This is painfully accurate. I'm not sure how companies fall prey to these problems, but they seem to be incredibly hierarchical. What I means specifically is that the lower level employees and mid-level managers seem almost rabid to praise, cater to, and and be swept up by the useless whims of nearly anyone in the executive suite. It's sickening, and not because of the impacts on work. Why do so many grown adults act so pathetically servile to someone who is in a higher rung in a company? These executives don't have better ideas inherently, and due to being so far removed from the real work, are often a misinformed distraction.
No one seems to think that an executive would want to be told that they are wrong, or misinformed, or missing the point. But, a worthwhile executive would want to hear exactly that. They would want to know if their ideas were actually going to disrupt work, make the firm worse off, etc.
And I know what you're thinking: many executives are self-interested, and just want to see their ideas implemented, company health be damned. Yes, that's true. But then why does anyone give them the time of day? If an executive is nakedly self-interested they should be sidelined as aggressively as possible, both to neuter them and also to protect the company.
I had a bit of hope when companies started down the OKRs path.
That model could work really well when done bottom-up, with individuals defining what they see as most important in their context and managers rolling that up into coherent strategies at each level as it goes up. Effectively, managers should be puzzling together what those closest to the product and customer find rather than forcing down goals and metrics.
Unfortunately companies don't work that way and leadership fundamentally doesn't trust their employees, especially employees they are a few layers away from in the org chart. OKRs ended up being just another name for leadership slamming goals down the org, no different than the Company Pillars I would see at Microsoft 15 years ago.
They act that way because anyone who didn’t got fired, and those that did got promoted. So either the ‘smart ones’ started doing it, or the ‘dumb ones’ all got removed.
Why do so many grown adults act so pathetically servile to someone who is in a higher rung in a company?
- Because the alpha apes on the top of the pyramid got all the bananas and they will share it only with the ones they like. And it goes all the way down. Too bad tha apes have not come up with a better system because the apes have prioritized bananas over everything else. Peace.
It's simple, at certain point at certain growth in a company, the "yes man" virus is going to infect the whole corporation. Why? Because there's one spot where the virus is going to spread, and around this spot only "yes men" will get promoted and they will only hire, reward and promote other "yes men".
It starts from a person or persons who don't know what they are doing, but are really good at selling themselves. So their only goal is to show themselves in a good light to leadership and fool them by surrounding themselves with people who will agree with everything they do.
I mean, I think there are a lot of motivations for people who behave this way, but one of the core ones is less a matter of servitude or slavering desire to satisfy upper management and a lot more a result of the kind of language this article uses.
People want to believe the things that they do matter and are often willing to gussy up their jobs to make their contributions feel important, to make themselves feel important, to feel like the world needs them. It's the same thing that motivates mall security guards to dress up in tactical outfits. "If I spend all my time doing this thing that doesn't matter and isn't super important, then I don't matter, and I'm not super important." They convince themselves that whatever this current thing is Truly Does Matter, and then are willing to run themselves into the ground to prove the point that they contributed to the thing that matters.
I see the sort of self-aggrandizing "identifying as your job" behavior that leads to this mindset in software more than a lot of other jobs. People get into software and their personality becomes "I'm a software engineer" or "I'm a coder." They're better than the average - they're a highly-compensated expert who understands concepts like "UX" and "Architecture" and "Infrastructure" and they are going to run a Beta Test and Have To Stay Late To Deploy The New Version. They have an Important Deadline! The things they are doing Matter. I think lots of people in software had this idealized image of themselves as a core contributor to a product that's broadly loved and people care about and are unwilling to accept that they are toiling away to marginally reduce the time to first meaningful paint on yet another shopping cart page which only a few people use because the company they work for is niche, not particularly innovative, and not interesting.
I don't think a lot of people are doing this for the promotion - I think they're doing it for the validation. So they can believe that what they do actually matters. The sad reality is that 95% of software is bad and uninteresting and the people working on it are mashing together lego pieces to re-solve completely solved problems for management that doesn't get what they're doing and customers who don't like their work, and the desire to create importance where there isn't any is a self-defense mechanism more than anything.
Breaking out of this mindset was a key development in my career and I've not seen any less success but I am substantially more happy.
