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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3036 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 1, 2023

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What is scarce today is proportionate authenticity in positivity and negativity.

A question I like to ask with my bi-coastal over-educated early 30s cohort is "Yes, of course Orange Man was very very bad, but how did you life get appreciably worse between 2016 and 2020, barring anything related to COVID?" As almost all of my cohort got into manager+ levels of mostly tech corporate work, completed a masters, and/or got married ... they can't really come up with anything concrete beyond "well ... my anxiety...blah blah blah." But that's just the point - negativity (in media sources or elsewhere) doesn't seem, to me, to be about real proportionate evaluation, but a kind of circular mood-affiliation. Even the less emotionally charged WSJ frequently has articles along the lines of "workers are worried the economy is real bad and whatnot." The body of the article amounts to "a bunch of online surveys indicate people are worried ... in general ... here's a few interviews with people who are worried ... in general."

Now, flip the coin the other way. Anybody here who routinely uses Slack or and other chat app in a corporate job will be familiar with the "EVERYDAY AMAZING" hyper-praise that a lot of front line managers HEAP on their employees for ... doing the basics. "Timmy and Janey ABSOLUTELY CRUSHED THEIR STANDUP THIS MORNING!!!!!" Followed with dozens of emoji responses. First, I think this is maybe the number one issue with career development today - front line managers are turning into weird cheerleaders until annual performance reviews where they absolutely gut these same folks. Consistent and honest feedback is really hard to come by and it's nearly impossible to calibrate the relative strength of feedback when you're getting the above (OMG YOU SHOWED UP TO WORK) on the one hand, and a muted "Hey, I think you could've delivered that report better..." on the other. Wait a minute, did I fuck up or not? If I did, how do I improve? What's the most important part of my job?

I know I mixed some topics up above here, but I don't think they're that unrelated. I think about this a lot as somehow who's moved into the Senior Manager / Director phase of the career and, looking down, see a lot of individual contributors who truly don't trust the feedback from the system. As a citizen who reads the news, I see something similar happening with your average man-on-the-street who's looking around and seeing "THE END IS NEAR" on a daily basis, but who goes home, orders from Uber Eats and isn't worried a stranger is poisoning his food.

What is scarce today is proportionate authenticity in positivity and negativity.

Oof, yeah the "authenticity" question has been banging around in my head too, and I'd write an essay on it if I can confirm someone smarter hasn't written it already and I get the time to do it.

This rings true: people want to hear positive affirmations if they come from a place of honesty, and maybe don't like it when it's a condescending sort of affirmation or obviously isn't sincere.

And when it comes to positive affirmations from large corporations, you can largely conclude that they're not sincere because it's all designed around getting you to spend money and they have no particular connection with you as an individual to 'authenticate' the affirmation.

Anybody here who routinely uses Slack or and other chat app in a corporate job will be familiar with the "EVERYDAY AMAZING" hyper-praise that a lot of front line managers HEAP on their employees for ... doing the basics. "Timmy and Janey ABSOLUTELY CRUSHED THEIR STANDUP THIS MORNING!!!!!

Agreed, although I do not have a large corporate job.

front line managers are turning into weird cheerleaders until annual performance reviews where they absolutely gut these same folks.

Also agreed, and funny enough oftentimes it seems like the performance reviews will gut someone for NOT buying into the positivity culture and being an overall 'downer' at work even if that's simply the result of trying to be honest.

But that's just the point - negativity (in media sources or elsewhere) doesn't seem, to me, to be about real proportionate evaluation, but a kind of circular mood-affiliation.

The comedian Dara O'Briain expressed this as "Crime is down, but the FEAR of crime is up!"

"Timmy and Janey ABSOLUTELY CRUSHED THEIR STANDUP THIS MORNING!!!!!"

Good Christ do I hate logging into LinkedIn for any reason.

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