ACT V: THE DAMAGE — What the system does to people
Shelley's original novel represents him as a man tragically driven by ambition and scientific curiosity, unable to deal with the consequences of his actions in "playing God," or being an irresponsible and negligent parent.
I've always been struck by the capacity that companies have to transform people.
While this observation is quite natural, I think it's necessary to make a distinction.
It seems theoretically and practically evident that people should be positively affected by work. The development of capabilities — academic, technical, professional, economic, and personal — could be considered essential purposes of companies, since without them, the organization is unlikely to achieve any of its objectives.
However, I find striking the capacity that companies have to transform great workers into great useless people.
Extremely intelligent people, with high academic levels, with excellent performance in their tasks, can be denaturalized to the point of becoming true cancers — useless, stupid, incapable. Some of them go from being apostles to true terrorists of the organization. Others, upon experiencing such a sensation, flee immediately.
This change can have infinite causes. Nevertheless, I believe that in most cases there's a common factor: disillusionment.
In work, as in other areas of life, the equation "expectations vs. reality" plays a predominant role. High expectations in the position, in the functions, in the tasks, in the bosses, in the companies — they crash hard against reality, leaving a feeling of emptiness difficult to bear.
Regardless of the origin of the error, disillusionment corrodes, absorbs, and mutilates — slowly — all those characteristics of the person that made them a great worker. It installs itself at first as a concern, an annoyance. But little by little it increases its effect, spreading through all interactions.
All this is due to the fact that the impact of work on people's lives has infinite magnitudes. But despite this, its actors permanently refuse to acknowledge it.
At year's end, companies tend to perform financial balances, review indicators, and many other activities from which they will "theoretically" "learn." An indicator they should incorporate is the Number of Frankensteins generated.
The Taleb Connection
Companies hire good people, then systematically break them. The asymmetry is total: small benefits to the firm — a slot filled, a deliverable shipped — against large damage to the person, slowly. The cost of every Frankenstein is paid by the worker, not the company that built the lab.
"Iatrogenics, literally, 'caused by the healer,' iatros being a healer in Greek." — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile (2012), Book VII, Ch. 21
That's the term. Harm caused by the helper. Companies present themselves as developers of human capability — academic, technical, professional, economic, personal. The iatrogenic version is the one Dr. Frankestein is about: same intervention, opposite outcome. The worker arrives healthy. The healer goes to work.
I wrote this in 2014 — my last post in the original series. The Frankenstein metaphor felt right: companies as careless creators, workers as creatures abandoned by their makers. Taleb calls it iatrogenics. Shelley called it playing God. I just called what I saw.
This article was translated from the 2014 Spanish original and revised in 2026 through human-AI collaboration — clarifying transitions and adding connections to Nassim Taleb's framework.