I have had a few bad interviews. When it gets to the non technical side of things they feel much harder to pass, because of some odd misalignment bubbling up.

Cells

Joining a company is, in essence, becoming part of a whole. Like cells within an organism. For us animals we don’t have a direct onboarding processes for cells that keeps them alive. Hey little cell, do you want to be part of my liver?

No. Instead we eat them and repurpose them after they are well beyond gone. The newly created cell has to abide to the growth an death signals that the organism orchestrates.

Unfortunately sometimes cells mutate to the point that they ignore the signals. We call them cancer, and they are a menace for the whole system. The immune system will fight the mutants as they are now foreign.

I believe that joining a company requires some form of shared hope, alignment in goals and manners that transcend the individual. And likewise abide to the structures of power that signal where growth and death needs to happen. Neat.

The analogy falters a bit if we take into account life beyond work. Things like personal beliefs, principles, competition can make this cellular contract end. There is more to life than work, right?

Signals from beyond

I have written a bit about the adaptive cycle:

[[2026-01-03-adaptive-cycle-omega-phase]]

I find ecology useful for systems thinking. The adaptive cycle with its discontinuity hypothesis helps to understand some of the dynamics at play.

The main idea is that there is a cycle that living things go through, converting energy into connections and complexity until they reach a limit, after which they need to reconfigure to find a new way.

adaptive cycle diagram

These happen at various scales in ecology. For interviews I see it as an interplay of 3 different scales:

  • Individual
  • Company
  • Society

Remember the signals within the company? There are signals for the company too. I can think of a few e.g.: monopoly laws and access to credit. But you know a big signal missing in there? Externalities. And a signal that is missing for all levels? Energy scarcity. [[2025-12-09-free-gifts-review]] does a good job explaining why are the externalities the way they are.

Individuals are more attuned to these signals. Otherwise books like Careless people would not exist. People revolt when companies act in a way that they consider harmful, so sometimes the signals skip the company scale.

I see this as an adversarial relationship. Companies try to assert their homeostasis by signaling their growth and death, while at the same time inhibit the inter-scale signaling. Laws are not strong enough to limit their growth, debt reduces their agency to even try.

They can only be cancer

The signals are very clear to me. The bigger the global capital is, the more nature claims we make and the harsher the future will be for future generations. I am not counting with miracles about the environment.

The adaptive cycle suggests that when resource overshoot happens, the best way forward is to invest on resilience and reduce in general, not to accelerate growth. This helps making the reconfiguration phase in an orderly manner.

I believe that some of the movements around energy around the Iran and Ukraine war signal exactly this, a directional change towards resilience at the national level. Every country is better off diversifying their energy sources and reducing consumption.

Strangely, capital does not work that way; it is protected from disruptions by corporate power, ensuring its homeostasis too. Without the appropriate signaling, companies have to grow aggressively to survive despite the bigger scale demand to slow down. They can’t afford to listen to the broader signal. Too big to fail, debt out of thin air, subsidised loses. [[2026-04-24-the-global-casino-review]]

We have seen these signals influencing capital before. Governments used to have less debt, more independent monetary policy. Monopolies used to be harder to sustain, public companies were more common.

With capital and the physical diverging, there has to be misalignment.

Following the analogy, cancer becomes systemic danger and eventual death of the whole organism. But the non cancerous cells have to keep going for as long as possible. Perhaps a remedy will come later. And even if it doesn’t, there is game after capital.