Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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It seems that happens to management at every company, at various strength. I swear there must be a source for all this shit, like Forbes or something.
A side note:
"... It's all hallucination.”
prone to hallucination.
No, just no.
Everything generative AI produces is a hallucination.
Some may correlate with reality, but it is still a hallucination.
My wife, as a teacher and educational psychologist, is honestly shocked that Growth Mindset's bullshit has moved out of education and into business; it's been responsible for removing classes that are streamed by ability and replacing them with things like tormenting low-achieving students by telling them they can achieve if they just try harder, and torturing high-achieving students by making them into unpaid teacher aids instead of extending them.
You, gentle reader, may be more shocked and angry at her news that some schools are adopting Agile, where they spend several hours every two weeks in retrospectives and planning what they'll teach for the following two week sprint, with no long term plan for the children.
Edit: “Here’s four links, have at them.”
Agile in schools.
Is there a solution for helping the low-achieving kids?
I worked at MSFT between 2021 and 2023.
The Growth Mindset is very much just a gaslighting tool. To be honest I didn't get the culty vibe from it while being on the inside, on the other hand no one ever tried to make me to read Satya's stupid book (thankfully).
One important thing I just have to talk about is The Layoffs. If you ask me about "Growth Mindset", or indeed if I ask around my former MSFT colleagues about the first thing that comes to their mind when they hear it, it will be that time when, not even a month after the massive 2023 layoffs where MSFT fired 11,000 people, we were told by management at a Townhall that it is time for us to "apply Growth Mindset and move forward". I remember very clearly that they tried to spin it as if the layoffs were something that just "happened to us" and we had to move on, as if it was a hurricane that hit the office and not a deliberate act of management to cut costs. It was fucking amazing to hear that from them after I had a literal panic attack due to the uncertainty after the first wave of firings.
I made the decision to quit not long after. When I was leaving the genAI brain rot was already in full swing. The stuff about autoplaging Connects is just a great affirmation of my decision, that company is fucked.
Yeah. The fixation on growth mindset may be relatively unique to Microsoft, but the role it fills in the organization is really common; it creates a fuzzy standard to justify management's decisions while it obscures management's responsibility for those decisions. It's like managers realized that the Jack Welch rank-and-yank approach is absolutely terrible for morale, talent retention, and the general ability of the company to function over the mid- to long-term, but doing big layoffs is still a great way to make the numbers look better to meet shareholder growth expectations. So instead of having clear expectations that can be met or even relative rankings that can be measured there's been a move towards subjective evaluations. That is probably the best way to gauge performance in a lot of areas, but that requires both that the manager doing the assessment know something about the work being done (your average MBA won't) and that the organization not have incentives to abuse the power this gives them (which shareholder capitalism definitely does).
Excuse me, I need a lie down...
Edit: How open is this to abuse you may ask? Imagine yourself to be an evil person, such as a ~~chickenshit~~ conflict-averse MBA-holding manger. If you need to get rid of an employee, then feed their Connect form through the nondeterministic bullshit machine repeatedly until it gives you an excuse. It's the perfect accountability sink + employee disposal. Employee argues? They're failing to apply the growth mindset.
Jesus.
they actually came up with something more fucked up than stack ranking
This is the Bad Place!
Where's Ed been? Corporate philosophies are a dime a dozen in tech and they're always just vague enough to use as a justification for management to do whatever they were already planning on doing.
Microsoft's growth mindset is no more problematic than Amazon's leadership principles or any of the other corporate pillars we inevitably need to phrase our accomplishments around in order to get hired/promoted. They're all the same pseudoscientific MBA BS that's been permeating the industry for years.
This article could have been written about just about any large tech company with the same concerns and conclusions.
But it was written about Microsoft specifically. What's your point?
It's written about Microsoft as if this is their unique dysfunction instead of an industry-wide dysfunction. It feels out of touch and lacking the insight I typically enjoy from this newsletter.
(it's programming dot dev again, isn't it?)
what a limp comment you have made. The post contains a treasure trove of insider information and specifics that paint a picture that is dire even to a jaded tech worker.