4mo ago

Where's Your Ed At- The Cult of Microsoft

www.wheresyoured.at The Cult of Microsoft

At the core of Microsoft, a three-trillion-dollar hardware and software company, lies a kind of social poison — an ill-defined, cult-like pseudo-scientific concept called 'The Growth Mindset" that drives company decision-making in everything from how products are sold, to how your on-the-job perform...

Spooky stuff that helps explain a lot of the dysfunction flowing out from Microsoft.

Technology @lemmy.world

MajorHavoc @programming.dev

4mo ago

The Cult of Microsoft

www.wheresyoured.at /the-cult-of-microsoft/

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50 comments

I worked at MSFT between 2021 and 2023.
The Growth Mindset is very much just a gaslighting tool. To be honest I didn't get the culty vibe from it while being on the inside, on the other hand no one ever tried to make me to read Satya's stupid book (thankfully).
One important thing I just have to talk about is The Layoffs. If you ask me about "Growth Mindset", or indeed if I ask around my former MSFT colleagues about the first thing that comes to their mind when they hear it, it will be that time when, not even a month after the massive 2023 layoffs where MSFT fired 11,000 people, we were told by management at a Townhall that it is time for us to "apply Growth Mindset and move forward". I remember very clearly that they tried to spin it as if the layoffs were something that just "happened to us" and we had to move on, as if it was a hurricane that hit the office and not a deliberate act of management to cut costs. It was fucking amazing to hear that from them after I had a literal panic attack due to the uncertainty after the first wave of firings.
I made the decision to quit not long after. When I was leaving the genAI brain rot was already in full swing. The stuff about autoplaging Connects is just a great affirmation of my decision, that company is fucked.
- Yeah. The fixation on growth mindset may be relatively unique to Microsoft, but the role it fills in the organization is really common; it creates a fuzzy standard to justify management's decisions while it obscures management's responsibility for those decisions. It's like managers realized that the Jack Welch rank-and-yank approach is absolutely terrible for morale, talent retention, and the general ability of the company to function over the mid- to long-term, but doing big layoffs is still a great way to make the numbers look better to meet shareholder growth expectations. So instead of having clear expectations that can be met or even relative rankings that can be measured there's been a move towards subjective evaluations. That is probably the best way to gauge performance in a lot of areas, but that requires both that the manager doing the assessment know something about the work being done (your average MBA won't) and that the organization not have incentives to abuse the power this gives them (which shareholder capitalism definitely does).

I swear to Christ that corporate America is only getting worse. The best thing that could happen to just about every major corporation would be aggressive antitrust action resulting in a breakup. All the FAANG companies would be a good start, along with every media company you could name.
- "You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling." Some corporations are criminal enterprises and should have their tax numbers revoked. Some corporate officers are criminals and should be prosecuted. Some are complicit in crimes against humanity or war crimes and should be internationally prosecuted.

In Satya Nadella's Hit Refresh, he says that "growth mindset" is how he describes Microsoft's emerging culture, and that "it's about every individual, every one of us having that attitude — that mindset — of being able to overcome any constraint, stand up to any challenge, making it possible for us to grow and, thereby, for the company to grow."
Strikes me as a poorly plagiarized Toyota Kata. Toyota Kata promises your org will be maximally adaptive but it sounds like Satya wanted to one-up that with "overcome any constraints". Toyota emphasizes iterative improvements as way a to build up systems knowledge, but Satya seems to take an essentialist read on the matter to say it's a "mindset", like improvement is an ingredient instead of a process.

My wife, as a teacher and educational psychologist, is honestly shocked that Growth Mindset's bullshit has moved out of education and into business; it's been responsible for removing classes that are streamed by ability and replacing them with things like tormenting low-achieving students by telling them they can achieve if they just try harder, and torturing high-achieving students by making them into unpaid teacher aids instead of extending them.
You, gentle reader, may be more shocked and angry at her news that some schools are adopting Agile, where they spend several hours every two weeks in retrospectives and planning what they'll teach for the following two week sprint, with no long term plan for the children.
Edit: “Here’s four links, have at them.”
https://www.sec-ed.co.uk/content/blogs/the-danger-of-growth-mindset/
https://www.edutopia.org/discussion/growth-mindset-dead (2015!)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorrison/2023/12/18/its-not-their-mindset-thats-holding-children-back-at-school-study-finds/
https://www.edweek.org/education/opinion-misinterpreting-the-growth-mindset-why-were-doing-students-a-disservice/2017/06
- some schools are adopting Agile
  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
- Agile in schools.
- Is there a solution for helping the low-achieving kids?
  
  Maybe, but it involves paying more for teachers.

Excuse me, I need a lie down...
Edit: How open is this to abuse you may ask? Imagine yourself to be an evil person, such as a ~~chickenshit~~ conflict-averse MBA-holding manger. If you need to get rid of an employee, then feed their Connect form through the nondeterministic bullshit machine repeatedly until it gives you an excuse. It's the perfect accountability sink + employee disposal. Employee argues? They're failing to apply the growth mindset.

Jesus.
- they actually came up with something more fucked up than stack ranking
  
  This is the Bad Place!

It seems that happens to management at every company, at various strength. I swear there must be a source for all this shit, like Forbes or something.
A side note:
"... It's all hallucination.”
prone to hallucination.
No, just no.
Everything generative AI produces is a hallucination.
Some may correlate with reality, but it is still a hallucination.
LLMentalist
- I don't like how people use "hallucinations" to refer to the output of neural networks, but you know what, it is all hallucination. It's hallucination on our part, looking at arbitrary sequences of tokens and seeing meaningful text. It's pareidolia, and it's powerful.
- I think he's underestimating the intentionality at play here. The dynamic he's describing (and describing very well!) has been evident since the first chatbot, ELIZA. I don't believe that Saltman and friends don't know about this dynamic, and I'll give them benefit of the doubt that they didn't think we had AGI in the 80s with basic text templates.

this is one of the wildest articles I've ever read

Microsoft Growth Mindset = Amazon Day One
- The more I think about it, the more "Day One" comes across as nonsensical.
  I woke up this morning, we had multiple data centers across the globe filled with millions of servers... Day One.
  I clocked into the swing shift, we have bins overflowing with unthinkable amounts of returned items, many of which are semi-perishable toiletries and personal hygiene products... Day One.
  As a simple-minded catchphrase to orient one's thinking, it becomes more and more absurd as the company scales. But Jeff don't care, he punched out a long time ago.

Where's Ed been? Corporate philosophies are a dime a dozen in tech and they're always just vague enough to use as a justification for management to do whatever they were already planning on doing.
Microsoft's growth mindset is no more problematic than Amazon's leadership principles or any of the other corporate pillars we inevitably need to phrase our accomplishments around in order to get hired/promoted. They're all the same pseudoscientific MBA BS that's been permeating the industry for years.
This article could have been written about just about any large tech company with the same concerns and conclusions.
- But it was written about Microsoft specifically. What's your point?
  
  It's written about Microsoft as if this is their unique dysfunction instead of an industry-wide dysfunction. It feels out of touch and lacking the insight I typically enjoy from this newsletter.

I'm all for criticizing large, unwieldy corporations bloated with layers of management who deliver limited value, engage in cutthroat politics, and promote slogans over real connections with people through sustained work efforts. But this article rubbed me the wrong way from the get go. The difficulty of developing a culture is never examined away from Microsoft. Most large companies have a c-suite who are so far removed from the average worker and their daily goals that they think pithy slogans are what it takes.
But I really became skeptical when they tried to summarize the findings of growth mindset and quickly dismissing it without couching in the ongoing reproducibility issue in psychology and failing to clearly show the controversy with growth mindset, the good, the bad, and the unclear. Which large company isn't peddling bullshit to get more out of their workers without deliver respect and wages?
I am hard pressed to find an example of a large company where executive management isn't oblivious to the real needs and desires of the average worker and middle management isn't flooded with back stabbing and petty politics. The most honest will tell you it's about market dominance and profit maximization and if happy workers help they do that as long as it doesn't cost too much and doesn't undermine their access to power.
- this post gave me a couple rounds of whiplash but this was the hardest turn on the rollercoaster:
  when they tried to summarize the findings of growth mindset and quickly dismissing it without couching in the ongoing reproducibility issue in psychology
  do you people come off a factory line like this?
  
  Did they read the same article? It addresses this pretty directly I thought.
  
  I don't know how to read this as a bad faith question, but I'll respond with sincerity in hopes that we can have an honest discussion.
  First, I'm not sure who "you people" and why my sentence is "off a factory line". When I reference the reproducibility issue it's the reproducibility issue in the field of psychology. Couching it in this crisis would temper the polemical tone.
  So what exactly gave you whiplash?

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