I worked for a large technology company in northern California. Most people worked for a competitor in the past. Most people plan to work for a competitor in the future. People generally tried to change jobs every two years. That dulls any desire to trash talk competitors.
If you say anything bad about a company, it might hurt you when you interview at that company in a year or two. Even if you genuinely dislike a company, you will interview there to get an offer. Competitive offers can double the value of your stock grant.
I expect that an us-vs-them mentality was easier to have when people tended to work at companies for a decade at a time.
My experience is even more extreme: I tend to feel more camaraderie with my counterparts (I'm a software engineer) at other companies than I do with my own company's senior leadership.
Someone I used to work with working for a competitor is offering me a job, and if I want to go back to my current employer in a few years they will likely take me.
In my experience the senior people in a firm often dislike their counterparts at competitors, precisely in the personal way you describe. Any lost sale is ascribed to backroom deals, palm-greasing, and unethical actions, even when there is no evidence of wrongdoing, rather than accepting that one's own product was a worse fit or that the customer contact was mishandled. The strongest leaders are able to ignore this tendency and make objective appraisals so that their companies can keep improving based on market feedback.
In my industry (management consulting), there is a sort of constant cognitive dissonance around this topic. The truth is that most competing firms are very similar since the "product" is hours of time with the consultants who are experts in the area the client needs. Thus, the quality of the firm's product really boils down to how good its people are in each area, which means recruiting and retention are always top priority. So on the one hand, management at my firm will denigrate the competitors by saying they have bad culture, ethics, or leadership - basically saying "this is a better place for you. Even if a competitor offers you more money, you should still stay here because of the vague cultural advantage". On the other hand, they will absolutely jump at any opportunity to hire a good person away from a competitor, which betrays their true belief that competitors have very valuable products, in some cases better than our own. Same thing with competitor's management - we will denigrate them, but we will also take every effort to learn exactly how they are marketing themselves to potential clients so we can steal their ideas.
In practice people self select so every firm thinks it is better than every other. The people at my firm who have good managers/projects have a good experience and tend to stay. The people with bad managers/projects tend to leave. At our competitors, the same thing happens, so the people who are dissatisfied at competitors come here. Thus the population of each firm is self-selected, so if you ask your co-workers who used to work at a competitor what they think of it, they will almost always say it was worse.
You wouldn't know it from the way that Adam Smith quote is thrown around nowadays, but it's clear when the full passage is read in context that he was arguing against laws requiring tradesmen to join guilds. His argument was that tradesmen try to collude all on their own, and while legally barring them from associating would be an infringement on their liberty, at the very least we should refrain from legally requiring them to meet.
I bet that the average person waving that quote around would be surprised to know that it was essentially an argument for 18th-century right-to-work laws.
This doesn't match my experience. I'm an entrepreneur and have been working in small tech firms my entire career. I think my competitors are mostly good people who are trying to do well in a crowded space. Where I think some bias may creep in is in the competitive tactics. If a competitor copies a product feature that my product has, they are being underhanded and deceitful. If I add a feature to my product that a competitor has, that's just business.
Workers (not owners) in competitive businesses are, in my experience, usually pretty chatty and friendly with one another. You never know if/when you'll end up working at the competitor. To the extent that there are trade secrets that the owner/principal would rather not share, the workers/agents are not fully aligned with that plan.
Working in the video game industry, most people see competitor firms as potential future employers. So there's not a lot of inter-firm animosity on a personal level. And most of us are fans of video games as players. So a new game launches that's amazing, you probably love it on its merits.
Since you asked. In the 80s I ran a small software company. In the 90s and 00s I was "Director of Standardization" in a medium-sized technology company - an engineering role in which much of my job was representing the company in national and international standardization bodies (ANSI, IETF, ITU, ECMA, etc. - technical standards, interoperability stuff). Since then I've co-founded and co-run a small biotech company.
When I was running the 80s software company I had little contact with competitors (trade shows was about all), and I was pretty hostile. I felt they'd stolen our IP and were sleazy (we did have one firm that made a pretty exact clone of our product - identical GUI, etc. and another that plagiarized large parts of our user manuals word-for-word). Also I was young and stupid.
In the 90s and 00s in the standardization role, my attitude was totally different. I was not (except toward the very end) in top management and never felt proprietary about the company. Most managers in the company had contempt for competitors - they'd claim they lied, were incompetent, untrustworthy, etc. I didn't feel that way at all - I had a lot of respect for the engineering abilities of competitors. and felt my role was to cooperate with competitors to draft technical standards that would make the industry as a whole larger and more successful. I became quite chummy with some of the representatives of competitors, but had more hostile relationships with others. A lot depended on their attitude - if they were there for short-term maneuvering to benefit their company at the expense of others (patent issues, sunk costs in ways of doing things), we didn't get along. Usually these were people who'd show up for a few months and then disappear. If they shared the common goal of building the industry, we got along and sometimes there was a lot of trust. There may have been some "Stockholm syndrome" going on where I sided with the industry as a whole more than with my particular company. I had an outside view and thought my own company behaved not much better than others (except to the extent I leaned on them to be better). I had some conflicts in the company with senior managers who saw competitors as slimy evildoers. And sometimes I saw my own company as a slimy evildoer, when we made exaggerated marketing claims, etc.
Since we started the biotech, again I haven't had much interaction with competitors, but what little interaction I've had has been mostly positive and cooperative. I can't think of any competitor that I feel is "evil" - just some are more competent than others. Sometimes we do business with them, buying/selling components needed for some larger project, quite cooperatively.
That all said, my experience is probably not typical.
In private language education in Korea? I'd say that virtually all of my employers as a teacher, and owners I've dealt with as a small-fry publisher, have had amiable dispostions toward most of the competitors they knew personally, but held hugely negative opinions about the industry as a whole. The 99% they didn't know were mostly a den of vipers, trying to make a quick buck with false promises.
Sure, some of this may have been their skillful operation within a collectivist culture, keeping how much they hated each other thoroughly opaque to yours truly. But I wouldn't put my money on that.
Why did it take Musk buying Twitter to reveal the High-Tech / Government collusion that imposed censorship on social media accounts who disagreed with the "Narrative"? Why were Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook all doing the same thing to censor free speech?
It used to be that American tech executives hated each other and fought tooth and nail to crush the opposition. But that was 20+ years ago. Since 2000, Silicon Valley firms have been found guilty of colluding to suppress employee salary offers and now they are guilty of colluding with the government to violate the 1st Amendment.
And what about the ongoing pattern of corporations merging and eliminating competition? How many hotel brands does Marriott now own? Seems to me corporate managers are quite happy to NOT COMPETE as long as they are rewarded financially. Do note that All the big tech firms collaborated to destroy Parler. So there we see cut-throat competition. Illegal collusion to prevent a company from even being able to offer its product to customers!
Very cordial on the defense bar here in Northern California, even among counsel that work for the same insurance companies, for instance. Relations with plaintiffs bar are usually fine, with some notable exceptions, unless they’re from LA. LA attorneys are a huge pain generally.
I worked for a large technology company in northern California. Most people worked for a competitor in the past. Most people plan to work for a competitor in the future. People generally tried to change jobs every two years. That dulls any desire to trash talk competitors.
If you say anything bad about a company, it might hurt you when you interview at that company in a year or two. Even if you genuinely dislike a company, you will interview there to get an offer. Competitive offers can double the value of your stock grant.
I expect that an us-vs-them mentality was easier to have when people tended to work at companies for a decade at a time.
+1
My experience is even more extreme: I tend to feel more camaraderie with my counterparts (I'm a software engineer) at other companies than I do with my own company's senior leadership.
+1
Someone I used to work with working for a competitor is offering me a job, and if I want to go back to my current employer in a few years they will likely take me.
In my experience the senior people in a firm often dislike their counterparts at competitors, precisely in the personal way you describe. Any lost sale is ascribed to backroom deals, palm-greasing, and unethical actions, even when there is no evidence of wrongdoing, rather than accepting that one's own product was a worse fit or that the customer contact was mishandled. The strongest leaders are able to ignore this tendency and make objective appraisals so that their companies can keep improving based on market feedback.
In my industry (management consulting), there is a sort of constant cognitive dissonance around this topic. The truth is that most competing firms are very similar since the "product" is hours of time with the consultants who are experts in the area the client needs. Thus, the quality of the firm's product really boils down to how good its people are in each area, which means recruiting and retention are always top priority. So on the one hand, management at my firm will denigrate the competitors by saying they have bad culture, ethics, or leadership - basically saying "this is a better place for you. Even if a competitor offers you more money, you should still stay here because of the vague cultural advantage". On the other hand, they will absolutely jump at any opportunity to hire a good person away from a competitor, which betrays their true belief that competitors have very valuable products, in some cases better than our own. Same thing with competitor's management - we will denigrate them, but we will also take every effort to learn exactly how they are marketing themselves to potential clients so we can steal their ideas.
In practice people self select so every firm thinks it is better than every other. The people at my firm who have good managers/projects have a good experience and tend to stay. The people with bad managers/projects tend to leave. At our competitors, the same thing happens, so the people who are dissatisfied at competitors come here. Thus the population of each firm is self-selected, so if you ask your co-workers who used to work at a competitor what they think of it, they will almost always say it was worse.
You wouldn't know it from the way that Adam Smith quote is thrown around nowadays, but it's clear when the full passage is read in context that he was arguing against laws requiring tradesmen to join guilds. His argument was that tradesmen try to collude all on their own, and while legally barring them from associating would be an infringement on their liberty, at the very least we should refrain from legally requiring them to meet.
I bet that the average person waving that quote around would be surprised to know that it was essentially an argument for 18th-century right-to-work laws.
This doesn't match my experience. I'm an entrepreneur and have been working in small tech firms my entire career. I think my competitors are mostly good people who are trying to do well in a crowded space. Where I think some bias may creep in is in the competitive tactics. If a competitor copies a product feature that my product has, they are being underhanded and deceitful. If I add a feature to my product that a competitor has, that's just business.
Workers (not owners) in competitive businesses are, in my experience, usually pretty chatty and friendly with one another. You never know if/when you'll end up working at the competitor. To the extent that there are trade secrets that the owner/principal would rather not share, the workers/agents are not fully aligned with that plan.
In Australia, Visy and Amcor agreed to collude:
https://www.smh.com.au/business/visy-and-pratt-fined-36m-over-price-fixing-20071102-gdrhy2.html
Visy didn’t fully follow through on their part, and significantly increased market share perhaps as a result.
Completely different by the culture of the specific company.
Sometimes you have incumbents where the business is pretty static and people often hop back and forth. Then everyone is friends and wants to collude.
Sometimes you have startups which know that one of the competitors will destroy the others within a few years. Then everybody is competitive.
Working in the video game industry, most people see competitor firms as potential future employers. So there's not a lot of inter-firm animosity on a personal level. And most of us are fans of video games as players. So a new game launches that's amazing, you probably love it on its merits.
Since you asked. In the 80s I ran a small software company. In the 90s and 00s I was "Director of Standardization" in a medium-sized technology company - an engineering role in which much of my job was representing the company in national and international standardization bodies (ANSI, IETF, ITU, ECMA, etc. - technical standards, interoperability stuff). Since then I've co-founded and co-run a small biotech company.
When I was running the 80s software company I had little contact with competitors (trade shows was about all), and I was pretty hostile. I felt they'd stolen our IP and were sleazy (we did have one firm that made a pretty exact clone of our product - identical GUI, etc. and another that plagiarized large parts of our user manuals word-for-word). Also I was young and stupid.
In the 90s and 00s in the standardization role, my attitude was totally different. I was not (except toward the very end) in top management and never felt proprietary about the company. Most managers in the company had contempt for competitors - they'd claim they lied, were incompetent, untrustworthy, etc. I didn't feel that way at all - I had a lot of respect for the engineering abilities of competitors. and felt my role was to cooperate with competitors to draft technical standards that would make the industry as a whole larger and more successful. I became quite chummy with some of the representatives of competitors, but had more hostile relationships with others. A lot depended on their attitude - if they were there for short-term maneuvering to benefit their company at the expense of others (patent issues, sunk costs in ways of doing things), we didn't get along. Usually these were people who'd show up for a few months and then disappear. If they shared the common goal of building the industry, we got along and sometimes there was a lot of trust. There may have been some "Stockholm syndrome" going on where I sided with the industry as a whole more than with my particular company. I had an outside view and thought my own company behaved not much better than others (except to the extent I leaned on them to be better). I had some conflicts in the company with senior managers who saw competitors as slimy evildoers. And sometimes I saw my own company as a slimy evildoer, when we made exaggerated marketing claims, etc.
Since we started the biotech, again I haven't had much interaction with competitors, but what little interaction I've had has been mostly positive and cooperative. I can't think of any competitor that I feel is "evil" - just some are more competent than others. Sometimes we do business with them, buying/selling components needed for some larger project, quite cooperatively.
That all said, my experience is probably not typical.
In private language education in Korea? I'd say that virtually all of my employers as a teacher, and owners I've dealt with as a small-fry publisher, have had amiable dispostions toward most of the competitors they knew personally, but held hugely negative opinions about the industry as a whole. The 99% they didn't know were mostly a den of vipers, trying to make a quick buck with false promises.
Sure, some of this may have been their skillful operation within a collectivist culture, keeping how much they hated each other thoroughly opaque to yours truly. But I wouldn't put my money on that.
In Montana, the incumbent trash companies collude with government to bar competition from new entrants.
https://fee.org/articles/young-montana-entrepreneur-is-being-legally-barred-from-hauling-trash-because-established-players-don-t-want-the-competition/
Why did it take Musk buying Twitter to reveal the High-Tech / Government collusion that imposed censorship on social media accounts who disagreed with the "Narrative"? Why were Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook all doing the same thing to censor free speech?
It used to be that American tech executives hated each other and fought tooth and nail to crush the opposition. But that was 20+ years ago. Since 2000, Silicon Valley firms have been found guilty of colluding to suppress employee salary offers and now they are guilty of colluding with the government to violate the 1st Amendment.
And what about the ongoing pattern of corporations merging and eliminating competition? How many hotel brands does Marriott now own? Seems to me corporate managers are quite happy to NOT COMPETE as long as they are rewarded financially. Do note that All the big tech firms collaborated to destroy Parler. So there we see cut-throat competition. Illegal collusion to prevent a company from even being able to offer its product to customers!
From personal experience, engineers and managers at Google tend to dislike other tech companies (Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Uber, etc)
You might enjoy this comedy sketch about hostile business relations: https://youtu.be/mpC_hO15IoA
Very cordial on the defense bar here in Northern California, even among counsel that work for the same insurance companies, for instance. Relations with plaintiffs bar are usually fine, with some notable exceptions, unless they’re from LA. LA attorneys are a huge pain generally.