Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity(leadingsapiens.com) |
Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity(leadingsapiens.com) |
Plenty of dumb stuff can happen on the inside with no penalty.
That’s the game you’re in.
Hanlon's razor is also something that has been repeated so many times its not even funny anymore, and it originated as a joke in a joke book despite the revisionists trying to change that. It has no valid basis for the claims it makes.
Malice exists, and unfortunately quite a lot of people are malicious today and don't realize it. This is how evil works. It blinds the individual to the destructive consequences of their actions, and rhetoric designed to allow those people to continue in such delusions abound.
Gross Negligence coupled with loss is sufficient to show general intent which is need definitionally to show malice. If you are grossly negligent, and you caused loss, you are acting with malice even if you don't recognize that you are doing so. These are basic things that are no longer taught, that evil people take advantage of; unfortunately. The only way to not be evil is to always question from multiple perspectives, and don't repeat destructive actions when it may benefit you as an individual.
This article is also pushing for a narrative as soft propaganda. It seems like it might be worth listening to at a cursory level, but that's how influential propaganda works.
You can say something influential composed with certain elements, and still be completely wrong in what you are saying. Those that can't tell it for what it is, will be the victims, or they will find other victims to sacrifice in their place.
School is conveyor belt. Everyone can be educated, everyone can learn what they teach you in school. Depending on where you went, you can all be high quality or you can all be terrible. You can pretend to compete, but in the end, nobody is really stopping you from anything.
Work, and by that I mean high-achievement work that is the type of thing that the top kids end up applying for, is a pyramid. You can have the cream of the crop starting a new analyst class, every single one of them a top 1% achiever in education. Most of them by far (like really far) will not be MD or CEO. Whether you are the guy who makes it rarely depends on anything you have control over.
I need to tell people this, because if you go to a top uni, you've run into a lot of people who were studious, ambitious kids. They think "hey, if I put more effort in, I get rewarded". Which is true for these non-rivalrous things like science exams.
Then they graduate, and if you were an ambitious kid there's a fair chance you gravitate towards certain careers. And in those careers, the game is different. If you think being a good kid will help you, you will be frustrated. Other young professionals have got the same plan, to stay up until the early hours working. Or spending time playing the politics game. IMO you can't really win at the pyramid game, even if you make it to the top there's a lot of sacrifice and a lot of nervousness about whether you get there and how long you can stay.
You have already made it very far, in that sense.
You put effort in, you've gotten rewarded. The washouts from the up-or-out places have lots of soft landing places available compared to most people.
Whether you crash yourself against the rocks of having to be the top of the absolute whole world... that's a personal thing. Being aware of the structure is probably good for informing your decision, but you might've noticed it earlier too.
Other people have gotten rewarded more than you. And this is probably not new to you. There are almost always teacher's pets, spoiled brats whose parents gave them way more than you, beautiful people who get things handed to them for existing, easily-charismatic assholes who coast by or fail upward because everyone likes them, etc. One of the dirty secrets of elite high schools and higher education is already that not everyone worked as hard as you to get there.
The next 25+ years of your career are often dealt navigating corporate politics, financiers' M & A, industry developments, etc. And it's here that lots of smart, academically excellent people struggle. You can be the world's greatest data scientist, but if you are revealing truths that your boss (or boss's boss) doesnt like, you're probably going to get bounced. You could be doing a great job managing a large group of employees and operating your division efficiently, but some private equity fund buys your owners out and strip-mines the company. Many, many more scenarios. But these aren't "hopeless" situations, there is opportunity to succeed, but that opportunity is based upon people skills as opposed to the academic ideal of right answers vs wrong.
It's called the Dilbert principle [1], and also Putt's law [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putt%27s_Law_and_the_Successfu...
In a sports tournament: Someone is going to win, no matter how good the participants are.
It doesn't matter how fast you spin your wheels working on things unless those things are aligned with delivering value to actual paying customers. Politics also doesn't really matter. Well, it matters to idiots, there are certainly a lot of those out there, and there's some truth that if you piss off the wrong idiot you're likely to be kicked out to the curb. But at the end of the day the times I or anyone else I know has created real business value, it has been heavily rewarded with promotions, money, etc.
The problem I see with a lot of academics is, like you mentioned, even if they are smart and spend a lot of time on interesting and hard problems, if they can't draw a straight line from their project to whatever business problem they are actually solving they don't last particularly long.
For most people, politics will be a dominant force - if not THE dominant force - that they live or die by. Once more than 2 people are involved, you by definition have politics (albeit weak politics). It then grows slightly until it suddenly becomes much more important at about 150 people or so. By the time you're at 1000 it's a major force, and at 5000 it's the only force that matters anymore.
And even if it's not your organization that's this big, a small company selling to Amazon will only succeed if they know how to play Amazon politics.
Really doesn't matter. I promise you. It might score you some points, sure. But it's not required or necessary.
>Politics also doesn't really matter.
It is the only thing that matters.
You can say the academic isn't solving the business problem, which isn't, how to make the best washing machine, but how can we make the most money by embracing enshittification. But that's probably not why he was hired.
We’re all supposed to believe what? That the extremely rare 19 year old startup founders of the world believe the world is meritocratic? Uh, of course they do.
Of course there are fewer CEOs, managing directors or whatever your current fantasy is. But there are millions of them on the planet - it's not that small of a class.
- Many of which are in their 20s or 30s because they created their own business or joined a tiny team or found an employer with just the right yearning (which would be half their fault but also half yours for looking for it).
- Learning how the world works is a life's work. It's fine if you couldn't hierarchy in your 20s, there is still time to learn.
- "Not with that attitude, you won't". If you are still obsessed with anti-corporate political ideas (as a random example), just perhaps that won't help you. That will seriously constrain how or if you continue learning about how the world really works. If you find a different obsession as things go (like a family, say), there is nothing wrong with that - but don't blame it on the pyramid. "The world" is a complex dynamic system of billions of people, interactions and ideas. It has NOTHING to do with your current preconception.
- As you continue growing up, you might find very different interests: public interest, scientific, engineering prowess, family time again, a completely different career direction, self-employment, technical or management consulting, art or craft - and there is nothing wrong with any of these. Your yearning of "top 1% recognition" that you identified with in school - or wished you identified with in school - will have changed and that's fine.
And this is true for everyone in that specific pyramid that you think is in front of you. If the top - some top - is truly your purpose in life, very few people in that pyramid are truly your competitors in your own race.
But this is hard to internalize. Most schools do not train for this. And school was presenting you with convenient easy(? lol) hurdles which work life does NOT. In life after school, you have to manage your own scoreboard, year in year our, decade in decade out - and this can be wearing. And there again, you can find mentors who WILL help open your eyes - if you bother to (easy right? no still not - but feasible for the people who try.)
And this is triple true if you switched country during or after your studies. You are now in an environment that you didn't even grow up in and you have far more to learn. A very serious disadvantage that will take additional energy to overcome - but will also help open your eye to this idea that you do have a lot to learn about how the world works (while the natives assume they already know.)
- In school you can fail the entire class, (ie, all the students) which is less true at work. At work, you're just hiring your "section" of the bell curve, and insofar as being "successful" means "doing well at your job and not getting fired" then a C or D student can potentially be happily and gainfully employed indefinitely. They might have to take a less prestigious job, but they can find their niche and their place. This one really surprised me. You just don't have freedom of movement in school the way you do at work, and so anyone who is observant and hard working can pivot to a relatively-good situation for themselves. This just is not true at school.
- You get nearly endless chances to fail at work, and you usually have a PIP period of weeks or months to parachute to another job if you actually encounter failure. I know some people who have been failures for an entire 30-40 year career.
- If you're bad at writing essays in school, it doesn't matter; you simply need to write essays and getting better or worse at writing essays won't modify the number of essays you need to write. With work on the other hand you can specialize and minimize your weaknesses and play to your strengths. Yes, you can more easily change positions to accomplish this, but even within a single position you can just find ways to focus on the parts of the job you're best at and and excel at that area.
- Very, very few jobs have anything which resembles testing. In the real world you must understand _why_ certain things need to be done, but almost everyone has the opportunity to pause and look up the details via references. Testing really does not represent this whatsoever. It's also the case that some tasks at work will be done over and over again, and in real depth, and via this depth and repetition you will actually memorize things via real behavioral reward mechanisms that are just not possible in a classroom environment.
- You can always seek more clarification in the real world, and can even negotiate your own limitations. Your boss has asked you to do something? Have a conversation with them and explain the limitations in the approach and what sort of partial approach you think might work. This works great in the real world but is much, much more limited in a classroom environment.
- In general any class with subjective grading where the work was not anonymized, the name on top would affect the grade (sometimes significantly).
- Some friends actually did an experiment once; person A said that the instructor was grading them harshly because they didn't like them. Person B said "surely not, maybe they just don't like your writing style." So they wrote papers and swapped their names. The paper written by person A, but with person B's name on it got an A, the other got a B-.
- The most extreme case of this was when I pissed off my instructor and she took me aside and informed me that regardless of the quality of work I turned in, I would not be getting a grade higher than a C on any assignment, and I should expect a D for the class. In retrospect, I think the instructor was trying to get me to drop her class, but I was a freshman and didn't realize that was something you could do 4 weeks into the semester and I ended up with a D.
- I once had a paper returned scored "56/100" the only comments on the paper were "Great Job!! Almost an A paper!" The cutoff for a passing grade in that class was 60%.
Academia is better at setting clear requirements and measuring those goals, but whether these requirements have anything to do with being successful or useful in the real world is an entirely different matter.
School isn't reality, its mostly not even trying to simulate reality. School breads a lot of "Why was I not rewarded? I did everything they said i should do" disappointment in the real world.
I've read that male instructors are expected to be more objective, and that female instructors are rated more poorly when they are more objective (https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/what%E2%80%99s-name-exposing-gen...) but not anything on the rates of objectivity itself
"It also means that staying the course when things don’t go your way isn’t just a virtue but a practice. To play the long game, you have to keep showing up even after crushing disappointment without getting cynical of the process. Put differently, you need high levels of frustration tolerance."
Stoicism helps, or any form of resilience training. Leaders need high frustration thresholds to reach the top, because the view from up there doesn't get any better.
In my experience, everybody that I've worked with has been stressed, by the job, the managers, co-workers, and their client base. The worse the economy is, the higher the likelihood of people getting let go, so of course everyone is weary of everybody else and making sure that if somebody's head is heading for the shopping block, it's not themselves.
> No one is out to get you; they’re just out to get through the week.
The author seems to be too naive. I don't have first-hand experience, but just hearing my friends who work at a certain company talking about what's happening, I know how terrible some people can be. And that's a widespread issue (otherwise I would not hear about similar things happening to people in different organizations).
One example: people take credit for other people's work in front of higher management. You think someone would accidentally make a mistake and forget what they actually did themselves? Is that even possible? No, they know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing that. They are not trying to be friends with you.
With that in mind, remember that corporate IT department knows everything you do on your work computer. Every email sent, every process started, every keystroke. Good luck!
I am much later in my career than the audience I assume this is intended for, but I have struggled to mentor junior colleagues on many of the major bullet points here so succinctly.
This should be recommended reading for new college grads entering a more traditional (I.e. non-startup) work environment. Definitely keeping a bookmark of this for that reason.
I'd never thought of it this way explicitly, but it makes sense.
1) I am a dork, embrace it
2) Avoid Math
3) Scientific method = troubleshooting with purpose. Use it.
4) People in charge can be total idiots, but they're still in charge
5) Popularity and Competence are not related
6) Competence and compensation are not related
7) If you stay focused and just do you, you'll succeed despite other people's drama and your personal pains
8) Abuse is abuse, and people negligent in doing anything about it are participating in it. Get toxicity out of your life.
9) People who believe in you are right. Ignore the rest and allow yourself to thrive despite them.
School sucked.
True; as long as humans are humans, this will remain to be the case.
This whole mastermind bullshit just seems mentally exhausting.
That's really funny, I remember the day I watched a kid's femoral artery get slashed in a fight and watched my teacher use his belt as a tourniquet, thankfully the kid lived because of that.
Most of my schools were taught by burnt out underpaid angry folks who wanted you to stay in line, that's it, any other behavior would be met with derision, verbal abuse, and targeted violence by other students.
Meanwhile rich kids get into good schools because they can afford after school activities and tutors since birth.
I don't think "winning" at school has anything to do with those things. That sounds like a waste of time. Winning at school is about building knowledge and relationships which further goals that you set for yourself, not that the school sets for you. Sometimes good grades are a side effect.
i miss the days where tech pay only slightly above average and ppl in tech were considered losers and dorks.
Same problem. They did well solving problems that someone already knows the answer to, applying concepts that were explained to them in class. Suddenly they face problems no one knows the answer to - otherwise we wouldn’t be trying to solve them. And they fall apart.
I think this is one part missing from the OP - some people just can’t seem to work without fairly rigid requirements. They do well in undergrad or a professional MS program, and there’s a place for them in a lot of big organizations, but there are a lot of jobs (phd student being one) for which they just aren’t a match.
Now in industry I had to learn the hard way that my fancy academic skills are mostly useless, and that my visibility within the organisation counts far more towards my career progression than my skills or what I actually contribute: co-workers who objectively produce trash but spend time selling it internally raise far faster through the ranks than me. My technical skills aren't that important, working towards visibility is. And OP's article is a great summary of that conundrum.
(I do not work in a US-style tech company, FWIW)
Curiosity is a superpower that you can leverage. It keeps you out of fight/flight and helps you reason when the stakes feel high. It demonstrates your willingness to collaborate instead of being reactive. Success at work comes from collaboration and communication.
Honestly, I have no energy to be as social as the work life needs me to be, maybe that is ok. Maybe no.
Sure, there is plenty of that, but some of what the author is describing can be chalked up to another principle: realpolitik. Every organization has values and practices that can become lip service when practical realities intrude. The inefficiency that is causing you a burden might be benefiting someone else who is working hard to keep it in place.
Personally, I worked in food service for a decade (mostly as a line cook of some sort) and most of these rules still applied, maybe to a slightly lesser degree.
Even with dishwashing, if you have some way of dishwashing that halves utility costs, someone would listen to you.
The answer might also be “who cares, get back to work” but that’s also true of a lot of middle-class employment. Your manager won’t give a shit if you think the expense reporting system sucks. Amazon’s famous for “disagree and commit” which is just a corporate way of saying the same thing.
I'm worry that somewhere out there there are kids hearing adults go "high school has to do [shitty thing] to get you ready for the 'real world', which is even harder!" (LOL no it fucking isn't) or "enjoy it, these are the best days of your life, adult life is so much harder" (what the actual shit are they smoking? Harder stuff than weed, for sure)
I had a relatively good high school experience, and even so, if people saying that stuff had been correct I'd have surely killed myself by now, probably before age 30. There is no possible way I could have tolerated decades more of life as unpleasant as high school, let alone worse. Harsh and short deadlines, general inflexibility of expectations, begging to be allowed to take a piss, the equivalent of multiple hour-long presentation meetings every single day, very-early starts, lots of rooms with shitty lighting and no windows, terrible seating that you're in all day long, complete assholes common and you're just stuck with them, they're not gonna get kicked out (this goes for teachers and students alike), and no realistic ability to leave and find something better.
Luckily, I had a part-time tech job in high school (I did later work a couple very-low-paid non-tech jobs for a while, so I'm not writing this "no really high school is far worse than adult life" perspective from an entirely privileged perspective) and could see that something was wonky about what these people were saying. Then I go to college and it's like a goddamn vacation. On to the "real world" and there are hard times but it's nothing like the 4-year marathon rigid-schedule grind of high school. Those tend to be more like, oh this week is rough, or this month, or perhaps this quarter. And I have so very much more freedom of action to fix things that aren't going well.
Adult life is far easier than high school. High school is insane. Like it's an actually-crazy thing to subject kids to.
This is probably not universally true. It certainly matches my life experience, but I have to admit that a life that gets easier and easier as time goes on is something that relatively few privileged people experience.
For me, school was a prison full of torturing peers, strict teachers with no flexibility, and ultra-high-stakes tests that to a large extent determined your future. Whereas work is a paradise and a breeze in comparison. And as life goes on, I make more money, can optimize my way further and further up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and things get better and better. This is an ultra privileged scenario though, and we have to admit that.
For many (most?) people, school was lower stakes and less pressure. You fail a test? No problem. You get a B or C on your report card? Not the end of the world. You don't get into Harvard? I wasn't trying anyway... Then you start adulting, and the pressure is on! You gotta gets some kind of job now and make some money every week so you can avoid homelessness and starvation. You've got a boss on your ass and threatening to fire you (or worse) every day. Your family can't help you anymore, and you're on your own to figure out the world. I know a lot of people who just can't deal with adulthood and hate it, and wish they were back in high school.
You may enjoy https://humaniterations.net/2018/10/24/the-first-prison
One of the more refreshing things to me about the working world is how failure actually has consequences. If you have a habit of bungling projects, disrupting coworkers, or otherwise engaging in antisocial behavior, I probably won't have to work with you for long.
I'm sure it's different elsewhere, but in the US you are never expelled (fired) from grade school simply for failing. Not only that, you can intentionally disrupt the education of those around you and effectively nothing will happen, and one poorly behaved student can derail an entire semester. Nothing short of repeated violence or actual crime is cause for dismissal in school.
What you learn in school doesn't apply to the job
Yet we still:
- fixate on GPA instead of having a sufficient threshold. E.g instead of considering anyone above a 3.0 we prefer a 4.0 student over a 3.8 student.
- we prefer hiring students with prestigious pedigrees
We test applicants based on leetcode and academic like problems
But I think we like to say things and act a different way. Academia has lots of politics, but so does work. Navigating these is something I find challenging and exhausting.
My last job my boss told me "this isn't academia, we care if things work." I was confused, because in my academic research the primary goal was to make things work. Just at a more fundamental level. I also used that knowledge to 20x the performance of one of their systems. They left the PR on read as it wasn't as flashy as the larger more complex model that I out performed.
Honestly, I think just no one knows what they're doing and we're all trying to figure it out. But we're talking confidently about causality and then don't walk the walk. I mean the first part is fine, the world is complex, but do we need to pretend that things are so easy? Maybe if we didn't they'd actually become a bit easier. Instead of having the complexity of the world and the complexity of (business and cultural) politics and navigating all the double speak we would just have the complexity of the world. Idk, I feel like half our problems (or more) are created because we want to pretend things are easier than they are, because not knowing is scary?
This statement is pretty interesting and revealing; school is very much not like that for a lot of people, and I suspect this means that the author was in a strict STEM curriculum where there can really be said to be correct vs. incorrect answers. (vs. something like English, social sciences, etc.) As noted, this likely also means that the author is just recently out of school, and is just figuring out how the real world works and how few people are capable of stepping back and judging objectively. (alternately, maybe the author has known this for years and is just writing for a younger audience)
i don't know where you worked, but i have been working for a few decades now, and i still expect exactly that. even more so than school was. the point is, even if my expectations do not match reality everywhere, not expecting that would be like giving up. instead, because of this expectation, i do my best to create a work environment where this is actually true, and i do not allow others unfair behavior deter me from my belief and expectation of fair treatment of everyone around me.
What I take serious issue with is that there's a whole ecosystem of not identical but comparable dysfunction in academia and yet he didn't spot it or is ignoring it. That to me is indicative of bigger problems.
He's not helping people solve toxic workplaces, he's helping people shift their thinking as they move higher in org
That being said, I’ve seen many outrun their own incompetence. Getting incentives right in large organizations is difficult.
You are screwed if a higher up perceives you as threat. real or imaginary. you won't even know about your status till you get laidoff.
One of the nicest things a boss has done was when it looked like I was getting the blame for something was to email everyone connected with it saying he had done it, not me.
I have worked with a lot of people like that too.
If things go good, the team gets the credit.
If things go bad, it's my fault.
Management 101. It's shocking how few managers know this simple motivational technique. The team appreciates it, because they know you have their back, and your managers appreciate it, because it's easy to fix the blame, and they [may] respect you, for doing it.
yeah a lot of people that get ahead seem to be intentionally ignorant (to the point of fooling themselves) to provide a kind of plausible deniability. It's obviously put on because you see they are shrewd political operators and and "errors" are always in their favor. But there's this game of who can appear the most aloof and thus impossible to ascribe any malice to.
https://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidi...
Engagement is mostly derived from upset people, and thus algorithms or clowns behave in unsustainable ways to make millions of pennies.
Academic bias arises from the ivory tower phenomena in a walled garden, and if some naive kid is often told they are the best-of-the-best special... they tend to truly believe the rhetoric as they slowly indenture themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect
Most HR folks quickly tire of entitled peoples petulance, as no matter how conventionally "smart" a applicant may be... no office wants to deal with drama everyday. =3
Yes, there are shitty people at work who take action out of malice and actually are out to get you, but in my experience, that's a small minority of the time. It's fundamental attribution error.
Perhaps someone will come up with a better incentive structure, but those people were fired years ago. As process-people often eventually win over creatives due to their singular focus. lol =3
ofcourse our middle manager knew that it was bs but she was the one mentoring this person so she ran with it.
i didnt even know about this when all of a sudden i saw it my review with hr.
i considered this person my friend and we even hung out with each others families over holidays.
i was totally shaken by the whole situation.
However, accidentaly attributing stupidity to what is malice is generally not too bad. If its malice it will happen again and you can revise your opinion.
Accidentally attribute malice to what is stupidity is an easy way to start grudges. This can blow back on you and turn someone who just made a mistake into someone who does actually hate you, and make third party observers think you are unreasonable.
So erring on the side of assuming stupidity is generally a good call.
What you call something matters a lot less than what you do about it.
What I mean by this is when you're in the weeds of "not in the first few options for diagnosis", a lot of conditions have a lot of overlapping symptoms. You might get a diagnosis for some condition, and then as new evidence comes to light, that diagnosis may change. After a while you start to doubt any possible diagnosis and even when you get one, you spend your time worrying about "What if I'm wrong? What if I don't have X?". The thing that's important to remember though is that for a good chunk of the symptoms that all of these conditions have, the treatment for them is exactly the same. It doesn't matter if you have condition X, Y or Z if the treatment for symptom Q is the same for all of them. That doesn't mean an accurate diagnosis isn't important, it very much is. But it's only important where the treatment options would differ. But if you want to resolve symptom Q and the treatment is the same, it just doesn't matter what you call it.
The same thing applied to malice vs stupidity. Unless there's a very different action to take to mitigate the problem, it doesn't matter which one it is. Lets take your example of someone taking credit for your work in front of upper management. If this was stupidity what would you do to mitigate the issue? You'd do more to document what you're doing. You'd make sure you have a chance to speak for your own efforts. You'd make sure that your contributions are more visible. You might get a neutral party involved in keeping an eye on things. You might gently correct your co-worker if doing so was appropriate in the moment.
So what would you do if it was malice? Probably all of the same things right? About the only difference in what you do might be whether you talk to the co-worker about it, or talk to HR. But beyond that, everything you'd do to mitigate the issue is more or less the same. And whats important is that the issue you have is that credit was taken for your work. Really in the end it doesn't even matter whether it was stupidity or malice because learning which it was doesn't get your credit back. And accurately labeling it doesn't stop you from losing credit in the future when it happens again.
But there is one personal benefit from assuming stupidity, you can feel less anger. It's a lot easier to be objective, and stay focused on your real goal and the problem you really want to solve when you don't feel like you're actively being attacked. So whenever there is ambiguity, and the actions you would take to mitigate the real issue are the same, why choose the label that increases your own stress and anger levels and makes you more likely to retaliate in a way that actually back fires on you because you're reacting in anger.
Which again isn't to say that you should be a doormat. But you can set boundaries for yourself and take actions to accomplish your goals without getting mired in judgements of other people's actions. Their feelings about it and their motivations aren't my concern, my concern is taking care of myself. I don't need them to see things my way, or admit to wrong doing to enforce my boundaries and take care of myself. And I can take care of myself a lot better if I'm not angry and stressed out.
This needs to be taught more actively in school. Negligence in stopping abuse, or fostering abuse = just as immoral as abuse.
Thankfully that level of toxicity did not follow into the workplace, but I did have a car vandalized by a coworker.
Truth be told I was a bit of a punk, and had a knack for pissing off the wrong people. We all have our flaws, but nobody deserved what I went through. I'm a man now, not the insecure boy who tried to act like he was better than others to compensate, and I reject toxicity immediately. No room for it. Hard lessons to learn when you grew up with abuse.
20 year programming career and I've never engaged with math beyond approximately Algebra II, in the real world. Hell, I go years at a time not needing anything trickier than Algebra I.
Nearly all of the math I actually use I learned in the 6th grade or earlier, overwhelmingly elementary school arithmetic—mostly the "bad" kind I got from memorization-based practice that mathematicians seem to hate even though it's a contender for the best bang-for-buck of almost my entire educational career, plus a lot of fractions-related stuff (so, so very many people are terrible at this, can't even do basic things, IME it's where an awful lot of people permanently fall off the math-train, way back in like 3rd grade), basic arithmetic, and pre-algebra-tier simple variable substitution.
Every now and then I get a bug up my ass to try to expand my math abilities, but 1) I'm so goddamn rusty at this point because I never use any of it that I have to start back at brushing up on high school stuff, which is discouraging, and 2) I'm not even really sure what I'm going to do with it (long experience suggests: nothing) so the motivation fades fast.
Sometimes these do not hold true, but then you have a truly toxic organization - one that you should run from, as fast as possible
Can't agree, I know people who got more work because they focused and did the work
This is a myth - most non-legacy admissions kids getting into good colleges aren’t spending on these things in the way that you think. They’re getting there because they’re actually smart and hard working and have a stable environment (like two parents). It doesn’t take much to get a very high test score for example - most of them aren’t even paying for group classes let alone tutors.
The bigger difference is that successful parents are constantly acting as role models, giving their children cues to follow, and passing on important knowledge that schools don't whether they realize or not. Many poor kids miss out on those things entirely, and as a result end up spinning their wheels later in life due to misplaced efforts and fumbled attempts. They may eventually figure things out on their own, but it'll happen several years down the road, and while they can narrow the gap closing it entirely becomes more difficult the further they ascend (feels a bit like Zeno's Paradox).
For example, having a good supportive community with after school programs or other youth outreach programs.
I was dining and eavesdropping a conversation at a table in a restaurant. It was a mother and 8 year old daughter talking about her future. They were talking about a career path to being a doctor, SAT scores and how she is studying right now for the SAT and other tests and the extra-curricular that would be required (whether the child naturally wanted this path is unknown). The mother remarked on another conversation with her daughter’s friend; that she did not ask the daughter’s friend about the career prospects, because she wasn’t sure if the friend had any. She didn’t want to have an awkward conversation. Notice that the supportive environment doesn’t extend to the daughter’s friend in any manner.
Citation?
Are we seriously claiming that average office socials/politics is no more than being able to play nicely with people?
I AGREE
PEOPLE tell me WHY you find this thought distasteful or disturbing
tech used to be a safe hiding spot for geeks to, idk, hack on something with total disregard for social norms and personal hygiene; now we have assholes weaponizing this by promoting RTO, hustle culture and "hurrr we are all one family" but it's fucking fake performance theatre and noone cares about computers anymore, only about number go up.
I still find that environment somewhat over on the ops side of things (I'm a sysadmin, technically) as corporate IT is still the red-headed step child so I get left alone for the most part but its still pretty rough.
We aren't immune over in ops land though either. Still getting newbies that are in it only for the money and I've worked with people who actively hated computers and didn't enjoy the work at all, only the paycheck.
However, I have to admit that maybe companies that engaged in this seemingly fair behavior went out of business because, ultimately, it's not good business. It seems like the only places paying well these days are FAANGs (or whatever it's mutated to) that will work you to the bone.
You also neglect that all business must necessarily account for inflation in their cost model (an impossible task). Enshittification is just the end result of money-printing through banking loans on the business cycle, that's why it follows the same adoption curves as ponzi.
The end result of that cycle is predictable, and has been discussed quite rationally but many people don't actually read books these days so its become lost knowledge.
The sieving and centralizing monopolization we see all comes from those entities being closer to the source of money than individuals. The systems of banking today neglect the true sources of the wealth of nations instead utilizing slave labor through clever recapture (of debasement lost to inflation). In aggregate these things creates a system where over-expenditure must be paid for by your children's distributed slavery; creating a hellscape of an environment where they are disadvantaged and may not survive. Its al indirect, but indirect things can be quite powerful and if you don't have the mind to grasp it your just trapped like an animal, not given the choice. A slave.
Usury eventually and inevitably gets to catastrophic levels given sufficient time, as all positive feedback systems do, left unattended.
This the long and short of it. It comes into play at some point either being your accelerator or your ceiling, depending on how things go.
The people who are actually hard to ascribe any malice to are often politically very inept, i.e.
- (nearly) "everybody" knows these people are not malicious
- but since people want to be manipulated, such people don't make any career
One usually exchanges Faustian contractual consistency with creative talent that drove initial success.
Politics is rarely about the technology itself, and there are always skeletons next to pirate treasure boxes. lol =3
I think point of starting much earlier is making the research, learning, testing just aspects of life. Then there’s no time spent during their teen years learning how to do that stuff when their minds are extra unfocused it’s routine. I would have probably preferred that than the way I was brought up (minus the prude attitude).
But ask me to do subtraction? Forget it.
This can be quite true. My mother worked in the justice system and had kept track of the students in and around my grade. A significant portion of them ended up incarcerated a short few years after graduation. Being under 18 had protected them somewhat from the bullshit they had pulled in school.
That's one factor that's lower-pressure (sort-of... plenty of kids end up working to help support the household, in addition to school) but still offering up similar risk & worries, on one side, and then all the bad stuff of high school and of not yet having the freedom of an adult on the other side, increasing pressure. I still think in the typical case, being a high schooler's a ton worse.
Add to this that the pressure on you in high school is in part to perform well so you don't fail at adult life. That adult life pressure, and the concerns about e.g. lack of employability or homelessness, are is already present in high school. The harm is in the future, but the pressure is already there.
Though, yes, one absolutely can "fail" badly at adult life. I don't mean to suggest it's entirely easy street. It's just a whole lot less unpleasant or difficult on average than high school.
I mean, truly, if adult life were anywhere near as harsh as high school, assuming I hadn't offed myself, I'd definitely have "failed" by now and be living on the street or something. Expectations are just... comically low, most of the time, not much-higher as so many suggested when I was in school, so it's pretty easy to do alright provided you don't get hit by bad luck (which exact same bad luck potential, again, high schoolers are exposed to via their parents anyway).
Still way easier than high school.
If next week the world went topsy-turvy and providing for my kids now (for some reason) depended on my attending and doing tolerably well at high school for the remaining decade or so that my kids are at home, no other options, but also I'm somehow relieved from all the hard parts of taking care of them and such... frankly, I dunno if I'd make it. High school was incredibly stressful (even after I threw myself a life line and deliberately stopped giving as much of a fuck about grades) and, quite literally, depressing, as in it gave me seasonal depression that took most of my 20s to stop cycling through, and recurring nightmares that didn't end until my early 30s, and I wasn't even bullied or anything. The whole institution's a mental-health catastrophe in a way that nothing I've seen in adult life compares to (perhaps prison does, I, fortunately, am not in a position to compare them)
(Separately, yes, I'm sure—very sure, having seen it up close enough times now—that old age health problems and the process of dying are going to be extremely, perhaps incomparably, bad, but I don't think that's what people were talking about when they said schools had to be shitty in order to prepare me for even-shittier adult life, I think they meant work and paying bills and parent-teacher conferences and stuff)
Anyway, in this context I was mostly addressing the idea that these "lessons" from high school don't hold in the "real world". To me, the "real world" includes your landlord, the cop on your street, etc., just as much as it does your job.
1) Many middle-class families rent and their landlords aren’t necessarily any more understanding.
2) Not to be too political, but many middle-class employees don’t enjoy a friendly relationship with police either and similarly can easily “fail”.
If your argument is that being wealthy affords you a lot of leeway to fail in life, I mostly agree (though again, there are plenty of minority groups who would disagree that wealth always affords that privilege), but “middle class” encompasses a very wide swath of people which this doesn’t apply to. Many middle-class employees in the US are a paycheck or two away from being pretty destitute.
Maybe you meant “professional” or “upper class” instead?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452724
being sociable isn't same as being good at politics. politics is just politics and it involves backstabbing and trampling over ppl.
not sure why ppl claim that office politics is some spl breed of politics that more noble and nice. "its just ppl skills" narrative is infuriating.
ppl with autism are actually very sociable and friendly.
I guess politics is about having balls too. I mean that’s not great what happened but either its true to a certain extent (not saying it is just saying you have to be humble sometimes), or its completely bullshit and you have to stand up for yourself.
Even if it works here, eventually she will try that same trick at another level with someone who is willing to take a bigger risk to get ahead, and they won’t be bluffing. Whole companies can come down because of people who behave like this and if I were the manager in this situation I would see how easily we could offboard this person, even if I thought they did good work in the past.
But as I said, even if she shouldn’tve been using the story to get ahead, and even if you pressure your boss saying you’ll basically quit if she gets promoted over you, there’s a possibility that you did cause a problem and that you have to recognize your own social failings. That’s I guess one of the most important “interpersonal” skills, to never be a victim, even when you have been victimized, and to try and view the situation objectively. You can both be in the wrong here at the same time, there’s no contradiction; recognizing that is an important skill in management.
These ideas work great when you have a large/growing labor population, we're seeing it start to fall apart in a tight/shrinking labor population. "nobody wants to work" is the drum beat of the employers that used to burn employes.
Weirdly my math background is actually more useful as a 'soft' skill in my current work. I am the go to person for talking to the data analysts in my company, and having a statistics background is pretty helpful for interfacing with managers or people outside the dev department.
Every once in a while I remember an algorithm for doing something I can include in our app and feel like a God, lol.
I can distinctly remember the three times this happened for a team I was on, in my couple decades of doing this, because everyone involved kinda got a thrill out of the extreme novelty of doing something resembling actual math of even a lower-end-of-undergrad level. Lasted all of a few minutes to perhaps a few hours, but still.
It's not the math facts you learn so much as getting lots of practice with that kind of reasoning.
This "well actually you're doing math!" stuff feels like some kind of rhetorical trick, when the "math" I'm doing doesn't seem strongly related to or to require being any good at the math-thing it supposedly is. It's not quite the same thing nor quite so far off the mark, but it seems at least in the same ballpark (ha, ha) as claiming that professional sports players use lots and lots of complicated trigonometry. Sort-of yes, going by something like unfair riddle-logic, I guess? But in reality, no, of course they don't.
I don't see any daylight between this claim and, "diagnosing a funny noise in an engine is math," and if that's true then I think we're heading into territory where we've rendered the term "math" so broad that it's no longer useful.
It's maths in the same way as when your brain hears a note at 440 hz and you go 'that's a C', i.e. while it may be practiced, the maths part of that is subconscious and its completely detached from the conscious maths anybody except mathematicians think about.
In the case of catching a fly ball, the "thinking about" approach using trigonometry is completely unhelpful. In the case of music, the "thinking about" approach of theory can be helpful, but many people who learned informally have been brilliant musicians without ever learning a formal approach to theory. In the case of math, the critical "thinking about" aspect is vital. Pretty much everybody needs it, Ramanujan aside.
What unites all of these cases, however, is that the formal "thinking about" aspect is useless on its own. Without the productive, creative aspect, it doesn't have anything to critique and make better.
It contains lots and lots of exercises.
In lower level jobs like retail and food service, nobody can retain workers.
You would think then "oh, labor market, the cost of labor goes up"
But no. Everyone is greedy, stubborn, and stupid.
Instead, you just run your business with half the labor. Does it work? Not really.
So then you think, "oh, well free market dynamics. These companies will go out of business because their product or service sucks"
But no! Because everyone is doing it! And now everything just sucks!
Eventually, those delivery drivers will be replaced by delivery drones.
Perhaps food service and in-person retail will start to go that way too. It’s my hope we can navigate that and still make a place where it won’t be so bad.
Why am I bagging groceries? Am I on your payroll?
Great, you put in a machine and replaced half your workers. Expect you replace them with me, your customers. The machine is just for kicks.
Why don't I cut my own hair? Because I'm shit at it.
If you went to a barber, and you sat down for a haircut, and they handed you a pair of clippers, would you go back? Fuck no!
The problem with having customers do their own checkout isn't that the fat and lazy customers have to get off their fat asses. No. It's that customers are unbelievably shit at that.
Have you noticed that, despite there being, like 10x as many self checkout lanes than before, the lines are longer than ever? Go ahead and do the math on that. Not only are people doing more work, they're paying more for it too, and it's a much worse service. Lose, lose, lose. Unless you're the corporate overlords.