Hacker News Reader

Comment by thenoblesunfish | Hacker News Reader

As an American in (Germanic) Europe, I was struck by how positively people think of the word "competent". In America that sounds like "not doing your best" or "having no passion". Here it sounds like "doing your job properly". People expect the plumber (or more to the point, the waiter) to do their job, but they don't expect passion or excellence.

View on HN

I'll take competent over passionatly aiming for excellence every time. Especially since competence gets the job on hand when it has to be done, even if the job is quite the opposite of glorious or fancy.

Well nowadays companies are looking for passionate and competent employees, which meaning is very different with dictionary.

Oh, and they require for the candidates to learn the companies business end to end before or during interview process, otherwise you're less passionate with our company.

Even better: buy in 143% into the company vision, because we all know culture beats strategy, and all culture flows from vision. Or some such...

I think it's three cultural artefacts:

1. American ethos really instills the notion of 'Follow your passion' as a dogma.

Life is complicated, and shit happens, but for americans that genuinely means you failed. (I see this a lot when I try to discuss homelessness and social protection in the US).

2. Follow up from that, 'everyone is special' or 'destined for great things' is a constant movie theme

3. Americans _really_ peg a lot of their self-worth to work.

Without fail all the americans I have met open the conversation with 'So, what do you do?' as if how I will be judged is wholy pegged on where I am on the totem pole and how much they can infer income from my occupation. You have made the person as an individual undissociable from the worker as a contributor to someone else's wealth or the gold standard of the self-made man.

These may be of the main reasons for the (now routine) shootings in US and their absence in Europe, even in countries where practically everyone owns a gun. If the culture is holding people up to an impossible standard, there's bound to be A LOT of frustration.

After several decades of working in the US the main problem from my perspective is that delusional employees, favored and enabled by management, destroy a lot of trust among their coworkers and that adds a lot of workplace stress for many people.

Your comment is super unclear as to who and what you're talking about. Delusional? Enabled?

You've said, "the main problem". Are you talking about something that affects most of the working population?

It's related to The Gervais Principle [0] which sees the company as a hierarchy of sociopaths at the top, clueless in the middle, and losers at the bottom.

However I think the specified hierarchy is not required for most workplaces. There is a lot more variety in where the sociopaths reside, and I consider both the clueless and sociopaths to be delusional. Deluded might be a better term for both.

0. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

How are the sociopaths deluded?

It’s the same in Asia - you don’t get the constant “do you like your job?” type questions - everyone knows it’s just that - a job.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com