aphyrThe future of everything is lies, I guess: Work
https://aphyr.com/posts/418-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-work
Thank you for this aphyr.
My one ask is people seem to put “CEOs” on a pedestal any time things come up, like they’re an alien life form and oh no they’re going to do something terrible. There are good company executives and shitty ones. You should try to start a company and see if you can be one of the better ones.
Class warfare generalizations have become the safe outlet for internet rage because going after CEOs and billionaires is most “punching up” construction that is generally relatable.
An unintended side effect that I’ve noticed is that it normalizes bad behavior of CEOs for those who invest a lot of “CEOs bad” grist (Reddit, Threads, even Hacker News). When someone, usually early career, takes a job with a bad CEO after years of reading “CEOs bad” content online, they can go into a learned helplessness mode because they think the behavior they’re seeing is normal. They don’t believe changing jobs would help because they’ve learned from social media to believe that their CEO’s bad behavior is actually normal.
This has becoming a frequent topic when in a rotational mentorship program where I volunteer: Early career folk join some toxic startup and stay because the internet told them all CEOs are like this. We have to shake them free from those ideas and get them to realize that there are good and bad companies out there and they have options.
> Early career folk join some toxic startup and stay because the internet told them all CEOs are like this.
I literally did this 12 years ago based on this reasoning, its good you're trying to counter that with the next generation.
With that said, I do wish there was more discourse around systemic issues rather than the usual finger-pointing towards rival social groups. Unfortunately I feel like our language gets in the way, systems issues are more abstract, but "bad people" are more visceral and easy to talk about.