[rpcastagna]

I don't have the context on the "engagement industry" or whatever that I think I need to appreciate this post as the specific criticism I think it's trying to be, but I think people really are bitterly unsatisfied with their jobs and saying the engagement "number has barely budged over the last decade" despite notable corporate success is sorta missing the point?

The idea that people's engagement or happiness -- or even just their general satisfaction at work -- is strongly correlated to their employing corporations' success is a persistent myth in tech that I just don't understand. People hate "sell outs" and they hate themselves when they sell out for a reason. You start as someone dedicated to a craft, you end up working somewhere that pays you a lot of money to do it but without giving you the chance to put yourself into that work at all, and then you end up making soulless work that not even you really like. But it made money so it keeps going like that until it absolutely blows up and everyone has to "rebrand" or another company slips in as the rebranded form in your place.

Steph Curry is happy when the Warriors win because he's on a team that is winning by playing the game his way. If the team made him go to dunk every time he got the ball I bet his satisfaction would be shit too -- and it probably wouldn't keep netting the Warriors more rings.

[TeMPOraL]

> You start as someone dedicated to a craft, you end up working somewhere that pays you a lot of money to do it but without giving you the chance to put yourself into that work at all, and then you end up making soulless work that not even you really like. But it made money so it keeps going like that until it absolutely blows up and everyone has to "rebrand" or another company slips in as the rebranded form in your place.

This is the best summary of what matches my experience in this industry that I've seen. Favouriting.

Based on what I read about it, I agree that the way "employee engagement" is pursued is missing the point. Especially that companies typically also optimize for having employees be replaceable cogs. I don't think you can have both. Engagement comes from aligned goals, autonomy, and coworkers you can relate with. Which is opposite of what you want to have when you're building a machine, where employees are dumb parts.

[jlawson]

The managers are pursuing legibility.

There's a great book about this called Seeing Like a State. It's about the conflict between top-down planning and bottom-up development of complex systems - things like cities and forests.

One of the big points is that leaders tend to be obsessed with making the system legible to themselves, often at great cost to the effectiveness of the system itself. There's a sense that "if I can't easily model/perceive it in my head, it doesn't exist or it's worthless". Of course the reality is that the majority of what goes on in a complex system is invisible to any outsider; the system is more complex than the brain trying to model it. So management efforts that ignore or even try to reduce that illegible complexity end up destroying much of the system they're attempting to manage.

I think there's also a simpler explanation: It's unintentional gamification. People like dopamine hits they get from rising numbers, rectilinear grids, clean charts and projections. So they pursue these things as an end goal, imagining somehow that this is the same as pursuing success. Of course a really well-working complex system (like a company or city or forest) is too complex to model with such tools. But the manager isn't playing to make a good complex system, he's playing a little game of graphs on his computer screen. The chart went up and to the right - you win today!

[rpcastagna]

To be honest I don't think the typical corporate strategy is irrational, either, because employees can be wrong about product and business decisions in exactly the same way that executives can be, and, ultimately, the construct of the corporation exists specifically so a pursuit can outlive any contributor to it. Endless discussion and fretting over every single thing hinders productivity, also.

But why am I supposed to feel good about being part of that system? And who decided that was the best we could possibly do?

19 years out from the release of Black On Both Sides and still all anyone wants is to tell me to try to have some fret in my heart behind the things that they do. I mean, I guess...

[walshemj]

And HR doesn't engage in presentism all the time?

[esoterica]

People who get paid in RSUs definitely want to see their company succeed. I bet the Amazon employees who have seen their shares go up 500% over the past few years are pretty happy about it.

> People hate "sell outs"

No one other than characters in 80s teen movies goes around unironically complaining about "sell outs".

[closeparen]

Stock goes up because a company does better than the market currently thinks it will, not because it does well. RSU issuing unicorns tend to have an extreme level of hype priced in already. In the best of all possible worlds, the stock might stay flat.

[skybrian]

People are happy when the company succeeds but few people in a large company think they personally have much influence on the stock price.

But you can act as if this were the case and it looks good, so sometimes you might be well-rewarded.

[toast0]

The great part about RSUs is you still get paid if the stock goes down (as long as it still exists). Sure, it's nice if it goes up a lot, but then you have a feeling of being stuck while you wait for those RSUs with nice gains to vest, and then a feeling of getting less when the next round of RSUs is much smaller. (Unless it keeps going up)

[rpcastagna]

I was thinking of Andre 3k at the OutKast reunion tour with the "sell out" thing here.

I'm also a software engineer at Google and I think our stock price has gone up too? I might be wrong.

[MisterOctober]

^ this is real talk. Companies constantly confuse

"company success [worker gets to pay their rent this month]"

with

"employee satisfaction [worker's role and tasks in organization are congruent with how worker sees / wants-to-see self]"

[lukethomas]

I should have clarified this a bit more in my post. I think it's possible for people to perform at a high-level and be "engaged" at work, even if the company isn't constantly winning like the warriors.

The only analogy I can think of is another sports one. I used to do track & field. I wasn't the fastest guy running, but I still pushed myself to beat my previous records. I felt a sense of progress/fulfillment when I ran faster than the past.

I think this can exist inside a company as well. It's highly unlikely that people find fulfillment by the mission of a company, but they can find some sense of fulfillment (at least in a work context), by "playing the game their way" and continuously improving.

[rpcastagna]

The problem with sports analogies is that athletes typically actually matter to the success or failure of their organization, and that's both immediately visible to and recognized by everyone involved.

Even for athletes, though, you see more simple name recognition for NBA players than for, say, NFL players, simply because basketball teams are smaller and the individual players are so much more pivotal to the team's success.

[losteric]

It can exist in a company, but I think the likelyhood of encountering such an environment is inversely proportional to the size and growth rate of the company... rapid growth in a large corporation leads to metric-driven management as established leaders try to retain control over broader business areas, disconnects between budgets and requirements arise due to increased organizational depth, and there's a loss of individual "freedom" in execution as managerial roles multiply to offset lower hiring standards of ICs. All of which have tertiary consequences, collectively strangling the freedom required for pride in work.

To use your analogy, it's like running if you were following a cart that laid out every foot step and were followed by another cart with a whip. There's no incentive or freedom to engage.