Thank you for saying this! I very much like that you’re acknowledging tensions and that unhelpful attitudes include BOTH “too much” and “too little” worry about each topic.
I’d also like to remind everyone (including myself; I often forget this) about typical mind fallacy and the enormous variety in human agency, and peoples’ very different modeling and tolerance of various social, relationship, and financial risks.
if you’re in a dysfunctional organization where everything is about private fiefdoms instead of getting things done…why not…leave?”
This is a great example! A whole lot of people, the vast majority that I’ve talked to, can easily answer this—“because they pay me and I’m not sure anyone else will”, with a bit of “I know this mediocracy well, and the effort to learn a new one only to find it’s not better will drain what little energy I have left”. It’s truly exceptional to have the self-confidence to say “yeah, maybe it won’t work, but I can deal if so, and it’s possible I can do much better”.
It’s very legitimate to see problems and STILL not be confident that a different set of problems would be better for you or for your impact on the world. The companies that seem great from outside are often either 1) impossible to get hired at for most people; and/or 2) not actually that great, if you know actual employees inside them.
The question of “how can I personally do better on these dimensions”, however, is one that everyone can and should ask themselves. It’s just that the answer will be idiosyncratic and specific to the individual’s situation and self-beliefs.
A whole lot of people, the vast majority that I’ve talked to, can easily answer this—“because they pay me and I’m not sure anyone else will”, with a bit of “I know this mediocracy well, and the effort to learn a new one only to find it’s not better will drain what little energy I have left”.
Or “last time I did that I ended up in this one which is even worse than the previous, so I do not wish to tempt fate again”.
Ouch. Sometimes the answer to “Why don’t you simply X?” is “What makes you so sure I didn’t already ‘simply X’ in the past, and maybe it just didn’t work as well as advertised?”.
It’s not necessarily that the strategy is bad, but sometimes it needs a few ingredients to make it work, such as specific skills, or luck.
On this issue specifically, I feel like the bar for what counts as an actually sane and non-dysfunctional organization to the average user of this website is probably way too lofty for 95% of workplaces out there (to be generous!) so it’s not even that strange that it would be the case.
This largely tracks with my experience wanting to work at a “more reasonable” company and struggling to do so. Many seemingly good jobs start to look a lot more awful the closer I get to them and I lose motivation. (I understand that this is also about risk tolerance and I’m fairly risk averse. And I understand that I’m simply not a strong candidate for highly competitive roles which may skew more sane.) Additionally, leaving a job and finding a new job are both immensely costly acts. So when it looks incredibly rare to find a “sane” workplace, and the costs keep mounting, in many cases the reasonable thing to do seems to be to stay.
Thank you for saying this! I very much like that you’re acknowledging tensions and that unhelpful attitudes include BOTH “too much” and “too little” worry about each topic.
I’d also like to remind everyone (including myself; I often forget this) about typical mind fallacy and the enormous variety in human agency, and peoples’ very different modeling and tolerance of various social, relationship, and financial risks.
This is a great example! A whole lot of people, the vast majority that I’ve talked to, can easily answer this—“because they pay me and I’m not sure anyone else will”, with a bit of “I know this mediocracy well, and the effort to learn a new one only to find it’s not better will drain what little energy I have left”. It’s truly exceptional to have the self-confidence to say “yeah, maybe it won’t work, but I can deal if so, and it’s possible I can do much better”.
It’s very legitimate to see problems and STILL not be confident that a different set of problems would be better for you or for your impact on the world. The companies that seem great from outside are often either 1) impossible to get hired at for most people; and/or 2) not actually that great, if you know actual employees inside them.
The question of “how can I personally do better on these dimensions”, however, is one that everyone can and should ask themselves. It’s just that the answer will be idiosyncratic and specific to the individual’s situation and self-beliefs.
Or “last time I did that I ended up in this one which is even worse than the previous, so I do not wish to tempt fate again”.
Ouch. Sometimes the answer to “Why don’t you simply X?” is “What makes you so sure I didn’t already ‘simply X’ in the past, and maybe it just didn’t work as well as advertised?”.
It’s not necessarily that the strategy is bad, but sometimes it needs a few ingredients to make it work, such as specific skills, or luck.
On this issue specifically, I feel like the bar for what counts as an actually sane and non-dysfunctional organization to the average user of this website is probably way too lofty for 95% of workplaces out there (to be generous!) so it’s not even that strange that it would be the case.
This largely tracks with my experience wanting to work at a “more reasonable” company and struggling to do so. Many seemingly good jobs start to look a lot more awful the closer I get to them and I lose motivation. (I understand that this is also about risk tolerance and I’m fairly risk averse. And I understand that I’m simply not a strong candidate for highly competitive roles which may skew more sane.) Additionally, leaving a job and finding a new job are both immensely costly acts. So when it looks incredibly rare to find a “sane” workplace, and the costs keep mounting, in many cases the reasonable thing to do seems to be to stay.