> All companies are fucked up... the trick is finding a company that's fucked up in a way that works for you
I think another way to phrase this is "No company is perfect, don't let good be the enemy of perfect, find a company that ticks as many of your boxes while triggering as few or zero of your red flags" or something like that.
Is my job "perfect"? Absolutely not but it's pretty damn close and compared to my past jobs it's by far the best (if you can't say this then you might want to shop around). I have a friend who gets every Friday off, is that nice? Sure is but I wouldn't like a number of other things about the company he works for. Life/work is a series of tradeoffs/comprimsies, just make sure you are feel like you have more positives than negatives and you'll be happy.
I'm extremely thankful that early in my career I realized that I enjoy working for smaller companies. I was "lucky" enough to essentially be contracted out to a big client and I hated almost every aspect of it (except that I loved working on a single product vs the small little projects for various clients as I had done before). I took that experience and found a job at a small company that had a couple of products that I could iterate on and improve.
It's common to say something like "If you aren't changing jobs every 2-4 years you are leaving a ton of money on the table", that's mostly true but one other big benefit of moving companies is you get to exposed to a bunch of different ways companies are run, their culture, etc. I feel like every time I've switched jobs I've moved closer and closer to my personal "perfect", in part because I've recognized the red flags from my past/current jobs and watched for them before accepting an offer at a new place.
I mostly agree. I'm at a point now where it's hard to believe that I could ever find a gig in my [broad] industry that has a balance that benefits my home life as much (100% remote, flexible schedule, great supervisor, low stress work, slow paced). However, it absolutely bores me to tears. It's quite literally the "dream job" that I had always imagined - I can play video games all day if I'd like, go fishing for half an hour here and there in the neighborhood lake, etc. - but I really want challenge again. I would almost guarantee that I'm going to have to give up a lot of those "freedoms" to get that 8hours of challenge back into my life.
From here, my worry is the regret when it almost inevitably affects my home and family time in a negative light. When I miss that baseball game later down the road or am on a "business trip" for a family event that I most certainly wouldn't ever have to do in the position that I am in now, it'll likely make me 'kick myself' for not keeping this position.
I felt this exact thing at my last job! I thought I finally had everything I wanted but turns out I was unchallenged and unsatisfied. A couple things that helped me were picking up other challenging hobbies or books that helped me feel stimulated but ultimately I ended up with a new job.
Turns out the perfect workday is not 2 hours of boring work but 5-7 hours of focused, interesting work.
If you've got kids, I'd say be very grateful for this situation and stay put! ;) If you're bored, how about doing some learning in the hours where you've got not enough challenging to do? Anything from online courses not even in tech, up to Computer Science PHD. Even just learn better cookery skills or something. ;) I mean, one's learning doesn't have to be connected to one's job.. at all! But finding your job easy, not being tired at the end of the day, having time for kids.... that's gold dust. Which is pretty much what you said :)
Great suggestions, and I have certainly been trying to increasingly fill my "off time" by improving myself. Some things I have implemented since taking on this role and working from home: completed my BSCS, weekly piano lessons, taking courses for certifications (Sec+, Net+, PMP).
> But finding your job easy, not being tired at the end of the day, having time for kids...
Yeah, that's certainly the crossroads that I am at. I'm at the age I feel like I need to make moves into areas that I want to be (infosec for me) while they're still available, or I'll lose them forever. But I also know I would love to have this job 10 years from now when (if) my kiddo is into competitive sports, etc. Then you add in the slew of other factors that could happen in a decade: reorganization, different supervisors, etc.
> From here, my worry is the regret when it almost inevitably affects my home and family time in a negative light. When I miss that baseball game later down the road or am on a "business trip" for a family event that I most certainly wouldn't ever have to do in the position that I am in now, it'll likely make me 'kick myself' for not keeping this position.
I worry about this constantly myself, I'm fully remote and I hope that I'll lapse into a sort of malaise at home and I'll start missing out on things I otherwise wouldn't.
> I'm extremely thankful that early in my career I realized that I enjoy working for smaller companies
Same. I have at worked at bigger organisations, at some mid point in my career, and it was reaffirming. I won't dig into the details, but when I think of the word "institutionalized" I think of how peculiar the way big orgs make you approach most tasks. Your skillset becomes intertwined with the institutions until you become encumbered and perversed with arbitrary approaches to things that don't apply outside your institution. You become ossified by these ideas and leaving becomes harder and harder.
My former coworker called it “making your own ball and chain”, and he is a prime example of this as well. He was very good as SAP and ABAP development, so most SAP work would get assigned to him because he can have it done faster than anyone else. Which also means no one else is getting much experience or training on SAP. And because he is always busy with SAP, he never gets trained on anything else either. Leaving was not a realistic option due to lack of experience in any development outside of SAP and SAP setup and customizations being very specific to the industry and the company.
Worked for a corporate and it was amazing to witness folks doing "BS" jobs and getting away with it and people contributing nothing measurable to project outcomes except attending meetings and the release party.
I work for much smaller company now - sure there is more pressure, a level of disorganization but everybody contributes.
> It's common to say something like "If you aren't changing jobs every 2-4 years you are leaving a ton of money on the table", that's mostly true but one other big benefit of moving companies is you get to exposed to a bunch of different ways companies are run, their culture, etc.
Yes, it's funny, many developers are strongly oriented towards "I must develop myself and become better" or "I must get the best deal for myself" which they see as polar opposites, it's an important part of one's identity to prioritize one over the other, but in either case I think two year tenures are best.
Companies should pay a big premium for developers staying longer than two years, but they pay less, I think because they assume developers who aren't moving are unambitious/coasting/used up.
Or because the best way to exchange information and improve knowledge and skills and processes at a corporate level is to precisely exchange people with other companies.
Also, I think you can actually generalize "any company" to "any organized human endeavor". People like to point out the flaws in governments, religious orders, the local PTA. Same thing. Get a group of humans together and watch them malfunction.
I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been an observer, seen family/friends deal with it, and/or been in leadership positions in a number of such organizations and they all have their own issues/dysfunction. Some were tolerable, others were not.
Realizing you have a lot of (if not full) control over what you associate with (company, religious org, etc) and therefore what levels of malfunction you do/don’t have to deal with is freeing. Specially with companies, I’ve had to encourage a number of friends/ex-coworkers to start looking for a new job after hearing what they put up with. The imposter syndrome is strong and feeling like they couldn’t get a better job (pay and/or environment). It’s wonderful when they get a new job and realize how what they dealt with was not “normal” or “ok”.
True, but life eats life: the universe is a fucked up place in general. We can iterate and strive for the ideal/perfect, but I think we gotta be pragmatic with the short time we get to experience it. And "perfect" might mostly be in the eye of the beholder like beauty -- impossible to get everyone to agree.
> I feel like every time I've switched jobs I've moved closer and closer to my personal "perfect", in part because I've recognized the red flags from my past/current jobs and watched for them before accepting an offer at a new place.
I'm pretty sure it's also because people do grow up bit-by-bit when they're exposed to different environments. Clearly, seniors can handle much more fuck-ups (or imperfections) than fresh graduates, often in much more graceful ways. I just thought this should never be underestimated.
> I have a friend who gets every Friday off, is that nice?
I'm in a similar boat as you. I really like where I'm at and if they switched to 4 day work weeks, it would be as perfect as it could get in terms of a job for me. Here's to hoping.
> I'm extremely thankful that early in my career I realized that I enjoy working for smaller companies
How did you determine this?
I an in this big question and I have worked for a small company but the lack of money, totalitarian decision making (CEO) and crazy hours didn’t work out for me. I‘ve put in more (health, lower salary) for more fun/culture.
I would love to try it again (small company) as I enjoyed certain aspect such as a great culture, techminded and young but beeing the main income at home I am sticking to my BS job in a big corp so far (unfortunately).
How did you determine what is a good vs bad small company?
The company I worked for before my current one had a lot of money problems so being profitable (even marginally so) was a requirement for me. Other than that I was fortunate that the company I now work for found me on HN (Who wants to be hired monthly thread) and that in all the interviews I got nothing but good “vibes” and saw no red flags. Almost 3 years later that’s held true and I’ve helped get 3 friends/ex-coworkers hired (I’d never invite even acquaintances to what I though was a bad environment or a sinking ship). I liked my coworkers already and adding in 3 people I know I work well with has been an immense joy.
I don’t know how you need to make to provide for your house but I live in a LCoL area and make on the lower end of CA wages (working for a CA company, <15 people). For me this works well as I have a good amount of headroom the grow (it’s already happened, I got around a 17% raise after a little over a year there and multiple bonuses) and I’m making way more than most jobs locally (aside from some really stuffy corporate jobs I’d never take).
It’s a different story when you providing for a family but my approach has been to never assume my job is guaranteed (which it’s not, no matter how big the company) and to plan for if I’ll lose my job tomorrow. That sounds super stressful but I literally never think or worry about it because I’ve got 6-8+ months in my emergency fund (shout out to YNAB for changing my life w.r.t. budgeting).
I won’t pretend what I’ve done/found was easy or that “anyone can do it” but it can be done. There are good small companies to work for that don’t suffer from the issues you mentioned (though I know exactly what you are talking about and have experienced that as well).
Life is short and I’m so glad I found the company I currently work for. My work/life balance is amazing, I enjoy what I work on, my work makes a tangible difference, I get to help shape the company’s future, and I work with talented people who I like.
It is, though I think they can be reversed while meaning the same thing. As for the whole “Why I decided on the inversion”: I’ve got no idea. It sounded right in context (in my head) and I should have googled it quickly to make sure I had the phrase right. My bad.
“Good is the enemy of perfect” would mean just trying to make something good enough means it will probably not be perfect. Which…ok…makes sense. I’ll have to run that by RPG next time I see him.
Indeed. Be serious and honest with yourself about stuff you love, and see how many of those things your company is/does, and stuff you hate, and how many of those your company is/does.
This is a natural consequence of all people being "fucked up", although I'd phrase it as "broken".
In the first anecdote the chef is a raging alcoholic, which is a pretty obvious issue, but everybody, no matter how successful or perfect-seeming, has some kind of cross to bear that occasionally makes them act in seemingly-irrational ways at times. Maybe they have a crippling phobia of spiders, so they refuse to watch any live TV programming that might show one. Maybe they have a birthmark across their genitals so they absolutely refuse to have sex with the lights on. Maybe they had perfectionist parents, so they react really badly to criticism. Etc, etc, etc.
This is not being broken. This is being a human. It's like calling a car that just rolled out of the factory broken because it will need service and repair over its lifetime.
A fear that makes you avoid some media does not make you broken. Body image issues you work around does not make you broken. Reacting badly to things that remind you of painful parts of your upbringing does not make you broken.
These are problems, challenges, issues, maybe horrible ones. But they are not the person and they do not make the person broken.
The author gives two examples of jobs they worked at then asserts that all companies are fucked up. I think you need better evidence or at least a more persuasive argument to claim that “all companies are fucked up”. Maybe the author didn’t literally mean that all companies are fucked up, but I’m not even convinced that more than half of companies are fucked up, based on this post.
Agreed. It's like saying "All families are fucked up." No, actually, I knew several people who had good families that generally supported each other and had mostly healthy interactions. The kids would sometimes be kids and do something shitty, but the parents handled it in a reasonable way and taught them how to handle their negative emotions. My family was not like that. Everyone wanted all the attention all the time (including my parents). It was fucked up. Some of my friends families were not fucked up. In some cases, even a single member of the family was fucked up, but the rest of the family wasn't. I think it's the same with jobs, personally.
I’m gonna play devil’s advocate here and suggest that you probably just didn’t know of the skeletons hidden in the closet. I came from one of those good families where things were handled reasonably and I was taught to deal with negative emotions and my mother was a saint and all of that is true; but my family is still fucked up, we still have our skeletons like everyone else I’ve ever met, and I’m still fucked up in my own way from some of it.
After typing this all out, I’m wondering if “fucked up” is not just a vernacular for “experienced”.
Thanks for pointing this out. I did fall for the “all families are messed up” meme, but it seems obvious now that there’s a continuum, some really bad, some really good, a lot in the middle.
I think it is actually worse. The author is preaching toxic complacency. If a company is fucked-up, it is sometimes not OK. If the work culture is toxic, it is not OK for any workers (not even the ones that participate in the toxic work culture). The logical conclusion I must draw is that worker alienation is fine actually, and you must simply find a company that is alienating at the same level that you have been alienated.
And even worse, the article extends the analogy to relationships, which can be interpreted to excuse domestic violence, as long as the victim is equally “fucked up”.
After thinking about the article some more, I reached the same conclusion. I was trying to figure out why the author wrote this, and my best explanation is that this was an attempt to defend companies that have been labeled “toxic”.
Like, “Sure Activision/Blizzard was a fucked up company (and maybe still is), but all companies are fucked up, so it’s really no worse than any other company. It was just the wrong type of fucked up for certain types of people (women, minorities, etc.).”
None of this is explicitly said in the article though, so hopefully this wasn’t actually the point the author was trying to make.
I think you are. The author is using the term "fucked up" kind of stupidly IMO.
What he's saying is that all organizations operate differently, and you have to find an organization that operates congruently to the way you operate. If you love to cook and drink a pint of vodka before lunchtime, maybe a restaurant where everyone's drinking all the time is just the place for you.
I agree, the article seems very anecdotal and grossly generalizing. The point at the end might be to look for a company that suits you, but that’s not really a new insight, is it?
Quite a few things in martial arts that are claimed to be ancient are in fact turn of the century inventions by Kano Jigoro, the inventor of Judo: grades and belts, the keikogi uniform used by many martial arts today, etc.
Kano was all about modernizing what he saw as outdated and ineffective training techniques. He thought that by making jujitsu a sport he could save it from irrelevance, in an age when people where more likely to learn tennis than martial arts. He was very successful, he created Judo and some of his earlier students went on to develop BJJ.
> This ranking system was inspired by the existing Dan ranking system in Go, devised by Honinbo Dosaku in the late 17th century.
This is interesting, as a kyu go player I was aware of the relation to color belts in Judo, but I didn’t know it was the go ranks that inspired the judo ranks. I kind of always assumed it was the other way around.
Yeah, good job. Going from white to yellow I can kind of believe because of dirty hands and stuff. Kind of far fetched but I could buy it. But from that to orange to red to black just from dirty hands (especially red you would expect from the blood of your enemies) is just bs.
I've come to the same realization a while ago, but I've also come to terms with it :-)
Of course most companies are messed up, the same way that every organization of sufficient size is. The reason is simply human nature.
I used to get really angry about lots of things, but I'm relatively calm nowadays. The trick is to look at all these antipatterns, political, inefficient, toxic behavior that you see in companies as some kind of force of nature.
Sales organizations building their own IT department. Product orgas caring about the process of building a product more than the actual product. HR guarding "people and culture", but talking shit behind employees backs.
Oh well.
You can either get angry, fight pointless fights and shorten your life. Or you make your peace and try to navigate the mess.
The prolog about karate belt colors is not true. I like the story of how you start with a white belt and practice so long it turns to black, but in reality the colors do have some symbolic meaning. After reading the full article I am not sure if it's author's sense of humor or just misquoting :)
They are a modern invention, but the Karate belts were not made just for westerners given that Funakoshi introduced them in Japan for kyuu ranks (after consulting with the founder of Judo).
This person... must be very young. Every chef I've met is a borderline or full-on alcoholic. Bosses aren't supposed to tell you what to do, they're supposed to deal with you when you aren't doing it. Those aren't companies being fucked up, those are just... ways work is done.
But the OP also shouldn't be glorifying being fucked up or working too hard. The drunken chef thing, that needs to change. Bosses not telling you what to do? That's the ideal.
Do what you are comfortable getting paid for, that enables you to have a family life, friends, and interests outside of what you get paid for. We were never supposed to work this much anyway (see: pre-industrial labor, hunter-gatherers, etc). If you are constantly stressed at work, find another job.
All companies are pathological is the way I think of it.
But I would add that in my experience it seems to correlate to size of the organization. I.E. smaller orgs are not immune but the larger you get the more organizational pathology that creeps in.
For me its based on 30+ years consulting, with many different companies of different industries, sizes, and maturity as an organization.
The value for me in this notion is that it has stopped me from fantasizing about idealistic work scenarios / environments.
The larger the company the more likely it is to have authoritarians and narcissists in positions of power. They will inevitably poison the culture and usually destroy profitability - although that may not be obvious for a while.
In fact they can create the illusion of doing the opposite. Occasionally they actually manage it for real, but more usually they create a boom/bust cycle where everything looks splendid until suddenly it doesn't.
I strongly suspect pathology is related to personality disorders. The less disordered the management team and employees are, the less political drama, time wasting, power playing, and passive aggressive incompetence you get.
I worked at a really big tech company on a tight knit operations team. The boss quit so the put the VP of eng in charge of our team. He never once came to our team meeting, never once told any of us what to do, asked us to do anything or in any way interacted with us except to say hi and have a beer if we were hanging out on Friday.
That wasn’t fucked up at all. We were all really good at what we did (with the possible exception of me, I was just trying to keep up), we identified what needed to be done, prioritized it and got it done. In other words we self-organized. That’s a sign of a good company. It was an environment that caused me to step up and take responsibility for things two levels above my pay grade. Not because I’m ambitious, but because things needed doing and I was the only one available to take care of them.
It’s funny that the author lists that as a way for a company to be fucked up. I’ve worked for a lot of fucked up companies. That’s one of the stories I tell my partners now about my hand-off management style. People will step up if given the opportunity. And if they can’t, it’ll rapidly become apparent and they’ll go find another company and somebody who wants to boss them around.
You said: "Not because I’m ambitious, but because things needed doing and I was the only one available to take care of them."
But this person doesn't always exist. Or that person might exist but might not want to "take care" of the team as they don't enjoy that or feel overwhelmed by it.
But in the end your team didn't self organize. You stepped up to organize it.
In many cases this only goes a certain distance, in many it doesn't and somebody needs to make the management decisions as a manager and understand what the team is struggling with.
I think certain types of teams are well suited for this when your customers are technical staff members.
"Operations" is kind of a loaded title because it could be 10 different things but I'm guessing in your context it's at least related to tech because the VP of engineering was put in charge.
If your job is to make the lives of your engineers easier by setting up infra and workflows to let them ship things faster and safer then you're kind of the perfect person to figure out what to work on because you're at ground zero experiencing everything first hand. Every bottleneck and problem you encounter is prime pickings for something to work on. Then you as a team (or as a solo person in this role) can figure out what to take on next.
This is the type of role I'm in now as a 1 person team with mostly free reign to pick what to work on and it's great. All of the devs basically treat me as a consultant, then I help identify ways to improve things and implement those solutions. I mostly focus on infra and deployment related topics. I regularly bounce ideas off the person I report to and we figure out long term goals together (a very positive experience), but day to day or week to week I self regulate my tasks to move towards the high level goals.
I started at a company that didn't have software as a focus. Went to a consultancy and did work for quite a few companies. Eventually got hired by a division of a billionaire's conglomerate. And I get to interact with members of my profession in similar sorts of situations.
And personally, I've yet to get to the internals of a company and not find some amount of spit, glue, and rubber bands holding together critical infrastructure.
Like always, there's something somewhere that will make me go, "They do what?" and raise my eyebrows.
And while I personally have not witnessed it, I do have friends who have worked for FAANG level companies and there is some amount of cowboy-ness there too.
I think of a time when I wanted to leave a company, and people pull a line like this out. They'd accuse me of a "grass is greener" mentality and try to tell me I had it good as I could get. But they were pretty spectacularly wrong.
Yes, all companies and all humans have problems. Perfection doesn't exist.
But this is not an excuse for a shitty or abusive employer, or just one that isn't for you. If you have intuition that there is better out for you, make a plan and follow it.
"You only have white belt and black belts and you never wash them"
Old wives tale.
Things don't have to be the way they were 10,000,000 years ago because
"that is the way they did it then."
If that was the case, we would still be diagnosing diseases using the 4 humors in medicine - black bile, blood, phlegm, and yellow bile.
In reality, it is good to give people feedback all the time, and it is good to give people a new belt as soon as they can do different levels of actions for each level. It's incentive to have a new belt every 2 or 3 months. It is a physical representation of progress.
I've read this a few times and don't get his analogy of martial arts belts to all companies are fucked up. It doesn't follow at all. I guess it means when you first start working after you graduate, you start at a white belt level and you keep working on getting into more fucked up companies as you go along until you find the one that is just as fucked up as you are in the same way you are, but this doesn't make sense because you also have levels of black belts - a 1st degree black belt is the same as a white belt to a 5th degree black belt. You never stop learning and getting better and higher belts. So I guess you need to keep finding more and more fucked up and worse companies for your whole life??? That fit you even better??? Because you learn to find more fucked up companies the more you practice finding fucked up companies?
Between that analogy and the toxic quote at the end... I have no idea what he's talking about either.
I have an actual anxiety disorder. I'm also pretty successful. Acute anxiety is debilitating -- it isn't something to be 'harnessed' for 'productivity'.
The medical community is one of the most harmful forces for people with ADHD (I know it's not directly related to your comment but I always like to point this out)
Your doctor/psych can really be your worst enemy. They watch their patients suffer horrible outcomes and death, while they do nothing and say "not my problem", and constantly spewing bigotry against people with the condition.
I HAVE to use stress and anxiety to get my work done, and it's incredibly debilitating.
> MOST SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE ARE JUST A WALKING ANXIETY DISORDER HARNESSED FOR PRODUCTIVITY.
I can’t help but think of recent headlines regarding the apparent drop in worker productivity over the past year or so—-most suggest that economists are struggling to understand the cause. Yeah, it’s a gd mystery. Why aren’t people motivated to be “successful”.
Unfortunately, some hirers optimise for this because in the short term the kind of people who they can rely upon to impose on, stay late and stress out (ie be seen to "care" in the corporate dystopia) and burnout are the fucked-up "normal" they aspire to.
As someone who fits this description exactly, it's you have to really manage the anxiety to hit your productive groove.
With my current job, I explicitly went from a full stack dev to a front end dev to shed responsibility in certain areas, because if I'm allowed to see the whole picture, I'm going to try and fix the full picture.
Yep, so by definition if your input (higher wage) increases while your total output stays the same, then the ratio once divided shows productivity per unit has decreased, as OP said.
The input is not the cost of the hours worked, but the number of hours worked. Essentially, productivity measures the number of items a worker can produce per hour worked. Wage or cost doesn’t enter the equation.
I think a better way to say this is "No company is absolutely perfect"
Binary statements aren't helpful, especially when one of the two binary options is impossible (perfect companies don't exist).
The real problem with binary statements is that it opens the door to people justifying severe problems at one company because "all companies are fucked up". Some problems are very different than others, and it's not really useful to lump them all into one bucket labeled "fucked up" that every company fits into.
> lol. All companies are fucked up... the trick is finding a company that's fucked up in a way that works for you.
This almost starts to touch on the nuance, but I think it's really important to clarify that not all companies are toxic, or abusive, or have incompetent executives, or underpay people, etc. There are entire classes of companies doing things that shouldn't be tolerated, especially when there are so many companies not doing those things that would be happy to hire good employees.
this was a big realization when I jumped from a scrappy startup to FAANG for two years. Was it all ice cream and unicorn farts? Absolutely not. Everything company has bullshit. It's your job to figure out if it's bs you can tolerate, or if it's not how changing jobs will alleviate it.
The fucked up examples he gives aren’t sustainable. Eventually that alcoholic chef isn’t going to be able to function well enough in the kitchen. Businesses can tolerate a certain amount of slacking and inefficiency, but a complete breakdown isn’t going to last forever.
On the downside, it can be particularly bad to find a place where the kind of fucked up they have and the kind of fucked up you have don't work well enough together to be happy or healthy, not bad enough to get worse, and you are all sort of locked into a slow slide of dysfunction that just gets a little worse month by month, but not enough that anyone makes a big change.
I’m convinced that companies have have quirks due to internalized organizational traumas that occurred in the past. Some calamity happens, the corporation overreacts and says “no, never again” to the bad thing, and develops practices to avoid it. The people that remember what precipitated the practice move on, and it just becomes a self-perpetuating oddity that everyone mechanically does.
As an outsider joining a company, I find you can actually get a sense of the unspoken history of an organization by all the batshit crazy things it does. There’s always a story about how that all came to be. I’m not saying understanding that will help you fix it (you probably won’t), but it’ll at least give you a chance.
While not all companies are as pervasively fucked up as the article claims, all companies do have problems, and these problems typically correlate to the stage a company is in. There's a great book on this which is older than I am called Managing Corporate Lifecycles. What's interesting with books about people is that they age much better than books about technology. Technology changes rapidly, but groups of people trying to accomplish something go through surprisingly predictable phases, regardless of the time period. If you like the title of the article but were disappointed by the content, I would highly recommend checking out the book I mentioned.
Fun article/writing style, but IMO not very accurate. No company is perfect, but most are not genuinely fucked up, just a little dysfunctional here and there.
Yeah, you can "turn your belt black" all you want but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll eventually end up at a company that works for you.
First, it may take forever. Second, companies (and you!) are constantly changing, and a company that might work for you today might suddenly be a hellhole if upper management changes direction.
So, yes, "turn your belt black". But there are many ways to deal with a company that is screwed up: quit, talk to your boss, look for reassignment, grin and bear it until it changes, etc. Turning your belt black is only marginally related to dealing with whatever is happening at work.
From the perspective of the people on HackerNews, they are.
You'd be shocked how often I hear engineers complaining about "politics" at the company (that they're trying to avoid) when really they're just talking about...human interactions. Humans being human.
> I worked an office gig one time where my boss just stopped telling us what to do. We were just supposed to "know." For some people, this probably sounds amazing right? No corporate politics. No bullshit meetings. Just do whatever you feel like! It was great for half a heartbeat but then it turned into "Lord of the Flies" ... the inmates running the asylum sort of thing.
When asked for advice on how to evaluate a job, I usually suggest looking at these 5 aspects:
(1) Team
(2) Domain the company competes in
(3) Technology used
(4) Commute
(5) Compensation
Most people focus too much on the "name" of the company and/or the compensation, and do not weight the other factors enough and often later regret their choices.
It's not outright false but it holds for the black belt.
Once you complete all the black belt Dan's your belt is so worn out it starts becoming white again.
It is outright false because TFA implies the belt would stay dark with all the accumulated crud. Kouryu practitioners wore belts because it kept their pants up, not because it signaled rank.
Yahoo's Tim Brady (founding Chief Product Officer):
When things are going well and you’re in a growth industry, you don’t have to deal with many difficult issues. It’s the old cliche, winning solves everything. It’s really true. It solves everything… or maybe better said, it masks all your mistakes. A lot of the mistakes you make get masked because you receive almost no negative feedback.
But then the bottom fell out and the board let Tim Koogle go. The upper ranks of management emptied out pretty quick, except for me and the CTO who stuck around. We got a new CEO and set of peers in upper management. Let me just say, I learned a whole lot more about business on the way down than I did on the way up.
Huh? This was a really weird article/post in my opinion. I agree with the sentiment and really enjoyed the message of "turn your belt black".
"Fucked up" to me means things more like fraud and indentured servitude.
Maybe I wouldn't have clicked with another title but it just left me scratching my head being "yeah that's bad but why does that make 'all companies' anything"
If you want to destroy it, then Elon is on the right track.
Steve Jobs got away with that in the early Apple days - the pirate flag - trashing the Apple II team as bozos , trashing folks when they did not deliver what he expected but the Lisa/Mac folks believed in their mission and was happy to put up with him.
And Sculley/board got rid of him before he could inflict more serious damage.
Don't think twitter folks is like that.
Also, Steve when he came back seemed to have mellowed due to having a family and rather had trusted lieutenants in place to execute his vision and some of them still remain there at Apple.
Well. It begins with a fake anecdote on karate belts - they were invented in France by Mikinosuke Kawaishi, so I am not really willing to read further han the first few lines.
"Wabi-sabi rejects the pursuit of perfection and embraces the reality of imperfection. The philosophy behind wabi-sabi can help us escape the hamster wheel of chasing an ideal life and teaches us to appreciate existence as it is: perfectly imperfect."
I think another way to phrase this is "No company is perfect, don't let good be the enemy of perfect, find a company that ticks as many of your boxes while triggering as few or zero of your red flags" or something like that.
Is my job "perfect"? Absolutely not but it's pretty damn close and compared to my past jobs it's by far the best (if you can't say this then you might want to shop around). I have a friend who gets every Friday off, is that nice? Sure is but I wouldn't like a number of other things about the company he works for. Life/work is a series of tradeoffs/comprimsies, just make sure you are feel like you have more positives than negatives and you'll be happy.
I'm extremely thankful that early in my career I realized that I enjoy working for smaller companies. I was "lucky" enough to essentially be contracted out to a big client and I hated almost every aspect of it (except that I loved working on a single product vs the small little projects for various clients as I had done before). I took that experience and found a job at a small company that had a couple of products that I could iterate on and improve.
It's common to say something like "If you aren't changing jobs every 2-4 years you are leaving a ton of money on the table", that's mostly true but one other big benefit of moving companies is you get to exposed to a bunch of different ways companies are run, their culture, etc. I feel like every time I've switched jobs I've moved closer and closer to my personal "perfect", in part because I've recognized the red flags from my past/current jobs and watched for them before accepting an offer at a new place.