If you see a piece in the NYT that's making fun of those weird tech nerds, odds are high it's in the styles section. Choire Sicha, formerly of Gawker, took over the section last year, and since then there's been a rash of pieces akin to this one. Not exactly hit pieces but it's hard to miss the wry condescension throughout.
You might be interested in reading Choire’s definition of what the Styles section is/should be.
>I totally hear you that the name “Styles” can sometimes seem like a purple spotlight on a green bowl of fruit, or like a goofy headline on a serious story. We will aggressively cover politics, gender, sexuality, health, crime, shoes and contouring. These things make change in the world. You think Sports is going to cover all this?
Please, before this degrades into the inevitable shouting match, let's please consider that there are two things that can both simultaneously be true:
1.Tech is less bad than many, many other industries. I can personally speak to overt, even illegal sexism in the field of medicine at a level that would cause riots in tech. I’ve heard similar stories in academia, to say nothing of fields like manufacturing. We live in a sexist society, and the professional world reflects that.
2. Being “less bad” than other industries does not mean we don’t have an obligation to do better. We as an industry need to be doing more to make sure that the vast majority of stories are like this one. We’re not there yet.
In Hollywood, men at certain levels throw tantrums and break things when something isn't to their liking. It's changing a little and the film industry is ready for a comeuppance.
But in IT and many other industries this kind of behavior would get you flat-out escorted out of the building. What's considered OK on a film set is not tolerated in most offices.
I think you'll find that narcissistic violent temper tantrums are an equal opportunity game in Hollywood. It comes with the territory, due to the "tormented artist" trope having some basis in reality.
I think your second point is the thing that is it always so easy to gloss over. "better" or "less bad" are very relative. In the end, the Golden Rule is the target but the reality is that there are a lot of people that suck and have no concept of self reflection.
The problem with "meritocracy" culture is that it often values only 1 form of meritocracy and that is direct, technical, individual contributions.
IE, it values the brilliant asshole.
Sure, the brilliant asshole is very smart, and makes good individual contributions. But thats not really what matters.
What matters is the TOTAL contributions of the entire team. And the brilliant asshole, often brings a lot of INDIRECT negative value to that entire team, as he creates a toxic culture that negatively impacts the other people that he is supposed to be working with.
Whether or not a "meritocracy" is good or not depends entirely upon the definition of meritocracy that you are using.
> The problem with "meritocracy" culture is that it often values only 1 form of meritocracy and that is direct, technical, individual contributions.
I haven't witnessed this, but maybe I've just gotten lucky with the companies I've worked at. The companies I've worked at seemed to value both your individual contributions as well as your ability to make others more productive.. being a toxic asshole to your coworkers would absolutely not fly, even if you were hyperproductive. There were certainly some people who were highly valued that were highly productive that didn't seem to particularly _care_ about making other people's lives easier, but they also weren't toxic - they mostly kept to themselves.
Positive stories are just as important as the stories of sexism and harassment. One tells us the problem exists, the other reassures us that something can be done about it.
A reasonable concern is that "doing better" to some metric or agenda pushed by outsiders or johnny-come-latelies will result in the degradation of the ability to foster diversity and merit.
For example, how would the relatively sterile and sexless HR policies of Big Co. handle the pole dancing the author refers to? How long before that had to go too?
My spouse is a doctor as well, and I've also observed the issues the author discusses. I don't think your read of the causes here is correct.
It's worth reading more about the history of medicine to truly understand what's going on here -- the culture of abusive overwork in American medicine goes at the very least back to Osler and the invention of the modern residency program, and has as much to do with cocaine than any corporate malfeasance. Certainly hospitals and the medical industry profit from this culture, but they hardly created it.
Also, on what basis do you say that longer hours with fewer tradeoffs don't improve patient outcomes? You frame it as though it's obvious but is there any evidence to back that up? My wife and most other doctors I know all claim they'd rather have longer hours with fewer handoffs.
Every single study of the effects of fatigue on human cognitive ability that I am aware of indicate that A) fatigue can have massive deleterious effects on peoples' abilities to perform even simple tasks, and B) people are generally terrible at evaluating their own levels of fatigue. There's a good overview of a lot of this research here: https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-research-is-clear-long-hours-bac.... I don't know exactly what the costs are for more handoffs; my fiancée is a doctor, and she and multiple doctors have told me they have that same concern. But we have mountains of evidence demonstrating how rapidly cognitive ability degrades with fatigue. The idea that doctors, frequently working in a massively demanding, massively stressful setting, are somehow immune to those effects defies logic.
> The idea that doctors ... are somehow immune to those effects defies logic.
That claim was never made by OP. Can we have a discussion without attacking a straw man, please? You yourself acknowledge you only know one side of equation. If the other components are larger it would not matter that you have shown one aspect - that nobody disputes, incl. OP! - to be negative.
> A new [...] study [...] showed allowing surgical residents the flexibility to work longer hours in order to stay with their patients through the end of an operation or stabilize them during a critical event did not pose a greater risk to patients.
> “It’s counterintuitive to think it’s better for doctors to work longer hours,” said principal investigator Dr. Karl Bilimoria [...]. “But when doctors have to hand off their patients to other doctors at dangerous, inopportune times, that creates vulnerability to the loss of critical information, a break in the doctor-patient relationship and unsafe care.”
I have no doubt that overall the long hours are bad, I only respond because you attack a position OP didn't take. Also, the long hours may still be a logical conclusion and even beneficial - within the twisted logic of dysfunction in the larger system: "For evil to triumph, all that is required is for good men to respond rationally to incentives."
> Also, on what basis do you say that longer hours with fewer tradeoffs don't improve patient outcomes? You frame it as though it's obvious but is there any evidence to back that up? My wife and most other doctors I know all claim they'd rather have longer hours with fewer handoffs.
I responded with evidence.
And yeah, I've seen the FIRST study. The control group, in this case, is working a 16 hour shift. Even if they only need one hour on either side of that shift to go from asleep to work and then back to asleep (which is not what I have seen), that control group is maxing out at 6 hours of sleep, well below the level where all but a tiny percentage of the population starts to see serious performance declines. https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-research-is-clear-long-hours-bac.... A more useful study would look at residents who are actually well-rested - who have gotten the consistently required eight plus hours of sleep over a significant enough period of time to have eradicated their existing sleep debt - and then compare their performance going forward while they continue to get enough sleep to residents working 16 or 28 hour shifts.
Maybe patient handoffs are so dangerous because of the dysfunction everywhere else in the system. Maybe patient current-state summary and recent-changes log could be much better maintained, if doctors had a bit more time and the forms/systems for it were refactored a bit.
Doesn't it sound like medicine is like a web service infrastructure where everything is on fire, and there's just no time to really fix the root causes?
FWIW, my mother is an MD, a Family Practitioner. She eventually became head of FP for a small commercial hospital chain in the US. Two years ago, after perhaps 18 years of professional practice, she moved to New Zealand and is a FP in a small town. She takes 3 days off a week, has reasonable hours, does less paperwork, does more with her own hands which she would refer to specialists in the US. She absolutely loves it.
Agreed, this culture of abuse goes way back, and is as much rooted in a macho "I went through this, you're damn well going to" mentality.
I do think the increasing corporatization of medicine in the USA has accelerated the loss of autonomy and satisfaction, which makes the abuse and overwork far more difficult to take.
Yes I think this is an important point, medical culture plays a big role in this. The only place I've seen a similar culture is in the army.
If you're exhausted or in physical pain or have a cold, you not only power through it but you suck it up and refrain from complaining, even if you're assisting a surgery. You may be officially encouraged to know and respect your limits, but if you actually do this you quickly go from being a "brother in arms" to weak and unsuited for the profession.
I really enjoyed the frustration of the article's author in trying to attribute Ted Chiang's writing to his personal life or history.
We as humans seem to have this unceasing tendency to essentialize -- to believe that everything we do comes from deep-seated psychological needs. We project every action onto some event from years past with a parent, a lover, a friend.
I feel like this is borne out of a desire to believe that behavior is deterministic. That if only we too had undergone the experiences of the person who we're reading about, we too would be that acclaimed sci-fi writer, or famous entrepreneur, or asshole president. It excuses, to some extent, the fact that we are not that person.
But sometimes that's not the case. Sometimes we just build shit for fun. It doesn't all have to be us coming to terms with our distant father.
Zuckerberg, of all people, once had a quote vis-a-vis The Social Network (can't seem to find it) that basically amounted to the idea that they had to make the entirety of Facebook be about his rejection by a girl because the idea of people building something cool for its own sake doesn't make a good movie.
What's interesting for me is I feel like this armchair psychologizing we all do is getting worse. I don't have any evidence to back this up, just a feeling -- as we're exposed to more people's behaviors, we fall back to essentialist attributions of that behavior more and more.
> That if only we too had undergone the experiences of the person who we're reading about, we too would be that acclaimed sci-fi writer, or famous entrepreneur, or asshole president.
This reminds me of a great line from a story by Borges:
> El método inicial que imaginó era relativamente sencillo. Conocer bien el español, recuperar la fe católica, guerrear contra los moros o contra el turco, olvidar la historia de Europa entre los años de 1602 y de 1918, ser Miguel de Cervantes.
> The first method that he imagined [in order to write Don Quixote from scratch centuries later] was relatively simple. Learn Spanish well, return to the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or against the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes.
I highly recommend the story (called "Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote" or "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote").
> I really enjoyed the frustration of the article's author in trying to attribute Ted Chiang's writing to his personal life or history.
I thought that recent article in Vanity Fair about AI risk and Elon Musk was a great example of this instinct to try to reduce everything down to personal traumas or monkey politics. Apparently Musk cannot really be concerned about AI risk, it has to be some ulterior reason: perhaps he's envious of Larry Page! Or it's propaganda for Tesla! Or desperate attention-whore behavior (because he doesn't get enough attention?) or something, anything, which is not, y'know, being worried about creating intelligences without builtin human morality & limits.
I learned about the phenomenon you're describing in English class. The professor's thesis was that the desire to create a narrative is a fundamental part of the human experience. In essence what you're saying is that The Social Network's narrative--the entirety of Facebook [is] about [Mark Zuckerberg's] rejection by a girl--is not a compelling enough narrative for you. For you, you would much prefer a different narrative--that he was building something cool for its own sake. As an engineer I can relate to your preferred narrative, but Hollywood doesn't consider us its target audience.
This raises the question: what's a good metric that's used to decide what the narrative is?
A major theme in non-fiction writing today is to construct a narrative around the events and objects.
That the writer couldn't do this with Chiang is hilarious. Chiang sounds like a great guy at a dinner party: incredibly nerdy and learned, but not playing the normal social games.
Too bad the article's author hadn't read other Chiang's works: I'd love to see an article which derives "Understand", "Seventy-Two Letters", "The Evolution of Human Science" or "Exhalation" from the personal history.
This is a really interesting question to ask, but survey-based responses only tells us how venture capitalists think they make decisions. Obviously this is a secretive industry but I think the far more interesting question to answer is around revealed preferences rather than self-assessment.
This is a problem we've managed to solve for dozens of other dietary preferences, from kosher status to gluten-free, without insisting on mandatory labeling. Why is GMO so special?
It's hard to believe the sincerity of your claim, given that you can reasonably infer anything not advertising itself as "non-GMO" contains GMO.
Do you think that I have the right to have my food correctly labeled?
It seems to me that a lot of food is labeled as kosher, low fat, sugar free, contains peanuts, gluten-free, etc. I am not sure where your comment comes from.
That's ridiculous. Excluding the subway, there's still approximately 110k riders each way on the LIRR[1] and 90k each way on NJ Transit[2]. Plus amtrak, you're talking about ~450,000 daily rail passengers. That would still make Penn Station one of the 3 busiest train stations in Europe, for context.
This article, and its reflection on the creative process, on the insecurities felt by those who take part in it, on the pain of how long it takes to get anything done resonated very strongly with me. I think there's a lot to learn here for those of us in the business of creating software or businesses.
It's also written by one of my personal heroes, Robert Caro.
I have a young child at home. He eats bamba, peanut butter, and a worrying amount of New York City dirt.
That said, this is such a dangerous article, and I'm honestly surprised the NYT published it. It's written by a non-scientist making a "common sense" claim, and it even closes with a paragraph-long variation on the "how much can we really trust science anyways?" claim.
My understanding is that there has been a single study, done among a largely homogenous population, that has indicated Bamba's benefit. Maybe Bamba does help inoculate against peanut allergies -- I think it's plausible, even likely. But it's certainly not anything approaching scientific consensus, the author is not a scientist of any variety, and I think this article has a real danger to mislead.
I don't think its particularly dangerous. While its less detailed and formal, its not particularly out of line from common medical guidance on the issue. [0] Certainly, major publications -- including the Times -- frequently print pop-health advice that is more at odds with medical science than this piece.
100 times this. Eliminating structure just transfers the heavy lifting to informal mechanisms -- i.e. your "culture." No culture is sufficiently well-defined that everybody has a consistent definition of it, meaning you will inevitably have a situation where 2 people are doing directly contradictory things in the name of the company culture. The whole situation at GitHub from a few years ago with a founder's wife running reckless is a perfect example of this.
Ultimately there are probably non-hierarchical models that allow for effective and interesting coordination in certain types of small organizations (viz the Kibbutz), but Holocracy seems like it's replacing Shit Umbrellas with Shit Centrifuges.
Holacracy actually has way more structure than a hierarchy. Just look at the constitution (http://www.holacracy.org/constitution), or read about the rigid way they conduct meetings.
