alt Hacker NewsYeah, this is a cold attitude and it’s also not somehow inherent to business. It’s a reflection of the decaying social fabric of American business culture. Wanting to work in a place with some civility and decency isn’t passive aggressive.
Having that opinion 50 years ago would get you fired from any company immediately. Because social mores were less eroded then.
When Aunt Judy gives me a gift, I try to get her one too. It’s not a transaction I need to keep in my head, worrying if I owe her something. That sounds like an extremely depressing way to interact with other people.
Pretending that there aren’t unwritten social rules around gift giving and obligation is disingenuous. There ARE rules and there are consequences for not following them. It isn’t about a transaction, it’s about the expectations placed on participants by others in the system.
It’s not depressing at all, it’s how our society works. Most people have no problem intuiting most of these unwritten rules, or are quietly taught by their parents or relatives.
The point wasn’t about transactions, but about whether or not the rules of the system are written down and accessible or not. Both social circumstances have rules.
If you come at it from the idea that businesspeople are cold and unfeeling sharks, and that everything is a transaction, then naturally you would think it’s sad and depressing that someone must apply rules in the workplace and rules in other social settings too. But that’s a vast oversimplification that misses the point: that business professionals carrying out a task directly and efficiently is neither cold nor unfeeling, nor is it some portent of a decaying social fabric. It’s simply professionalism.
Most working people aren’t professionals and have no desire to be, so it comes across as hostile and insensitive, but it’s not.