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Comment by lxe | Hacker News Reader

What delusional playbook does every tech leader get the idea to refer to their employees by cringey names like "Plaids" or "Metamates" in serious memos like this?

Imagine if your physician did this...

"Hey there KaiserPermanientoid! You have cancer!"

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It's all part of the cult of personality. "We're all a family." Remind me, when was the last time your father just cut out half of the family?

It happens.

And it's considered dysfunctional or abusive

More often than you'd think. The best retort to "We're all a family" is "You obviously haven't met my family, or you wouldn't be saying that."

I used to say that it's a bad idea to go into business with family.

My family cut out the underperforming father when I was younger. Does that count?

Divorces can be ugly.

But the thing is that people being cut off aren’t part of the cult anymore. Starting the conversation with the in group name is not just bad form, it probably also starts the rest of the people wondering if that name means anything anymore.

Maybe nobody is actually a Plaid except the board members. The rest of us are merely The Help, being coddled to extract more concessions from us.

But like, who at this point is not cynical enough to fall for this? I guess brand new college grads.

When I worked at Amazon, it was all "Amazonians" like I'm supposed to feel some kind of kinship with the 1 million+ people who work there. Plus the cheap branded clothing. Ugh.

At my company we called everyone Auxon, but then eventually figured out that engineers are way more expensive than livestock, so we replaced them all with oxen. Now it's just me, my co-founder, and a smelly barn with keyboards on the ground connected to Emacs terminals getting sporadically trampled by hooves. /s

Also, I have no idea where this compulsion comes from, but I agree that it's peculiar. To me it has always felt like a bit of infantilization. It does appear to work wonders for some company cultures though where they've managed to unanimously attract people who don't find it patronizing.

This official cute naming of employees actually goes back to sometime before the Web, in software/hardware companies.

Dear Kaiser Permanientoid,

While your time on this Earth is impermanent, your time with us will soon be permanent.

Kaiser is actually very good at IT employee retention.

Demonyms are an important part of creating an artificially constructed affinity group in which employees’ (part instinctive, part learned) inclination to family/community is directed at the corporation, an entity designed to serve the interests of capital by extracting value from them.

As an important audience for these messages is the remaining employees, and this is a time of particular risk of the façade cracking, it is one of the more important times to deploy every tool to reinforce it.

Some companies would organically begin referring to themselves by a name.

This was noticed as an indicator of a good corporate culture.

So of course it becomes a metric and is then forced on everyone.

This is why the best "employee group names" are HR-unsafe. That's how you know they're real.

By tying an employees's identity to their employment, it's easier to retain them

It's like a Cory Doctorow/William Gibson/Philip K Dick story

It's a cheap way to foster common identity. Look to professional sports, it's common to refer to players and staff as a Yankee, a Brave, a Charger, a Dolphin, etc. They are not only a member of that group, but they are that group. It's a part of your identity.

Even with schools, you're not just an alum, you're a Tiger, an Eagle, an Engineer, etc.

So instead of "working at Google", you become a Googler. A tweep. A Metamate. A, I hope, Lyfter. The job is now part of your identity. You don't do a thing at a place, you are the company.

And it costs nothing.

They all hire the same consultants to coordinate their layoffs. That's why the narrative and pr sounds similar across tech companies.

It's in the Kool-aid recipe

it all trickles down from management consulting best practices that are basically handed out as playbooks to founders. It's based on psychology studies and is intended to create an "in-group" effect to make people more loyal to the company and thus work harder and increase employee retention

You're a customer in that case, not an employee?

Standard bubble nonsense. The kind of thing you will look back on 5 years from now and remember the good ol days and the absurdity of the bubble times.

We went way beyond the dot com bubble in all regards. The hangover of this much partying sucks.

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