Some people hate it when I apply Sovietology to Second Life. When it fits, it fits, however, as it does for our beloved "Kremlindenlab" from time to time. The Tao of Linden is a perfect example. For me, it's merely Soviet political culture dressed up in cyber-clothing for the New Age, with the word "Tao" sprinkled on it like New Age Holy Water to give it that certain chic pinache. Arggh. The Lindens aren't just making revolutionary software, they are revolutionizing the workplace and the company. This nutty stuff is call "The Future of Work". Look out. It's going to get unstoppable with tekkies and academics behind it and liberal newspapers like the Christian Science Monitor, and we'll have to work extra hard to prove that it's a fraud -- at least in the way it is is being implemented here.
It would be one thing if this cult-like stuff were merely on the company blog, like all company blogs in the universe have stuff like this -- we all have it at our companies. And if the CEO spouted it as a kind of motivational talk that had certain touchpoints that meant certain things to the people in the office, but which wasn't taken really formally or literally. But...when you see the employees earnestly, from the youngest to top programmers at the apex like Andrew Linden, spouting it, you have to really worry. In fact, Andrew's posts in the past on my blog about whether LL is profitable are exemplary indications of just how deep the cult goes. Let's analyze it.
First, it's important to understand about the Lab that it is a giant open barn-like space where there are no offices or walls -- everybody can know everybody else's business, and the CEO's desk, we're told, is not in any special corner, enclosed office but is out there with everyone else. Each time I access a Linden individually in world, I always marvel at how distracted they are -- they are subject not only to phone calls but other Lindens constantly come up and interrupt them at their desks. There is no knock on the door. No sense that "It's Tuesday, deadline day, I won't open Joe's office door" or "Jane has an emergency, her door is shut, don't bother her."
Second, they have an internal task-tracking system called the JIRA, a piece of software that is supposed to transform the workplace, but which is merely a newfangled piece of totalitarian machinery where you can't vote "no" and where other people can constantly edit, move and defeat you under the guise of "democratic participation".
Third, they have something called "the Love Machine" which is a kind of automated love pat, where when someone does a good job, you send them a kudo and a point, and bonuses in salaries are actually based on how much of that good lovin' the machine rolls out on a period basis. Creepy. And likely gamed in subtle ways -- even if not obviously camped, employees may even unconsciously conspire to make sure the largesse rotates among staff.
Fourth, they have crafted a mission statement (finally) that says as their goal, "to connect us all to an online world that advances the human condition" -- no matter, if you are confused about how the "us" is, Kemosabe, because it's obviously not "everybody".
1.
Work together! (Collectivism)
The problems we face in creating Second Life are usually larger than one person can solve, and solving them together is one of the great strengths we have as a company. We will succeed only if we collaborate with each other extensively and well. This means helping others reach their goals, asking for help and input often, and being easy to work with. Create teams as necessary to solve specific problems, and support your teammates. Remember that being open and honest is essential, but is only the threshold requirement - great collaborative work requires intuitive compassion and support.
Many problems in science -- or for that matter in the humanities -- are solved by one individual working alone, in solititude, thinking and pondering and working by themselves -- although of course, interacting with his peers at key moments, voluntarily. The idea that something as complicated as streaming a world to 8 million people 24/7 has to be a company picnic all the time is worrisome because you can't see *where the individual accountability is located*. Remember, Cory Linden didn't quit because SL doesn't work or something was broken, the way an officer in the Navy might be demoted or discharged to take the rap for an entire unit or ship; he quit over something else entirely we aren't told about.
"Collectivism" is the Soviet term for having a group be the unit of society rather than the individual. It grows out of Russian and indeed Central Asian culture to subsume the individual to the group. Yet Russian history is filled with stories of how individuals, including even Lenin himself, made a difference -- ruthlessly suppressing everyone else because they've been trained into being collectivized (ever wonder how that works?!). Never once in the Tao will you find anything about individual responsibility for anything except not sticking their neck out, and lending their back to be leaned on -- or patted.
Letuchka is the Soviet term for "a flying meeting" -- making groups to discuss an issue, to have a meeting about something. The idea that you make teams on an ad-hoc, as-needed basis at first seems very attractive. But then when it's "the collective's" responsibility -- it's no one's. Rather than have job descriptions and job duties and the go-to person for this or that on-going function, the responsibilities constantly shift and reconfigure. There aren't supposed to be any bosses because in the collective, everyone is ostensibly equal. Yet...that's just the fiction. In reality there are always people who, in the inimitable words of Jennyfur Peregrine are "more relevant than others". It's clear from this framework that serious problems fall through the cracks -- because nobody made a team around them, and because a group, not an individual was on the line. No individual had a set job responsibility, as the teams reconfigure on an ad hoc basis to do...whatever they feel like.
In collectivism, the collective is always running things, the individual is suppressed, and individual excellence isn't encouraged (and in fact it's a ruse, as somebody always *really* runs the collective, but without the legitimacy of authority named as such -- which is what opens up the door for abuse and misrule). Everybody knows what it's like to try to work on something and have a boss in your hair, or "traipsing through your back yard" in an office. In fact, it's often the geeks who wish they could just *pay* a non-geek boss to *go away* while they solve this or that crisis on their own.
2. Your Choice is Your Responsibility. (Execute and Report (Vypolnit' i Dolozhit').
There's a dual meaning here.
Most companies tell you what to do. Then they make you accountable to the person who told you what to do, not to yourself. We don't think this gets the best long-term results with a truly ambitious project like Second Life. At Linden Lab, you are expected to choose your own work, you have to decide how you can best move the company forward. This isn't always easy, but it can be very rewarding for you and it is a huge win for the company. This doesn't mean that you can't ask someone else what to do - it means that you are responsible for choosing who to listen to! You are responsible for listening well and broadly enough to choose wisely.
And once you have chosen, you are responsible for executing well to making your choices work. You must understand that other people now rely on you for single-minded execution, and it is time to shut out the noise and work without distraction. Sometimes you will fail, and in those cases it is very important to fail fast and fail publicly - that is how we learn and iterate and ultimately win
If anybody has ever bothered to read my translation of Stalin's letters to Molotov, for example, they can see that a common theme for Stalin was the idea of *execution*. No, not just the execution of people by firing squad -- although he was big on that. But the idea that once given a task, and accepting a task, you had to *do it*. To execute it -- really implement and fulfill it. Then report on it. Telegram after telegram would go out with the iron words telling people not only follow instructions, but adding that they had to *do them, too* and prove that they had done them. This suggests a rather non-compliant system of subordinates and the need for constant dogging.
At the Lab, they do two duplicitous things in this Tao. First, they take the legitimate concept of "individual responsibility" -- one I've just outlined above -- and put it into a context where it is nothing short of the most concerted public peer pressure -- something like being in the stocks. If in "most companies" a person is accountable to do what another tells them, it's because that person might be twice their age, more experienced, paid more, and have more at stake than someone who is a 20-something. Linden Lab is all about rewarding, cosseting, feting, and pumping up the immature 20-something who comes from a culture where his parents have already been doing that for 20 years -- and they reinforce it.
Imagine having to "chose who to listen to" in an office which, even allowing for the totally mobilized and loyalist work force at the Lab, will have different factions. We get a sense of that in Andrew's discussion about the open-source plans and the attitude about them. A young toady currying favour might see where the power vectors lie and go and seem to be chosing one faction over another. A system like this makes for that sort of culture. Rather than have an open and obvious set of tasks and objectives under a mission determined by the board -- a public goal that everyone can see -- again, there's no rule of law. It's whatever I feel like doing -- if I can package it and sell it as cool. It's whatever faction prevails that day. This may explain why we get sculpties one day and Voice another and something that all the Lindens jokingly call Liberacion -- but not a platform that *works*.
In all of this discussion, the word "customer" or indeed any outside factor to whom one must be responsible is ever mentioned. It's all in a bubble, a cocoon. There is openness -- but not really, as it is only to the core inside the Linden camp. It's not something the rest of the world can call them on, or share in. A goal like "making humanity better online" or the new mission statement "is so vague as to be meaningless because no one knows what they mean by "better" -- they aren't telling. There's no service orientation whatsoever to this company, as they see themselves involved in a profoundly isolated and intense cultic experience finding the truth of the software and making it -- and everybody outside of the magic circle be damned.
One would hope that individual Lindens or teams would have goals like "be the best god darned customer relations specialist ever" and "reduce response time to customer complaints" but that simply isn't indicated. The idea that any one of these precious personages hired can simply stand up and say "I want to make sparklies" -- and sparklies become the cool thing to work on -- is terrifying to contemplate, long term. With no grownups, with everybody supposed to be supportive and helping the darlings, nobody ever says "Sparklies are too expensive and time-consuming, ditch them until teleportation works."
3. Be Transparent and Open (Padding Reports, Self-Criticism (Pripiska, dopiska, sama-kritika)
There are many ways to emphasize responsibility, accountability, communication and trust. We believe that the one key principle that best supports all of these values is transparency. As much as possible, tell everyone what you are doing, all the time. This transparency makes us responsible to our peers, makes us accountable to our own statements, and replaces the need for management with individual responsibility. Over time, it creates and reinforces trust. Be willing to share ideas before you feel they are ‘baked’. Report on your own progress frequently and to everyone.
There is nothing I find as suspect in this "new open office" stuff than this invocation of the words of transparency and openness -- again, the sprinkling of Holy Water -- and yet the creation of a pressurized, peer-reviewed, collectivism setting in which it must take place. As anybody who knows who has ever Twittered for more than a day, the first thing human beings do when they are asked to tell what they are doing is not tell *literally* the truth, especially if it is something like "sitting at my computer in my pajamas at 10:30 am reading Twitter and not starting my real job yet".
When lifelogging, people fluff and pump Twitter atrociously. They let you know when they are boarding jet planes to exotic cities; they let you know when they are meditating or going to church or tithing to the poor; they let you know when they merely sit next to a famous person at a conference; they let you know their fabulous blog postings or the amazing expense reports or coding projects they are turning in on time. What they rarely tell you are their problems, their shortfalls, their long periods of paralyzed fear or boredom or inability to write; they don't tell you what they are doing as if *you* had asked *while catching them in the act*. It's a really profound fallacy to think otherwise.
They mandate to constantly to tell everybody what you are doing can only lead to one thing: the Big Lie. People will internalize this need and begin an elaborate play-acting. In the Soviet Union, the command to fulfill the idealistic plan, and the courageous vowing to fulfill and overfulfill the plan, simply led to lying, where people began to skillfully pad their reports and report fake production figures. People learn how to become very skillful telling you how they are doing fabulously.
The thought of an "always on" lifelogging office is unsettling because it misses the need for any office to have downtimes, and to enable people even to goof off now and then. Some jobs are like sausages. You don't want to know how it is done; you just want it on your desk by 4:00 pm. Some employees might do this through methodical time-budgeting and thorough checking of facts and laborious research. Others might simply discover that fabulous live source after 3 hours of noodling around chatting to different people. If the story is good and completed and on the desk, the process by which it got there isn't as relevant as completion of the goal -- up to a point.
4. Make Weekly Progress
We believe that every person should make specific, visible individual contributions that moves the
company forward every week. Projects must be broken down into measurable tasks so that making weekly progress is possible. This is a principle that almost no one believes is true when they first hear it,
yet everyone who keeps to this principle over the course of several months is stunned by the amount of progress made during that time. Set weekly goals and report progress to everyone.
Software creation -- which is the main business of the Lab -- may not lend itself to creative deadlines or acceptance of "deliverables" and has only one criteria: works/doesn't work. But...if that were the only criteria for things, the Lindens would have never put out Voice as anything but a beta yet. LL would have a much, much bigger audience of believers and supporters of the Tao if the quality of everything on the grid wasn't *worsening* -- much like the Soviet Union's infrastructure began to crumble and break.
I suspect that when you tell employees "always to tell me what you are doing" you create a din of happy noise that means they *never really* tell you what they are doing. And I wonder how much success they are having with this. Proof of this comes from some anecdotes I've heard from visitors to the Lab about Philip getting exasperated with the staff who resist when he makes a simple request: turn in a weekly progress report. These Linden prima donas have a million excuses -- too difficult, too busy, too special to make it understood. And yet...they are supposed to be "always on," available on a JIRA or other ridiculous mechanism describing their work "transparently". That's just it: you can't first claim "always-on" transparency in an office with no wall and a JIRA tracking their every key-stroke, then also demand weekly reports -- no wonder they resist.
Give me a plain old paper print-out weekly progress report in an inbox, please God, and save your fabulous JIRA gyrations.
When, as the Tao has it, the "need for management is replaced with individual responsibility," it at first sounds like an attractive placing of the individual on the line (as I noted). Yet...in the context where this is only achieved through 24/7 scrutiny by peer pressure which is really an elaborate screen for non-accountability, it's suspect. It seems to me that all LL has done with this Tao is replace the traditional hiearchical management structure emphasizing outward pulls and the bottom line and the chain of command, with a vague, hippie sort of support group that applauds and eggs on this or that prima dona who gets up to do this or that self-identified task -- or ignores them and focuses on what grabs their attention that moment in their ADD-muddle.
But the reality of the collective -- as we know from Wikipedia -- is that in fact, there are always a few cadres who really run things. So all this system does is remove *real* responsibility mandated in a corporate hierarchy with titles and specific job descriptions, and puts that management function into the hands of crypto-bosses and shifting figures in charge of ad-hoc groups with changing loyalties.
5. No Politics! Never act to advance your own interests at the expense of the interests of the company. This is the one principle, outside of violations of law, for which violation will likely result in immediate termination.
Voluntarism -- this term, used by Khrushchev, was a sin used to accuse those comrades who stuck their necks out and got too much attention for themselves, or went against the grain.
The collective is all; no one person -- even the CEO? -- is expected to have some interest
So we can only conclude that Cory Linden violated the "No Politics!" rule -- although Philip told the BBC that they didn't disagree about overall company direction -- but maybe it's Philip violating the rule, when you think of it. Suddenly, he, as a lone individual in this collective where everyone is supposed to be equal (yawn) is sticking up his head and saying "I get to decide, and Cory goes". That would be normal in any normal office; in this one, we were led to expect differently about the "future of work" where everyone is their own boss.
And here I have my doubts, when Philip says in the leaked email covered by massively.com, that "This is one of those times when, in having me as your leader, you will also have to trust me in my decision."
Cory, in his statement, says, "Philip and my visions for the future of Linden Lab are divergent enough that he decided to lead in his own way."
Where's the Tao? Where's the Love? Where's the Collective and the Transparency?
(BTW, there are furious debates about the authenticity of these emails, as to whether they are authentic, written in the heat of the moment, and released against the will of Linden Lab, singularly or collectively, or whether they are elaborately-prepared PR fakes, meant to sound like leaked e-mail but in fact carefully crafted. Many people think either they aren't leaked and are deliberately crafted, or that at least there is a lot more to the story. I think a third possibility, given what we know of the Tao, is possible: that Lindens, working in this culty atmosphere of "the Future of Work" with its elaborate -- but ultimately deeply insincere -- transparency and accountability procedures simply learn how to perform -- play-act -- very well. They instinctively write e-mails of historical grandeur and nuanced passion and nobility because that's part of the elaborate MMORPG role-play called "Linden Lab". Of course, ethnographer Thomas Malaby, who is supposedly writing a study of Linden Lab, might shed light on this, but I'll bet he will never look at the question in this way: that Linden Lab, when they made the MMORPG of Second Life, took the game out of, and kept it for themselves, to play as a company.
6.
Might Makes Right Just kidding – wanted to make sure you’re still paying attention. Lots of things could be said here: Have a sense of humor. Have a sense of humility. Have fun. Call out inconsistency in principles when you see it. Don’t let a staid form and function become routine and boilerplate. Which leads to our last
principle . . .
Wow, is that a piece of Freudian wierdness, or what?! This is the clause that is supposed to prevent the entire system becoming the totalitarian monster it is, but there's little evidence it works, once everyone is enlisted in the cult.
Do It With Style It’s not enough that we want to change the world. It’s not enough that our product is incredibly complex and our vision is vast and shifting. We’re not just going to win, we’re going to do it with style. That means a lot of different things, and a lot of what it means can’t be captured in a handbook.
Find out by talking to your colleagues, by living the principles above, by exploring Second Life.
Welcome to Linden Lab.
There's little I could add to comment on bombastic propaganda like that, with its many Marxian internal contradictions, like the "vast and shifting" vision, whatever the hell that means, which might boil down merely to "we get to change our mind and switch course whenever we feel like it."
To all of these Leninisms in Lindenism, let me add a few more out of the culture:
o Can't vote no. This is a central idea of Cory Linden's, which he coded into the Feature Voting Tool (another job he might have done "in a night" from the looks of it). Anyone can put up a proposal, but if you oppose it, you can't vote no. Instead, you have to start a counter-proposal and hope to get votes. This is done in the believe that in the science of crowd-sourcing and crowd-wisdom gathering (sigh), you need to push up the "yes" and "think positive" and not encourage any "negativity" which might lead to "mobbing" and "griefing" by masses of "nos". Um, the same mobbers and griefers can pump up a "yes," of course, by the same logic -- and do.
The makers of JIRA itself (Atlassian) don't allow you to vote "no" on their software device, and fail to see the need for this, using the same geeky "Future of Work" logic of Cory Linden. God, this is evil. It's like the Soviet Union, more than anything. You have to be able to vote "no" as a corrective in any system. All you have to do is go look at the JIRA in Second Life to see the idiocy that goes on there, and the crying need for the corrective of "no". If people are given their full voice, they will participate more; as such, trapped in a game of yessing up fanboyz' proposals met to please Lindens, they are discouraged because it is rigged.
o Silent treatment -- Lindens must have uniformly gone to a weekend training session where they were told that if you wish to avoid conflict, simply stop answering, stop talking. This comes under the mantra of "don't feed the troll," of course, as they imagine, based on their deep MMORPG culture, that people who persist with criticism or a contrary view are "trolls," and that giving them the silent treatment, and
o Omerta -- or the code of silence of the mafia. Surrounded by NDAs and separation and non-compete and who-knows-what agreements, Lindens never, ever talk when they leave Linden Lab, not even anonymously to journalists who over time, could collate the info from these sources. At this point, we know there was an experiment to put in various long-time residents as liaisons -- Garth Fairchang, Cubey Terra, Oeneraut Eisher and others -- yet they all wound up leaving the Lab (Chadrick was the most recent). Why?
o Uravnilovka -- levelling down, dumbing down, making everyone artificially equal in the name of egalitarianism. This word is best summed up by the anecdote about the difference between a Soviet and American. The Soviet who didn't have a cow would see that his neighbour had a cow, and ask the state to take it away from the neighbour, and have the two share it on a collective farm; the American would see that his neighbour had a cow, and work hard and strive to emulate him and earn a cow himself. Lindens believe they play no favourites, that everyone is equal, but precisely because they maintain that fiction, they break it, by creating an advance guard -- themselves -- with their selective advisors -- the SL Views gang.
o Fake altruism -- (geroism) there is nothing more deep-seated and hard to expose than the fake altruism of MMORPGs. It is a style popular among geeks where a few take on the heroic unpaid labour of doing chores for a game company like writing manuals or moderating forums or cleaning up inworld garbate or handling newbies and orienting them -- the creation of a noble class of volunteers whom everyone is supposed to laud for their selflessness. The problem is that quite often, people chose this path to gain reputation enhancement; the fastest way to get a job in the game company or at least to get in good with the game-gods is to volunteer to do scut-work. It's a bizarre kind of apprenticeship. It creates a class of self-congratulatory types who imagine they are doing everyone a favour. Often they are not. The game company would be better off hiring one person and paying them to write the game instructions properly than having a dozen hacks put it up haphhazardly on Stratics.com.
Proof of the fakery of the altruism is usually easily discovered by making a pin-prick in the vanity and calling them on the fakeness. They get incredibly angry and self-defensive in ways that the truly altruistic would never do.
Fake altruism in the Lab can be seen by this apocryphal story now making the blog rounds about Cory being discovered once building some big elaborate thing (a giant chicken? a spaceship?) that someone found awesome and asked why he didn't fly it around inworld. He replied, nobly, that the world is for residents, and they should do the building, implying that if he, as a game-god, were to put the object out inworld, residents would be discouraged by the sheer awesomeness of Cory's thingie from ever making their own stuff.
Bullshit. Put it out, Cory, and take your lumps. You fear competition, and hide behind fake altruism. That's what it's all about. In fact, if the Lindens had done a little bit more building and shaping of the world, it might have been a lot better place...
o Stakhanovitism, the cult of the udarnik, or shock-worker, and the speed-up (uskoreniye)
If you ever wanted to see an absolutely crystal-clear and breath-taking example of this phenomenon -- and some of the others about fake altruism and fake transparency, read this astounding office hour with Andrew Linden.
I'm sure if I were to get my hands on the full Tao of Linden playbook, I'd find many more Sovietisms because it merely stands to reason: people aren't going to re-invent the wheel here when they dream up a new utopian collectivism. It's been done before, in the 19th and 20th centuries. Digitalizing it doesn't change its nature.
The Future of Work in this format is going to have one obvious test: whether the company and its world-product survives and becomes profitable.
We're waiting.
I very much enjoyed reading this.
It's a wonder they get anything done at all with that ridiculous Tao and so forth.
And of course the idea that there are "no politics" is a joke. Just HAVING that directive means there will be more politics, just underground and way more hypocritical.
About the profitability: I believe SL is already profitable. Philip himself said so in an office hour, over a year ago, when he said they were very close to paying off the investors, and the game itself had long since been profitable.
Then shortly afterwards it was said (and I forget where or when) that the investors had been paid off.
Surviving as a company and being profitable isn't really the obvious test of how good their methods are.
If they don't survive, it is obvious they failed any test.
But even if they do, who's to say that things couldn't have been a lot better if all these lunatic notions about how to run an office had been jettisoned?
It is long past time to get rid of the Tao of Linden. And put up some cubicles, where people can work in peace.
coco
Posted by: Cocoanut Koala | 12/15/2007 at 09:51 AM
Strike that "office hour" above - I meant, a Town Hall.
Posted by: Cocoanut Koala | 12/15/2007 at 09:52 AM
Cocoanut, they are profitable, but are you sure they paid the investors? And...yes, isn't the point that they could be much more profitable?
And...did you notice in Andrew's comments on my blog that I linked here he talks about how profit is a kind of relative not true/false proposition.
I guess only in Silicon Valley...
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 12/15/2007 at 10:23 AM
Excellent article Prokofy.
For example I did not know about the Love Machine, although I heard the term a few times without knowing what it was, but had instead been wondering how they are doing their promotions, bonuses etc.
One thing which intrigues me is what you say about the transparency. LL states that this is an ideal which they strive for for the company. I've read a couple of times that Lindens said, that they are more open and transparent as any other company out there.
However, as you also point out, hardly anybody knows anything about the internals of LL. They do publish their statistics, and some of them are making them even look bad, but I think every publicly owned company is more transparent, because they are forced to publish the hard data which their investors need. And with many companies if you know someone working there, you can get a picture how it looks and feels to be there on the inside.
Those stats are like the emails about Cory. Potemkin transparency (to bend another soviet concept).
It's like I wrote about the JIRA. Transparency consists of information and a frame of reference to interpret it. The 2nd is consistently lacking. Or like they age verification PR on the blog, which I found atrociously spin doctored (everybody know it was to cover their asses and most people would simply have accepted it that way, but having it shoved down your throat in that merry "we're doing it for you, kids" form makes you choke).
Your article just made me make that connection between the blog and their internal procedures. I've been long wondering about a certain "i can't really put my finger on it" weirdness in their communication, but it may well be, that they're communicating on the blog just the same way they're doing it inside, which (the communication style) in a way makes sense under the Tao.
In fact it's beginning to make a lot of sense. Like the problems they have communicating with the open source programmers, which they tend to find rude. But open sourcers out there don't need points from the Love Machine ...
Nice food for thought ... thanks for writing ...
Posted by: Nicholaz Beresford | 12/15/2007 at 12:31 PM
Why work on the difficult problems at all? You don't have to at Linden Research. Make your task to be the 31337 pwnzr of battlefield every friday during the bf fest at LL. (must be on COD4 by now).
The inherent problem is there is no leadership under this model. Soviet Communism failed. Someone should have got that. But more disconcerting is that a former navy officer/submariner appears to be of a communist mindset. Oh wait.. did anyone ever say exactly who's navy corey was in? As for the assumption someone who was in the navy likes things ship shape... thats crap. every former submariner i have had the displeasure to have to work with in the software business has always had mental problems and refused to do anything they did not feel was important. and they always wrote half-assed poorly thought out hacks to do things and refused to consider any strategic thinking as valid. ever been locked in a tin can 9 months out of the year for 4 or 5 years? duh...
To go where sl needs to be requires direction, requirements, tasking, prioritization, software quality assurance, continuous process improvement (scientific methods) and discipline. none of this is possible under this so-called tao.
So when you are in charge and you need to get things done and you see you have someone usurping your authority and working against you.. what do you do? send the blocker skidding across the parking lot on their ass. its called making hard decisions. such decisions must be made ruthlessly and fast as soon as the problem has made itself evident. not "hope for the best while dancing with teletubbies". No, such decisions needed to be made long ago.
Anyway i hope things improve. not much choice in direction when your nearing the bottom anyway.
Posted by: Ann Otoole | 12/15/2007 at 02:07 PM
Nicholasz, one point I could note is that Linden Lab is not a public company. They aren't required to tell anybody squat, except the IRS. They don't have to reveal half the things that they in fact do reveal.
But given that they hawk all this Future of Work stuff, we expect more of them.
Ann, I find it odd that you would actually find *other* former submariners who are now working as coders in IT firms. Huh? There are lots of them all over?
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 12/15/2007 at 02:56 PM
When a group is form, Prok, there is someone who takes on the responsibility for that group. So your several paragraphs about that is false.
Also, very few things in this world were made by single people - American propaganda not withstanding. Real science is done by teams, not individuals. While some guys get their name on the header - they most likely are not working alone. They have students, assistants, peers, a whole world around them involved in their work.
And as for Lindens... They are constantly working. Constantly. Sometimes in groups, sometimes not, and these groups are almost never physically together. They use voice chat to work on projects, they're constantly on IRC to ask questions and give answers, and yes, their offices are open... But I've sat and watched and almost never does someone break the bubble around another without being reached out to first. It's crazy-polite.
I don't know what you have against volunteering. If work goes undone because there is no one to do it or no money to pay someone to do it...
If you enjoy doing something, do that something.
Posted by: Crissa | 12/15/2007 at 07:19 PM
yes prok there are a lot of former submariners in the it workplace. not exactly a lot of careers in the "operators of gadgets on a submarine" technology sector. I.e.; so what you operated things on a sub. what good is that on dry land in the civilian sector? yes many many former military have had to retrain after they got out. i mean whats nuclear propulsion anyway? a glorified steam engine lol.
Posted by: Ann Otoole | 12/16/2007 at 03:29 AM
No, it's not false. Because when someone takes on responsibility, they aren't in a position of authority, because a) it's all decentralized and distributed and b) they are shifted to another group another day. So they do not get respect or control.
Proof of that is the way it took the extra-system hiring of Sidewinder Linden to come into this silly system and then finally get Havoc out. Until then, all the "distributed decision-making" wasn't getting it done.
The big lie of this entire clap-trap is that it democratizes and frees people -- but it doesn't, it makes not only anarchy rule, it makes those who illegitimately seized power in anarchy rule -- or misrule. It's a very old story that history has already shown a number of times; dressing it up as a computerized system in the cyber age doesn't make it prettier.
Teams are important, but individual excellence and brilliance are important too, and what this system does is diminish and discourage both individual excellence, at the end of the day, AND individual accountability.
The "constantly working" stuff isn't impressive to me. Studies show, for example, just this week, that students who pull all-nighters do worse than those who study normally on a schedule.
The Stakhanovitism just doesn't work. And what happens when everyone imagines they are in a high-octane beehive of Hive Mind, they become terribly self-congratulatory and don't see obvious disasters -- like, say, Windlight.
Volunteering is a good thing, but that's not what this is about. This is about an ancient male MMORPG ritual that involves vying for pecking order in the sandbox world, and showing off and gaining followers and street cred by doing what amounts to quests for the good of the group. It's a ritual, and therefore not authentic. It's what people do to get in good with the game-gods and get ahead in the system. It's merely a means of advancement for self-interest and for tribal affiliation.
Proof of that is the way the Volunteer Code was written -- see my past post on that.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 12/16/2007 at 06:43 AM
No, I'm not sure they paid the investors; I just remember someone important (maybe Philip) saying they did.
This was before I knew to always note DOWN these what to me are obvious and memorable comments, and note their source. (Not that I do it now either, lol.)
The thing in the Town Hall, for instance - I know Philip said that, and it may have been only in the audio version.
And then I remember something about the investors being paid off. But since I don't remember who or when, that is less certain than the first thing, said in the Town Hall. I think it was someone other than Philip, though.
In any case, why would this be hard to imagine, or accept, or whatever? Seems to me reasonable that they would have them paid off by now, particularly since it was a year or so ago when Philip, I know, said they were very close to it.
Why wouldn't they want us to know that they are now profitable, anyhow?
coco
Posted by: Cocoanut Koala | 12/16/2007 at 05:35 PM
"But open sourcers out there don't need points from the Love Machine ..." _Nicholaz
Would be nice if more of them were like you (you don't seem rude here or your blog), rather than the inflated-ego prima-donna's I have run into in RL work and here in SL. I can understand why the Lindens find most of them to be rude...I do as well and I don't subscribe to the Tao.
Posted by: Maklin Deckard | 12/18/2007 at 04:37 PM
Good article, Prokofy. The Linden injunction that employees must "be transparent and open" recalls the Calvinist requirement to leave one's curtains open so that the sin police can make sure everyone is behaving themselves. Yet the top management remains opaque. No one knows why Cory left, and there is lots of speculation about whether, and when, Linden Labs paid off their investors. You for one state that the employees working in a huge barn-like space are continually distracted, while Crissa in her comment insists on the contrary that "almost never does someone break the bubble around another without being reached out to first." Which version should we believe?
The Tao of Linden is an example of what the French call "langue de bois," which can be translated by "stonewalling," "doublespeak" or "waffling," though the literal translation "wooden tongue" is easy to understand. The term referred to soviet-era speeches covering up bleak reality with announcements of outstanding performance. Such speeches generally reported false statistics, a practice which gave birth to jokes along the lines of: "studies show that 110% of the population is satisfied." In the absence of free press or democratic elections, which could have provided reality checks, communist bureaucrats actually believed their own hogwash. Amyrta Sen observes that urban Maoist leaders in the fifties truly thought the harvests were fine, when millions of peasants in the countryside were in fact starving to death.
Your "sovietology" makes parallels between soviet collectivism and new-age business collectivism. These parallels are real, in that many Silicon Valley businesses have taken up elements of the old collectivist ethic of the California hippies, and integrated them into their business models. But is sovietology the most pertinent way to analysis a twenty-first century venture capitalist company? An alternative might be to apply a neo-leftist critique, to show how post-modern management only represents a new level of sophistication in old-fashioned capitalistic exploitation. Where Taylorism established methods for controlling employees from without, through objective measurements of performance, post-modern management transfers the control to within the employee's own consciousness, so that each one struggles to measure their own performance against subjective criteria. Thus management requires that employees must take personal responsibility, without however giving them the necessary autonomy really to do so. In such a context, where roles and responsibilities are fluid, if things work out the bosses take the credit, and if they don't, you get the blame.
But, to take a positive approach, how could the Tao of Linden be improved, in the interests of the company itself? You show very well how the double-standard of transparency, applied only to employees but not to management, leads in fact to everyone hiding what they really think, which deprives management of necessary reality checks. A company that wants to know what its employees are thinking should start by writing something in their "Tao" to the effect that "top management believes in the usefulness of free speech within the workplace, and is ready to discuss with employees how this could be guaranteed." Such an explicit engagement would take them at least one step away from the "langue de bois."
Posted by: Danton Sideways | 02/05/2008 at 04:43 AM
As someone who knows a few Lindens and ex-Lindens in real life I can say this article would be HILARIOUS if I didn't know you were serious and without a sense of humor.
In all actuality they're just a bunch of "hip" 20-30 somethings that are really into the fact they work for LL and are "on the cusp of a new era" or whatever. See dot com company for more information.
Having worked in a similar environment at Nextel back in 97 I can say that such an environment fosters creativity but has more of a danger of egos getting in the way. LL does have a lack of structure which has obviously turned into a lack of focus. This is why they've had to refocus several times (from "let's get 1 million users!" to "this thing isn't scalable...whoops!" and so on).
If you ever work for a medium to large-sized corporation you'll eventually understand that LL isn't that different from how most corporations actually work these days. They want everyone to WANT to work there instead of just have a job because that means more dedication.
From a business standpoint there's nothing wrong with that. The only issue is when the individual stops being able to separate work time from personal time...but that's on the individual to figure out.
As far as finding out why Cory Linden got fired or whatever, that's actually none of your business so there's no reason to tell you (absolutely no one in the company) about it. That's between Cory and his former employers.
Remember, it's not a country with a government running it. It's a mall/recreational area with a company owning it.
Posted by: SqueezeOne Pow | 02/05/2008 at 12:46 PM
Correction: the name of the Nobel Prize economist who studied famines is *Amartya Sen*.
@SqueezeOne –
im in ur base, killin ur d00dz
You've provided additional evidence of stressful working conditions. Leading-edge dotcoms draw on a supply of dedicated 20-30 somethings who want so much to work there that they will accept lack of structure, constantly changing focus and unclear separation of work time from personal time. The ingredients conducive to various forms of exploitation and psychological mistreatment are obviously united here. But such abuse harms the company. It is more important to develop organisational intelligence than it is to squeeze young tekkies dry. And employees who feel emotionally protected will have higher productivity anyway. Human rights is a best business practice.
Posted by: Danton Sideways | 02/08/2008 at 03:46 AM