from Hacker News

Company Missions Are Bullshit

by nelsonfigueroa on 7/7/24, 3:52 AM with 14 comments

  • by lewdev on 7/7/24, 4:21 AM

    The first company I joined had all of these amazing core values and talked about how each employee must exemplify these things. I totally ate it up and noted times that demonstrated these values so I could use them on my annual review.

    In my first 2-3 years I always hoped for raises and promotions, but nothing came of it. When I stopped caring, a role opened and I was promoted and got my raise. It was then I realized that it wasn't because I "demonstrated core values," it's because I fit the role and it opened up which made the company more money.

    The best advice I got from this experience is to make your boss look good. Whatever that is, make more money and build great things, and you will be rewarded with your raises and promotions. Otherwise, go find better opportunities on your own if they won't give it to you. As for following company values, don't take it too seriously but pretend you do and play along.

  • by benatkin on 7/7/24, 4:19 AM

    They typically make money by having a territory, and trying to win on that. For instance, Adobe has creative apps as its territory, and it tries to buy the competition, jack up the prices, make it hard to cancel, and tacitly encourage people who can't afford it like students to use it anyways. The mission statements usually indicate what this territory is.

    They don't have to rightfully own this territory. Most don't.

    I was thinking of it along the lines of the territory because of A War of Art by Stephen Pressfield which I read a long time ago. I should read it again because I'm not sure I got it right: https://jareddees.com/territorial-vs-hierarchical-orientatio... But I would argue that Stephen Wolfram would be a good example of this, where he had a similar role for decades.

  • by dqh on 7/7/24, 4:14 AM

    I almost can’t believe that I am defending this sort of thing, but if every company has the same mission of making money, then perhaps it is redundant to state it? Leaving the mission statement free to describe a way in which value is to be created.

  • by ohmyiv on 7/7/24, 5:09 AM

    It seems I'm wrong, but I always thought it was a given that a company's main goal is to make money, so the mission statement is used to define how that's going to be done. (Whether they follow it or not is a different can of worms.)

  • by Pet_Ant on 7/7/24, 4:12 AM

    Oh out company mission has respect, honesty, and integrity in it all while trying to staff every project not legally mandated otherwise with offshore staff.

  • by taesu on 7/7/24, 4:10 AM

    every layoff survivals make me more soul-less towards my day job. I could not agree more. I stopped buying into the bs mission north stars and short phrase missions. I just do my work and shut off.

  • by esafak on 7/7/24, 4:21 AM

    That's a false generalization. A lot of companies, such as Google and Uber, have meaningful, and understandable missions that they successfully realized, at least for a while.

    Also, the mission and the values are separate things. The values are more prone to being made up.

  • by salomonk_mur on 7/7/24, 4:13 AM

    I've been heavily advocating for this honesty in my current organization. It's painfully obvious that money is all that matters, we can stop with the unnecessary lies.

    The mission can be capitalistic. We can say our mission is to be the best in our industry for our region. No need to say we are changing X amount of lives (because we aren't).

    Then you attract talent that is keen on working in an organization striving to be the best (meaning being on the leading edge of tech in a given industry). But keeping a more altruistic mission when it's not true is just a recipe for disillusionment and higher personnel rotation.

  • by fidrelity on 7/7/24, 4:14 AM

    Yes, mission statements are usually just bullshit.

    But if you want to fulfil your mission you still need to make money, otherwise you have a dead company.

    Making money can never be a goal in itself. At the very least the money serves the status of founders and shareholders or enables one to pursue economically unviable hobbies.