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Comment by kanox | Hacker News Reader

WTF does "toxic culture" even mean, other than clickbait?

Some people seems to use this as meaning "anti-social" or "excessively aggressive" but the word only appears in the article as "toxic fixation on margins" where it's equivalent to "harmful".

The gist of the article seems to be that Intel lost in the mobile space because it refused to chase opportunities with lower margins. But decisions regarding such deals are made by a small handful of people at the top, the "culture" of the rest of the organization is irrelevant.

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"Toxic" is one of those terms like "problematic" that rely on in-group knowledge to understand. I've often heard it in reference to masculinity; often used by feminists who have a more concrete definition in mind. And, sure you can look at any violent crime stats to see masculinity has its problems, but instead of the more reasonable claim they're making a very nasty one that's indefensible.

Allusions to people being poisonous are particularly destructive. This was very common in the military, if a soldier didn't fit in, he was labeled as something similar to toxic so that others knew not to associate with him. Even then, when the military does it, there's a practical solution: the soldiers get out of the military.

If you claim a larger group is toxic, you have to ask: these are our neighbors, what do we do with them?

> But decisions regarding such deals are made by a small handful of people at the top

Yeah, that really blew the article for me. Something like not-invented-here syndrome is a cultural issue, not bad corporate strategy.

> Allusions to people being poisonous are particularly destructive.

The phrase "toxic masculinity" isn't directed at one SPECIFIC man, so you can dry your tears.

Please don't post ideological swipes or personally nasty remarks ("you can dry your tears") to HN. It only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

To clarify: when I said "you can look at any violent crime stats to see masculinity has its problems" I'm acknowledging that the issue the feminists are trying to address is a real one. And that's an olive branch to avoid derailing the discussion into politics.

To say that masculinity has a problem because of violent crime statistics is identical to say that femininity has a problem because of eat disorder statistics.

Correlating statistics is useful when looking for potential causes in a large space of unknowns, but horrible when misused as evidence to justify a negative label on a category of people. Its not an olive branch for peace.

I'd describe it more as a palpable malaise. Teams feel like they're on islands 1000 miles apart from one another. You can feel it in the air the moment you enter any organization like this (if you know what the other side feels like).

A massive organization that has gone stagnant tends to exhibit the same mechanics. You're on a team solving a problem for a stakeholder. You might not know who the stake holder is or where they are. You might meet your real stakeholder once every month or never. If your company is process minded they'll create proxy stakeholders to create the illusion of task identity.

Proxy stakeholders are the worst. Since the gizmo you're working on isn't for them, any enthusiasm for your work is feigned. They're your only line to the person(s) that actually care(s). The human connection between you, your labor and its consumer is severed, isolating you further. This puts the employee on a slalom to resentment and alienation. The better your proxy is, the shallower the grade, but you'll end up there eventually.

Despite the fact I've seen quite a few successful techniques to obviate this eventuality, 99% of companies don't have a symbol in their minds for the trajectory and it happens anyways. The flat org chart thing is an interesting cudgel to solve the problem, I'm convinced it's not the best solution.

"Toxic" in this context just means negative or harmful. There are many ways in which something can be negative or harmful, not just one.

Anyone who uses toxic in this way is just going to look silly.

It's been used this way in the English language since the mid 17th century.

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