
Carnival Cash: The Cult of Seniority - nkurz
http://www.daedtech.com/carnival-cash-the-cult-of-seniority
======
ChuckMcM
That is an interesting perspective. In my experience it seems a bit too narrow
to generalize across companies but I know a lot of folks who have had some bad
experiences at companies and then have extrapolated that to an entire
industry. It has been interesting meeting folks at IBM who have 20+ years at
the same company. Atypical of Silicon valley folks but not unheard of[1].
Having the experience of having been at a company for a while gives you the
ability to do things that people who have not been there cannot, in part
because you have a better view on where things get done or don't get done.

It is apparent from Erik's response to recruiters[2] that he approaches work
in a somewhat mercenary way. And while that can work it sets a tone for your
relationship with the people in the company that does not work to your
advantage, and can sometimes be a handicap down the road as you re-encounter
people with whom you have previously worked.

Companies are communities of people. Communities have norms and values and
expectations. It is always uncomfortable when you don't fit in with the
community, and some people are better at "finding their people" than others
are. I can say though that when you and the community "click" for what ever
set of reasons, it can be a wonderful thing indeed, and a real sense of loss
when you lose it.

[1] One of my early friends at Intel is still there 30 years later, and the
same with folks at Sun I knew who are now with Oracle as part of that
acquisition.

[2] From the comment section Erik wrote:

    
    
       This is particularly valuable when talking to labor 
       salesmen (i.e. recruiters).
    
       "They have a pool table!"
       "Don't care, what's the pay?"
       "$X"
       "Not enough money."
       "But, they have a pool table, and everyone there will be
        your dudebro and they'll even add rockstar to your 
        title!"
       "Don't care, not enough money. Call me back if the 
        offer changes."

~~~
jordanb
Wanting good pay instead of meaningless breakroom toys makes you a
"mercenary?"

I'm all for working hard and leaving a position with everyone feeling like I
made a difference, and I'm still close friends with many of my former
colleagues and bosses. But at the end of the day my compensation for doing
work others want done is my salary and the cash value of the provided
benefits.

The cash value of a pool table in the break room is essentially $0, and a
recruiter pretending it's not is trying to pull a fast one.

~~~
ChuckMcM

       > Wanting good pay instead of meaningless breakroom 
       > toys makes you a "mercenary?"
    

No it does not, but focusing on the pay first and the environment later does.

~~~
hawkice
If I asked a potential employer how many meetings a week people in the
position/team usually attend, and they say 20-30, that is clearly too much.
But I am reasonably certain I would be criticized by you as using the wrong
tone if I said as much.

"How many meetings do people in this position usually take a week?"

"Maybe 20, but it varies."

"That's not good, the interview process should end here -- but tell me if or
when you have an environment that is more in line with what I am looking for."

You see how the same problem seems to appear? Unless your critique isn't what
I am imagining, pay-first isn't the issue, it's that you think it's a
violation of standard norms in hiring situations to have hard requirements,
and to bluntly communicate when something is not a good fit. I think you will
find that hiring managers do not share this opinion of correct behavior.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I think asking for meeting frequency is a good one, and one that speaks to the
job as opposed to the remuneration.

When you get the answer "maybe 20, it varies" rather than end the interview,
understand the environment. So I'm going to assume that going to meetings for
you is something you don't like to do (and I can certainly understand that,
worthless meetings are worthless) But in this same stream of questions my next
one after 20 would be "How many of those meetings are run by the person in
this position?" If the previous person in that position was calling 15
meetings a week it would credible to ask if the job required them to do that
(and if so why) or if it was simply their preferred way of operating? If you
are leading/managing a project with a fairly large scope you may find it
easier to have a short meeting with the sub-project groups than read i _m_ r
emails each week, where i, m, and r are issues, members, and replies. But if
its a small company and the previous person just wanted to have meetings with
everyone to feel useful, that might not be your style either. If there are 20
people/groups that want the person in this position to be at their meeting
then its a valid question of how you might want to scale that position in a
way that doesn't involve meetings.

Money is a "score" and number of meeting are a "task". Mercenaries go for a
big score and don't care about the tasks needed to get there. There isn't
anything wrong about being a mercenary, it is just another community of
people.

------
aeflash
I think the author makes a couple flawed assumptions. First: that all people
are motivated primarily by money, and second: things that have no direct
monetary value have no value.

Some people value the work they do, or the work their company does. Some
people value their teams and the people they work with on a daily basis. Some
people value working in a nice space, or their own spaces. Some people would
like to look back at 65 at what they have built, rather than what they have
earned, not really caring that they may have earned 20% less.

I do agree that chasing seniority for title only can be a fools errand. A
higher title can be a substitute for self-esteem issues, but on the other
hand, it can also lead to higher pay scales.

Also, I've known companies to reward those "corporate idealists" with more
than just carnival tickets.... If your company doesn't reward putting in the
occasional extra hour and seeing things through to completion, it's a bad
company to work for.

~~~
alexandercrohde
Agreed.

Who says social comparison (discarded by this article as "carnival tickets")
plays no role in satisfaction? Research shows that making more than peers is a
better predictor of happiness than absolute income
([http://e-archivo.uc3m.es/bitstream/handle/10016/15313/happin...](http://e-archivo.uc3m.es/bitstream/handle/10016/15313/happiness_perez_JPE_2011_ps.pdf?sequence=1))

Great article.

------
jwatte
While the caricature is entertaining, I have never worked in a corporation
that works at all like what's described. At companies I've worked at, if
you're checked out, you do not last. At companies I've worked at, some
prodigies have very high positions at 30; some maintenance steady goers may
find a good pace in the middle into senior age. A successful corporation lets
every employee both contribute, and stretch. And working with experienced
people who know what they are doing is the best way to learn real skills that
can't be learned from reading an open source project wiki.

~~~
UK-AL
That or your an idealist. And those prodigies have token seniority as
described.

~~~
onthesideofthe
> That or your an idealist. And those prodigies have token seniority as
> described.

This is what I don't like about articles like this. It provides a language to
put down and dehumanize others without offering anything positive.

29y/o CEO? Sociopath.

Coworker that's been promoted ahead of me? Idealist, just mere token
seniority.

I'll earn more money than him by job hopping a few times anyways.

------
makeitsuckless
I'm now over 45, and I've never, ever worked for a company like that.

So ask yourself: how do bloggers that rant about such companies get this
wisdom?

It's always the people that play the game and fail that loudly blame the game.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I expect it is unfair to generalize that "people that play the game and fail"
blame the game. Rather there are a number of people who do not understand how
communities work, and never have, and so they don't recognize when they are
being antagonistic to the very people they want to be friends with.

I remember having a conversation with a relatively new programmer who was
ranting they were "fed up with all the political BS and just wanted to write
code and be left alone." That is a sentiment I completely resonate with, but
in this case the "political BS" was folks trying to help this person become
more effective in the organization.

What was impairing their efficiency was that this individual wrote code in a
vacuum. people trying to integrate with it were frustrated when this developer
decides on Friday night that they don't like how they structured the APIs with
an opaque handle and convert everything into a callbacks which appears as the
new API to the rest of the organization on Monday. It wasn't "political BS"
that was causing these folks to be angry with this individual, it was that
this individual was actively making their job harder than needed.

But when it became clear that more people where being hindered than helped, I
was asked to step in and see if I could help this person see what the real
issues were. I was only 50% effective, they understood the issue but decided
to leave rather than slow down to listen to the needs of the other engineers.
To this day they assert they were 'forced out' but nothing could be further
from the truth.

~~~
dctoedt
> _I was asked to ... see if I could help this person .... they understood the
> issue but decided to leave .... To this day they assert they were 'forced
> out' ...._

Off-topic rant: For the love of God, will everyone please STOP with the use of
_they_ as a gender-neutral singular pronoun. History shows us a better way:
Decades ago, feminists coined the term _Ms._ , which has all but totally
replaced the old-fashioned _Miss_ and _Mrs._ Those concerned with gender
neutrality should do likewise, instead of inflicting ambiguity and inaccuracy
on the rest of us by (mis)using _they_.

</rant>

~~~
ChuckMcM
I understand your rant, and I've been around for a while, I explicitly use the
gender neutral pronoun because of a post I made here where someone took my
LinkedIn history, gender of the person, and subject and back tracked it to an
individual who later, and quite reasonably, chastised me about sharing in
public.

Since that time, I've paid more attention to whether or not I can share an
example at _all_ given how easily the Internet allows one to deduce such
things. Not surprisingly, the Internet doesn't like obviously fictionalized
examples either so it limits my sharing to things about me and things which I
can make reasonably opaque.

~~~
dctoedt
> _I explicitly use the gender neutral pronoun because of a post I made here
> where someone took my LinkedIn history, gender of the person, and subject
> and back tracked it to an individual who later, and quite reasonably,
> chastised me about sharing in public._

That's certainly a valid concern. Another approach would be simply to keep
repeating "the person" instead of _they_ , as in: _I was asked to ... see if I
could help this person .... the person understood the issue but decided to
leave .... To this day the person claims to have been 'forced out' ...._
That's a bit jarring, granted, but at least it doesn't promote linguistic
abomination <g>.

On a related note, I was recently at a church service where the prayers had
been changed to eliminate _any_ pronoun for _God_. EXAMPLE adapted from Psalm
103: _Bless the LORD, O my soul, And all that is within me, bless God 's_
[vice _His_ ] _holy name._

------
rpcope1
Wow, this is a great read; it also sums up about every company I've ever
worked at with more than a couple hundred people. It's amazing how many people
will pull in more time than absolutely necessary on things they don't care
about, even at tech companies, just to "get ahead."

~~~
makeitsuckless
If you've worked for multiple companies that function like that, that probably
says more about you.

~~~
rpcope1
I can't tell if that's a rather passive-aggressive ad hominem or what, but
sometimes its hard to know the true inner machinations of some of our
"revered" tech giants until you've seen them from the inside. Needless to say
that's not somewhere I stay for long.

------
Gaussian
Averaging 60 hours a week - for a career - at a corporate job as a developer?
That's not something I've witnessed. Projects can ramp up and down, but
sustaining that level of hours for long clips is only something I've seen at
startups where the whole team is invested. If you're putting in 60 hours every
week, for years, for some corporation, then you've been had.

------
michaelochurch
The one thing I disagree with in this is the point about an office. Having an
office matters. Being visible from behind sucks, and the open-plan stress
means that you spend an unacceptable amount of your leisure time recovering
from work instead of actually doing things. I'd gladly take a 10% pay cut not
to deal with that. I don't give a shit about having a _nice_ office. I'd be
fine with 50 square feet and a small window.

As a programmer, I'd want an office just to have some space where I can get
work done. That's not because I'm a true believer or a corporate man. It's
entirely selfish: my career will be better if I succeed than if I fail, and
these terrible open-plan offices do enough damage to day-to-day performance
that I'd rather not be in one. Though I'm a Sociopath/opportunist I generally
find that it's usually in my interest to work hard, do my best, and play fair.
In a conflict, I'll favor my interests above almost anyone else's, but I also
avoid such conflicts as much as I can.

Other than that, I think that the carnival cash metaphor is spot-on. Moreover,
I think the spawning issue (i.e. that sociopaths/opportunists don't usually
start at the top) is worth note in technology because it's such a young
industry. The age discrimination and the Scrum nonsense are all about creating
a permanent culture of the clueless/idealist mindset-- at all levels. The VC-
funded ecosystem is one where the Sociopaths get to play multiple companies
(as investors, advisors, and executives placed into successful companies after
the fact) and the checked-out MacLeod Losers (pragmatists) are shut out by the
time they wise up. The goal is to produce monochromatically Clueless/idealist
companies that the Sociopaths/opportunists in VC can manage from a distance
and discard if they become inconvenient.

