Hacker News Reader

Comment by tlb | Hacker News Reader

The term 'toxic culture' is mostly used to describe widespread harassment and bullying. 'Ossified' or 'stagnant' are more apt terms for a company that can't seem to seize new opportunities.

The thing about margins is that it's a lot more fun to work in a division with high margins. Low margin businesses are grim, because every cost matters. When you can charge $5000 for the latest Xeon, you can pay high salaries and have fat travel budgets. So it's hard to get people used to working on high-margin divisions to move into a new low-margin division, even if it might eventually be bigger.

View on HN

I worked with a guy who contracted with them in the 90s — he laughed that they flew him cross country every two weeks as a contractor to attend a staff meeting

I work for Intel. I agree that "toxic culture" is a term I would reserve for work environments where harassment is tolerated, which doesn't describe my experience.

There does seem to be a lot of dissatisfaction with leadership, though, and it's related to those high margins. In theory one would expect that those high margins would trickle down to compensation, but it seems to all be going to dividends, stock buybacks, and acquisitions. When it comes to employees, "we haven't budgeted for that".

There are certainly some people[1] alleging that Intel has what most would agree is a toxic culture, but yeah this article really didn't illustrate that.

[1]https://semiaccurate.com/2018/06/29/intels-firing-of-ceo-bri...

> The term 'toxic culture' is mostly used to describe widespread harassment and bullying.

I guess it's a continuous spectrum. What you describe is the worst possible end. Maybe next to it you have people which just don't care about people and take advantage of them by all means. Well and then there are places were people get burned out, managers loose their shit and yell at employees etc.

Seen it all, in fact it's like a domino effect. People involve in this, then they also involve in similar stupid activities.

You can't prescribe how language is used. Toxic culture now means this. Changes in usage happen over time.

If you google 'toxic culture', all the top results (other than this article) refer to harassment and bullying rather than slowness to adapt to change. Same with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_workplace. So a descriptive linguist would agree with me.

Maybe the phrase 'toxic culture' was imprecise and lazy to begin with. Now people are adapting it in a more precise way.

That wiki page was started in 2011 and it's based on a pop-management book. It's hardly an established term.

>It's hardly an established term

Yet you said...

>You can't prescribe how language is used. Toxic culture now means this.

So apparently you can.

For this author it does mean this. Feel free to use this phrase however you want though.

Communication is a two-way street. A word becomes meaningful when the recipient is able to understand the author through it; if there is no such consensus, then the word can't be said to mean anything.

A word is simply a shared reference to a concept. The consensus is around whether or not that reference is valid anymore.

Here’s a concrete example: “citizen” meant something completely different 100 years ago. At that time it meant “member of the set of landowners”, which resolved to “white male landowner”. Now the concept of citizen is much different and a lot more contentious.

"citizen" is meaningful because people do have a shared understanding of its meaning - people who are arguing about who is and isn't a citizen are still agreeing about what a citizen is. This article doesn't seem to be claiming that the culture at Intel has the aspects that people normally refer to when they say "toxic culture", it's trying to express something different - there's no factual disagreement, only a semantic one, which means the word has failed to convey meaning.

>Now the concept of citizen is much different and a lot more contentious

Right, and _both parties agree to the current definition_. That's the entire point.

That's not how language works. Words and terms have meaning, you can't just make stuff up and say "languages evolve/everything is subjective/use whatever phrase you want whenever you want."

and then in the same breath state this is "adopting a more precise definition of the term". These comments are like arguing with my six year old.

When it's a phrase with no inherent concrete meaning, yes you can.

> a phrase with no inherent concrete meaning

All words and phrases are made up. None of them have an “inherent concrete meaning”. Commonly-accepted deifnitions today may have been entirely foreign a few decades ago.

Words and phrases can have a de facto inherent meaning when they are in a language shared by the speaker and listener (including a shared knowledge domain).

When in spite of this shared language/domain situation, a phrase is gobbledygook, it is fair to say it has "no inherent concrete meaning".

Exactly. It's not like the author is saying, "The cat is on the red table."

Yes, so the author is free to talk about 'toxic culture' as inflexible management and that makes sense to me.

So if you think all these things, why do you feel a need to convince us we're wrong? I mean, does your blarf just not embiggen the point yule's trying to make? I mean, depending on what you might think I instoll with a breem like 'your blarf'.

I do agree that it all glarps like slofting ar a six year old.

ok.

> You can't prescribe how language is used. Toxic culture now means this.

Seriously? You can't prescribe how language is used either.

Meaning in language is constructed around conversations about how words should or should not be used. No single person can prescribe language, but discussions about what words mean in their context is how language evolves.

I'd add to this that, among the changes that happen to language, there are those that are true, organic, and grass-roots, but also there are those that are forced, manipulative, and agenda-driven. :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com