Work Hard You'll Get There Eventually (hint: no you won't)

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2013/11/26/work-hard-you-ll-get-there-eventually-hint-no-you-won-t.aspx

by sweedy • 12 years ago

146 84 12 years ago

blogs.msdn.com

sarreph• 12 years ago

There's no real alternative offered here.

I understand there's a whole 'open' and 'small' world out there and I can learn lessons from my peers, but if I'm not supposed to be 'working hard for my boss' in the modern corporate world, what am I supposed to be doing to 'get there eventually'?

blakesterz• 12 years ago

I think there is an alternative offered here, it's just rather buried in there, I had to read it a couple times to find. I think these to bits of advice are pretty good:

"Today, success requires a modern perspective on the industry and actively managing your skills and relationships."

"Your loyalty must lie with your own career in the industry where you've chosen to work."

phoen• 12 years ago

The dog-eat-dog one-person band?

AdrianRossouw2• 12 years ago

learning, doing, telling people about it.

making friends, finding mentors, teaching others.

I think this is why open source is becoming the new programmer's resume. It is kind of the intersection of all those things.

None of this precludes working hard either, just for who and why you are doing it.

tejay• 12 years ago

This appears to be an older post, but I think what the original author meant was that hard work alone isn't a sufficient condition for success (I'd argue it is a necessary one, though).

The real answer is there probably isn't a sufficient condition for success, but hard work in pursuit of your own goals (rather a manager's) increases the likelihood of a positive outcome.

Still, I'd have gone a step further. 'Career' is such a false construction. Go do fun shit and get really good at it. Maybe I'm naively optimistic, but if you're really good at something, it's pretty easy to get paid (a lot) for it.

danbruc2• 12 years ago

Hard work is not important, good results are. That's a very different thing.

typicalbender• 12 years ago

In the article the author mentions that hard work is table stakes, meaning everyone is working hard but you need to do something different to actually get ahead and stand out among your other hard working peers.

dpweb2• 12 years ago

"if you're really good at something, it's pretty easy to get paid (a lot) for it."

This is only true in technology and because of the current market in tech labor and skills (and powerful people are working hard to change that).

It's not true for the musician, or many other passions where the reward has to be the work itself because it's hard to make any kind of living at it.

zanny• 12 years ago

If you work hard for your boss they laugh their way to the bank paying you the same flat salary and pocketing the profits of your labors.

To get there eventually (sadly?) you have to plan to get out from under others siphoning your productivity like that. Because the modern corporate culture has shifted to taking advantage of the best, rather than empowering them. Mostly because there is a surplus of (skilled) labor in most industries. If there wasn't, your boss would be treating you better because you are a scarce resource they don't want to lose because its either expensive or time consuming to replace.

And like the article says, "working hard" isn't invaluable.

zenbowman• 12 years ago

Work hard for your boss, but learn to, and intentionally practice communicating your work to a wider audience, so you are not tied to the fate of your boss or company. Speak at meetups, conferences, take an active role in mentoring, and develop meaningful relationships with peers in other companies so that when you want to move, its easy to do so.

Ixiaus• 12 years ago

Contributing or producing your own oss software too. Writing your thoughts and experiences in a blog our book too.

michaelochurch3• 12 years ago

It's easier to call out bad and outdated advice (Welch's) than to offer good advice, which the OP doesn't.

The problem with Welch's advice is that it's what successful people say, not what they do. You should pay attention to what unsuccessful people say and know (they're the ones who know the organization's true character) but what the successful people do. Take knowledge from the losers, but copy the actions (often unknowingly competent actions) of the winners.

I'm not a VC, haven't completed an exit, nor am I an executive or technical architect at a brand-name company. At age 30 and an IQ over 150, not being in a decision making role is failure. While I'm OK by objective standards, you should count me as unsuccessful, because I should be leading with my talent and I'm not, because I've picked some terrible startups. You should take advice from someone like me in terms of what I say. You shouldn't do what I do, because it obviously hasn't worked. Cognitively, I understand how to play politics; in the field, I'm bad at it.

Likewise, you should ignore what Jack Welch says but watch what he does. You should listen to what I say, but not copy my footwork. That's counterintuitive, for sure, but unknowing competence is superior to learned, analytical insight when you're in the field.

Basic point: what successful people say about the career game is the socially acceptable bullshit (work hard, over-deliver, never lie, be a team player) that has nothing to do with how it actually works. If they were the type who'd talk about how the career game actually works, they wouldn't be successful. They'd be pissing too many people off (like I do) by telling too many ugly truths.

Welch says: Don't panic. Just get in there and start thinking big. If your boss asks you for a report on the outlook for one of your company's products for the next year, you can be sure she already has a solid sense of the answer. So go beyond being the grunt assigned to confirm her hunch. Do the extra legwork and data-crunching to give her something that really expands her thinking -- an analysis, for instance, of how the entire industry might play out over the next three years.

Terrible fucking idea. Executives don't see a young grunt trying to work on the big picture as "initiative". (I learned this at Google when I pointed to a superior G+ Games strategy.) They see it as a challenge to their turf. They hit back hard, and they have all the power. It doesn't end well.

In reality, overperformance is a lot more dangerous than underperformance. Underperformance gives you about a 30% chance of being fired within 12 months, usually in the context of a layoff that affords severance. If you underperform smartly (and focus on building contacts and skills for your next gig) you'll have plenty of time and energy in reserve to tackle any consequences. Overperformance gives you a 5% chance of being tapped as protege of someone important and a 95% chance of being fired (usually with a dishonest but humiliating "performance" case being manufactured; if you're a star, your job duties will be rearranged so you can't perform) inside of 4 months. Not fucking worth it.

In general, this is even more true of VC-funded startups than large companies, so I don't want to hear the "startups are the antidote" retort. The median VC-funded startup is way more dysfunctional and political than, say, a large investment bank.

hnnewguy• 12 years ago

"They see it as a challenge to their turf."

This is a good point. While I believe the "system", in general, works to get people where they need to go and build the right products and services, the internal politics on a person-to-person basis are essentially random; you never know what you're going to get when you step foot in an enterprise. And the associated costs of having a "bad" manager are high.

mildtrepidation• 12 years ago

Somehow you've decided that, despite labeling yourself unsuccessful, people should pay attention to what you say. The only support I see you making for this is citing your IQ, which is meaningless.

You obviously believe you're telling people things that work, and the attempt to help is something I'm sure people appreciate. But based on what you're saying here, either you don't follow that advice, you don't understand it well enough to apply it correctly, or you do apply it correctly it's actually bad advice. So unless you're learning from what successful people have done (not just said), you're offering unproven advice, and even if you are, you're offering advice you don't seem to understand.

michaelochurch3• 12 years ago

I've had a lot of terrible luck. Some of it was no one's fault, most of it was not my fault. I'll probably be a lot more successful now that I have my shit together. But when things go bad for you, you learn what people really are in a way that the ones with charmed lives never really do.

I suppose I'm lucky insofar as I had my bad luck in my 20s, when it was easier to recover than in one's 50s.

Much knowledge can only be gained through misery and suffering. Since humans are mostly defective, it's rare that a person who hasn't suffered, been betrayed, etc. knows how people actually work.

Additionally, understanding how human organizations work is no substitute for real-time footwork. Ideally, one wants both. I have a wealth of the first (and, unlike Welch, I'm willing to share what I know) but (unlike your garden variety corporate psychopath) I'm not good enough at reading people to develop that "snake sense" for others' weaknesses. In the field, that's also very valuable, and it's something I never developed.

crazy1van• 12 years ago

Terrible fucking idea. Executives don't see a young grunt trying to work on the big picture as "initiative". (I learned this at Google when I pointed to a superior G+ Games strategy.) They see it as a challenge to their turf. They hit back hard, and they have all the power. It doesn't end well.

You really need to know your manager. Some are very turf conscious like your G+ games person, but many aren't.

Also there is a difference between a new employee going above and beyond on an assignment and a new employee thinking they already know enough to radically change a product's strategy. There are a lot of super smart new employees who think smarts alone makes them qualified to jump into a new job and instantly know better than the people who have been working it for years.

sheepmullet• 12 years ago

There are a lot of super smart new employees who think smarts alone makes them qualified to jump into a new job and instantly know better than the people who have been working it for years.

And often they do. I've found a fresh perspective really helps as I am sometimes too close and invested in the existing process. Doesn't make it easy to stomach though...

dpweb2• 12 years ago

Liked your blog post michaelochurch on meritocracy by the way..

I think generally people are not seeing the problem correctly.

There is nothing wrong itself with over-delivering or being a team player. "Meritocracy" is easily adopted as a concept (especially by smart technical people I would say), because its entirely logical and also happens to appear the "moral" thing. It is. But, it gets distorted quite often and that distortion is called company politics.

Your goal is not to over-deliver in itself or kiss your boss' ass, or emulate powerful people. Those powerful people may have gotten powerful by stabbing backs all over the place - do you really want to emulate that? I would argue maybe money and prestige ranks higher for people then the tranquility in the belief that they themselves are moral people - but tranquility is high up on the list - if you really put it to people.

Don't even listen to career advice by CEOs or your best friend. Your goal is nothing more - than to make yourself valuable.

Your value may or may not get recognized, it depends on your company environment, but I strongly believe this, it will and MUST eventually - even if you have to quit and go find it at another company or start your own, where you will be rightly compensated by the general public.

ryandrake• 12 years ago

Is it really that much of a mystery? Here's how to succeed in tech. Sorry for the cynicism, but it's pretty obvious if you open your eyes and look around the Valley:

1. Have rich, preferably white parents who can get you into Harvard, Stanford, Yale, etc.

2. Found a company that does whatever (it doesn't really matter as long as it involves whatever's hot in technology in some way), and use your family/school connections to get funding.

3. IPO or get acquired by SuperUltraMegaCorp.

4. Luck into being employee 2-10 at such a company.

Notice, there's nothing about working hard, impressing your boss, company loyalty, etc. You can find exceptions, but I don't think you can argue against this being a common, almost default formula these days.

mattgreenrocks3• 12 years ago

The cardinal sin: there's nothing there involving R&D, or furthering the state of the art. This is why software lost it's way: it's too timid. We all use the same set of tools ("best practices"), same languages ("traction"), and target the same saturated demographic.

The consequence: every software job requires 5 years experience in $TRENDY_FRAMEWORK rather than 10 years of generalist experience. But, hey, we'll quiz you on hash table implementation to pretend we're on the cutting edge!

We're making our day-to-day jobs worse. Stop it.

Yuioup2• 12 years ago

I feel weird reading a piece on career advice by somebody who works at Microsoft.

shawndumas• 12 years ago

honest question; where do you work?

mattgreenrocks3• 12 years ago

Total ad hominem. MS has some great talent, and MS Research does some awesome things.

Yuioup2• 12 years ago

Good point. I should stop making throwaway remarks on HN.

smtddr• 12 years ago

Here's how I think of it.

Smashing your shoulder against a heavy metal vault door as hard as you can over and over, hoping someone at the other side will eventually hear you and open the door is a waste of time. It results in burn-out with nearly no hope of progress.

Instead, you should examine the door and try to open it yourself with a very deliberate attempts of sound reasoning based on where the weak points of the door may be. And after awhile, you may even discover that you can walk around it... or maybe that door isn't blocking the path you should be on to begin with.

qwerta• 12 years ago

I found that it is very important to have enough free capital (energy, money) to catch opportunities when they come. If you work constantly at limit of your strength and have no free energy to even explore, it is practically equivalent to being broke.

hagbardgroup5• 12 years ago

The new system is not 'better' than the old system, and is probably significantly worse. While it's true that Welch's advice is no longer valid, it's because the legal, financial, and monetary environment has changed so much since the heydays of GE.

My grandfather retired a millionaire after working as a basic GE accountant for his entire postwar life. So as far as he was concerned, GE treated him well, and it treated his family well enough that my mother still remembers the Christmas parties that the company threw in upstate New York for their genuine human warmth.

When I compare how GE treated my grandfather versus how my father was treated by the companies that he worked for (taking the ambitious, go-getter advice), I am struck by how poorly he was served by both that and the overall cultural structure of the United States. My grandfather survived a Nazi prison camp for the US Government, and his weeks of eating grass soup paid off.

So to people saying that Welch's advice was psychopathic bullshit, I say sucks to you. Grandpa worked 9-5 for Jack, was not a particularly ambitious man, and came out way ahead in return for his loyalty. While surely this did not work for everyone, it did for enough of the people for stories like this to be common.

My perspective is entirely different -- because the US no longer rewards loyalty in either the public or private spheres. It is in fact punished, as this writer notes. How exactly can you build a company that lasts for longer than a relative eyeblink when every person is looking out for #1, and expects to be stabbed in the ass by everyone around them?

LinkedIn is a pain in the ass. Propagandizing for yourself to eke out a good living and career hopping all over the country is a pain in the ass. Both activities are tangential to producing profitable work over a long period of time. Every jackass who wants to get a VP position has to be a hot air spewing 'thought leader' now. This is all wasteful activity that defeats the entire economic purpose of firms.

The modern cynicism is corrosive to our long term prospects as a country, even if it is correct individual advice for the current environment. It will not survive, because this country will not survive as a single entity given such broken incentives and cultural mores.

justinmk• 12 years ago

because the US no longer rewards loyalty in either the public or private spheres

The comfort of 1950s US was an accident of the WW2 windfall resulting from our happy position as the creditor for most of Europe. Pointing to that accident as a model for future progress is childish.

hagbardgroup5• 12 years ago

Sorta. It is too complex an issue to debate in detail on HN without a formal moderator. You are grasping an important part of it.

Amezarak2• 12 years ago

Can you explain to me how the federal government being a creditor to European nations after World War II ensured happy times for employee/employer relations? If creditor/debtor status of the federal government makes such a difference, why didn't the massive US federal debt (around 110% of GDP) negate that creditor status? This argument has never made sense to me since a) most European countries had almost fully recovered by the mid-50s, yet this boom lasted much longer, b) our exports (and imports) were way down during the post-war period and basically irrelevant c) the loans were mostly inflated away. I don't understand what mechanism would have had the observed effect.

If anything I'd have thought the wage and price controls from WWII were a bigger factor, since in the absence of higher pay, companies had to offer more benefits and cultivate better relationships with their employees to keep them around - and there seems to have been a lot of inertia from those policies.

FD3SA2• 12 years ago

That, in combination with the ~50% tax rate on income and capital gains. Turns out, when you redistribute wealth, consumption increases so rapidly that the economy takes off.

That no longer is much of an option, as wealthy individuals have not only managed to reduce capital gains to ridiculously low levels, but also diversified their holdings throughout the globe. This makes taxation a poor tactic, as capital will just flow to tax havens as the rate increases.

Turns out that feudalism is the natural state of man, and reprieves from it are quite temporary anomalies.

For those interested in details, Thomas Piketty's Capital is an excellent reference on the subject. Also, the movie Inequality for All is a far more approachable presentation based on the book.

x0x0• 12 years ago

I think it was more we where one of the few advanced economies not bombed into the ground.

coldtea• 12 years ago

And yet the US has had far more wealth the next decades, per capita and in aggregate (adjusted for inflation) that it ever had back then, right?

So it's not like the new ruthless environment is a result of budgetary restrictions.

cml2• 12 years ago

I don't disagree with your sentiment, but I think that Mr. Welch's advice could be read as extremely cynical as well: maybe he's just telling people what they want to hear, which has the added benefit of encouraging (perhaps unwarranted) loyalty in lower-ranking employees. Like a self-serving Socratic "noble lie" for corporate types?

hagbardgroup5• 12 years ago

It was not a lie at the time. It worked out just fine. Why do you think he enjoys such an excellent reputation now? Reputation is just an effect of the sum of your interactions with people.

FD3SA2• 12 years ago

How exactly can you build a company that lasts for longer than a relative eyeblink when every person is looking out for #1, and expects to be stabbed in the ass by everyone around them?

Exactly, but I believe you have the causal chain reversed. It was the big companies that severed the bond of trust, and the employees who had to adapt to the new free-for-all market.

Neutron Jack eliminated 81,000 jobs in 5 years from GE (1980-1985). This resulted in the remaining employees, quite rationally, being very concerned for their careers. And thus, they began looking for options, and looking out for #1, because they knew they couldn't depend on Jack.

Of course, I agree that it is not productive to constantly be looking for better opportunities, but this is a result of never knowing when a Jack-like CEO is going to lay you off. Big companies started this war, and now they have to live with the consequences.

The startup movement is, for all intents and purposes, a way for talented employees to directly capture some the incredible value they would otherwise have created for big companies. Jack could've given these guys profit-sharing, equity or other incentives to work for him. Instead, he hung the sword of Damocles over their heads.

Elon Musk would've made one hell of an employee for any big corp. Instead, after weighing his options, he realized it would be better to just beat them at their own game.

You reap what you sow, Jack.

pdonis3• 12 years ago

It was the big companies that severed the bond of trust

Because they had to. The original "bond of trust" was never about actual two-way loyalty; it was about the company bottom line. Companies used "bond of trust" rhetoric to lure employees in; they never actually meant it.

In the period following WWII, most industries in the US were growth industries: companies had to get and keep workers by hook or by crook, even if it meant giving them lavish compensation well beyond what their work would actually be worth in an equilibrium, non-growth market, because the alternative for the company was to lose all the growth business to their competitors, as people bought cars, refrigerators, etc. who had never had them before. (Pg talks about this in one of his essays: basically, companies like GE in the two decades or so after WW II were startups overpaying for labor to capture market share.)

By the 1970s and 1980s, much of that growth had stopped because most of the markets for the big US industries were reasonably saturated. Most people now had cars, refrigerators, etc., so those companies all had to shift from a growth market to a mature market where most business was from repeat customers wanting to upgrade their products, not new customers who had never had the product before. So the companies, in order to stay in business, had to drastically change the way they treated employees, since the costs of those employees were now a significant driver to their bottom line.

I'm not saying the companies were good and sweet and true; of course not. They broke a lot of long-standing employee agreements in the process of downsizing. I'm just saying that any employee who didn't see it coming from a mile away wasn't paying attention, and any employee who actually believed the company rhetoric about the "bond of trust" was living in a fool's paradise from the beginning.

Jack could've given these guys profit-sharing, equity or other incentives to work for him.

He could have given some of them those incentives, yes. He could never have given all of them those incentives; there wasn't enough to go around. The plain fact was that companies like GE had too many employees for a mature market; there was simply not enough business any more to support all of them.

Again, that doesn't mean the way he did it was good. But if it took what he did then for employees to realize they couldn't depend on him, then again, those employees weren't paying attention; they should have known from the start that they couldn't depend on him, that if push came to shove he was going to do what was best for the company, not best for them. Any employee should always know that; that's what it means to be an employee.

pdonis3• 12 years ago

The new system is not 'better' than the old system, and is probably significantly worse.

It's worse if your goal is to work for one company for your entire career, and take whatever that company can offer you, yes. The new system no longer offers that goal as a realistic option.

However, by not offering that goal as a realistic option, the new system at least forces people to take responsibility for their own careers, instead of expecting someone else--"the company" or whoever--to manage their careers for them. I don't think that's a bad tradeoff, all things considered.

justin66• 12 years ago

So to people saying that Welch's advice was psychopathic bullshit, I say sucks to you. Grandpa worked 9-5 for Jack, was not a particularly ambitious man, and came out way ahead in return for his loyalty.

I'd have thought your grandfather was retired by the time Welch took over. In any case, Welch changed GE corporate culture away from what your grandfather would have been nostalgic about.

watwut2• 12 years ago

You grandfather was not only one working for Jack Welch. He might have benefited, plenty of others did not. Jack Welch laid off a lot of loyal hardwoking capable people in his days. GE cut all businesses in which the company could not dominate the market in first or second positions and I doubt those all were slackers. Were your grandpa be employed there, his treatment would be much different.

He used "fire 10% management" strategy for years, maybe even started that thing. I find suspect that someone who is not particularly ambitious man working 9-5 survived long in that stab back otherwise you will be one of fired 10% environment. Maybe he retired before or was stable due to connections?

There were bound to be many many people who worked hard, did their best, achieved a lot and then fired cause somebody had to be fired no matter objective absolute performance.

Jack Welch contributed his share to dropping loyalty. Whether the "old high loyalty" was better or not, Jack Welch is among those who destroyed it.

hagbardgroup5• 12 years ago

Quite possibly. My grandfather's working life stopped in the mid-1980s. I had hoped to communicate that the search for human villains and heroes tends to be misleading. Our actions are often reactive to larger, more complex trends in politics and finance.

It is easier to say "Jack Welch, big badman, such fat meanie" than it is to track all the myriad complex changes in tax policy, central banking, technology, society, and in other fields.

"I find suspect that someone who is not particularly ambitious man working 9-5 survived long in that stab back otherwise you will be one of fired 10% environment."

You're entitled... to your feelings. I would describe someone who worked for over 30 years without attempting to reach an executive position as 'not particularly ambitious.' I could also be lying. Or paid off by GE. I could even be Jack Welch.

Don't trust what you read on the internet.

CamperBob22• 12 years ago

GE cut all businesses in which the company could not dominate the market in first or second positions and I doubt those all were slackers.

(Shrug) The ones who weren't slackers did better somewhere else. The ones who were slackers, Welch was right to fire. What's the problem here, exactly?

I'm not defending stack ranking -- it's stupid and counterproductive. But the notion that GE owes somebody a lifetime career at their shareholders' expense is unsustainable in a world that (rightfully) doesn't work that way anymore.

skybrian• 12 years ago

The original post was short on actual advice. My advice would be to make sure that what you do makes sense to the many people you work with, to people who don't know you at all in other parts of the company, and sometimes even the outside world.

This doesn't mean endless propaganda. It means taking the outside view, writing well, and perhaps sometimes giving presentations that are actually useful. It means earning trust at a distance, not backstabbing like you claim.

mattgreenrocks3• 12 years ago

because the US no longer rewards loyalty in either the public or private spheres. It is in fact punished, as this writer notes

Loyalty is seen as weakness: "this person can't hack it on their own!" Everything is viewed through the lens of power, which makes for a highly toxic environment.

Propagandizing for yourself to eke out a good living and career hopping all over the country is a pain in the ass. Both activities are tangential to producing profitable work over a long period of time.

Thank you.

In the absence of believing in institutions (employers), we now just believe in ourselves. To the point where we're actively encouraged to "do things and blog about them." Yes, we need to call attention to the things we've done because...well, everyone else is yelling about what they've done.

I understand the need to talk about what you've done, but it's beyond ridiculous how much self-promotion goes on. Sometimes I feel Twitter and HN is over 50% self-promotional. It's gross.

gummify• 12 years ago

Jack presents good advice that still is an important part of culture in certain sectors and within certain types of businesses if you want to move up the corporate ladder. He says to work hard but also to work smart, I don't think he's saying number of hours worked or level of brown nosing positively correlates to return on efforts or dollars. You must have a career strategy and not just be a hamster running around a wheel. Work hard at that strategy and whether it means being promoted up the ladder every year in the same company or to deliver on something groundbreaking and then exiting within a couple years or less. In other news, I wonder how Jack and Tim Ferriss would get along.

DanielBMarkham• 12 years ago

Yeah, after reading about a dozen of these over the years, it's just depressing.

Look at it this way: success in life is 1/3 working hard, 1/3 working smart, and 1/3 being lucky.

You might ditch the first two and get really lucky. Or not. Your best bet is to do all three. Even then, guess what, little snowflake? You're not that special, and you may only have bad luck.

So what? If you're doing something you have passion about, or if you ever grow up enough to learn to create your own passion as you go along, you're going to be doing the first two things anyway. So this isn't about some secret formula to get what you want; this is about just doing something more fulfilling in life than taking up space and seeking to self-stimulate. Might be worthwhile. Who knows?

Yep, the old days of "I'll be loyal to the company and the company will be loyal to me" are gone. But that was just a tiny piece of the big picture. Simply because some of the details shift around doesn't mean the basics have changed that much. Good grief.

ADD: The more I think about this article, the more it bugs me. So the advice is don't try to impress your boss because he won't be around long? How about just trying to be a pleasant, hard-working, reliable person that other people find enjoyable to work with, boss or not? Or do we sulk around wondering why we should do anything at all unless there's something directly in it for us?

youngbenny• 12 years ago

Uh, Beavis neoliberalism is cool, huh huh

tsunamifury• 12 years ago

Cooperate-Cooperate, Betray-Cooperate, or Betray-Betray.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_game

In the golden era we imagine the corporate worker relations was a cooperate cooperate game, producing hard work, good will, and strong meaningful community for everyone.

Then corporations realized they needed workers to cooperate while reserving the right to betray them (layoffs, terminations etc) because as the market grew more cut throat due to everyone's success, a company needed to stay lean and competitive.

Workers are now growing wise to this and we are entering a betray-betray era. Corperations are working to force cooperation while reserving the right to betray (see google/apple/facebook engineering cartel) but workers in high demand fields are becoming savvy as they can use their skills to go anywhere

The problem is the net result of the betray-betray game is assumed to be net lower than the other strategy to play the game, causing the community at large to gain less over multiple games.

To me this is the net result of cynicism: damaging the community in the name of optimization. Capitalism as practiced is a pain-optimization machine and until we choose to risk playing the game as a cooperative endeavor, it will never improve.

scythe2• 12 years ago

Not everything is the prisoner's dilemma. There's no reason -- at least not in your post -- that self-motivated individualism can't be efficient; such ideas were advocated by e.g. Hayek and Friedman (to say nothing of real macroeconomics). If my time is better spent somewhere else because they offer me more money, maybe that's because the work I do there will produce more value for the world overall.

In other words your argument is circular: you assume that individualism is bad, and you conclude that capitalism (which starts and ends with individualism) is bad.

Furthermore have workers and corporations always competed cf. unionization in the 1920s and so forth; in general this has been considered an overall benefit (working fewer hours --> quality of life and education).

tormeh2• 12 years ago

You assume that your wage is proportional to the value you deliver to the world. Bad. Not correct. Try again. There is a positive correlation on the population level, but on the individual level the relationship is tenuous at best.

legutierr• 12 years ago

What you describe is more an iterated prisoner's dilemma rather than a static game. What's interesting is that it has been demonstrated in controlled circumstances that the most successful strategy in an iterated prisoner's dilemma game is tit-for-tat [1], a strategy that any participating party can choose to adopt at any time.

The fact is, corporate-labor relations is not a monolith. Although some (or even most) participants in the labor market may be engaged in betray-betray behavior today, that doesn't mean that such relationships are universal or will come to dominate the labor market over time. Given that tit-for-tat is theoretically the most successful strategy, companies that adopt generous performance-based policies with their employees should enjoy long-term competitive advantage against any rivals who have chosen less-friendly employee policies. If this model is predictive, the advantages of a "betray only" strategy for corporations will be relatively short-lived, because the inevitable betray-betray relationships will make such companies less competitive than entities that adopt a "tit-for-tat" strategy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat

zw123456• 12 years ago

The reason that successful people tend to give such useless advice about how to be successful is that most of them do not recognize how much of their success is due to luck. There is a tendency of humans to minimize the degree to which luck contributes to their success. The also tend to minimize how various advantages they were born with (social status etc.). Basically successful people want to believe that their success is 100% due to their brilliance and ability and anyone could replicate it if only they worked as hard as they did. When confronted with trying to explain how they became successful, they resort to all sorts of silly sounding platitudes.

bitcycle• 12 years ago

I fully agree.

One must seriously consider his or her professional trajectory and major milestones. Companies these days don't allow for upward movement unless you're willing to spend a decade playing nice with the right people and consistently over-delivering. On the other hand, changing jobs from company to company likely benefits the employee much more by allowing him or her to enter in to a new role that they are fully qualified for. The same goes for pay, even if its a similar role. The primary goal of a Company is to pay the employee as little as possible in order to get the most out of them fulfilling their duties in the role that they were hired to fill. Having the boat rocked by folks changing roles (upward movement) or increasing salaries is something that each Company tries hard to avoid.

charlieflowers• 12 years ago

Warning -- this article (while it has some valid points) should trigger your "bullshit radar." Why?

It's very heavy on the "this guy is old so he couldn't possibly know what we need." And the problem is, that's a message that strongly appeals to the biases we on this site are likely to have.

Readers of this site tend to be young, smart, and highly motivated. Anything that smells like "I don't need lessons from the previous generation; I already have the right instincts because of my youth" will automatically appeal to us because it would be very exciting if it were true.

That alone doesn't make it false. But it means your internal "I better check myself for objectivity" flag should get triggered. Beyond that, though, look at how much of the article's content is devoted to this theme.

Probably half or more of the sentences are spent on this idea. When you're writing for public consumption, you have to learn to be terse and efficient. All those words spent on "geez, just look how old this guy is" are expensive. But the author deemed that the most effective use of words, because he is intentionally trying to play on your biases.

When someone is intentionally playing on your biases, look out. You might be having smoke blown up your ass (which the Surgeon General does not recommend).

Work Hard You'll Get There Eventually (hint: no you won't)

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