Street fights
Street fighting is a topic on which a large number of men hold strong opinions, although very few have been in a true fight. I haven’t, and I hope never to be in one. Playground fisticuffs are one thing, but for adults, street fighting is far too dangerous to be considered anything but a terrible idea. It’s not likely to happen, but a punch from an adult can kill. The exact mechanics by which punches to the face incapacitate aren’t fully understood, but rotation in the neck (constricting blood vessels) seems to be a culprit, and the forces involved in a proper face punch are enough, with the right conditions, rupture blood vessels in the neck and head and end a life. A person falling and hitting the ground can do it, too.
Anything before age 16 doesn’t count. Martial arts sparring doesn’t count. Boxing doesn’t count. Fight clubs don’t count. Those are a lot safer. In a real fight, you typically don’t know your opponent. If he wins, he might kill you (intentionally or otherwise) once you are on the ground. He may have a weapon and, even if he doesn’t, he can kill you with a few kicks or punches. Losing means you’re likely to end up in the hospital (and possibly dead). Winning means you have to appear in court, possibly for murder. Either way, it’s not a good place to be. If there are bystanders, the loser faces humiliation but probably won’t die. If there are none, it is up to the one who wins the fight, and unintentional (or intentional) deaths from punches and kicks happen all the time.
The moral bikeshedding around fistfighting (and the actual physical risks of it) are discussed in this analysis of the Trayvon Martin case. Is George Zimmerman a huge asshole and a probable racist? Absolutely. Should he have followed and harassed a 17-year-old? No, not at all. Is George Zimmerman a good or admirable person? Clearly not. Was Zimmermann in mortal danger during that fistfight? Yes. He was on the ground, being punched, which alone puts his life in danger. (“Ground and pound” constitutes attempted murder in most jurisdictions.) He had a lethal weapon and, if he lost capacity, he’d also lose control of the weapon. Zimmerman’s wrongdoing was following a stranger in the first place– but not firing a gun in “just a fistfight”. When the opponent is a stranger and there is no one to break up the fight, there is no such thing as “just a fistfight”.
Fistfights (and armed confrontations) aren’t like what people see in movies or on television. Some notable differences are:
- in most, the loser is incapacitated within a few seconds. One punch can do it, and the element of surprise (that is, being the one to start the fight) confers a huge advantage.
- fighting is exhausting and most people will be winded (and vulnerable) inside of 15 seconds. Fights become remarkably more dangerous at this point, a common cause of unexpected death being falls after a decisive punch.
- it’s very difficult to get up when grounded, especially if one has taken several blows to the face or head.
- an incapacitated opponent is easy to kill, either with continual punching, kicks to the head, or a stomp to the head or neck. Most fights are broken up before that can happen, but unexpected deaths (even from a single punch) occur, sometimes hours after the fight.
- if there are two or more opponents, fighting skill and strength typically won’t prevent a very bad outcome. Two-on-one is dangerous.
- most untrained people, when attacked, will panic. Between the short duration of typical fights, the incapacitating nature of blows to the face or head, and the effect of surprise, that initial second or two of shock is enough to cause them to lose the fight.
Knowing all this, I also know to avoid getting into fistfights. I might know more than most people about them (because I’ve done my research) but I won’t pretend to have any idea how I’d perform. It’s not worth finding out.
Enough about fistfighting, though. It’s not that interesting. I just wanted to bring it up, because it’s something that men think they know a lot about, and they tend to underestimate the risks. There are a lot of people who think they know what they’d do in George Zimmerman’s position (panicked, mounted, having sustained several punches). Most of them don’t. They haven’t been in a fight since junior high, and those don’t count.
“I would…” Stop right there. You don’t know.
Let’s talk about organizational life, on which I’ve shared a lot of opinions.
Ask a software engineer in Silicon Valley for his opinion on collective bargaining, and you’re likely to hear a negative response. Unions have been targeted for negative publicity for decades and have a reputation for mediocrity and corruption. “I don’t need no stinkin’ union!” Your typical 25-year-old engineer probably hasn’t been fired from a job he wanted or needed to keep (a summer job doesn’t count). He’s probably never faced financial pain or stress on account of a bad job outcome. If he needs to negotiate a severance (or, a more delicate task, an agreed-upon reference) from an employer unwilling to budge, he probably has no idea what to do.
As with fistfighting, most people have an alarmingly precise image of how they’d get out of a bad situation and, for the most part, they don’t know.
“If I were in that grapple, I’d grab his wrist and bite down, then drive my elbow into his balls, then knee him in the head until he gave.” (No, you wouldn’t. You’d be panicked or confused, having taken several punches, and struggling to stay conscious.)
“If I were in a two-on-one fight like that, I would…” (Sorry, but in a two-on-one fight against capable, adult opponents, you’re fucked.)
“If I were put on a PIP, I would…” Same principle. If you’ve never been in a real fight, you don’t know.
Companies have trained fighters on staff, between their attorneys and HR. They have hard fighters who’ll insult and belittle you, and soft fighters who’ll pretend to take your side, while taking notes that can be used against you. If the company wants you in a two-on-one, you’ll face that: your manager and HR, or your manager and his manager. You basically can’t say anything in a two-on-one meeting. They will plan the meeting beforehand together, decide on “the story” afterward together, and (most likely) you’ll have no credibility in court or internally. If the meeting is adversarial and two-on-one, say as little as you possibly can.
In a police interrogation, you’d have the right to have your attorney present, and the right to remain silent, and you really want to exercise those rights. Watch this incredibly convincing video, backed by decades of experience, if you have doubt on that matter. What about a PIP meeting, which comes unannounced? On Tuesday, your boss was congratulating you on your work. You were an employee in good standing. On Wednesday, you’re told in the middle of a 1-on-1 “not performing at your level”. You were ambushed; there was no sight that this was coming. That corner you cut because your boss told you to do so is now being cited as an example of the low quality of your work. Most people think they would immediately fight intelligently, with the same confidence as applied to fistfights. Not so. Between the initial panic (especially if the person has financial needs) and intense emotions related to betrayal, it’s going to be really hard not to shit the bed when under a PIP ambush. And, as with a fistfight, it’s really easy to lose quickly. Raise your voice? You’ll probably be fired “for cause” because of “threatening behavior”. Attempt to amend the PIP’s factual inaccuracies? (There will always be inaccuracies in a PIP and they’re intentional. Those documents are supposed to piss you off because about 1 in 5 will lose his cool, thereby firing himself on the spot.) That might be construed as insubordination.
HR is probably present in meetings with management, from that point forward. The reason put forward to the PIPee is to protect the employee against managerial retaliation, and that’s complete bullshit. HR is there to corroborate management’s version of the story (even if management lies). Nothing that the employee says can improve his case. As with a fistfight, two-on-one means you’re probably done. Avoid it if you can.
In one way, it’s more perilous to be under PIP ambush than in a police interrogation, though. In the latter, one has the right to be silent and to call in a lawyer. In a PIP meeting, the rules aren’t clearly defined. Is an employee who refuses to answer a manager’s question guilty of “insubordination”, allowing termination on the spot? Can the employee be fired for refusing to sign the PIP “until I talk to a lawyer”? (That will be noticed.) Can the employee turn down an “independent” HR party’s meeting request “to hear your side of the story”? (Don’t fall for this.) Is the employee guilty of insubordination if he shares, with other employees, that he’s under a PIP, and voices his supposition that the decision to place him on it was political? At-will employment is complicated and undefined in many cases, and the answers to these questions are, “no one knows”. The company will terminate (once a PIP is shown, the decision has been made and only a change in management can reverse it) when it feels it can do so with minimal risk and cost. Some companies are aggressive and will use anything that is said in a PIP or HR meeting as cause to fire without severance. Now, at-will employment has a lot of serviceable corner cases (despite what employers claim) but is it worth it to launch a lawsuit against a deep-pocketed adversary? For most people, probably not. And lawsuits (again, like fistfights) are another form of combat in which an untrained person has no idea what to expect, and is at a disadvantage. Say the wrong thing, and it will be used against you. Even if you “should” win because you have the space or superior ability, you can lose in seconds.
With PIP meetings, management has had time to prepare, and the employee is ambushed. That unfairness is intentional. It’s part of the design. Same with the two-on-one intimidation. In a PIP meeting, silence will be presented as a non-option. Even though this is illegal, most employers will claim that not signing the PIP will lead to termination (record this conversation on a cell phone if you can; but if you’re not unusually calm, there’s a low chance that you’ll remember to do this). They can bring anyone they want into the room, but you almost certainly won’t be allowed to have an attorney or representative present. It’s unfair, it’s shitty, and you need to have a plan before it ever gets to that. Your best option is to say, “I need to go to the bathroom”. Take time, calm down, and possibly call a lawyer. If you return to the PIP meeting 20 minutes later, so be it. They can wait.
Macho self-reliance
No amount of self-defense training will make it safe to get into a street fight. The odds may improve, but it’s still an inherently dangerous thing to do. Knives aren’t good protection, being much harder to control in a fight than one might think, and inviting other weapons such as guns. Speaking of guns, most people wouldn’t know what to do with a gun in a situation of actual danger. Many would think that, with a gun against four unarmed assailants, they’d be able to emerge the winner. I wouldn’t count on that.
All that said, there are plenty of people (mostly men) who believe that, because of their martial arts training or because they possess a weapon, they can safely go to places, and engage in behaviors, that make fistfights common. They’re wrong. The issue is that people wish to identify with the winner in any conflict. “I would never end up on the ground like that.” They overestimate their performance in the face of fatigue, panic, confusion, or under time pressure. Until something bad happens to that person, many people assume it never will. “I’d never be put on a PIP, because I’m good at my job”. That’s wrong, too. True low performers are usually eased out through other means. PIPs are generally used to sucker-punch a politically-targeted high performer, and they work. Plenty of people shit the bed the first time they see one.
In the world of work, this macho self-reliance is seen in the resistance of many workers to any sort of protection. You hear this one a lot from software engineers: “I wouldn’t want to work somewhere where it’s hard to fire people.” I’m sorry, but that’s a bit ludicrous. It should be hard enough to fire people that the politically unlucky still end up with a decent severance, and hard enough that people who fit poorly with their first project are given at least one more chance.
Let’s talk about the “10x engineer”. That effect is real. It’s not only about natural ability, so it’s not the same people who’ll be “10x” in every single context. Motivation, project/person fit, political position (those who write code and make decisions will always be more productive than those who read code and are downwind of decisions) and domain-specific expertise all apply. To understand why, consider the Gaussian bell curve, which emerges as random variables compound additively. In most human affairs, though, they compound multiplicatively, producing the “fat-tailed” lognormal distribution. Sometimes, there are knock-on effects that produce an even fatter-tailed power law distribution. (If this all sounds like jargon, the takeaway is, “outliers are more common than one would think.”) Consider a world in which a new employee’s productivity is a function of the outcome of a 6-sided die, like so:
| Die | A | B |
-------------------
| 1 | 0 | 4 |
| 2 | 9 | 6 |
| 3 | 10 | 10 |
| 4 | 10 | 20 |
| 5 | 11 | 40 |
| 6 | 11 | 100 |
In scenario A, average employees (10 points) have job security, because even at that point, they’re above the mean productivity (8.5 points) of a new employee. Even the noticeably below average employees are OK. On the other hand, in Scenario B, the mean is 30 points, which means that the mediocre ’3′s and ’4′s (10 and 20 points, respectively) should be fired and will be, even if it’s not their fault. In practice, it doesn’t workout quite that badly. Firing average employees is bad for morale, and the “10x” effect is as much about motivation and purpose as it is about the individual. But we can see, from a theoretical basis and considering the convex nature of software development, why tech companies tend to have such mean-spirited management practices. From their perspective, they’re in the business of finding and exploiting 10x-ers (who won’t be paid anything remotely close to their value, because they’re lucky to still be employed) and anyone who seems not to be a 10x-er should be tossed back into the sea.
Closed allocation tech companies, one notes, are notoriously awful when it comes to internal mobility. This is a severe ethical issue because internal mobility is promised almost inherently by big companies. It’s the one advantage large companies have over small ones. Yet, most technology companies are set up so that median performers are practically immobile (unless their projects are canceled and they must be put somewhere). Headcount limitations and political intricacies (one manager not wanting to upset the other) arrange it so that middling and even average-plus performers can’t really move anywhere. The fact that there are political externalities to deal with, alone, makes them less desirable to the target team’s hiring manager than a fresh recruit from outside the company. Stars generally are worth fighting a broken transfer system to attain, but they generally don’t want to move, because they have a gravy train they’d rather not stop.
Most software engineers think too logically and will take basically reasonable premises (“low performers should be fired”) to unreasonable conclusions (“performance reviews should be part of the transfer packet”). This allows technology companies to abuse them, taking advantage of their just world delusion and rugged individualism. When very real abuses are targeted toward those around them, they fail to perceive that such things could ever happen to them. “I’m a rock star coder. I’ll never be put on a PIP! If I were, I’d just work weekends and show the boss he’s wrong!” This is like claiming that knowing a couple jiujitsu throws makes it safe to get into bar brawls. It’s just not true.
Do we need unions?
Originally, I said no. When I said that, to be frank about it, I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. I got professions right, but I had a defective understanding of what labor unions actually do and why they are important.
I’m not ready to come down on either side of that question. We also don’t want to see the seniority-bound nightmare of, say, the airline pilots’ unions. Also, uniformity in compensation begets mediocrity on both sides and we don’t want that; the good news is that writers’ and actors’ unions seem not to destroy the upside in pay for those people. Hollywood’s labor pool, including celebrity actors, is unionized and hasn’t suffered in quality or compensation for it. Professional structure doesn’t necessarily lead to mediocrity.
However, we need collective bargaining. We need the right of a software engineer to have an independent representative, as well as legal counsel, in the room when in hot water with management (to prevent those “shit the bed” PIP ambush scenarios). We need protection against political terminations, such as for revealing salary information (the general prohibition offices have against that isn’t for anyone’s benefit but their own) or committing the overperformance offenses (doing a job too well, and embarrassing others) typical of engineers. We need to be part of a political body that corporate management actually fears. When we act in good faith against the interests of our employers (say, by revealing abuses of power) we shouldn’t have to do it alone. We also need to have the right to have those contractual issues that are embarrassing to negotiate for oneself (severance, health accommodations, privacy) negotiated for us by more experienced parties. We need automatic legal assistance in questionable terminations, and automatic work-stopping shutdowns (strikes) against any employer who resorts to a negative reference. We need sleazy and unreliable “back channel” reference checking to be abolished, with employers who engage in or allow it being sued or struck into oblivion.
Right now, we get none of this, and it’s a total fucking crime.
That delusional programmer self-reliance (“I know how to handle myself in a fight”) allows employers to isolate “troublemakers” and pick them off, one by one. It allows them to negotiate salaries and conditions down, brutally, due to asymmetric information and broken, reputation-driven power structures in which even six months out of traditional employment can ruin a person’s life. It allows stack ranking and closed allocation, which any labor body with self-respect would fight back against.
Because of our nonsensical self-reliance, when we do fight, it is usually an individual acting alone. Employers can easily ruin the reputations of isolated individuals, and few will protect a person thus disparaged. Consequently, those battles are typically ineffective and humiliating to the fighter. The conclusion of the workers is that management simply can’t be fought. Yet those same people believe that, through hard work or some notion of personal “merit”, they’ll never face political adversity, unfair terminations, or humiliating, destabilizing processes such as PIPs. Like armchair street fighters, they don’t know what the fuck they are talking about.
Collective strength
Street and bar fights are depressing, illegal, stupid, and dangerous. Your average person would have no idea how to respond in a sudden, unexpected assault, and be completely at the mercy of the attacker. Others who could assess the situation would have a chance to interpose, but the victim would have lost the fight by the time the initial shock wore off. The good news is that such things are uncommon. Most people haven’t been in a fight since high school, if ever. Why? In public spaces, attacking another person is dangerous and generally a terrible idea. One might get beaten up oneself, especially if others interpose, and jail time is likely. When it comes to physical violence, there’s an understanding that, while rare, bad actors do exist and that it’s worth it to protect a stranger against an attack, if one can. People will often defend each other, which makes the costs and risks of assault sufficiently high that it’s a rarity.
In the workplace, we don’t see this. When a good employee is served with a PIP or fired, nothing really happens. People live in such fear of management that word of the unjust termination is unlikely to travel far, and even more unlikely to have any effect on the company. Those who oppose a company’s management in any way, no matter how trivial and even if it is accidental, are isolated and embarrassed by the organization. If it really cannot afford the image issues associated with a clearly political demotion or termination, it will simply assign him untenable work, interfere with performance, and render it impossible for him to do a good job, making the eventual outcome appear deserved.
The result is that sudden, unpublished assaults are common in the corporate world, sometimes because a person falls into an unknown political trap and winds up in a management-level grudge, sometimes because the organization must protect unrelated interests, and sometimes for no reason at all. They are rarely talked about. The person is isolated and either goes silently, or is humiliated. Opposition to the organization resulting from his treatment will never happen. In light of the severe (and unreasonable) stigma placed on employees who “bad-mouth” ex-employers, he can’t sue or publicly disparage that company without risking far more than he should ever have to put on the line. No one has the individual employee’s back, and that’s a shame.
Software engineers might be the worst in this regard, because not needing support is taken as a badge of pride, as seen in tech’s celebration of reckless firing, punishing work conditions, and psychotic micromanagement in the name of “agile”. “I don’t need no stinkin’ rights. Two fists are all I need.” That just makes no sense. It renders the individual programmer (a person with skills for which demand is so high that, if we acted collectively, we could really improve things for ourselves) easy to isolate, exploit, and humiliate if he even attempts to get a fairer deal.
The enemy, and this is especially a problem for software engineers, is delusional self-confidence. People feel a lot safer than they actually are, and to communicate the truth of one’s lack of safety is taken as admitting weakness, which allows the bad actors to isolate their targets easily. This prevents non-managerial professional groups (such as software engineers) from acting collectively and overcoming their current disadvantage.
