Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

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I thought that that was his point, really. If you hire a manager who cares more about his career than the company, then the employees under him will think "Why should I work hard to make my boss rich?" If you hire someone who cares about the company's goals, then there's at least a chance of them thinking "We're here to accomplish something great, and my manager is my partner in achieving that, someone who can help remove obstacles in my way."

For this to work, it has to extend all the way up to the CEO, otherwise somewhere along the chain, someone is going to think "Why should I work for the company just to make some other guy filthy rich?" That's the basis for building a company culture, though.

This is something Google's done particularly well, at least so far. I never see Larry or Sergey crowing about their billions or talking about how they built the company - they're always talking about how much more we (= everyone) could be building. By and large, that extends to all the senior executives.

When you don't have that, you end up with a culture more like Enron, which had employees that were probably as smart as Googlers yet was famous for its dog-eat-dog individuality. We know how that turned out.

I would argue (as a person who dislike hierarchies), that healthy, grown up person should care only about his very own goals, when working for a company. I am not saying that the goals should not be aligned with corporate ones, yet to care too much about goals of something amorphous, necessarily unstable system like a corp - well it may hurt one's identity, bring a false sense of excessive importance of corporate issues and, brutalize the person by making him/her overcommited to corp and ignoring of needs of people below.

Corporation is a fiction, only individual matters.

The whole reason we have corporations is so that people can accomplish goals that are too big for any one individual to tackle.

If you care only about your own goals, why not work for yourself and bypass the corporate system entirely? It's sorta implicit that someone who's working for a corporation is doing so because they share the goals of that organization yet can't achieve them on their own. (Yeah, I know that's not always the case because some people lack money and don't have the imagination to get it without a paycheck, but you were talking about "healthy, grown up" people here...)

Why work in corporation? Well, because 1) it is easier to find a job this way; 2) it is a good place to get experience.

I work for a corporation - for me it is easier, for now. I do not share any goals with the corporation at all. My goal is simple - to collect money (to drain the corporate cash), it is kind of opposite to the corporation's. Yet, my other goal is to maintain my integrity, so I am going to contribute as much as I think is justified.

You can work for yourself, even if you in somebody else's building.

I think you are missing the point of this article.

He's saying that there are people who view the world differently from you, and that their type of ambition (shared with the company and/or team) is more useful to a corporation.

You are making a judgement that your world view is correct. I don't think he's judging the correctness of either view, only the usefulness of each kind.

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