[lbo-talk] a test scorer's lament

[// ravi]

On May 28, 2011, at 7:28 PM, Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
> // ravi wrote:
>> This is not about the kind of change many of us would like to see,
>> such as organising workers or demanding ethical behaviour from the
>> corporation, etc. I am talking about some of the kind of changes that
>> are celebrated in business schools and in empty rhetoric from upper
>> management. The stuff about disruption, innovation, best practices,
>> etc., (example: “Agile methodologies”). It’s all bullshit and lip
>> service.
> 
> When I look at the U. S. over the past 200 years, I see massive social transformations.  Most of them were precipitated by capitalism and the incessant drive for new markets and higher profit margins.  Innovation and change are tangible, obvious historical products of capitalist social relations.  It's not bullshit.

I don't see a necessary conflict between what the two of us are saying. I offered one resolution as a postscript in my previous message.

What I am calling bullshit is the corporate paeans to "change" and all that rot about innovation, so on. And how much these things matter in hiring decisions. Of course if you had a chance to hire Bill Joy or Jamie Zawinski (pretty good coders in the computing world/history) you would be smart to do so, whatever their other beliefs and proclivities, but such candidates are not the norm. Corporations have their own personality, without doubt, but these are set early and are highly resistant to change (often due to their star employees!).

Admittedly, I am not very knowledgeable about companies outside tech, but in that area, the field is littered with dead or dying organisations which are by their very nature incapable of adapting or changing course: the server corps that Microsoft killed (e.g: Sun), Microsoft in an Internet world, Google trying to make money through products other than search, Cisco and it’s pathetic thrashing about in consumer products (outside of their core networking space), on and on. These companies are flailing not because there is no employee level impetus for change for the better. The classic case is Doug Bowman, a designer at Google who tried to change Google’s awful user interfaces. He was run out of town by Google engineering head honcho Marissa Mayer and her top lieutenants.

Hence my conviction that corporations want technically smart people who will get things done “at the end of the day” (a phrase, that more than anything, is representative of modern corporate jargon and thinking).

	—ravi