251–260 of 488 posts
Notably, the CEO was not mentioned in this petition. Putting on my tinfoil hat, could this be a ploy by Armstrong to continue purging the political activists within the company?
Don't see how, their expenditure seems to go up each year. I assume that's the political activism you're referring to? https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/30/coinbase-ceo-offers-severanc...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get why this is viewed as beyond the pale? Sounds like your manager cared about how you all were doing, and wanted a way to observe trends in how you were doing in order to help you, which is the same exact thing a manager does implicitly every time she talks to you. Obviously this isn't reproduceable psychological science, but is there more to the story to explain why you found this to be objectionable?
It is absurd to reduce "happiness" to a single, one-dimensional value, as the sliders illustrate. Edit: what would you do with this information as a manager, anyway? At best, you know your employees are unhappy but not why. So you still have to sit down and talk with them. Which you should have been doing in the first place instead of wasting everyone's time with this happiness index crap.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like something that happened at Sun around 1990, which I described earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15660759 At Sun, during the dark days of Solaris, when everyone was depressed and wanted to quit, our manager sat down with each of us and asked: "I want to know your happiness index, a number from 1 to 10. You can use any algorithm you want to come up with it, just use the same algorithm each time…
I don't get why this is viewed as beyond the pale? Sounds like your manager cared about how you all were doing, and wanted a way to observe trends in how you were doing in order to help you, which is the same exact thing a manager does implicitly every time she talks to you. Obviously this isn't reproduceable psychological science, but is there more to the story to explain why you found this to be objectionable?
The way one colleague bluntly explained it to a VP (in the context of Sun's DeskSet productivity suite "MailTool", "CalandarTool", "ClockTool", "CommandTool", "DBXTool", "XBugTool", and of course "TATool", "PizzaTool", and "HappyTool", etc) was that he was currently working on "ResumeTool".
This is the same management that banned the discussion of and spending work time on PizzaTool! (Which I ignored.)
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-...
And who required us all to use the horrible XBugTool, which got extremely angry if you used it to file bug reports against itself:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/xbugto...
Instead of the standard way of killing the window system by typing "exit" to the first CommandTool console you brought up, I sarcastically suggested developing "ExitTool", an easy-to-use visual interface for exiting the OpenWindows X11/NeWS server, which would interoperate with "YesTool" and "NoTool", drag-and-drop user interfaces to the ever popular Unix "yes" utility:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/i39l.h...
>In other words, what are the problems people use xinit to solve, that make them need to use xinit instead of some other solution? I don't care so much about the particular solutions themselves. [Of course I'm not interested in anybody else's solution, because in my spare time, I'm developing ExitTool, a fully customizable point and click graphical user interface to exiting the window system, which has a special private interclient communication protocol to rendevous with other applications subscribing to compatible desktop metaphors, actually empowering the user to drag'n'drop from YesTool (a full featured graphical adaptation of the classic unix utility), and cut'n'paste from NoTool (actually implemented using trendy and powerful object oriented programming techniques as a subclass of YesTool!)]
(The whole "-Tool" naming scheme at Sun was such a sausage fest, from the early days when "SunView" was originally called "SunTools"!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunView
https://web.archive.org/web/20120216050221/http://toastytech...
It was obvious that this happyness index ploy was upper management's passive-aggressive way of rubbing our noses in the fact that they refused to acknowledge or do anything about what we had already made concretely crystal clear to them quite directly and verbally, without playing silly abstract numeric scoring games.
And it goes without saying that they didn't change what they were doing or try to make us happier after we reported our low numeric happiness scores, which were really just their way of figuring out who to fire first.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get why this is viewed as beyond the pale? Sounds like your manager cared about how you all were doing, and wanted a way to observe trends in how you were doing in order to help you, which is the same exact thing a manager does implicitly every time she talks to you. Obviously this isn't reproduceable psychological science, but is there more to the story to explain why you found this to be objectionable?
Because you don't know how this information is going to be used and whether it's going to be used against you? Because it's weirdly reductionist: no longer happy or unhappy with or about anything, just a number in a vacuum?
We'd already explained our complaints quite extensively in words. Asking for a number was an insult, and a way of brushing off all the words we'd already communicated. Especially as a substitute for acknowledging or doing anything about the words we'd already communicated.
Oh for heaven's sake, just quit. Vote with your feet and walk them out the door to another job. The market is good (for now), best do it before that changes. When the people who do the actual work leave and they can't hire anyone due to their poor reputation because of the previously rescinded offers, they'll reap their own rewards.
Initiatives like the Dot Collector and the Performance review system that has led to a toxic workplace culture I was curious about that "Dot Collector": Dot collector was an application invented by Ray Dalio’s hedge fund and Bridgewater Associates. The application has set its foot in Coinbase since the start of the year and has been in use by the HR and IT teams of the company. The user interface of the app is quite…
The modern tendency is to codify and systematize all management decisions. In the old British Empire, the upper class learnt the classics (as in, ancient myths) and were packed off to go rule the world. It didn’t go so badly (for Britain). Perhaps we can combine the two - managers to study human nature, and then study the problem, and then use regular brainpower to come up with good solutions.
Initiatives like the Dot Collector and the Performance review system that has led to a toxic workplace culture I was curious about that "Dot Collector": Dot collector was an application invented by Ray Dalio’s hedge fund and Bridgewater Associates. The application has set its foot in Coinbase since the start of the year and has been in use by the HR and IT teams of the company. The user interface of the app is quite…
I've been in situations like this before. The end result is one giant popularity contest, with the beautiful people clique getting the highest ratings, and everyone else getting varying degrees of shit based on how unpopular they are and how much intrigue is currently going on. They didn't even have to actively collude; humans come with very sensitive popularity meters built-in, so they instinctively know where to pl…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is absurd to reduce "happiness" to a single, one-dimensional value, as the sliders illustrate. Edit: what would you do with this information as a manager, anyway? At best, you know your employees are unhappy but not why. So you still have to sit down and talk with them. Which you should have been doing in the first place instead of wasting everyone's time with this happiness index crap.
I feel perfectly comfortable reducing my workplace happiness to a single value. I don't think I could even expand it to more than two axes if I tried.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been in situations like this before. The end result is one giant popularity contest, with the beautiful people clique getting the highest ratings, and everyone else getting varying degrees of shit based on how unpopular they are and how much intrigue is currently going on. They didn't even have to actively collude; humans come with very sensitive popularity meters built-in, so they instinctively know where to pl…
> The end result is one giant popularity contest, with the beautiful people clique getting the highest ratings, and everyone else getting varying degrees of shit based on how unpopular they are and how much intrigue is currently going on. Welcome to life. Human social hierarchies have always worked like this. The only thing this dot collector is doing is presenting it explicitly in a way even people with poor social…