Dead End Jobs: Are You Suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?
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Re: Dead End Jobs: Are You Suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?
#2I once worked at a company that managed to pull off all four conditions with one brilliant but devious hack: The warehouse uniform was a t-shirt imprinted with, "The beatings will continue until morale improves."
Perceived Threat
This implied that problems were the workers' fault, not the boss's. Subtle, but effective.
Small Kindness
Believe it or not, many people were actually glad to be given their own t-shirt by the boss.
Isolation from Other Perspectives
Everyone had the same t-shirt. Eventually, what started out as a joke became the accepted condition.
Perceived Inability to Escape
There was never any doubt who was in control. Resistance was futile.
Re: Dead End Jobs: Are You Suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?
#3A poor economy doesn't help either. I think part of the fear is not being able to find other work to pay the bills so many of us settle for the current situation... or work on startups on the side!
Re: Dead End Jobs: Are You Suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?
#4A poor economy doesn't help either. I think part of the fear is not being able to find other work to pay the bills so many of us settle for the current situation... or work on startups on the side!
Yeah- the threat is very real for people underwater on their mortages, with huge student loans, or about to put kids through college. It definitely is an awful position to be in, but a lot of people are forced to do this to make ends meet. It's not just psychological disorder.
Re: Dead End Jobs: Are You Suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?
#5Amazing, I never thought if that way. This notion really explains some phenomenon that I've seen. Coworkers I knew drove themselves insane programming themselves to death for someone they didn't even like. Leading those individuals to suicide to escape. It never occurred to them that they could change jobs. Stockholm Syndrome definitely affects programmers. If I catch anyone doing this again I'm blowing the whistle.
Re: Dead End Jobs: Are You Suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?
#6There was a very good piece on this posted to HN this fall. Wish I could remember the source...
Re: Dead End Jobs: Are You Suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?
#7I once worked at a company that managed to pull off all four conditions with one brilliant but devious hack: The warehouse uniform was a t-shirt imprinted with, "The beatings will continue until morale improves." Perceived Threat This implied that problems were the workers' fault, not the boss's. Subtle, but effective. Small Kindness Believe it or not, many people were actually glad to be given their own t-shirt by t…
Oh yes, I recently escaped from a company like this. I'm not afraid to name names: ClickBooth.com, a Sarasota company in the affiliate marketing space.
Myself and other programmers that once worked there all feel so grateful, we all get together on a regular basis and feel so lucky to have gotten out.
Here's a funny anecodote. They were having a hard time finding new developers. About 9 months ago, if you look through my HN posts, I posted to a "Who Is Hiring" thread. I mentioned a few of the cool things about working at Clickbooth and put my work email address in my post.
The next day I was called into my managers office. The HR woman saw my HN post. She was upset. For some reason. Still don't understand why, exactly. But it's not "my place" to post these things, I was told. And I should go delete my post. And my manager, he played the "good cop" routine... "I talked to the CEO and I'm not going to pursue this further." Oh, really? How lucky of me. You won't discipline me for, ya know, going above and beyond and trying to attract good developers to the team. Oh, gee, thank you sir, so much, for your kindness.
I didn't mean to rant for so long, but boy, it feels good.
Re: Dead End Jobs: Are You Suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?
#8I don't know why anyone would put up with this nonsense. The market for tech is amazing right now and has been for years. It's inexcusable that anyone worth their salt should feel trapped in a dead-end job.
Re: Dead End Jobs: Are You Suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?
#9I've been mindful of this since my teenage years, which is why I swore to myself a few things before I had even turned 16:
* If I don't like a situation, I will leave it. After all, the easiest way to change your environment is to escape it.
* Fear of failure is a great motivator. When you quit without having another opportunity already lined up, you have a lot of obvious motivation to find a new job since your income is $0. I've found it easier than lulling myself into complacency by continuing to get my income from the source I hate.
* Don't just zig, zag. I've been programming professionally for 12 years. Eventually I will stop, at the very least from being bored. Honestly, I want to work on Formula 1 cars, preferably before I'm 40. One day I'll stop building massive data engines for finance, and instead work on bleeding edge race car engines for racing teams. In the next 18 months I'm working on chasing another crazy dream successfully enough to have the option to walk away from big finance research.
It's difficult to describe my mindset about this, and being a ruthless, very self-critical perfectionist probably helps tremendously. I always joke that it's my mission in life to prove everyone else wrong.
The one that is hardest to follow is the first. For instance, I've never completely struck it out on my own, and have always worked for startups run by other people. My solution was to create a business that could be successfully run by myself, with no help from anyone. That's in the works... but in the meantime, I'm at another startup.
Re: Dead End Jobs: Are You Suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?
#10You can become mentally locked into a programming language or development tools or an operating system, or to particular approaches to solving problems, too.
Learning something entirely new is more work, as is spending your own money on this given employers can tend to avoid funding career-unrelated tools and learning.
Corporations themselves can become locked into products and solutions and businesses.
Counterintuitively, there can be value in the bungee boss approach in countering this syndrome; of a policy of periodic and scheduled managerial evictions with business reviews and a review of the bosses, and of institutionalizing some instability within organizational management. A Darwinian policy of up or out; where each middle-tier and upper-level bosses are treated as and measured akin to a self-contained CEO and sales rep, and where each is going to be promoted or pushed out.