I think a lot of the 'irrational' workplace behaviour you describe can also be seen as a rational response to bad incentives on the part of employees. It is relatively rare for jobs to consistently reward employees for performance that contributes directly to company profits so much employee behaviour is instead a response to what is actually rewarded by a perverse incentive structure.
One of the reasons small companies and startups can be successful despite lacking the resources or economies of scale of larger companies is that large companies have great difficulty maintaining a structure that rewards employees for productive activity.
I agree. My strategy has always been to determine what my supervisor / professor / etc really wants, and give that to them, as opposed to what they say they want. Occasionally, this requires a great deal of effort and skill, as they demand brilliance, but quite often all they really want (and will reward) is for every print-out to be in color or something equally useless.
The frustrating thing is that what some of my supervisors have wanted from me is failure. Robert Greene lists the first rule of power as 'Never Outshine the Master'. This has meant sometimes sabotaging projects to increase my status (and prevent hostility). I sometimes find that just a few hours per week on a project is an optimal contribution and I have had some success with using the remaining work time to work on external projects.
Unfortunately, playing that game in the long term requires either the right personality or psychological reserves that I did not have at the time so I left what was at least superficially a perfect opportunity to get paid a full time wage while actually working on my own entrepreneurial interests.
It might be nice to think about how you would have to think about things in order to not have your psychological reserves depleted by such situations.
We have this crazy tendency to be hurt just by other people being crazy.
I've encountered quite a bit of hostility when proselytizing that viewpoint.
It's the sort of viewpoint you're supposed to have, not admit to having.
I'm in the top 30th percentile for household income in the United States. I recently had a performance review, was qualified "fully successful," and when I specifically asked my supervisor if I was doing anything wrong, he reassured me that there was not a thing I could change to do better. I receive regular monetary bonuses and praise, and was rewarded with a certificate of achievement just two days ago.
All of this despite the fact that I perform real, skilled work approximately one or two hours per week, and spend the rest of my time surfing the web, in plain view of everyone walking down the hallway, not even bothering to alt-tab when my supervisor comes into my cube to chat with me. (ETA: personally, I consider my work ethic to be atrocious, and if I were my supervisor, I would not tolerate what I have just described.)
I take the money provided and I spend it on various frivolous pursuits, and donate to SIAI. I'm not sure about long-term promotion potential, considering my lack of actual work, but it seems fairly rational in some sense that I take from the irrational and put in only what effort is required to achieve my goals, thus maximizing output/input (productivity).
The emotional impact of not making a difference is distressing, I agree, but that's a different, rather involved, topic.
One of my coworkers (like you, at a government job involving software) had occasionally said "you can only read Dinosaur Comics so many times before you have to find an open-source project to start contributing to".
We created a lot of our own work; we were given a lot of leeway to find and fix problems ourselves, even if the problems hadn't actually appeared yet. We were encouraged to find research areas to work on, and use our time to do that as long as it didn't detract from our other duties, which probably only consumed 4-10 hours a week. So, we had license to work as diligently as we wanted, and for the most part on nearly anything we wanted. However, we generally found that most days, we weren't able to be productive for more than 4-6 hours, and ended up spending a lot of time reading webcomics, writing toy programs, and drinking tea in the break room.
I think for most people, 30 hours of high-quality creative work a week is about their limit. I'm sure some people are exceptions, but some of the most productive programmers I know (from FOSS projects I worked on to government jobs I held and even a stint at Microsoft) spend about half their "day" goofing off.
I do have rigid security on my work computer
Fire up a VM then, or shell out somewhere. You're technically competent enough that any network access - much less unfettered recreational web-browsing access - is enough.
and I don't have any projects I feel like contributing to at the moment. "Meaningful work" is an elusive concept to me.
I feel like you're not even trying. There genuinely are no FLOSS project you want to contribute to? Well, I suppose that's possible. Then why not become an auto-didact and start working through textbooks? SICP may be too elementary for you, but SICP is far from the only textbook available online. Why not pick up a productive hobby like Wikipedia editing, or proofreading for Project Gutenberg? Or, or, or...
If you have plausible rationales for all of these, I think I would diagnose your real problem as akrasia or general depression/lack of energy.
I would like to explain that, intellectually, I understand that I have severe akrasia and likely clinical depression. However, it primarily manifests itself in the form of the phrase, "I don't care," and it is a recursive lack of caring, such that I do not care that I do not care; at least, that's how it feels. I find it very difficult to acquire motivation under such conditions.
How does one start to care? I've thought about it a great deal, and never came up with an answer outside of, "you just do."
Yes.
Did you know the phrase, "good enough for government work," actually used to be a compliment?
I've worked for a dozen years in IT at a very large, very stupid corporation which has gotten larger and stupider every year. I've been phoning it in almost my entire career, and despite that I get ridiculous raises and promotions all the time. Most of my projects I consider to be failures in one way or another. Either came in late and over-budget, undelivered on features, was poorly designed and difficult to use etc. The only successes were the small projects early in my career where I wore all the hats and did everything myself. So that is really all I am good for but instead I manage teams working on projects worth as much as 12 million a year.
I recently tried to take a step sideways and get a different job in the company where I'd be more hands on and six months later they had me take over the group. Despite the fact that I mostly wasted my time here. My only real useful survival skill here is sounding smart on the phone and winning lots of the status meetings, and that seems to be the key success criteria.
So I just sort of look at it as one big joke and tell myself I'm just here for the lulz and the fat paychecks as long as they are dumb enough to keep writing them but...that...
Teamwork only happens when everyone in the group respects each other. Without respect, people don't try to understand different ways of thinking and communication breaks down. You end up with an environment where everyone has their own agenda, no one speaks the same language or subscribes to the same logic, and junior-level employees are forced to operate within a uniform system to which only small incremental changes can be made. It's so difficult to be understood that a very limiting lexicon of cliches develops to compensate, i.e. "reinvent the whe...
Yep, good points on teamwork.
I think it's inefficient to try and change corporate culture from the bottom up
The apparent alternative, top-down, doesn't fare much better - I speak from some experience.
Culture change in general is very hard to bring about, because what we think of as "culture" tends to be precisely that which people do without thinking about why. To even describe cultural aspects often requires talking to an outsider: "Sorry about that, I should have explained that we don't greet people with handshakes here."
The computer example confused me, because I'm not sure what it has to do with compartmentalization. Compartmentalization means you neglect to apply knowledge from one domain in another; people being unable to understand computers seems to happen because they don't have any applicable domain knowledge in the first place.
Oddly though, 'turn it off and back on again' or 'try disconnecting and reconnecting the cable' really does solve a remarkably large number of tech related problems. Arguably a non-expert without any special knowledge is probably quite rational in trying that as the first approach to solve any given tech related problem. It may even be that the next best thing to try if it fails is to try it again. Further attempts probably have rapidly diminishing utility however.
It actually seems to me that the trouble computer-illiterate people have is often a case of insufficient compartmentalization, not too much. To take your keyboard example - they know things that work in a software domain, and know things that work in a hardware domain, and are failing to keep these separate. Kids, who start with far fewer preconceptions of how things should work, pick up the use of computers much faster.
Also, we computer-literate people probably underestimate how sheerly arbitrary many things must seem like to people who haven't had a long exposure to computers. (How is a person to know that keyboard settings aren't stored in the keyboard? After all, you could toggle the write-protect status of a 3½ inch disc by flipping the right tab on the disc. And the amount of region switches on a DVD drive is stored in the device itself. And once you know that electrical devices lose at least some of their settings when the power is turned off, it isn't too unreasonable of a hypothesis that unplugging the keyboard might reset the settings.)
I just tried to find work that is, basically, as close to pure thinking as I can get in corporate situation, with little chance of micromanagement - being the only data mining guy at my co.
I'm curious--I was under the impression that lesswrong.com was a community dedicated to rationality. Some may be like your father--good at math, but bad at navigating computers. Why did you assume that people on this site are computer oriented?
being bored in endless meetings which are thinly disguised status games
You seem to be assuming that the meeting is useless just because people lied to you about its purpose. The status games may well be important to the functioning of the firm.
I enjoyed reading this, but I'm not sure what the fallacy is.
You're testing out whether people will allow you to lead beyond what official authority you have. Provided you're not squelched, I imagine this will make you less stressed and more engaged. It will boost your status at well.
Clearly, you have to measure the gain of setting your own course against the risk of being perceived as overly slothful, rude, idealistic, or independent.
Passive-aggressive tactics, like making only a token effort on projects you expect to either fail or prove worthless, are indeed unsatisfying and stressful.
On another note, I don't think anyone has ever shut down their computer in the hopes that it would help them find a file. That example throws me off for a few reasons actually. I think your thoughts not being true to yourself at work are very valid, but I think the reason it happens is because we're trying to fit within a system (not such an irrational idea in many cases). Learning how that new system operates is key to mastering it--weather it's corporate culture or a new type of computer platform. I would argue that it's a lack of familiarity with a give...
"Real users would never do that" is a phrase of art among professional software testers, and they use it with heavy irony. For vastly more values of that than you care to imagine, there are real users who in fact not only do it, but expect it to work.
Great posting. I think it's important to go for direct action where possible. Challenge bad workplace behaviour when it happens. Talk to people openly about bad practice. When the boss is demeaning, say straight out that it's not acceptable and ask how he would feel if the roles were reversed.
Importantly, don't forget to be friendly - especialy friendly to the nice people. Smile at everyone you meet. Ignore the assholes and find ways to quickly recover after negative encounters.
The No Asshole Rule book really helped me to deal with my current work situation - definitely recommended.
No, thank you. I'd rather suffer where I am.
ETA: I've become uncomfortable with this line of conversation, and feel that people are putting too much pressure on me in an attempt to other-optimize. Thank you for your attempts to assist, but I would rather that this thread end here.
Related to: Outside the Laboratory, Ghosts in the Machine
We've all observed how people can be very smart in some contexts, and stupid in others. People compartmentalize, which has been previously hypothesized as the reason for some epic failures to understand things that should be obvious.
It's also important to remember that we are not immune. To that end, I want to start off by considering some comfortable examples, where someone else is the butt of the joke, and then consider examples which might make you more uneasy.
"The mere presence of a computer can short circuit normally intelligent people's brains." -- Computer Stupidities
The reassuring cases concern smart people who become stupid when confronted with our area of expertise. If you're a software developer, that tends to be people who can't figure out something basic about Windows. "I've tried closing the app and restarting, and I've tried rebooting, and it doesn't work, I still can't find my file." You take a deep breath, refrain from rolling your eyes and asking what the heck their mental model is, what they think closing-and-restarting has to do with a misplaced file, and you go looking for some obvious places, like the Desktop, where they keep all their files but somehow neglected to look this time. If it's not there, chances are it will be in My Documents.
It's sometimes draining to be called on for this kind of thing, but it can be reassuring. My dad is a high calibre mathematician, dealing in abstractions at a level that seems stratospheric compared to my rusty-college-math. But we sometimes get into conversations like the above, and I get a slightly guilty self-esteem boost from them.
Now, the harder question: how do we compartmentalize?
I propose work-life compartmentalization as a case study. "Work-life balance" is how we rationalize that separation. It's OK, we think, to put up with some unpleasantness from 9 to 5, as long as we can look forward to getting home, kicking our shoes off and relaxing, alone or among family or friends. And perhaps that's reasonable enough.
But this logic leads many people to tolerate: stress, taking orders, doing work that we think is meaningless, filling out paperwork that will never actually be read, pouring our energy into projects we're certain are failure-bound but never speaking up about that to avoid being branded "not a team player", being bored in endless meetings which are thinly disguised status games, feeling unproductive and stupid but grinding on anyway because it's "office hours" and that's when we are supposed to work, and so on.
And those are only the milder symptoms. Workplace bullying, crunch mode, dodgy workplace ethics are worryingly prevalent. (There are large variations in this type of workplace toxicity; some of us are lucky enough to never catch but a whiff of it, some of us unfortunately are exposed to a high degree. That these are real and widespread phenomena is evidenced by the success of TV shows showing office life as its darkest; humor is a defense mechanism.)
Things snapped into focus for me one day when a manager asked me to lie to a client about my education record in order to get a contract. I refused, expecting to be fired; that didn't happen. Had I really been at risk? The incident anyway fueled a resolve to try and apply at work the same standards that I do in life - when I think rationally.
In everyday life, rationality suggests we try to avoid boredom, tells us it's unwise to make promises we can't keep, to avoid getting entangled in our own lies, and so on. What might happen if we tried to apply the same standards in the workplace?
Instead of tolerating boredom in meetings, you may find it more effective to apply a set of criteria to any meeting - does it have an agenda, a list of participants, a set ending time and a known objective - and not show up if it doesn't meet them.
You might refuse to give long-term schedule estimate for tasks that you didn't really believe in, and instead try breaking the task down, working in short timeboxed iterations and updating your estimates based on observed reality, committing only to as much work as is compatible with maintaining peak productivity.
You might stop tolerating the most egregious status games that go on in the workplace, and strive instead for effective collective action: teamwork.
Those would be merely sane behaviours. It is, perhaps, optional to extend this thinking to actually challenging the usual workplace norms, and starting to do things differently just because they would be better that way. The world is crazy, and that includes the world of work. People who insist on not checking their brain at the door of the workplace are still few and far between, and to really change a workplace it takes a critical mass of them.
But I've seen it happen, and helped it happen, and the results make me want to find out more about other areas where I still compartmentalize. The prospect is a little scary - I still find it unpleasant to find out I've been stupid - but also exciting.