual labor is convex and we can no longer
afford Cluelessness, or Loserism. The most important work– and within a
century or so, all work where there’s demand for humans to do it– requires
self-executivity. The hierarchical corporation is a brachiosaur sunning
itself on the Yucatan, but that bright point of light isn’t the sun. | L********n
发帖数: 930 | 4 真不错， 谢谢推荐。 要是中文的就更好了 LOL | d****n
发帖数: 12461 | 5 写得很好，不过有些观点很悲观啊。
看了一篇关于程序员只能干到35岁的文章。 | o**********e
发帖数: 18403 | 6 interesting. thanks for recommending!
这位有点牛牤性格。
在大公司确实不好混，
可是很有见地。 | M*********6
发帖数: 263 | |
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