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Comment by artsyca

5 years ago

There are no great companies left and everyone of any worth evaporates and ends up "working for themselves" and employee mentality has made most corporations into dystopian surveillance states where management rules by force of mediocrity so the ones that stay are happy to wallow in their entitlements as long as they're free to dress in rags and can afford their mortgage payments yea

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artsyca

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CydeWeys  5 years ago

Your view on this is far more negative than average. There are plenty of people who have been working at companies for a long time and are content there.

  • artsyca  5 years ago

    Hey CydeWeys my good fellow I appreciate your opinion very much and I'll tell you why I'm cynical

    Maybe there are a few epic companies but for 80% of devs at a guess they'll grow up grow old and grow decrepit in an open concept office reeking of pizza and microwave popcorn surrounded by a bunch of distressed disrespectful and discounted directors and managers treating them like cannibalistic humanoid underground developers while preparing them to be eaten by the machine like a rabid pack of Morlocks

    I wasn't put on this earth to be turned into Soylent Green for a feature factory that chews up people and spits out machine code and Alan Turing sure as hell didn't give his life so we could wear house shoes to the office

    Compared to what we're missing out on the free granola tastes like bitter bile and all ever managed to do was get drunk on great quality booze I'll admit and barf up artisanal pizza and salads

Balero  5 years ago

Out of interest, which companies do you think were great?

  • artsyca  5 years ago

    Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, the Medici, Nintendo and Apple in the early days, a lot of Canadian and probably American banks in the sixties and seventies and eighties.. Airlines before the economy model.. Lots of iconic hotels and restaurants, Ma Bell.. all kinds of companies have been great it's just that as people we think we're above it all somehow and our attitudes have brought us to a point where it's understood we're only trading time for money and we're selling ourselves short at every turn and all our corporations are merging into one megalocorp where it's just mediocrity and toxicity and even this forum is nothing but an echo chamber of the neurosis

    Another problem is that CEO's don't understand what they're really in it for -- they're not in it for the mind state that comes with being a leader but only for the profits they can extract from the bargain it's obvious by their actions and their dress

    In short a company that has high alignment and high autonomy the two are not mutually exclusive and indeed form the basis of what I'd call the American Way

    • bryanrasmussen  5 years ago

      So, a fictional company, a family before capitalism was conceived, two startups that made it big but before they became big, and pretty much everything else defined by nostalgia for a time during which your fictional company was supposed to have existed.

      I agree that the current crop of MBA CEOs are detrimental as a whole.

      Perhaps it's just starting off with a fictional company but this really reminds me of someone being asked to list heroes and naming John McClane and the guy who said Nuts to the Nazis at the Battle of the Bulge. Which I got to give props to the second guy of course, but it feels like the viewpoint is limited and not securely tied to reality.

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