Yuppie Philosophy

The word Yuppie is used both to describe a social condition — being young, ambitions, urban, and professional — and to describe a particular way of relating to the world of work. We deal with the latter here.

In essence what follows describes the Archetypical Yuppie: the one who earns the derogatory connotations of the word.

The social generation prior to the Yuppies were the Craftsmen: people who believed that by working hard and doing a good job they would achieve success, be recognized, and get promoted. In truth it does not often work that way: some productivity goes unrecognized, some success is misattributed, promotions go to the people who are chatting up the boss — instead of actually working.

The Yuppie insight is that since recognition goes to those who are associated with successful projects, the short road to success is by associating oneself with projects after they start becoming successful. Because people who are already succesful are expected to be successful in the future, it is important to look like one is already successful. Because promotion can only go to a person whose name the executives know, make sure the executives know one's name.

Yuppies relentlessly pursue and ostentatiously flaunt status symbols, and are rewarded with generous compensation. They prefer managerial jobs where there primary occupation is designing documents and presentations that ally their names with successful projects and deflect blame for unsuccessful ones.

The Yuppie insight is one of the classic disease memes. It is competitive because it is literally true. It increases the status of sufferers. It is a disease because once an organization exceeds a critical mass of Yuppies, it cannot function: someone has to do work. Any organization dominated by Craftsmen will attempt to accept the Yuppie at face value, and thuse any Craftsmen organization that becomes infected will eventually fail.