TechTakes

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.

My wife, as a teacher and educational psychologist, is honestly shocked that Growth Mindset's bullshit has moved out of education and into business; it's been responsible for removing classes that are streamed by ability and replacing them with things like tormenting low-achieving students by telling them they can achieve if they just try harder, and torturing high-achieving students by making them into unpaid teacher aids instead of extending them.

You, gentle reader, may be more shocked and angry at her news that some schools are adopting Agile, where they spend several hours every two weeks in retrospectives and planning what they'll teach for the following two week sprint, with no long term plan for the children.

Edit: “Here’s four links, have at them.”

• https://www.sec-ed.co.uk/content/blogs/the-danger-of-growth-mindset/
• https://www.edutopia.org/discussion/growth-mindset-dead (2015!)
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorrison/2023/12/18/its-not-their-mindset-thats-holding-children-back-at-school-study-finds/
• https://www.edweek.org/education/opinion-misinterpreting-the-growth-mindset-why-were-doing-students-a-disservice/2017/06

In Satya Nadella's Hit Refresh, he says that "growth mindset" is how he describes Microsoft's emerging culture, and that "it's about every individual, every one of us having that attitude — that mindset — of being able to overcome any constraint, stand up to any challenge, making it possible for us to grow and, thereby, for the company to grow."

Strikes me as a poorly plagiarized Toyota Kata. Toyota Kata promises your org will be maximally adaptive but it sounds like Satya wanted to one-up that with "overcome any constraints". Toyota emphasizes iterative improvements as way a to build up systems knowledge, but Satya seems to take an essentialist read on the matter to say it's a "mindset", like improvement is an ingredient instead of a process.

Excuse me, I need a lie down...

Edit: How open is this to abuse you may ask? Imagine yourself to be an evil person, such as a ~~chickenshit~~ conflict-averse MBA-holding manger. If you need to get rid of an employee, then feed their Connect form through the nondeterministic bullshit machine repeatedly until it gives you an excuse. It's the perfect accountability sink + employee disposal. Employee argues? They're failing to apply the growth mindset.

Microsoft Growth Mindset = Amazon Day One

I swear to Christ that corporate America is only getting worse. The best thing that could happen to just about every major corporation would be aggressive antitrust action resulting in a breakup. All the FAANG companies would be a good start, along with every media company you could name.

It seems that happens to management at every company, at various strength. I swear there must be a source for all this shit, like Forbes or something.

A side note:

"... It's all hallucination.”

prone to hallucination.

No, just no.

Everything generative AI produces is a hallucination.

Some may correlate with reality, but it is still a hallucination.

LLMentalist

this is one of the wildest articles I've ever read

Jesus.

Where's Ed been? Corporate philosophies are a dime a dozen in tech and they're always just vague enough to use as a justification for management to do whatever they were already planning on doing.

Microsoft's growth mindset is no more problematic than Amazon's leadership principles or any of the other corporate pillars we inevitably need to phrase our accomplishments around in order to get hired/promoted. They're all the same pseudoscientific MBA BS that's been permeating the industry for years.

This article could have been written about just about any large tech company with the same concerns and conclusions.