Soundtrack: EL-P - Flyentology 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 performance is judged. I am

Kind of an inflammatory title, but I like to let it match for accessibility.

I’ve been enjoying Ed Zitron’s articles lately, because they call out CEOs who aren’t doing their jobs.

I’m sharing this partly because I’m honestly surprised to see criticism of Satya Nadella’s leadership. I think Satya has been good for Microsoft, overall, compared to previous leaders. And I was as convinced as anyone else when the “growth mindset” first hit the news cycle. It sounds fine, after all.

TL;DR:

  • Satya has baked “growth mindset deeply into the culture at Microsoft”
  • Folks outside of the original study authors have generally failed to reproduce evidence of any value in “growth mindset”
  • Microsoft is, of course “all in” on their own brand of AI tools, and their AI tools are doing the usual harmful barf, eat the barf, barf grosser barf, re-eat that barf data corruption cycle.
  • Some interesting speculation that none of the AI code flaunted by Microsoft and Google is probably high value. Which is a speculation I confidently share, but still, I think, speculation. (Lines-of-code is a bat shit insane way to measure engineer productivity, but some folks think it’s okay when an AI is doing it.)
  • heavy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

    Lol uh I mean I don’t think the author* is giving the generally normal people just working their job enough credit. In my anecdotal experience, the growth mindset stuff is just an excuse to say certain things at meetings, or make certain decisions, nobody is extremely bought in or anything.

    In fact, I knew some folks that left Microsoft because of the growth mindset changes for more “old school” places like Boeing.

    Generally speaking I think all these companies have some kind of cultish exterior, I can say this about Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook for sure. If you’re ever let inside the walls though, it’s mostly regular people trying to live their lives.