I really enjoyed this when I was younger, around the time it came out. Over time though I came to realize it's way too cynical and reductive to really guide you to any sort of successful outcome.
Do your best to be confident, kind, and engaged and you will run circles around the characters enumerated here, even the "winners".
One of my problems with it is the horrible and overloaded terminology. "I'll call them losers, but I don't mean they're losers". Fine, find a better and less pejorative term, then.
People deserve dignity, even if they are (sometimes forced into) making economic choices you think suboptimal.
Indeed, I find the alternative naming proposed on the DaedTech blog a lot better: opportunists/idealists/pragmatists. Giving up on financial ambition and simply enjoying life is a pragmatic choice for many if not most people.
Agreed. In fact, the 'minimum-effort Losers' at certain booming industries (i.e. tech) are, in my view and arguably somewhat objectively, absolute 'Winners' of capitalism.
Health-preserving work, at least a bit intellectually stimulating, paying so well that you can amass wealth and/or retire early + limited responsibility and no serious legal/economical fallout due to failure
"Losers" in tech have got a great deal.
Edit: to add - _job mobility_ to a level that even the 'Sociopaths' envy
That isn't an actual quote from the article. The article series quite clearly explains that these people are economic losers because they trade their time (just like the clueless and some sociopaths) for a paycheck but have neither the higher floor of the clueless or the higher ceiling of the sociopaths.
If you take article in the spirit of "All models are flawed, but some are useful" (some famous statistician named G.E.P.Box), then it is interesting perspective from which to look at organization.
Unfortunately that's exactly what a sociopath or clueless would say.
I believe in "work hard & be nice to people", but for religious & stoic reasons rather than expectations that it will be a successful strategy in most corporate environments.
You want the _optics_ of working hard and being nice, without being a pushover, and with seeking opportunities to advance yourself. A sociopath is a master manipulator in this regard.
The easiest way to obtain the optics of this, is to actually embody it. (much easier than cultivating sociopathic tendencies) The danger is that you over-nice, and end up a sucker.
The sociopath works because he can appear to be the conscientious achiever without doing the hard part. It's possible, but better to just be the conscientious achiever for your own sake.
Thanks, you put it much more clearly than I did. It's what I was getting at with the confidence part, that you need to know your boundaries and what your goals are, and not being afraid enforce them. You can do this while being kind and will achieve better results because you have friends and allies to work with.
> It's possible, but better to just be the conscientious achiever for your own sake.
I don't think that kind of committment is one concerned with the prospect of failure, and this may be the difference in subjectivity, which seems to be grandparent's point.
If I had to be bucketed into one of these categories it would be the sociopath one. But, I've done it without doing the things described by the author as necessary, and seeing those who have tries to work in that way eventually fail.
How healthy/functional are the institutions you have worked in, though?
I think healthy institutions find and reward the best people, and so this model fails in them. But the author’s assumption is (perhaps accurately) that most companies are in fact dysfunctional. Earlier in my work history I worked at some awful companies where this model rang an awful lot more true.
And I do think that the article is reading too much into the show. While the show has a sense a realism (all shows do), it is a fiction, and many things happen for the sake of comedy or plot.
The primary flaw of the article is that it gives FAR too much agency to the "sociopaths".
Most of the sociopaths are where they are because of randomness, too. The sociopaths often recognize that a situation could benefit them personally so they grab ahold--this is the point where they may stab somebody in the back.
However, after they mount up for the ride, the tiger goes where it wants and they really don't have any control over it. If it goes well, congrats on your promotion. If it goes badly, even with a scapegoat your promotion path is done so start looking for a new job.
So, the "sociopaths" are a product of 8 coin flips that all came up heads--unfortunately they all think they are geniuses.
I'm sure you've seen terrible behavior in corporate environments. I have too.
But I've also seen wonderfully productive, supportive behavior. I've seen leaders who uplift and who succeed by helping those around them. I've learned to pay attention to who I work for, or with, and to support the kind of people who I want to see running things.
It's a grave error to only consider the worst while ignoring the best.
> But I've also seen wonderfully productive, supportive behavior.
Me too, 99% coming from the rank and file, cleaning personnel, etc. A VP wont sacrifice his chances of promotion to help you, and if he has to fire you to get it,he will.
I think I've seen one VP ever take the fall instead of firing an employee, and that was a principal engineer who was the VP's friend. Moral victory- but both the VP and the engineer were fired in the end.
That said, I believe this is an isolated and extremely rare incident.
I think it's clear even by your tone you recognize those aren't great leaders. Are you saying you feel they are -successful- leaders? More so than the kind ones? I think most would view Obama as a more successful leader than Trump; certainly, he won re-election easily.
Obama is a great politician (as in kiss the babies get the votes politician). He is one of the most inconsequential presidents in the last 100 years. Basically nothing happened during his presidency. The status quo was maintained, some trends got worse (inequality, climate record) and a barely functional health plan was put in place, that's it.
But I really wish people understood how difficult it is to get to "nothing happened." Pilots put in hundreds of hours, and the plane landed, so "nothing happened." The 20 hour surgery went well and the person survived, so "nothing happened." Etc. etc.
Trump has had a much bigger impact on America than Obama did... whether that’s good or bad depends on your perspective. If, say, your mother was one of the villagers raped and murdered at Dos Erres in Guatemala, you might feel some catharsis from the hastened demise of the American republic.
Didn't say anything about effectiveness at creating change; Trump could have had that on lock just by pressing the red button, so to speak. I said leader.
Is winning re-election really the metric for a great leader? If anything, an effective leader is going to have more opposition when it comes to re-election. No one is concerned with an ineffective leader, least of all their enemies.
In fact I've never worked in an environment like described in this article. I'm not questioning their existence, I know plenty friends who work(ed) in toxic environments, and sure I've been a bit lucky.
But the whole idea that unavoidably you're either a loser, clueless, or a sociopath just doesn't seem rooted in reality to me. Plenty companies are not set up as toxic exploitation machines.
I think both you and the parent have missed the point.
The word “loser” is not the colloquial use of the term, and there is no “winner” (despite the confusing quotations above). Here it simply means loser in the economic sense — they produce an outsized amount of value for the company. They may be fully aware of this, and be happy and productive. They are simply unwilling or unable to do what’s necessary to climb the corporate ladder. If they have awareness of this dynamic, then they’re also unlikely to be promoted in middle management, since the sociopaths want people that will be loyal to them and support their agenda.
Similarly “clueless” doesn’t mean they are idiots — simply that they don’t have what it takes to be a sociopath, and aren’t aware of how they are being used. In other words, they are thinking exactly like the parent post — that’s exactly the kind of person the sociopath wants to promote to middle management.
Finally, “sociopath” is an exaggeration, and it doesn’t mean these people are terrible humans with no redeeming qualities. It just means that they are focused on their own outcomes above others, and internally may be lacking in the conscience department.
He goes quite deep over the full series and puts them into very rigidly defined boxes with whole sets of behaviors and even specific language and secret communication modes attributed to them.
If you loosen it all back up it's vague enough to be generally applicable.
Do your best to be confident, kind, and engaged and you will run circles around the characters enumerated here, even the "winners".