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Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

254 points by sherilm 1y ago

AtlasBarfed 1y ago
Corporations are rigid authoritarian hierarchies (I would say communist in the soviet style sense), so they tend towards the "kafkaesque" nature of such power structures.
bitwize 1y ago
At work, data, metrics, and KPIs are great for "fishing expeditions"—looking for reasons to fire you in case you start to become too expensive to want to keep around, or if middle/upper management just doesn't like 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!
hobs 1y ago
"Study hard, get good grades, follow the formula and ultimately merit wins." 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.
- everyone 1y ago
  Yeah, in work it's all about who you know. What your connections and background are. Everything is like that, including school, but I guess the person who wrote this article didnt realize that.
- SilverElfin 1y ago
  > Meanwhile rich kids get into good schools because they can afford after school activities and tutors since birth. 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.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    > This is a myth Citation?
    - astrobe_ 1y ago
      I want to see that too; because OP is saying between the lines that "public school kids" are lazy dorks by birth.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    Based on personal experience I don't believe it has as much to do with smartness or willingess to work hard. A lot of poor kids have that too. 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).
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - righthand 1y ago
    > and have a stable environment 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.
apwell23 1y ago
it used to be that tech provided somewhat a safe space for autists like me to hide out. now its full of management ppl who would've gone into other industries but were lured in by high pay in tech. i miss the days where tech pay only slightly above average and ppl in tech were considered losers and dorks.
- isoprophlex 1y ago
  Someone downvoted you and it's against the spirit of HN to challenge this because it makes for boring reading but 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.
  - aitchnyu 1y ago
    In the past computers affected only telephone lines. Now they affect drones, taxis, movie distribution etc so "noone cares about computers anymore" and "other industries" as GP said is hard to define.
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    Also in agreement, I miss the old days. 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.
  - snozolli 1y ago
    I've lamented that in the late 90s, it seemed like there were a lot of smaller companies hiring at good pay. I've seen job listings recently, looking for senior engineers with a laundry list of skills, and the pay is lower than I made in 1998 as a new grad, adjusted for inflation. 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.
rs186 1y ago
> If you have to, blame stupidity not malice > 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.
- xivzgrev 1y ago
  He's got a program to sell you, he's focused on the problem he addresses. He's not helping people solve toxic workplaces, he's helping people shift their thinking as they move higher in org
- yoyohello13 1y ago
  Yeah I think “don’t attribute to malice what can be explained be stupidity” is applied too broadly these days. There is absolutely malice behind some decisions/actions, and it’s dangerous to just shrug it off. Even more concerning, often the malicious people will hide behind stupidity.
  - andy99 1y ago
    > Even more concerning, often the malicious people will hide behind stupidity. 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.
    - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
      > But there's this game of who can appear the most aloof and thus impossible to ascribe any malice to. 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
geocrasher 1y ago
My experience with school wasn't that different from work life. Lessons that I learned in school that followed: 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.
- BinaryIgor 1y ago
  5) Yes - but even if not popular, competent people are always respected 6) I would say that there's correlation, but it's not 1.0, more something like 0.5 - 0.7; other factors matter as well. Sometimes these do not hold true, but then you have a truly toxic organization - one that you should run from, as fast as possible
  - geocrasher 1y ago
    High school was toxic, and so were my first few jobs. Lessons learned the hard way.
- yoyohello13 1y ago
  I’m with you except for 2. Knowing math is great.
  - geocrasher 1y ago
    Math is amazing, and I'm becoming interested in it after being out of school for over 30 years. But, my own incompetence with numbers meant gravitating away from them, for me. I am not dyslexic, but I think my ADHD does with numbers what dyslexia does to words and letters.
    - 1y ago
everdrive 1y ago
I was quite surprised how different work was from school. There are a few specific considerations I never really see discussed: - 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. I could go on, but I was honestly shocked when I got my first job and I was actually a pretty good employee. This has been true ever since, but I was screwing up in school all the time.
- rockercoaster 1y ago
  Seconding all this. 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.
BinaryIgor 1y ago
"Meanwhile, subjective decisions are constantly happening behind the scenes. The decisions about who to trust, or who gets a shot are made through informal reputations and shared stories about your value. Then the “data” is used to justify them in retrospect." True; as long as humans are humans, this will remain to be the case.
saltysalt 1y ago
This is great advice: "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.
SilentM68 1y ago
Hmm, this does not sound like an accurate interpretation of work culture. Perhaps this is true in an ideal job environment. The word "Work" says it all. It's work, labor, hard stuff, not fun and stressful. There is no actual way to manager that kind of stress unless your work is what you normally do for fun, and you enjoy. This does not describe the average work environment. 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.
jongjong 1y ago
I always assume malice until otherwise proven and I let my enemies believe that I'm well-intentioned towards them.
mayhemducks 1y ago
What a load of dung.
not_that_d 1y ago
I have seen really inept people given manager positions because they were out going and then crash after six months in the position and expecting that we fix all the management issues for some reason. Honestly, I have no energy to be as social as the work life needs me to be, maybe that is ok. Maybe no.
nadis 1y ago
> "When you assume stupidity instead of malice, you stay above the fray, stop taking slights personally, or turning misjudgments into betrayals. This way we retain agency and choice." I'd never thought of it this way explicitly, but it makes sense.
octagons 1y ago
Wow, this is overall great advice. 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.
OutOfHere 1y ago
Sorry but I'd rather not play politics at work. If they don't value me, I'd rather just go where I'm valued for the time that I'm valued. I don't want to serve an undeserving organization. Playing politics at work implies avoiding adversity, which in turn means not actually growing transferable skills.
lordnacho 1y ago
The drawing of the pyramid addresses something I've been saying to people for years on this topic: 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.
- oceanplexian 1y ago
  Is it weird that I have a totally different perspective on this? Then again I dropped out of college at 19 to start working in Big Tech (tm) after exiting my startup and have been there 15+ years now. 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.
bencornia 1y ago
> Assuming malice turns you into a cynic. In contrast, assuming stupidity keeps you curious. 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.
prmoustache 1y ago
I prefer just doing my job, while putting my limits in the energy and time I dedicate on it. And I just look for a new job when I get fed up and/or want a rise. This whole mastermind bullshit just seems mentally exhausting.
- zug_zug 1y ago
  Agreed. I’ve actually tried quite hard for decades now and I wish I had just chilled — that extra effort rarely turns into a commensurate reward
aidenn0 1y ago
This is somewhat funny because many of my classes in school barely even managed a veneer of objectivity in scoring, and grades for many things were far more opaque than any annual review I've had at my job. - 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%.
- quelsolaar 1y ago
  Yeah the idea i that school is somehow a bastion of meritocracy is misguided. 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.
- Danjoe4 1y ago
  Male instructors are more objective.
  - thunderfork 1y ago
    Source on this? 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-gender-bias-student-ratings-teaching https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/what%E2%80%99s-name-exposing-gen...) but not anything on the rates of objectivity itself
cadamsdotcom 1y ago
Once it’s nice and cosy with a customer base that won’t leave unless it’s truly awful to them, a company no longer has to really do anything right. Plenty of dumb stuff can happen on the inside with no penalty. That’s the game you’re in.
tekno45 1y ago
Everything is more complicated than you learned in 3rd Grade.
__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
> Study hard, get good grades, follow the formula and ultimately merit wins 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.
pjdesno 1y ago
I run into a fair number of good undergraduate students who are terrible phd students. 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.
- a_bonobo 1y ago
  Funny enough, I was an academic for close to a decade before I resigned in disgust; and I feel like OP's article could be Work is not Academia. As an academic, all I needed to do is write papers and get grants, metrics that are easy to game and fairly clear to achieve. 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)
pololeono 1y ago
relevant -> https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
cainxinth 1y ago
> You can call it organizational absurdities. Or more bluntly, institutional stupidity. 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.
low_tech_love 1y ago
"no one is out to get you" yeah... no.
trod1234 1y ago
School in the last 50 years was never about education. It was about inducing a level of thought control and torturing the intelligent/competent to reduce their number to only those that can be controlled, and as systems of disadvantaging those that might create wealth, through economic warfare. 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.

254 points by sherilm 1y ago

Corporations are rigid authoritarian hierarchies (I would say communist in the soviet style sense), so they tend towards the "kafkaesque" nature of such power structures.

bitwize 1y ago

At work, data, metrics, and KPIs are great for "fishing expeditions"—looking for reasons to fire you in case you start to become too expensive to want to keep around, or if middle/upper management just doesn't like 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!

hobs 1y ago

"Study hard, get good grades, follow the formula and ultimately merit wins." 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.

everyone 1y ago
Yeah, in work it's all about who you know. What your connections and background are. Everything is like that, including school, but I guess the person who wrote this article didnt realize that.
SilverElfin 1y ago
> Meanwhile rich kids get into good schools because they can afford after school activities and tutors since birth. 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.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  > This is a myth Citation?
  - astrobe_ 1y ago
    I want to see that too; because OP is saying between the lines that "public school kids" are lazy dorks by birth.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  Based on personal experience I don't believe it has as much to do with smartness or willingess to work hard. A lot of poor kids have that too. 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).
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- righthand 1y ago
  > and have a stable environment 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.

apwell23 1y ago

it used to be that tech provided somewhat a safe space for autists like me to hide out. now its full of management ppl who would've gone into other industries but were lured in by high pay in tech. i miss the days where tech pay only slightly above average and ppl in tech were considered losers and dorks.

isoprophlex 1y ago
Someone downvoted you and it's against the spirit of HN to challenge this because it makes for boring reading but 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.
- aitchnyu 1y ago
  In the past computers affected only telephone lines. Now they affect drones, taxis, movie distribution etc so "noone cares about computers anymore" and "other industries" as GP said is hard to define.
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  Also in agreement, I miss the old days. 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.
- snozolli 1y ago
  I've lamented that in the late 90s, it seemed like there were a lot of smaller companies hiring at good pay. I've seen job listings recently, looking for senior engineers with a laundry list of skills, and the pay is lower than I made in 1998 as a new grad, adjusted for inflation. 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.

rs186 1y ago

> If you have to, blame stupidity not malice > 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.

xivzgrev 1y ago
He's got a program to sell you, he's focused on the problem he addresses. He's not helping people solve toxic workplaces, he's helping people shift their thinking as they move higher in org
yoyohello13 1y ago
Yeah I think “don’t attribute to malice what can be explained be stupidity” is applied too broadly these days. There is absolutely malice behind some decisions/actions, and it’s dangerous to just shrug it off. Even more concerning, often the malicious people will hide behind stupidity.
- andy99 1y ago
  > Even more concerning, often the malicious people will hide behind stupidity. 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.
  - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
    > But there's this game of who can appear the most aloof and thus impossible to ascribe any malice to. 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

geocrasher 1y ago

My experience with school wasn't that different from work life. Lessons that I learned in school that followed: 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.

BinaryIgor 1y ago
5) Yes - but even if not popular, competent people are always respected 6) I would say that there's correlation, but it's not 1.0, more something like 0.5 - 0.7; other factors matter as well. Sometimes these do not hold true, but then you have a truly toxic organization - one that you should run from, as fast as possible
- geocrasher 1y ago
  High school was toxic, and so were my first few jobs. Lessons learned the hard way.
yoyohello13 1y ago
I’m with you except for 2. Knowing math is great.
- geocrasher 1y ago
  Math is amazing, and I'm becoming interested in it after being out of school for over 30 years. But, my own incompetence with numbers meant gravitating away from them, for me. I am not dyslexic, but I think my ADHD does with numbers what dyslexia does to words and letters.
  - 1y ago

everdrive 1y ago

I was quite surprised how different work was from school. There are a few specific considerations I never really see discussed: - 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. I could go on, but I was honestly shocked when I got my first job and I was actually a pretty good employee. This has been true ever since, but I was screwing up in school all the time.

rockercoaster 1y ago
Seconding all this. 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.

BinaryIgor 1y ago

"Meanwhile, subjective decisions are constantly happening behind the scenes. The decisions about who to trust, or who gets a shot are made through informal reputations and shared stories about your value. Then the “data” is used to justify them in retrospect." True; as long as humans are humans, this will remain to be the case.

saltysalt 1y ago

This is great advice: "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.

SilentM68 1y ago

Hmm, this does not sound like an accurate interpretation of work culture. Perhaps this is true in an ideal job environment. The word "Work" says it all. It's work, labor, hard stuff, not fun and stressful. There is no actual way to manager that kind of stress unless your work is what you normally do for fun, and you enjoy. This does not describe the average work environment. 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.

jongjong 1y ago

I always assume malice until otherwise proven and I let my enemies believe that I'm well-intentioned towards them.

mayhemducks 1y ago

What a load of dung.

not_that_d 1y ago

I have seen really inept people given manager positions because they were out going and then crash after six months in the position and expecting that we fix all the management issues for some reason. Honestly, I have no energy to be as social as the work life needs me to be, maybe that is ok. Maybe no.

nadis 1y ago

> "When you assume stupidity instead of malice, you stay above the fray, stop taking slights personally, or turning misjudgments into betrayals. This way we retain agency and choice." I'd never thought of it this way explicitly, but it makes sense.

octagons 1y ago

Wow, this is overall great advice. 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.

OutOfHere 1y ago

Sorry but I'd rather not play politics at work. If they don't value me, I'd rather just go where I'm valued for the time that I'm valued. I don't want to serve an undeserving organization. Playing politics at work implies avoiding adversity, which in turn means not actually growing transferable skills.

lordnacho 1y ago

The drawing of the pyramid addresses something I've been saying to people for years on this topic: 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.

oceanplexian 1y ago
Is it weird that I have a totally different perspective on this? Then again I dropped out of college at 19 to start working in Big Tech (tm) after exiting my startup and have been there 15+ years now. 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.

bencornia 1y ago

> Assuming malice turns you into a cynic. In contrast, assuming stupidity keeps you curious. 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.

prmoustache 1y ago

I prefer just doing my job, while putting my limits in the energy and time I dedicate on it. And I just look for a new job when I get fed up and/or want a rise. This whole mastermind bullshit just seems mentally exhausting.

zug_zug 1y ago
Agreed. I’ve actually tried quite hard for decades now and I wish I had just chilled — that extra effort rarely turns into a commensurate reward

aidenn0 1y ago

This is somewhat funny because many of my classes in school barely even managed a veneer of objectivity in scoring, and grades for many things were far more opaque than any annual review I've had at my job. - 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%.

quelsolaar 1y ago
Yeah the idea i that school is somehow a bastion of meritocracy is misguided. 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.
Danjoe4 1y ago
Male instructors are more objective.
- thunderfork 1y ago
  Source on this? 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-gender-bias-student-ratings-teaching https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/what%E2%80%99s-name-exposing-gen...) but not anything on the rates of objectivity itself

cadamsdotcom 1y ago

Once it’s nice and cosy with a customer base that won’t leave unless it’s truly awful to them, a company no longer has to really do anything right. Plenty of dumb stuff can happen on the inside with no penalty. That’s the game you’re in.

tekno45 1y ago

Everything is more complicated than you learned in 3rd Grade.

__MatrixMan__ 1y ago

> Study hard, get good grades, follow the formula and ultimately merit wins 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.

pjdesno 1y ago

I run into a fair number of good undergraduate students who are terrible phd students. 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.

a_bonobo 1y ago
Funny enough, I was an academic for close to a decade before I resigned in disgust; and I feel like OP's article could be Work is not Academia. As an academic, all I needed to do is write papers and get grants, metrics that are easy to game and fairly clear to achieve. 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)

pololeono 1y ago

relevant -> https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

cainxinth 1y ago

> You can call it organizational absurdities. Or more bluntly, institutional stupidity. 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.

low_tech_love 1y ago

"no one is out to get you" yeah... no.

trod1234 1y ago

School in the last 50 years was never about education. It was about inducing a level of thought control and torturing the intelligent/competent to reduce their number to only those that can be controlled, and as systems of disadvantaging those that might create wealth, through economic warfare. 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.