My decades of working in very capitalistic companies has taught me two things:
1. Emotions are bigger factor than logic when it comes to business decisions.
2. We often assume wrong on what a “rational” economic choice should be. We believe it would be constructive, but economically beneficial choice for an individual often does not align with the constructive choice.
In my personal experience, companies turn to these tools when there are organizational problems because it places the burden on the individuals instead of the system. Who has a large influence on the system, those at the top.
The environmental initiatives are wonderful and they've got a surprising amount of market traction.
Cons
Grove is a place where meritocracy-espousing libertarian men get together to talk about diversity and inclusion in between the more pressing conversations that dominate their Marin-dwelling lives concerning craft whiskey and Teslas. They all agree that diversity and inclusion are good things to invest in, but they don't actually want to promote anyone that doesn't look or sound just like them so they tend to focus their virtue-signaling efforts on volunteering their time outside the company and sending everyone emails about how woke they are because they say “Latinx” or something. Of course they’ve hired the obligatory token PoC HR muppet to sit there and shut down every uncomfortable Slido question that comes in on their behalf—rest assured, this person is nobody’s ally.
Even if you accept a role that you find interesting and report to a person you respect, that will all change very quickly when that person disappears to go do something else and you get traded to some other team. Your primary responsibility as an individual contributor at Grove will likely be to make sure that your manager fails up no matter how little management acumen they demonstrate or show an interest in acquiring. You should take pride in either training your department's "director" or flat-out doing his job for him (yes, it will be a man) because that's what being a team player is all about. Yeah, his CV says he's got 20 years of experience, but he's only been here a few months. He just needs to learn. Also his contract says we have to pay him for the full year if we fire him so... Remember, we have a "blameless culture." The valley’s a small place—you wouldn't want to say anything that might hurt your career, would you?
To make all of this worse, one of the investors who is (rightfully) tired of letting these entitled brats run around with his money recently decided that Grove needs to have an IPO immediately because IPOs are hot. The entire roadmap was thrown out the window to try and get the CTO’s disaster of a monolith ready for an auditor and every middle manager in every unnecessary fiefdom is convinced that they're some kind of diabolical chessmaster who's going to use the ensuing chaos as a smokescreen that will enable them to pull off a coup of the entire operation and crown themselves the holy king of soap subscriptions or something. It's toxic. Really, really toxic. I shudder to think how awful life must be for the folks in the fulfillment centers given what I've experienced as a well-compensated office drone with the privilege of saying "no" when somebody tells me to do something completely insane.
Advice to Management
Find something useful to do with the all-hands meetings. Marketing does not need a captive audience to congratulate themselves in front of every single week.
Sure, I'm all for teaching it. It would still face the same issues as other education topics. Use science as an example. It is taught in schools. And yet, we still have a strong anti-science culture in the U.S.
The other factor I'm not hearing in this conversation is that there is a third-party in why the Bay Area has so many high paid tech jobs: the VCs. I know of multiple startups orignally based elsewhere who were pressured to move their company to the Bay Area by the VC. I suspect there are many ways in which the VCs have an invisible hand in creating the Bay Area market.
I don't know how to unwind the VC intanglement when talking about compensation. I do think it should be part of this conversation.
> Look at this instead as a problem of knowledge distribution
I personally found this to be helpful. I find it more comfortable to document and present internally to my companies than to the public at large. I've tried blogging, but it feels pointless. At least with internal presentation, I hear positive feedback from it. Maybe it is just that one person six months later who messages me that I saved them days of work.
The plagues of Europe didn’t stay in Europe. They eventually came to the Americas where they wiped out most of the native populations.
If globally connected people are so bad, then why has the Catholic Church been so big on extending their reach across the globe throughout history. Why spread the gospel?
This just seems like a low blow. I’m not even sure what question is unanswered here. The vagueness of this article makes it hard to have a conversation with.
I learned a lesson about opportunity costs while worked at an IT company. When I started, the company managed the IT for small companies, most being three to five people companies. We had full control of decisions so we kept them up-to-date with the latest best practices. I'm sure there was a bias of the types of companies who went with us as we charged more than competitors.
We started to gain larger clients. We thought that a 5,000 person company would be ahead of the 5 person company when it came to technology. Not so. Here is what we learned: there are political risks for changing technology. A CTO (these are not tech companies) would wait until people were complaining so extremely that people would have to feel that changes were good. It all arose from that bias most people have about change being bad unless it is ten times better.
I don't see "retention" of talent in here but "recruiting" is. Is your team rapidly growing, or do you have high turnover? Recuriting is a costly activity compared to retention.
Jumping on here as this is a widespread issue in tech writing.
"The first time you use an initialism or acronym in your document, the words should be written out with the short form placed in parentheses immediately after."
The next question is, will they. I know of a town in Indiana where a surprising number of people don't get medical help. Some of it is money, but a big part is cultural. Indianapolis scares them. I dare say, for too many Indianapolis is scarier than COVID-19.
Everyone will come in contact with the virus. People under 50 years old (as recent reports have stated) have a high chance of survival. The deaths from it will mostly be from those 50 years and old. Voters who are 50 years and older largely vote for the Republican party.
Assuming an older dev is also a higher level, they are likely to be dealing with many non-technical problems like project management and politics. As such, their big problems to solve are less the tech and all the other issues around the tech.
1. Emotions are bigger factor than logic when it comes to business decisions.
2. We often assume wrong on what a “rational” economic choice should be. We believe it would be constructive, but economically beneficial choice for an individual often does not align with the constructive choice.