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Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says the company used to be so idealistic that people were 'not working very hard'
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
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I always found it amusing how the term "entitlement" has been butchered by Americans. It's the only language they know and they keep butchering it with low level polemical theatrics.
How is "I'm here for myself" an entitlement? This is not your family. The goal in any job is to maximize returns, i.e. least amount of work for high financial return (like ... wait for it ... running a business). Sure there are other factors at play too (career growth, not wanting others to have to work more because of you, being genuinely interested in what you are doing and not seeing it as work, not wanting to treat customers like shit), but that's an individual thing. A business isn't automatically entitled to any of that.
The entitlement of the business owners and CEO are the real fucking entitlement here. These pricks aren't entitled to my motivation. If they want me to be motivated to work hard, they have to provide that motivation. If the pay is shit, the work is shit, the colleagues are shit, and the boss is an entitled prick, there's no fucking way I'm motivated, and no fucking way am I gonna work hard.
While we're on the topic. If a business owner wants his workers to care about the profits of the company. Maybe they should be guarenteed a part of the profits, possibly even make their share of the profits be determined by how much value they add to the company. Though I see why the business owner doesn't want socialist stuff like that, since they'd end up owing the company money.
Giving me flashbacks to one of the worst jobs I ever had years and years ago. Within five years of leaving, all but two members of the most toxic team I'd ever worked with had quit, and the CEO had twice relocated the main office to cheaper and smaller buildings (I presume because of a drop in revenue). He treated them like shit, and they all passed it on down to new hires, effectively destroying employee morale from the top down. What a miserable crab bucket of a job.
Agreed. Although I am not even going this far.
I don't understand Huffman's use of the English language (I learned it when I was 4 and I use it for work and media consumption).
Idealism? What idealism? I've worked in several American startups and corps, I have friends who've work in multiple US tech corps and smaller startups. I have no clue how he brought idealism into the picture. And how is idealism related to working hard or not working hard? It's an unrelated concept. If anything, idealism implies you work too hard, instead of going with the flow and putting in effort only when it benefits you. And what's entitlement got to do with any of this?
It honestly sounds like Huffman bringing up random keywords in a borderline word salad "Entitlement! Entitlement is bad, right (it's neither good or bad)? Idealism is impractical! We must work hard!"
Probably things like "but the mods do that work for free, we should make things better for them" and "but we have no original content, it's the users who provide value, we should make things better for them." You know, stuff like that.
The harder I work the bigger my CEOs paycheck. Why the fuck should we "work harder"?
In this case it's a deliberate misuse by the GOP to conflate the word with welfare programs that the voters see as free handouts to the lazy. So then they can tout polling data that shows voters against entitlement programs as fodder to gut/end social security and Medicare. I'm constantly having to have this discussion with conservatives when they use the word incorrectly.
Yay Capitalist propaganda!