In my experience/opinion it also has to do with the artificially inflated complexity of many things in corporate world. Which leads to more people being required (which is the point of course), which leads to more communication (which does not work in favor of autistic people generally).
So now you have a three individual contributors, a line manager, a human resource people lead or whatever it's called this year and many many meetings.
True, it's a nightmare in my corporate job. Most of my work is jumping through hoops other teams have put up, in most cases not really for function but just for political purposes (it makes them important and needed).
When I see this it's pretty clear how big companies like meta can dump billion after billion into something and have nothing to show for it. Most of the work is just artificial, satisfying other teams' unnecessary requirements.
In my experience, autistic adults - if employed in their area they care about - will also care about things like ‘does it work’, ‘is it good’, ‘is it doing the right thing’.
That will get you targeted in the current corp environment pretty bad.
They also tend to compulsively tell the truth - also a bad idea in the current corp environment.
And if doing something outside of their interest, burnout is hard to avoid. Especially when you have bosses screaming at you to go go go - to do stuff that just doesn’t work.
Meta question: Can anyone comment on why ChatGPT produces such patterned writing? There are structures that it uses in nearly every response, and it’s obvious that much of this article was copy pasted from its output. But the corpus LLMs are trained on don’t have these patterns, at least not nearly at the frequency that I think would be required to produced them so consistently in the output. Does anyone know why this happens?
I don’t really see how a near infinite corpus which occasionally contains that pattern could end up with it so highly represented in the output.
I could see this being an argument for why it ends up being bland or having an inconsistent style (for example).
So I suppose that could be a theory, that what happens naturally has a structure that needs to be corrected for, and right now the mechanism that produces the structural correction is overly simplistic and heavily overweights examples of that structure, but that this structure does not actually occur naturally from the model.
I think a big part of the issue here is the management style that says "Set unreasonable expectations in the hope that you motivate people to achieve reasonable results". That few managers can objectively predict or even evaluate performance and staffing needs, so we'll just fuck their day up a bit and the shit rolling downhill will hopefully wipe out the slackers.
You simply can't "do more with less" in the long term by overloading people. There are only 8 hours in the workday. So the ridiculous growth mandates of Jack Welch et al simply create a certain amount of disappointment that needs to be absorbed somewhere in the org chart.
Autistics can frequently do the work, but they have difficulty handling this particular trauma of not making the numbers being demanded. Of disappointing their bosses. Demanding unrealistic numbers is an attempt to stress the people at the bottom into staying busy all the time, and if they are already busy all the time, they will show no improvement.
Stay on for a few years and you internalize that a certain amount of disappointment is mandated, and should not be taken personally. The "expectations" might be distant goals, but they were never expected. Chasing the sunrise a bit, day by day - you'll never get there. If you're putting in your eight hours, staying busy, you're doing all you can, and you should treat a manager asking for more like you would a new CEO who's completely illiterate - dangerous but not living in the same world, informationally, as you.
If you have a manager that isn't completely incompetent, they would rather keep on an employee like OP and not meet goals, than deal with a new hire who will be even worse relative to goals. It is only when management is spineless, incompetent, or corrupt that they give in to this sort of pressure and let go of performers.
This seems like a good time to mention Adolf Hennecke. People who don't know much history don't know about the campaign that made him famous in the country where he lived.
Put briefly, Adolf Hennecke was the poster boy for a productivity campaign like what management tried to effectuate in the story, and that the author thinks has anything to do with neoliberalism. The thing is that Adolf Hennecke didn't live in a neoliberalist country or work for a neoliberalist company, he lived in East Germany and worked for a VEB, which you may translate as "public corporation". He worked for a state-owned company with a duty to general society rather than any shareholders.
It sounds like you’re trying to argue that because one of these “efficiency” campaigns originated in East Germany that they are really a socialist plot. How do you explain the use of these things in corporations in the US?
No. I think these things are basically something some managers do, and that "management did this because neoliberalism" is as meaningless as "… because communism".
“they’ve been folded into Frankenstein positions that demand constant multitasking, social performance, sensory endurance, and emotional labor on top of technical skill”
My sense is that this is due to automation, not “neoliberal capitalism” as the author says. It’s much easier to automate a job if it’s a single task that’s done in a deterministic way.
In my experience/opinion it also has to do with the artificially inflated complexity of many things in corporate world. Which leads to more people being required (which is the point of course), which leads to more communication (which does not work in favor of autistic people generally).
So now you have a three individual contributors, a line manager, a human resource people lead or whatever it's called this year and many many meetings.
True, it's a nightmare in my corporate job. Most of my work is jumping through hoops other teams have put up, in most cases not really for function but just for political purposes (it makes them important and needed).
When I see this it's pretty clear how big companies like meta can dump billion after billion into something and have nothing to show for it. Most of the work is just artificial, satisfying other teams' unnecessary requirements.
In my experience, autistic adults - if employed in their area they care about - will also care about things like ‘does it work’, ‘is it good’, ‘is it doing the right thing’.
That will get you targeted in the current corp environment pretty bad.
They also tend to compulsively tell the truth - also a bad idea in the current corp environment.
And if doing something outside of their interest, burnout is hard to avoid. Especially when you have bosses screaming at you to go go go - to do stuff that just doesn’t work.
Yeah I'm thankful I have a direct manager who I can use as a "filter" for my bluntness.
Absolutely this.
Meta question: Can anyone comment on why ChatGPT produces such patterned writing? There are structures that it uses in nearly every response, and it’s obvious that much of this article was copy pasted from its output. But the corpus LLMs are trained on don’t have these patterns, at least not nearly at the frequency that I think would be required to produced them so consistently in the output. Does anyone know why this happens?
I got the impression it's due to the reinforcement learning step, where it's taught to follow instructions, which rewards the model for such writing.
The average of 2+3 is neither 2 nor 3, but somewhere in the middle?
I don’t really see how a near infinite corpus which occasionally contains that pattern could end up with it so highly represented in the output.
I could see this being an argument for why it ends up being bland or having an inconsistent style (for example).
So I suppose that could be a theory, that what happens naturally has a structure that needs to be corrected for, and right now the mechanism that produces the structural correction is overly simplistic and heavily overweights examples of that structure, but that this structure does not actually occur naturally from the model.
I think a big part of the issue here is the management style that says "Set unreasonable expectations in the hope that you motivate people to achieve reasonable results". That few managers can objectively predict or even evaluate performance and staffing needs, so we'll just fuck their day up a bit and the shit rolling downhill will hopefully wipe out the slackers.
You simply can't "do more with less" in the long term by overloading people. There are only 8 hours in the workday. So the ridiculous growth mandates of Jack Welch et al simply create a certain amount of disappointment that needs to be absorbed somewhere in the org chart.
Autistics can frequently do the work, but they have difficulty handling this particular trauma of not making the numbers being demanded. Of disappointing their bosses. Demanding unrealistic numbers is an attempt to stress the people at the bottom into staying busy all the time, and if they are already busy all the time, they will show no improvement.
Stay on for a few years and you internalize that a certain amount of disappointment is mandated, and should not be taken personally. The "expectations" might be distant goals, but they were never expected. Chasing the sunrise a bit, day by day - you'll never get there. If you're putting in your eight hours, staying busy, you're doing all you can, and you should treat a manager asking for more like you would a new CEO who's completely illiterate - dangerous but not living in the same world, informationally, as you.
If you have a manager that isn't completely incompetent, they would rather keep on an employee like OP and not meet goals, than deal with a new hire who will be even worse relative to goals. It is only when management is spineless, incompetent, or corrupt that they give in to this sort of pressure and let go of performers.
It's not only about raw numbers. Others here explain.
This seems like a good time to mention Adolf Hennecke. People who don't know much history don't know about the campaign that made him famous in the country where he lived.
Put briefly, Adolf Hennecke was the poster boy for a productivity campaign like what management tried to effectuate in the story, and that the author thinks has anything to do with neoliberalism. The thing is that Adolf Hennecke didn't live in a neoliberalist country or work for a neoliberalist company, he lived in East Germany and worked for a VEB, which you may translate as "public corporation". He worked for a state-owned company with a duty to general society rather than any shareholders.
What does a coal miner's story have to do with this narrative?
Hennecke seems to be just one of many "udarniks" [1], common in countries east of the iron curtain.
There isn't really a lineage between that and contemporary capitalist culture IMO.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udarnik
It sounds like you’re trying to argue that because one of these “efficiency” campaigns originated in East Germany that they are really a socialist plot. How do you explain the use of these things in corporations in the US?
No. I think these things are basically something some managers do, and that "management did this because neoliberalism" is as meaningless as "… because communism".
“they’ve been folded into Frankenstein positions that demand constant multitasking, social performance, sensory endurance, and emotional labor on top of technical skill”
My sense is that this is due to automation, not “neoliberal capitalism” as the author says. It’s much easier to automate a job if it’s a single task that’s done in a deterministic way.
AI takes jobs faster than cremate new ones.