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