YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Have you read the Gervais Principle?

=> https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...

The purpose of a system is what the system does. -- Stafford Beer

I mean this sympathetically, but you and your partner seem to have an unhealthy relationship with work.

Employment is a business transaction. You sell the company your time - it gives you money. That’s the deal. The company is not your family, your father or a secret ledger of who worked hardest.

Think of it like buying groceries. You don’t expect the supermarket to love you because you’ve shopped there for 15 years. The supermarket doesn’t expect you to keep buying burnt bread out of loyalty. Either side can end the transaction when it stops making economic sense.

Once you understand this, corporate behavior becomes much less mysterious and much less emotionally destructive. You stop thinking you must deserve to be seen, deserve to be noticed, deserve to be loved.

There are no sacrifice points. Unused vacation days aren’t loyalty deposits. Working nights isn’t an insurance policy. Being liked by 30 people doesn’t give you 30 votes at budget time.

Your partner may have been excellent, and the executive may be a fool. Both things can be true. But a corporation is a bundle of incentives, budgets, politics, and contracts wearing a branded hoodie.

Do good work. Be kind to colleagues. Take pride in your craft. But take your vacation, keep your CV fresh, maintain relationships outside the company and never EVER outsource your sense of worth to an org chart.

Talk to an expert on relationships.

I've seen a fair share of personalities in middle/upper management. My hypothesis is that in large organizations, people that operate at that level often exhibit more survival skills that are ruthless than moral. A common characteristic I've seen is they manage "up" well and are often not good managers themselves. So if they control the narrative with their management, even when they screw up everything, its articulated as something else and not their fault, they may even believe that to be true.

I don't think it matters what industry it is, you get an organization large enough and some humans start exhibiting these behaviors, they often rise up in leadership ranks.

Have you ever read the Ribbonfarm series about organizational/management theory tied to The Office?[0] Its worth a read or a refresh. It might even be cathartic reading for your partner after an event like this.

[0] https://ribbonfarm.com/series/the-gervais-principle/

>how do these people consistently survive their self-inflicted disasters?

There's a lot of good answers here. One supplement I would make to a few of them is it is harder to fire or punish someone the more they resemble you. A lot easier to see the fault in a woman a couple of rungs down than a guy your age who looks a lot like you and you've had beers with for a decade. The (truly) wealthy aren't like me and you. And in a crisis you'll find out how they're different real quick.

If an army general orders a disastrous assault that completely fails, they might get demoted or relieved of command. The infantry that were ordered to charge the machine guns pay a much higher price (as do the junior officers that lead the charge). Hell, perhaps nowerdays they'll have a 'blameless postmortem' to 'learn lessons' and there won't even be a demotion.

Us folks who work for a living aren't charging any machine guns, thankfully - but if my boss's boss's boss can't get our division to make a profit the entire division is at risk, no matter how good my area of the division may be.

Or hell, maybe nobody in my 'chain of command' made any mistakes at all. We could be the world's greatest manufacturer of airplane seats - but if the plane they're put into has a few crashes, and orders dry up, there's no money to pay my wages.

Is it just? No - it's just the nature of work.

Just to add another item to the list others have brought up :

Goal displacement -> Goal displacement occurs when an organization or individual shifts focus from original objectives to secondary goals, often prioritizing procedures, metrics, or internal processes over intended outcomes.

In large corps, people who are good at staying in a company, and people who are good at serving the company's objectives are typically two different skillsets. And one of those skillset helps you stay inside the company more than the other.

There's a fallacy that we all fall into: We think that our job is about turning the crank, and that the best crank turners will stay around the longest.

It's not: I've been involved in quite a few projects that get abandoned, (or otherwise miss their target) for one reason or another. There's a few things that you (or your partner) can do to protect yourself.

Most important: Make sure that your role (as an engineer) in your company is in the most critical part of the company as you can handle. When budgets get cut, it's not the best "crank turner" who keeps their job; its the people in the most critical roles for products (and projects and processes) that the company no longer can fund. (Note that this isn't foolproof, because foolish management can still goof and let you go.) (Note that in large companies, this is much harder because you can become critical in a niche that the company decides to divest from. To handle this, move into a subsidiary that would be sold as a unit.)

Secondly: Understand the business cycle. All products (and projects and processes) have a lifetime, and at a certain point they are "done." (As in, not worth investing in paying the best crank turner or the most critical person to keep working on it.) When you smell this happening, let it be known that you're open to severance when the budget gets cut. It's always easiest to let go of the person who's willing to take severance because they're ready for a change in scenery.

Next: Make sure you can get a feel for how the product (project, process, ect,) is actually used. You might have turned the crank really well, but if no one is using the result, it's time to be proactive and move on.

Finally: Learn to judge your management, and build relationships with your boss's boss. This will give you a lot more insight into the company so you can learn when to move on or how to position yourself in the most critical part of the company.

> how do these people consistently survive their self-inflicted disasters?

Well, being at the top of the org chart in the first place is naturally insulating. But since HN is a forum attached to a startup fund, I wanted to put two cents in for how this happens even when there’s no incompetence.

Before I do that, I’ll be clear that I’ve personally seen incompetent execs make massive mistakes and survive. Working for a game studio acquired by Disney for a decade, we had a new one every 2 or 3 years and they’d shut down studios on a whim just to make their Excel sheets look good. One closed our small research division one day because he didn’t see revenue. He got reamed by the board for it and whined the reaming had been the worst day of his career. Boo hoo. But didn’t get fired. Disney tried to shut down the studio on the heels of a billion dollars in profit from this studio because they couldn’t figure out how to make a sequel or think of a new game, and because there were was some big tax incentive to getting the hundred or so people off the payroll. It seemed short sighted in the extreme.

Anyway, the complete answer to your question also needs to acknowledge that planning business is difficult, and whole companies and departments both fail all the time. As a worker, we don’t always see how the sausage is made and where the income is coming from, but management can be pretty messy, it’s not clockwork and people can’t predict the future. There are a lot of reasons that departments or companies can be closed for no fault by anyone, worker or manager. And, while there are plenty of incompetent decisions made, it’s also true that sometimes best effort managing still results in people losing jobs. In those cases, it’s possible and occasionally the right thing to do to keep a manager who tried hard to save things, even if they couldn’t. And there’s a gray area, and a lot of narrative, in between competence and incompetence too. I have no doubt in your case there was incompetence, but whether the disaster was self-inflicted or was even a disaster is viewed differently from the top. They might be talking about it as having averted a larger disaster.

You're under the assumption that corporations (especially big ones) are some form of meritocracy. Don't believe the bullshit, it's all about politics, timing, and luck (in that order).

Publicly-traded companies always put short-term profits over anything else; if they don't demonstrably do that, the leadership exposes themselves and the company to shareholder lawsuits. I've been at a BigCorp where layoffs happen at the end of each quarter to look good on the balance sheet, only to hire most of those people back. Rinse and repeat.

Again, this has nothing to do with "doing a good job" or being a model employee. The days of working hard and getting rewarded are dead and buried, and the MBAs are the ones with the guns and shovels.

It is an interesting subject - but so much have been written about it in the past. I would like to read what are the new angles.

And for the past discussions see:

HACKER NEWS DISCUSSION LINKS

THE GERVAIS PRINCIPLE

* The Gervais Principle Main Submission (October 2009) https://ycombinator.com

* The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to "The Office" (August 2024) https://ycombinator.com

MORAL MAZES

* Moral Mazes: Bureaucracy and Managerial Work (February 2020) https://ycombinator.com

* Moral Mazes and Emotional Labor Comment (October 2019) https://ycombinator.com

MEDITATIONS ON MOLOCH

* Meditations on Moloch Systems Discussion (April 2019) https://ycombinator.com

* Meditations on Moloch Main Discussion (March 2023) https://ycombinator.com

* Context from Scott Alexander's Blog (June 2025) https://ycombinator.com

THREADS INTERSECTING MULTIPLE CONCEPTS

* Best books for dealing with workplace politics and dishonesty? (December 2020) https://ycombinator.com

* Analysis comparing Gervais Principle to Moral Mazes (April 2023) https://ycombinator.com

* Ask HN: Stories of political intrigue in large companies (December 2023) https://ycombinator.com

* Things I want to say to my boss (December 2025) https://ycombinator.com

Corporate world is tribal, if not feudal. Reason why the Nobles can do nothing wrong by default, and the Villagers are always the villan. If I may have a suggestion, Buckminster Fuller - Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth is a short and great perspective over these dynamics.

Never work tirelessly for anything that isn’t yours.

Because it is a human business, and human business is always messy and unfair.

You are not supposed to get any amount of fairness unless you have the power.

So much of it is association. The human brain (for better or worse) is really good at building comfort in routine. If you see the same person over and over, you naturally will think they are just "part of the environment." They belong there. You get to know "how they tick" and even if that person has faults, you sometimes overlook them because you have built up a rapport. Yeah, Billy in accounting can sometimes be late, but he is friendly and always knows the scores from the big game.

We would rather a known variable, even if it is not the best instead of an unknown that might be better.

I once jokingly answered in an interview question about time complexity something that is seemingly incorrect but is actually correct.

Everyone knows object lookups (hash maps) are generally O(1) complexity and thus more performant than arrays for looking up values.

And that becomes a rule of thumb - codified as law.

But it’s not always true. For example if you know the index, the array lookup is significantly faster in virtually all languages.

But I answered in a way that sounded like it was exactly wrong. And it was treated as such.

To me, it sums up the problem with corporate intelligentsia. And it gave me yet another reason to be fake and lie all the time.

While I think the nuance should separate the strong from the weak, instead you just get snapped to a grid of mainstream talking points anyway, so you have to stick to that grid up front if you know what’s best! Choose the right paths and they are rigid