developer.* Blogs - When it isn't nice to be nice - Comments

"Human beings need to be subjects as well as objects" - Adorno

Edward G Nilges — Thu, 17 May 2007 05:55:15 -0700

To phrase the question as "are we victims, or are we agents of our destiny" is to use a linguistic framework. This framework, found in the mass media, presents us with a choice so obvious (nobody wants to be a "victim") that we wind up using a life-narrative that is at odds with the facts, and becoming victims in fact, all of the time.

I prefer to ask whether were subjects or objects. Sometimes, of course, we are objects but we also have a right to be subjects in some meaningful way.

Sure, we have to be processed as objects at times.

But it's a lie to pretend that when this is happening we are choosing it.

The corporate relation is a caricature of the economic trade off in which we work for a while for a rough equal to get some damn sort of grub stake, because it's so structured so that one never acquires meaningful equity.

Item: Paul Wolfowitz is trying to tell the board of the World Bank that paying your girlfriend a fat salary is not really a termination offense.

Now, suppose an ordinary corporate employee, or even a higher manager below flag rank, pulled that shit.

Get it? There is a Power Elite, as the narrative sociologist C. Wright Mills said there was in the 1950s, and its ranks are closed, in American society at least, to all but old boys (and, *pace* feminists who analyze it in such a way as to tell ordinary guys that they have a fantasy male privilege, old girls), and useful thugs like Wolfowitz, especially if the latter are privy to nasty secrets and can pull down the old boys.

As a team leader, you have to recognize that your team is being used to accomplish goals that it doesn't set and if it collectively announces "we are masters of our fate: we are captains of our soul", it's going to be victimized.

No really

chrishmorris — Fri, 11 May 2007 01:12:00 -0700

I've just seen Bert again, and I'm very impressed. He really has gotten stronger by this experience. He's now considering writing a paper to share the lessons.

Bert doesn't work for a US corporation but a Uk research institute; Len can't continue harrassing us much longer because he retires soon.

But the real discussion between Edward and me is not about the facts. It is about how to respond to them. Bad things happen, especially at work. Are we victims, or are we agents of our destiny? As a team leader, which mentality should I exemplify and propose?

Happy ending?

Edward G Nilges — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 23:38:05 -0700

Not so fast. In the corporation, you merely create enemies when you're right, and this is because the corporation uses negative capabilities. Len has gone to ground and will probably take his revenge on this Bert guy sooner or later.

Look, here's the deal in a corporation. The paycheck is supposed to erase, in the final analysis, ANY pleasure in being "right", and the employee who feels vindicated is in the danger zone, since he wasn't supposed in the first place to have anything resembling a human reaction to the original bitch-slapping in the first place.

And to be brutal, I have seen corporations fail when technical people get to be "right" all the time. I saw one company fail when its head technician made himself a millionaire by writing HIS OWN OPERATING SYSTEM for the mainframe and holding his company ransom to his whims thereby.

In a corporation, you're paid for being a Magic Christian, who always disclaims the credit and turns the other cheek, and this is BETTER than starving in a hotel room while writing a compiler book: I speak from experience.

You're in a real sense a Party Member as in Orwell's 1984, such that the Party or the Corporation needs not only your output but also your Attitude to continually certify its right to immortality (First Boston, the financial services firm, dates back to American slave owning times and made its first million on slave trading: First Boston has been named as an American company which should fund reparations to American black people for slavery for this reason).

The only valid reason for Bert to see vindication was, from the Company's point of view, his ability to continue to earn every penny of what they paid him by being effective despite Len, who will, I predict, follow his own self-interest as opposed to the interest of the company by sabotaging Bert and Bert's output.

It's not a pretty sight, and it is why we cannot and should not rely on corporations to substitute for civil society.

The only thing that matters, from the hegemonic point of view of the company, is that Bert continue to produce things of value and protect them from Len's selfish attempts to discredit Bert by discredting his work product.

And if all this seems demonic, this mess of people struggling with each other in such savage ways, that only foster the immortality of corporations, some of which do evil things from slave trading in the past to financing the denial of global warming today, then all I can say is...come from the shadows.

Don't Cultivate the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: don't Amplify Your Effectiveness. Instead, do your job, or as my long-deceased supervisor at a Chicago programming shop used to say, don't do me any favors, do your job. Save your money, attend university extension classes, join Open Source communities, and march and protest the war in Iraq.

Bert came through this

chrishmorris — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 13:03:35 -0700

Bert came through this challenge magnificently, albeit after a delay. He presented a thoughful and objective report about how the component concerned can be improved, along with a measured and justified complaint about how he had been treated.

Now he could probably succeed at anything. Go Bert!

Adult baptism

chrishmorris — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 12:48:57 -0700

Now he could probably succeed at anything. Go Bert!

When it isn't nice to be nice

chrishmorris — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 07:33:20 -0700

How do you help someone face up to criticism?