Mark Zuckerberg is in the middle of a coordinated-if-haphazard heel turn, removing tampons from mens’ rooms and welcoming slurs back to his platforms. This occurs while the neighborhood next to mine is still on fire, and his behavior stands in stark contrast to the imperative to love one another or die that is all around me. I connected with this take:
[I]t is probably worth thinking about what is happening in Silicon Valley as a revolt of the bosses against their workers. none of this is rational. it is simply causing misery for the purpose of causing it.
First of all, fuck anyone who is for what Zuck is up to, and may god give you blood to drink. I find the hateful nihilism in all of this quite depressing. But I guess I am not shocked to see it revealed that many industry leaders have invested in progressive causes transactionally, rather than out of solidarity, basic decency, and an ideological commitment to a brighter future in which the humanity of others is an end rather than a means to an end.
That it is right to affirm the humanity of others should be the only reason one needs to do it. But we have just established that many powerful people are transactional, and not moved by morality. In the interest of working towards better outcomes, let me take on some of the labor of expanding upon why the boss revolt is not rational. Winning, fun, and positivity are correlated, and spiteful misery as a business strategy is very stupid.
Stand by while I turn my temperature down 30 degrees
As the tech labor market has cooled off, skepticism about perks and positive vibes at work is a broad trend. Zuck’s latest rollout is definitely on the more bigoted and mean-spirited end of it, but this has been going on for some time now. Let’s play “spot the logical error:”
- Some things that feel good and are positive are a distraction from work.
- This thing feels good and is positive.
- Therefore it is a distraction from work.
Look, I have responded to production incidents whilst a founder played Guitar Hero (not even the good songs) on a projector directed two feet above my head. At times I have had to share an office with sales bells, round-the-clock ping pong tournaments, mechanical keyboards, kegerators, and a nontrivial fortune in DJ equipment. I have watched anti-footwear coworkers put bare feet on communal tables. One time a guy passed out in a boat that we had in the office for obscure reasons. While many of these things have a time and a place, let’s say that it has not left me as a workplace hedonism maximalist.
I am here to tell you that these sorts of workplace culture programs, which are all good and fun, are not that:
- Hack weeks, i.e. “go make a cool thing with coworkers.”
- Bootcamps and rotations, e.g. “go experience what a totally different team is doing.”
- Official slack time, e.g. 20% time [1].
These were all practices that got started in the middle 2000s, when startup funding was hard to come by and we needed to stretch our headcount as far as we possibly could. All of these have what might have been called “ulterior motives,” however that would be ahistorical since the motives were made explicit at the time.
Hack weeks and bootcamps create new edges in your relationship graph, and spread knowledge. Slack time provides the fertile soil for those edges and that knowledge to bear fruit: serendipitous product, organizational efficiency, or what have you. All of this makes people want to keep working hard. Not for you, really, but for each other.
To the extent we can still stomach identifying as “hackers” in its original sense, we should seek clever, synergistic, joyful, high-leverage, and possibly subversive ways to get the outcomes we want. That’s what all of this was about.
Again, I view DE&I [2] as a moral imperative. But it can also be understood within the framework of this school of thought. We can find genius where society has overlooked it. And we should take seriously the project of creating the incentive and permission structures that allow these talented people we’ve convinced to work here to contribute to their greatest potential.
I wish I didn’t feel so insane and frustrated while pointing this out.
Winning is fun-correlated
“Winning is fun” is a mantra I have deployed in the past, and I have meant it in the spirit of “the main thing that’s gonna make people happy is if the product is making users happy.” As is the way with these things, magical thinking can certainly take hold and we can get cause and effect mixed up.
Fun is not a precondition for winning. But if you hope to win, you should expect to be having fun. This is all to say that if you are systematically eradicating fun things, using “anything that feels positive must be wasting time” as a heuristic, you have thoroughly disappeared up your own ass. If you are committing willful acts of harm as Zuckerberg is, may an even darker abyss than that await you.
Meta’s size makes it de facto unkillable, and I’m sure it’ll exist in some form for centuries. But it’s my hope that it will exist in the sense that IBM exists today. Theoretically you know it’s out there, but it’s very hard to grasp the point of it and it feels thoroughly irrelevant. Nobody remembers who started it or why.
A healthy, happy, positive, spiritually fulfilled workforce is an end unto itself but yes, also a means to an end. Eventually, either our industry or an adjacent one will figure this out again [3] and the ironic points of light that constitute the historical tech workforce will go congregate there instead.
Like this? I have a recent related talk called Egoless Engineering.
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Google’s 20% time in popular imagination is conflated with the idea that engineers will ship products on their own. That is typically a bad idea, because successful product launches take a village. I have no idea if that is really what that was about at Google, but unscheduled slack time in my experience has explicitly made that kind of outcome a non-goal. ↥
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Noting that I am saying “DE&I” here and not “DE&I programs” is the moral imperative. I’d like to defer to the experience of under-represented people in tech, many of whom have experienced the actually-existing programs as a sham. ↥
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Barring positive black swan events that might come from organizing, or negative black swan events such as the return of indentured servitude. ↥