The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)
ribbonfarm.com

・

261 points

・

janandonly

・

3 days ago

126 comments

bananaflag ・ 10 hours ago

See the Scott Alexander review:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-pri...

  • orthoxerox ・ 9 hours ago

    Scott took it too literally. See also how the broader rationalist community took issue with Sam Kriss for inventing a not-obviously-fake historical figure.

    The biggest takeaway for me is that you shouldn't expect to succeed as a manager by meeting (or exceeding) KPIs. It's about as effective as being a "nice guy" and expecting intimacy in return.

    The KPIs are there for assigning blame, not for identifying key personnel. You can game them to increase your compensation if you are already doing something that an even bigger manager finds useful and important. Conversely, you can get away with half-assing every official performance indicator as long as you keep delivering the real thing.

    • hammock ・ 2 hours ago

      That’s a good takeaway and if anyone doubts you just think about how you set “goals” in the HR system every year during annual review time , vs. what your boss talks to you about

    • markus_zhang ・ an hour ago

      Just curious what’s the definition of “success” here? Getting promoted and getting a better compensation?

  • betenoire ・ 5 hours ago

    > arrested development is the dark side of strengths in the sense of Positive Psychology

    I see some correlation here to hesitancy in adopting LLMs for coding.

  • gsf_emergency_7 ・ 10 hours ago

    Liked this comment:

    "If we could convince [any] Sociopath that we were all Losers, we might be able to entice them into spilling their secrets as 'Straighttalk'. (Arguably that's what this book is..)"

    On one hand Rao doesn't say much about Gametalk (he basically defers to Eric Berne) which is the Loser's sociolect and should well be our default.

    On the other, Rao much more optimistic than Orwell, who declared doublespeak the lingua franca?

    • BoxOfRain ・ 7 hours ago

      > On the other, Rao much more optimistic than Orwell, who declared doublespeak the lingua franca?

      If time travel were possible, one of the first things I'd do is introduce Orwell to the 'algospeak' of today. This would do two things, firstly it'd show him a decent piece of evidence that Newspeak isn't as effective a tool for limiting human thought as he believed, and secondly he'd have to write another version of Politics and the English Language aimed at the language sins of attention economy era social media.

      • PaulDavisThe1st ・ 5 hours ago
        ・ 8 more

        and then I'd show him a news broadcast from last week, where the president of the United States of America literally said "War is peace".

        • wavemode ・ 5 hours ago
          ・ 7 more

          Is the use of "literally" here, and the use of quotes, meant to be taken literally (as in, he literally said this)?

          Or is this the sense of "literally" which actually means "figuratively"?

          • yakz ・ 4 hours ago
            ・ 5 more

            A post to the Truth Social account for Donald Trump included: "The heavy and pinpoint bombing, however, will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!"

            That's the closest thing I'm finding. Not seeing reporting that he literally said "war is peace".

            • rl1987 ・ 4 hours ago
              ・ 4 more

              That sounds more like "peace through superior firepower" rather than "war is peace".

              • nyeah ・ 3 hours ago
                ・ 2 more

                Can we be literal? It means peace through using superior firepower to kill people.

                • randallsquared ・ an hour ago

                  Sure, but it's not equating the states of war and peace, but asserting that war is a method for achieving peace, presumably when everyone on the other side is incapable or undesirous of attacking or threatening same.

              • pphysch ・ 3 hours ago

                There's a vast gulf between "having" superior firepower as a deterrent and "using" superior firepower for mass murder, particularly against elementary schools and desalination plants. The latter is war, at its worst.

    • OgsyedIE ・ 9 hours ago

      The Berne books Rao cites as explanations of Gametalk are solidly good entries in of themselves, although it's probably best to use an LLM to get search results of the best introductions to TA first to see if they've been surpassed.

      • gsf_emergency_7 ・ 8 hours ago
        ・ 3 more

        Adhering to the predictable/ritualistic/comfortable nature of "Gametalk",

        Here's one question I asked:

        "How does Eric Berne's Gametalk as interpreted by Venkatesh Rao signal to the sociopaths that those who engage in them are losers worth talking to? Distinguish between "channels" that Eric has identified as well as new signals that Rao or others have discovered."

        https://youtu.be/9B3oem_56jg?t=52s

        • hrimfaxi ・ 6 hours ago
          ・ 2 more

          Can you expand on your included youtube link? It's not clear the relationship.

          • gsf_emergency_7 ・ 6 hours ago

            I'll admit the connection is loose, personally found it amusing because:

            Mike is the archetypal nihilist (Sociopath or Loser), the other two would potentially be engaging in a Clueless interaction if Mike wasn't there, according to the Scott/Rao theory of jokes, you need 3 for a Loser joke.

            The preceding banter seems to be more of a Loser Gametalk: no social status is at stake; it's irrelevant to their white-collar role. Mike's Straighttalk intervention is typical of a sociopath; the wall breaking joke is that these Losers don't know what his real job is. If they did, the pointless but playful debate would have died a violent death-- because it'd get too real

            If these were Clueless middle managers debating their value to their company, it might even be out of character for Mike to notice them..

    • ajb ・ 8 hours ago

      I guess one day there will be a massive leak of executives chats with their LLMs, and we'll find out what they really think.

      • conception ・ 8 hours ago
        ・ 2 more

        I think that’s called the Epstein Files.

        • gsf_emergency_7 ・ 8 hours ago

          Used to think that Epstein was a Posturetalker but turns out he is a native Gametalker

  • tkk177 ・ 3 hours ago

    [dead]

alecco ・ 10 hours ago

(2009)

Previous discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

  • alecco ・ 4 hours ago

    What I've seen many, many times.

    1. business people sold themselves as the best to manage companies and took over companies (just like lawyers do in governments), changing the norm from decades ago when it was more likely for engineers to run companies than some kind of McKinsey guy

    2. but they have no idea besides business/money metrics so they quickly become overwhelmed and decide based on who makes the most compelling argument ("don't bring me more problems, give me solutions")

    3. sociopaths exploit this by telling the execs what they want to hear

    4. only after a while, after significant investment of resources in the decisions/projects proposed by the sociopaths it comes up to light it's complete nonsense

    5. the sociopaths are aware of this, so they usually pivot before SHTF or they even exploit the situation to ask for more to "fix" the problems

    6. the execs who backed the sociopaths want to cover their own asses so they hide the problems from higher ups for as long as possible (CEO, board, investors, shareholders, clients, authorities, public)

    7. competent people are pulled out of productive work and thrown to solve impossible or even contradicting situations; some burn out, some leave, and the ones who stay are often stained forever like they were the cause of the problem

    Sometimes the sociopaths are external consulting companies or companies offering some magic huge system that they promise will solve all the problems.

    Sociopaths exploit information asymmetry.

    Classic: https://web.archive.org/web/20051013062258/http://www.kuro5h...

    • zoeysmithe ・ an hour ago

      This is really ableist. Sociopaths? Most people in charge of running companies from top to mid-level are average people, even if some dark-triad coded people exist. What you're angry at is what capitalism is supposed to do: maximize value for the the capital owning class, that is to say ownership. There was never some engineer owned utopia. Business culture has always been this way, in fact, its only been worse in the past pre-socialist/labor movement times, not just with labor (child labor, long hours, dangerous conditions, etc) but also product (poison put in bread to make it cheaper, etc.) There is no way out of this dynamic in capitalism because this is all fundamental to capitalism.

ma2kx ・ 10 hours ago

The MacLeod Life Cycle reminds me on the 5 seasons of the illuminati calendar:

Verwirrung Season of Chaos January 1-March 14

Zweitracht Season of Discord March 15-May 26

Unordnung Season of Confusion May 27-August 7

Beamtenherrschaft Season of Bureaucracy August 8-October 19

Grummet Season of Aftermath October 20-December 31

From the book Illuminatus!

  • virtualritz ・ 7 hours ago

    The translations make no sense to a German native speaker. The list even swap meanings, i.e. between confusion and clutter.

    Accurate translations are:

    Verwirrung = Confusion

    Zwietracht = Discord

    You swapped i and e; somehow English speakders do this to German words all of the time. The 'ie' in here is a long 'i'.

    Zweitracht on the other hand would mean a "double traditional costume", if that word existed (it does exist in theory, it is just then number two [Zwei] and the noun for a traditional costume [Tracht] strung together; would be a great name for a German shop that sells used/pre-owned traditional costumes btw.)

    Unordnung = Clutter

    Beamtenherrschaft = Rule of the public servant class

    Grummet = Second hay harvest

    • exmadscientist ・ 7 hours ago

      Illuminatus! is one of those works where there's a decent chance this is just a mistake or oversight, but also a decent chance this is exactly what the authors intended. You never can quite tell, and they definitely liked that.

    • sanderjd ・ 7 hours ago

      I think the reason that English speakers swap ie/ei is that the pronunciations of these is not really consistent in English (at least in the American accent I speak), and I can't think of any words where both orderings exist but have different meanings. So the general impression I have about this is that I know there are supposed to be rules about it, but it seems pretty arbitrary and unimportant semantically.

      • QuercusMax ・ 5 hours ago
        ・ 2 more

        Frahnken-STEEN vs Franken-STINE

        • FrustratedMonky ・ 20 minutes ago

          Exactly, Americans do use both pronunciations .

    • croes ・ 6 hours ago

      But Beamte are heavily linked to bureaucracy.

      Chaos is the opposite of order and the opposite of Ordnung is Unordnung

viccis ・ 3 hours ago

I like the first blogpost or two. If I recall, it quickly shifts into a pop psychology grindset self improvement book if you keep reading the posts. Its reach starts to exceed its grasp.

DonsDiscountGas ・ 3 hours ago

Hot take: being clueless is better than these essays make it out to be. The examples are all really socially annoying people (Michael, Dwight) but I've known some pretty nice and pleasant middle managers who had generally great lives. They probably could've gotten all of that with less work but perfectly hitting the Pareto frontier is quite difficult.

  • the_af ・ 2 hours ago

    According to this theory, the Clueless are the ones who suffer the most.

    They invest most, they care about made up goals nobody else cares about, they play by rules everyone else thinks are dumb, they feel loyal to a company that doesn't love them back, and because they are more invested in the company, they are the ones who feel the loss the most when the sociopaths pull the rug.

    I think it's actually the Losers who have it better: they are simply not invested enough, they are replaceable but also find their place in other companies, and in any case, failure affects us-- I mean, them -- less simply because they are not invested as much and they never felt any loyalty.

    "Loser" is a loaded term because it sounds like the cultural, lowercase loser ("so and so is such a loser!") but it actually means "loser in the game of maximum capitalist profit and power". But if you're not really playing that game, being a loser at it isn't so bad.

    • cshimmin ・ an hour ago

      Yeah perhaps a better term for Loser is Abstainer. Because the Sociopaths also can certainly lose at the game of maximum capitalist profit. Loser/Abstainer just chooses not to play the game.

      • throw4847285 ・ 23 minutes ago

        The problem with these theories is that they fall apart as soon as you start adding or modifying the types. Because they aren't actually correct, just simple and flattering.

      • the_af ・ an hour ago
        ・ 3 more

        Fully agreed. I think "Loser" is a misnomer. And indeed, going by the essay, the Sociopaths can also lose big... they are willing to risk it all for personal gain, but it can end very badly for them if they miss their window, their manipulations get exposed, or decide to do illegal things to get ahead (high profile cases in my mind: Enron, Epstein, etc).

        • orthoxerox ・ 38 minutes ago
          ・ 2 more

          The names come from a cartoon that predates Rao's essay. He simply reused them because they mostly work. Just like the Sociopaths are not all literal sociopaths, the Losers are not all literal losers.

          • the_af ・ 36 minutes ago

            Yes, I understand this. I was simply making this explicit, it was a good idea to clarify that neither Losers nor Sociopaths match the common definition of those terms.

adamesque ・ 5 hours ago

Okay, so then — who gets squeezed more by AI: the clueless or the losers?

  • Aditya_Garg ・ 4 hours ago

    losers, clueless never had to be productive, just scapegoats. But now losers dont get that buffer window to try and become sociopaths, they just dont get hired at all.

    • pphysch ・ 3 hours ago

      But clueless need losers to exist, so as a second order effect, they lose as well.

system7rocks ・ 4 hours ago

This is why I come to this site. Some of the tech stuff goes over my head and limited skills, but this article was insightful and still so relevant. It probably applies to non-profit organizations that tend to falter after their visionary (aka psychopath) leader retires.

And it likely applies to a ton of churches out there, especially megachurches, where you walk in to the lobby and see leadership books by their star CEO aka pastor about leadership or life lessons or whatever. But those megachurches churn through employees until they find just enough psychopaths (aka executive pastors) willing to be assholes for God, plenty of clueless who are happy to serve as that middle management, and then those who are okay with being loyal and doing just enough week to week for a paycheck.

I've seen it all too often.

Check out the podcast Bodies Behind the Bus if you want a glimpse about what happens to those who actually call some of those megachurches to live into what they say - like actually caring for their neighbors.

k__ ・ 9 hours ago

I liked that model a lot, but it made me a bit sad too.

All my life I was bad at being a loser, somehow I never really felt I fit in. I thought this was because of psychopathic tendencies or something. However, after reading this I realized there was another option and I was just clueless.

  • Arubis ・ 6 hours ago

    It is perhaps crucial to note that Venkat Rao, the author, himself found an escape from the system under study here; he’s been consulting or otherwise feral for about 15 years.

  • baggachipz ・ 7 hours ago

    I've always been a clued-in loser because I lack the sociopathy to get promoted :(

varispeed ・ 7 hours ago

From what I have observed. Quiet people who speak sense and don't get involved in arguments, never rise to the top, whereas those loud morons almost certainly do. Often because those quiet people think they'll be less shouty, nagging. As long as the quiet ones can get on with the job and the loud pricks don't interfere, it makes the organisation dysfunctionally work. That said, world would be much nicer if these types could be just sacked. They don't contribute anything but increase stress and eat the salary budget that otherwise could be redistributed to the rest of the productive workers.

  • lionkor ・ 7 hours ago

    The quiet ones need to learn to speak up when they have something important to add. Just sitting there quietly and not speaking, not participating in discussions, and not speaking up when something is wrong, is NOT noble.

    "Quiet" people who know when to speak absolutely rise above anyone else, in a professional setting, in my experience.

    • riskable ・ 6 hours ago

      The right time to speak up about something that's wrong is always NOW. Why? Because if you knew and didn't say something at the earliest possible moment you will get blamed for inaction later.

      If you don't say something when you see something is wrong, never say anything about it (at all). Otherwise you're asking for trouble later when the shit eventually hits the fan. "You knew and didn't say anything‽"

      Even if someone gets upset at you for speaking up, that's still a better situation than being blamed later when the real finger pointing occurs.

      "Don't look at me! I warned about this!" is a very real get-out-of-jail-free card in medium to large organizations. Especially if you have your objections in writing (save all emails!).

      As a great example: At my work, the company made a piss poor decision to buy an (expensive) enterprise product that I warned would not work to solve the problem it was being purchased to solve. I warned them ahead of time that it wouldn't work. Then I warned them in the middle of the project and again, at implementation time.

      When it didn't work, management came down HARD on everyone. In the middle of the finger pointing meeting I pulled up my emails which were sent to the people trying to point the proverbial finger and the meeting was over. Just like that! I saved the whole team with the simple act of voicing my objections in writing at every stage of the project.

      If I didn't do that I have no doubt that some scapegoat would've been fired. Instead, no one got fired (sadly, because the normal rules of incompetence don't apply to the clueless/management layer, haha).

      Unfortunately, to this day management never takes my offers of, "instead of purchasing this terrible 'enterprise' solution for millions of dollars, give ME that money and I'll produce a solution that's better in every way. I'll even have it up and running faster than we could requisition and install the product!"

    • namtab00 ・ 7 hours ago

      The problem is knowing the "when", or better yet choosing the "right" one. Don't ask me about these targets I have on my back.

      Many times and in many orgs, the window to speak up opens too seldomly and it's barely cracked open...

    • lnsru ・ 7 hours ago

      I see your naive opinion attracted lots of negativity. In perfect world decades ago the quiet ones had a chance. With right approach and good timing it worked very well: https://www.bmwblog.com/2025/02/10/bmw-3-series-touring-hist... And that was seen in German economy growth. Now it’s completely different. Result is secondary, process is most important: https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/munich-...

      Now it’s noise and screaming. You can speak up, result will be the same as if you would do that in the forest. Loud bullshiters will be promoted. Your technical opinion with properly perceived problems will be discarded as stupid. Welcome in the age of noise. And it also reflects in the current German economy and probably politics too.

    • mikkupikku ・ 4 hours ago

      We've got to pick our battles.

    • pc86 ・ 5 hours ago

      Being able to yell and scream and be loud yet choosing to be calm and quiet can be noble in the right circumstances. Being quiet and timid because that's all you're capable of doing is simply being ineffectual and weak and isn't noble even when being calm and quiet is the right thing to do.

    • tsunamifury ・ 6 hours ago

      Yes but how else will they live a rich internal life where they are the hero’s and everyone else is useless.

      If they speak up their illusions might be shattered!

  • gowld ・ 6 hours ago

    "most loud morons rise to the top" is very different from "most of the top are loud morons".

    Also I don't think either is true in general, but it is partially true in fundamentally social regimes like sales an bureaucracy where mother nature isn't involved so truth isn't a major factor in success.

    I think critics use the word "moron" too often to mean "someone whose intelligence is different from mine, and doesn't have a respect for truth as a universal principle". Ladder climbing "sociopaths" apply their intelligence to social puzzles that many engineers and scientists ignore or don't understand. And some people are smart but also bullies, and dominate people who might be smarter. That's different from being a dumb bully.

tsunamifury ・ 6 hours ago

This essay was my bible at Google. It openly matched internal hierarchy and our own secret GDNA testing results illustrated it directly showing VP and above scored highly on the need to dominate over discover truth etc.

The problem was to my existential horror: i couldn’t use this knowledge to get anywhere beyond clueless. Because super large western organizations either purposefully hide information or are full of stupidity so much that they can’t share it.

I never could climb to any kind of safety —- until I realized that was the point. There is no safety. You only climb if you recognize death is inevitable, leaving those who want safety behind.

So now that I’m further up: Peter Turchins elite over production is my new nightmare

  • nixon_why69 ・ 6 hours ago

    I resonate with your comment but completely reject the conclusion. Death is inevitable, who cares how high you climbed on a ladder you didn't define? Why is that meaningful?

    Money is nice, dont get me wrong, but to value the climbing itself?

    • pc86 ・ 5 hours ago

      Doing hard things is tautologically good.

      • mewse-hn ・ 2 hours ago
        ・ 2 more

        > Doing hard things is tautologically good.

        Bahaha yeah overwork is virtue, sure

        • pc86 ・ 13 minutes ago

          I didn't say anything about "overwork." No need to make assumptions (or just make things up).

      • mikkupikku ・ 4 hours ago

        Bullshit. Many things are hard because they shouldn't be done and systems have evolved to make the thing hard for good reason.

    • tsunamifury ・ 5 hours ago

      It’s interesting. That’s all. Boredom is death for me.

  • gyomu ・ 6 hours ago

    The safety, if that’s what you wish to attain, lies in living as frugally as you can while vesting your RSUs for as long as you can bear, and GTFO of the rat race.

    • tsunamifury ・ 5 hours ago

      This is a lie for smooth brains who think they’ve figured out the “hack” to the system.

      Usually resulting in living as if you worked a menial job not having a family and essentially working hard to not achieve anything. Then mostly living the rest of your life consuming your own smugness.

  • JimmyBiscuit ・ 5 hours ago

    > Peter Turchins elite over production is my new nightmare

    The Lamborgini Urus is a sign of the apocalypse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6_Z0yGwtx0

    • lotsofpulp ・ 4 hours ago

      Conveying information via 10min+ videos that people preusmably watch at 1.5x+ speed is also a sign of the apocalypse.

  • subpixel ・ 5 hours ago

    As the essay points out, we losers have only two paths out of loserdom. The first is to leverage sociopathic tendencies, to scheme and maneuver and accrue power (probably as a minion to an actual sociopath, I don’t think transformation happens except at the early stage of a career). The second is to check out and coast, tacitly improving our position without actually striking a new bargain or finding any safety.

    My own losing trap, which I think is common, is to try to periodically make sense of the organization and map a logical path forward for myself. This never works. My career progress in the organization has actually come about through sheer accident and/or lucky association.

    • gtowey ・ 17 minutes ago

      Man does this hit home.

    • tsunamifury ・ 4 hours ago

      Same mostly, you can increase your luck a small bit by the strategy you outline, but then you reach the limit of Elite Overproduction where your competence will work against your lucky pretty fast (Elites start to hate the competent and dont want them around since they make them look bad)

obviouslynotme ・ 3 hours ago

I have enjoyed this article series many times in the past. Having been in all three classes, he got losers and clueless correct, but he is mistaken on the sociopaths.

1. Sociopaths don't recruit. They build fiefdoms and leverage social ties. How many times have you seen a random guy making minimum wage become senior management? Almost never. The exception to this is people who are hired to be in the running for senior management who are moved all over the company at a fast pace to get the lay of the land.

2. Losers are sociopaths who do not have the birthright to be sociopaths. Put the other way around, sociopaths are losers born into valuable social ties. Their natures are the same. Power corrupts. Most people never learn what they become with power. The clueless are the strange ones, the glue that holds everyone together and keeps the lights on.

3. As the author says, gametalk is obtuse discussion distinguished by the stakes involved. That is normal human social patterns, only distinguished by the stakes. If direct, straightforward discussion was the norm, we wouldn't need to use adjectives for it. The clueless are once again the outliers of the organization. The stakes and who gets to use them are the dividing line once again.

It's hard to think that most people are so selfish they would throw their group and others under the bus for benefits, but if you look for it, you will see it everywhere. Most people do not have the ability to exercise enough power to make it obvious.

Think about Resume Driven Development. Half of it is clueless people genuinely excited for Brand New Thing, but what about the rest? They know that in five years, companies will demand ten years of experience in Brand New Thing. So what do they do? They push for Brand New Thing wherever they can. This lets them accumulate leverage for their next job. Who does this hurt? Their company and everyone who has to deal with their Ball of Mud when they leave. This is the moral equivalent of some senior manager taking short-term gains at long-term loss to grab a fat bonus and fail upwards into another company.

I really enjoyed the series, but it has the same problems as other realpolitik subjects. Clueless will grab onto it thinking they can become the next Alexander the Great or Jeff Bezos and make a fool of themselves. The essential ingredients are never spoken out loud, and topics like this are always gross oversimplifications by their very nature.

bookhimdano ・ 9 hours ago

This is interesting enough, I’d buy a book about this (audiobook at least).

I’ve tried to limit myself to only the best and most practical books about leadership that didn’t start corporate speak, and I doubt Gervais Principle would be quoted or used in work conversation, so it’s perfect.

0xbadcafebee ・ 7 hours ago

I find all these principles to be wrong. Having worked in many companies of many sizes in many industries, there's a more variable distribution of characteristics of office workers. They can be sociopathic, empathic, competent, incompetent, kind, mean, sincere, duplicitous, flexible, inflexible, passionate, aloof, personable, antisocial, motivated, unmotivated, productive, unproductive. And they're always a mix of these things.

Some people are promoted without reaching their level of incompetence. Some leaders are actually empathetic. Some middle managers are effective. And some low-level grunts are consciously and happily both productive and exploited without desire for more. Granted, they're in the minority, but they do exist. I would rather there be language to describe and venerate these people, than to paint the whole world with a pessimistic brush.

  • mikkupikku ・ 4 hours ago

    The whole point of stereotyping, which is the basis for the "Gervais principle", is to cover up any subtly or nuance and feel smug about ourselves when doing it. You coming in here with your "actually real people are more complex and varied"... You're spoiling the fun!

  • nine_k ・ 5 hours ago

    Have you seen a blockbuster full of nuance, pastel colors, and "yes but"s? A publication like this needs to be garishly gloomy and scandalously cynical to generate enough stir. It draws attention. Why would one think that a book about exploitation and self-deception won't exploit the reader a tiny bit?

yedidmh ・ 11 hours ago

Anyone else can't scroll on this site?

p0bs ・ 10 hours ago

Focusing only on the second and top layer of the diagram, I usually call them “the increments and the excrements”.

OgsyedIE ・ 9 hours ago

The most interesting parts of the essay are the ways that Rao (a full proponent of the niche psychotherapy school of transactional analysis) applies his view of psychoanalysis to describe the social dynamics between coworkers with differing levels of nihilism.

He argues that the 'sociopath class' of social-climbing nihilists map 1:1 onto the leaderships of large organizations but it's rare in the real world. Usually there are people of all levels of naiveté and nihilism at all ranks of organizations, with naive true believers mixing with nihilists at the top, the middle and the bottom fairly equally, because the world has too much churn to settle into the kind of density-separation equilibrium he describes.

prox ・ 10 hours ago

That was a fun read, and it might even explain why a lot of Gen-z is opting out of any sort of career building, wanting values instead (or next to) a paycheck. They saw their parents do The Office in real life.

Interesting is also that Michael does make a really good arc from season one to when he leaves. He remains clueless, or rather he it dawns on him he does not want to become like Ryan or David (the articles sociopath). Like he says in a later season “Business is about people.”

  • TheGRS ・ an hour ago

    The smartest thing they did with the US version of The Office after season 1 was to make Michael highly competent in sales and its longterm relationships. S1 and the UK version of the show viewed the boss as incompetent at every level, it was much more cynical. Making Michael marginally competent gives him an empathetic leg to stand on for the audience. Had they kept Michael exactly like David Brent it probably would have still been hilarious but flamed out around season 2 or 3.

    • malcolmgreaves ・ an hour ago

      I agree, it made his character arc more interesting. Also, the entire show is centered around Michael. The later seasons really suffer without him.

      It is also useful because it shows an old adage: people get promoted to their level of incompetence. Michael is actually an excellent salesman. He's a bad manager. He was promoted to branch manager because he was good at a different job.

      This is just like when a really good engineer is promoted and becomes a bad manager.

  • lelanthran ・ 6 hours ago

    > That was a fun read, and it might even explain why a lot of Gen-z is opting out of any sort of career building, wanting values instead (or next to) a paycheck.

    Wouldn't that make them even bigger ~losers~ Clueless?

    The ~losers~ Clueless are strictly those who put in more effort than they get in return but who cannot see it!

    Putting in +25% extra into their job for a 5% promotion, for example.

    Putting in effort for anything other than money is in the companies interest - they want people to be happy with vibes-as-compensation instead of money-as-compensation!

    ---------------

    EDIT: I meant to say Clueless, not "losers".

    • the_af ・ 6 hours ago

      > The losers are strictly those who put in more effort than they get in return but who cannot see it!

      I think those would be the losers who get promoted to clueless, at least in this metaphor. The losers who aren't clueless are putting in the bare minimum work that doesn't get them fired. If they overperform, they (according to the theory) get promoted.

      I fully agree this nasty "vibes-as-compensation" bullshit, "we're all a family", etc, is in the interest of the top leadership. The sociopaths, if you will.

      • lelanthran ・ 6 hours ago

        You're correct, I meant Clueless, sorry. In my defense, I last read this when it was first published, so maybe ... 15 years? 20?

  • Apocryphon ・ 5 hours ago

    Gen Y was supposed to be values-driven too, Gen X invented slackers and grunge who were all about authenticity, boomers were children of hippies, beatniks preceded hippies…

    The malaise afflicting Gen Z is more- secular- than cultural, I fear. The endpoint of economic trends.

    • dragonwriter ・ 4 hours ago

      > boomers were children of hippies

      The hippies largely were Boomers, not their children.

netfortius ・ 5 hours ago

The "organization evolution" diagram is missing a crucial step, usually happening just before "death": some Sociopaths start trading intelligence (required, to a certain level, if to sustain crucial efforts in producing positive results) for mediocrity, in order to gain full obedience (the Clueless being hired are no longer A+ or A, but rather D, E, etc. level players, fully & blindly dedicated to the "leader"). This step is to be observed today in some governments.

notahacker ・ 7 hours ago

Ironically the original Office, featuring Ricky Gervais, has a much better and more nuanced implicit theory of management than this.

Brent (Gervais) is neither a sociopath nor the top dog he thinks he is, he's a middle manager who it's implied was legitimately good at sales, but is not at all good at the role he's been promoted into because it's a completely different one.

The actual upper management, sociopathic or not, are certainly not scouring the underlings for underperforming sociopaths phoning it in to promote (imagine Keith being promoted!), and are actually more interested in making them redundant to make efficiency savings. We don't see senior management at all, they don't see most of the employees at all and they clearly don't have much idea what's going on, initially considering promoting Brent (because he applies for it and can bluff his way through an interview) but then in the second season bringing in Neil to oversee him and get rid of him (because they've started paying attention). Neil is obviously more socially adept which is probably why he's been promoted higher at a younger age, but he also appears to be actually good at his job. On the other hand, Gareth whose career appears to have topped out at assistant to the Regional Manager, ends up getting Brent's middle management job though he has zero social skills and actually liked the guy whose seat he takes, because he wants it, he grafts and he's there. Most of the others in the office neither work particularly hard nor particularly care for seeking promotion. And it's a paper company, they don't exactly have many ways to identify high performers anyway and the really ambitious and talented people are elsewhere.

(We don't see the people at the top at all, but they probably went to the right school, started in middle management somewhere else and hopped jobs adding bullet points of performance they can claim credit for to their CV until they got C-suite titles and compensation)

  • the_af ・ 6 hours ago

    > Brent (Gervais) is neither a sociopath nor the top dog he thinks he is, he's a middle manager who it's implied was legitimately good at sales, but is not at all good at the role he's been promoted into because it's a completely different one.

    I think in this hierarchy Brent is supposed to be Clueless rather than Sociopath.

    I agree it doesn't 100% match the characters.

    By the way, I like Steve Carell but the British show was much better than the US one.

daralthus ・ 8 hours ago

This is broadly accurate, but if anyone feels like freaking out and quickly needs an antidote to the "high" class of sociopath grifters, perhaps could find some solitude in Wim Wenders' Perfect Days for a few hours.

epolanski ・ 8 hours ago

The distinction between losers, clueless and sociopaths has been very useful in my career.

It made me recognize how many times I, or people I know, was the weakest link in the chain, the clueless.

So have been the many examples of power talk and the importance of information.

  • pwillia7 ・ 6 hours ago

    have anything to read more about the power talk stuff?

    • epolanski ・ 5 hours ago

      Not really to be honest because the framework under which Venkatesh Rao talks about power talk is a bit different than how most sociologists see power talk.

      Sociologists focus on tone, Rao focuses on the content.

      In The Gervais Principle information is a currency and treated as negotiation leverage. You never give it for free, unless strictly in the boundaries of your job. Thus, under this lens, you collect as much information and never give it away for free.

      Suppose you're a software engineer and a service you work on is slow.

      There's two ways you can go about it:

      "Our API has a 300ms+ latency, I have some ideas on how to fix it" -> giving information, and work for free. You're in the loser/clueless category.

      Which of those depends on your awareness: are you aware of the political game and ignore it and focus on the craft? Loser. Are you not aware of the political game and try to do "what's best for the team/company"? You're clueless.

      Then there's the sociopath's version:

      "We may have a performance issues affecting reliability. Before we go deeper, we should decide who owns performance optimization."

      This is power talk. Even if you don't own the performance optimization you still:

      - communicated that you hold information others don't

      - you're setting the tone and direction of the meeting

      At this point somebody may raise the point of "which performance issues?" and here the hard part begins, how do you navigate and play the game? Are you prepared to motivate why ownership comes before information?

      In the end, probably the best way to learn power talk in the context of the Gervais principle is to experiment, observe and study. Because no other sociologists has focused on it with Rao's angle.

tomhow ・ 4 hours ago

Previously...

The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41214180 - Aug 2024 (173 comments)

The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33298158 - Oct 2022 (149 comments)

The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25486869 - Dec 2020 (60 comments)

The Gervais Principle III: The Curse of Development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1267202 - April 2010 (27 comments)

The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=937541 - Nov 2009 (32 comments)

The Gervais Principle, or The Office According to "The Office" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296 - Oct 2009 (63 comments)

MachineMan ・ 8 hours ago

[flagged]

  • spicyusername ・ 8 hours ago

    I don't think those two things are alike at all, unfortunately, however "cool" it feels to make such an analogy.

    Perhaps it's worth going and reading about actual slavery and what it was like.

    • lencastre ・ 8 hours ago

      perhaps is doing a lot of massaging there

      • velcrovan ・ 7 hours ago

        I love me a good massage

    • FrustratedMonky ・ 7 hours ago

      Either side of an analogy can have factors at different scales. But it can still be a valid analogy.

      If you are saying that because slavery was much worse, then modern slaves should just suck it up and work harder. Then that isn't really helping is it?

      This is kind of the argument "others have had it worse, so lets not try to make anything better for people today".

      • hrimfaxi ・ 6 hours ago
        ・ 3 more

        Are you seriously equating the modern office and work, where, you know, you can go home after, to life as a slave on a plantation? Sure, analogies can have factors at different scales but the scales come into the equation when the factor is the axis we are analyzing.

        Is your issue that life requires action to maintain it? Do you believe no work is required at all in life? The idea that work is like slavery is deep when you're 14 and then not so much.

        No one had said our modern lives couldn't be better but you don't have to liken our existence to slavery to get to "things could be better".

        • MachineMan ・ 5 hours ago

          The tools of slavery have evolved but the overall end goal has not. The almost cliché slavery depiction of the chain and whip had evolved into the coolie system, the offshoring system and the kafeel system. The office is simply a part of that family of exploitation methods. There is a difference between serving the collective good and being a slave.

          Many of us want to work on something greater than ourselves, to contribute to society not out of selfishness or lifestyle, but to genuinely help society function and make people happy. Many of us aspire to make a small dent in the universe with something great, something that can stand the test of time, building a thing in defiance of our own mortality in the hopes that our ancestors remember us, learn from us and run with the torch of civilization, to improve the human project to a level of greatness that we may ourselves never witness. In a way, to create is one of the highest forms of self expression as a human.

          This is entirely different from reality, where retirements are wiped out by financial sorcerers, after decades of fulfilling your end of the social contract, trading in your productive years to a company that _does not care about you OR your community_, where run away inflation, debt and taxation are used to funnel capital to other competing nations or a unwitting fifth column whether that is transmigrasi in Indonesia, the influx of Indians in Texas or the mass refugee stream to Europe caused by US-Israeli inflicted wars, which has already surpassed in numbers the transatlantic slave trade, the endless wars that balance domestic unrest with a common enemy to rally around the flag, and the accompanied transfer of wealth across nations as these warmongers decide which country gets axed to serve the greater powers. There is no saving for retirement, there is no freedom, there is only bondage, death and taxes.

          Meanwhile, the collective fruit of western society is plundered through the illegal pirating of the intellectual output of millions of creatives who poured everything they have in it, and it is plundered by the very same class of people that sued common folk for pirating software, music, movies and books. Aaron Swartz would roll over in his grave to see how the government supports companies like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic who rely on plagiarizing IP at scale.

          The collective fruit of an entire civilization’s labor is plundered before your very eyes right before they launch it into a cataclysmic war that wipes away the very people who dedicated their lives to the sciences and humanities in order to further the human project. To deal such a low blow is an atrocity that is worse in its impact than the plantation system, it is reminiscent of the bronze age collapse that leveled ancient Egypt.

          No good deed goes unpunished, as Ozymandius found out the hard way.

        • FrustratedMonky ・ 6 hours ago

          Maybe it is about agency. If you have no agency, aren't you a slave? If your boss is expecting a blowjob or will fire you, is that not pretty bad?

          I didn't know that American Slavery was the benchmark by which we can use that word. If I'm not literally being whipped I can't use that word now?

          How about servitude? Subjugation? Yoked? What is acceptable now?

avazhi ・ 8 hours ago

Lots of word salad in this nonsensical write up anyway, but the author lost all credibility when he said that David Wallace is an ubersociopath.

  • lencastre ・ 8 hours ago

    you might need to reread his thesis again

    • avazhi ・ 5 hours ago

      Reading word salad once is enough for me, thanks.

  • iugtmkbdfil834 ・ 8 hours ago

    << author lost all credibility when he said that David Wallace is an ubersociopath.

    This one got me interested. Can you elaborate? It is a show, but there is absolutely plenty of evidence within the show to support that claim.

    • avazhi ・ 5 hours ago

      Such as what?

      There was plenty of evidence that Jan was a sociopath, or Ryan (obviously), but David had quite literally 0 sociopathic tendencies. Plus, this author said something about how David (and Jan) were both 'clueless' about Michael's incompetence, so it isn't like you can argue that David knew he was incompetent but tried to get him promoted to corporate anyway (which would obviously have been manipulative, although that alone wouldn't make him a sociopath).

      When Dwight did random crazy shit, like set a fire in the office to do fire safety awareness day, David told him straight up that he couldn't do that and why. At no time did David display a lack of social skills, lack of empathy, or antisocial behaviour (except for a bit after he gets fired and prior to starting up Suck It). The most you could probably say there is that when Michael and Holly were forced apart (Holly back to Nashua), David was a bit muted - but even then, he tried to send Michael on a vacation (which got Michael laid in the end), even though the episode ends with Michael raging at David.

      I'm happy to hear what the 'plenty of evidence' is.

      • Insanity ・ 2 hours ago

        It's been some years since I've seen The Office, but I thought David was the only somewhat reasonable person. Don't see how he would match up with the sociopath either, but my memory might be failing me.

      • the_af ・ an hour ago

        > At no time did David display a lack of social skills, lack of empathy, or antisocial behaviour

        I don't remember David much, but let it be noted that the essay uses "sociopath" in a different way than the commonly understood definition, much like the essay's use of "losers" doesn't mean what people usually mean by loser (as in "so and so is such a loser!"), it means "made a bad economic bargain / they are losing in the capitalist maximum profits & power game".

  • FrustratedMonky ・ 7 hours ago

    Better at hiding it. The sociopaths aren't 'obvious', they put on a mask, and the better the mask, the more they look normal.