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.
Yes and no. On the flip side, you now have the means to have a much more comfortable and pleasant life than the high school dropout classmate you haven't seen in six years.
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.
You say no but you're not disagreeing - you're saying that there's enough space in the middle of the pyramid for all the people who didn't drop out of school which AFAICT is orthogonal to GP's point, that there's not enough space at the tip of the pyramid for all the talented people who work very hard.
There’s obviously can’t be enough space for every moderately above average person who works very hard… since that adds up to tens of millions to hundreds of millions of people across the world.
I disagree that competition among fellow high-achievers is the primary obstacle. Maybe, very early on, when you're in a class of investment banking recruits or first-year law associates, etc. But that gets sorted out in the first few years.
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.
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.
It depends a lot on where you end up. There are niches where you can live by market forces alone, and breeze through life being almost unaware of politics - but that's the exception.
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.
Says the 19 year old startup founder who drops out of college and has it made before most people even start thinking of what they want to do.
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.
This is a little tricky. I think it's more about understanding the philosophy. Lets say you make washing machines. The "academic" will say, great, for next year's model, let's fix the most common failure point and improve reliability so our customers love us while the "psycopath" or "savvy employee" will say, no, our brand is still strong, let's make cheaper machines and save money and we can manipulate some of the review sites and anyway, better for us if they fail after 6 years than 10 years, the customers don't have many choices anyway.
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.
Even if you "make it" in the context of your career and organization, you will lose in the housing market of any metropolitan area where such careers are on offer, simply because other people were there first.
The pyramid is mostly a question of incorrect perspective or viewpoint.
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.)
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.
I have the same experience, but would like to clarify that almost everything on this list is mostly only true of middle class employment. You absolutely can "fail" if you are on the bottom rung of the political-economic ladder -- this looks like a life in and out of prison, homelessness, despair, and an early death. You don't get endless chances from your landlord or your parole officer. If your area of weakness is "money" (earning enough of it, knowing how much to spend and how much to save, etc.), then you are still fucked. To someone with a poor education, filling out a job or EBT or WIC application is indeed a high-stakes test with disastrous consequences for failing. Your boss in the restaurant kitchen does not want you to question their methods of dishwashing -- he will fire you instead for being lippy if you try to negotiate around it.
That's a fair point. My first job was retail, and I was accidentally late for a shift _once_ and I got put on probation for weeks and wasn't even allowed to take sick leave during the probationary period. The better the job the less you're treated like trash. People float all sorts of explanations for why this would be, but I think fundamentally people just don't know how to move away from class hierarchy. I think it's built into us.
I believe it's because if you are easily replaceable, then screwing up means you're not worth the trouble. If you aren't easily replaceable (whether it's because you have demonstrated you're a good employee or you're working a high-demand role), you are worth the trouble and you'll get more chances. There are other reasons too, such as jurisdictions where suing after being laid off is more common, which makes more chances, PIP and severance packages more likely.
>I believe it's because if you are easily replaceable, then screwing up means you're not worth the trouble.
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.
Well, then they're not easily replaceable. Which implies those workers have other options. And thus employers that treat workers worse than other employers will see workers leave and/or find it harder or more expensive to hire. So it all works out.
Well, maybe fast-food restaurants were a low-interest-rate phenomenon or whatever the equivalent term is (a high-labour-supply phenomenon?). If that kind of business can't afford good enough working conditions to get a decent supply of labour while selling its products at a decent price, then yeah, the whole industry will burn. But if there's a demand for it then sooner or later someone will start offering it. I think that probably looks like a decoupling between middle-class-oriented (e.g. Costco or Chipotle) and working-class-oriented.
During COVID a new kind of food business sprung up called a virtual restaurant (or a ghost kitchen), where instead of having to rent a restaurant space and hire wait staff, they just had a kitchen and delivery drivers. Lower expenses, fewer staff.
Eventually, those delivery drivers will be replaced by delivery drones.
I promise I’m not that whiggish when it comes to automation, but there was a time when a good portion of human labour was washing clothing, and now that’s become much less of a thing for much of the world.
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.
Sometimes we do our own laundry, sometimes we pump our own gas, and sometimes we prepare our own meals. Not having a servant to do those things for us doesn’t make us destitute; it makes us human.
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.
Often I hear "I wouldn't take a higher paying job. It's not worth the stress". But I find the opposite to be true. The better paid the job, the less that's expected of you.
Most of the examples you gave seem focused on life outside of work aside from the last one, so I’m curious which of them you’d say don’t also apply to lower-income jobs. There are lots of ways for middle-class people to “fail” too outside of work.
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.
That's fair, but I don't totally agree that there is a "work sphere" that is different from the "life sphere" in this regard. That distinction between politics and economics is a synthetic big-L Liberal one that only goes back to approximately Napoleon. The fact that some people have worse jobs, worse working conditions, and worse pay is fundamentally related to the fact that they rent, struggle with money, and have a poor education. Our society has bucketed them into this life, which is a package deal, just like the middle class package is.
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.
Sure, but these are all true of middle-class employees as well:
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?
We can quibble about where to draw the markers, but my point is that these "lessons" that people in these comments are decrying as mostly not true about the "real world", are in fact true for some people, likely even some of the people that you went to school with. You and I heard our asshole math teacher say "It's not gonna be this easy in the real world, cats and kittens!" and probably now regard that as the opposite of true. Many others wish life was as easy as high school. Thanks for the engagement but I don't see any point in "arguing" this point -- that we appear to both agree on -- any further.
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.
> 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.
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.
There's perhaps more pressure in a way because you're now responsible for fixing any problems, but kids are exposed to the exact same risks of adult life and employment via their parents, plus some extra ones that adults aren't subject to (parents can be abusive, for one thing—adults can abuse other adults in their household, but getting out is a lot easier for an adult than a kid, especially young kids).
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).
Are you a young adult who is not responsible for anyone but themselves, perhaps? Many adults have to take care of children or their own parents, manage teams, work jobs with serious consequences on other people's lives, deal with having cancer, etc. High school was tough in its own way but I think mostly due to everyone being young and having no life skills yet.
Solidly in middle age, three kids, plenty of other problems.
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)
> You get nearly endless chances to fail at work...
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.
I also find really interesting how we frequently talk about how different the two are yet also reinforce the divergence.
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
I'm not saying what you learn in school doesn't matter (I think it does. It forms the foundation) but we often talk as if the knowledge is completely disjoint and then hire using academic pedigrees as the primary signal. I had an interview last week where a guy was saying "this is an engineering role. It's very different from academia" and then was fixated on my publication record. This seems quite common.
We test applicants based on leetcode and academic like problems
This was clearly originally inspired by the traditional engineering interview but it's become optimized where all we do is study these problems. Instead of building more things and expanding our portfolios. Maybe we should go back to whiteboard interviews and in person. It'll put the focus back on evaluating how a candidate thinks and you can't use GPT on the whiteboard (without easily being caught)
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 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%.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I would imagine that the author is young, very intelligent, and just really starting to pick up real-world career experience. What the author points out is true, but I cannot imagine most HN readers are thinking "I'm expecting my workplace to be totally fair and merit-based, just like school was."
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'm expecting my workplace to be totally fair and merit-based"
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.
I'll bet we agree more than you think. Understanding reality isn't the same as capitulating to it. Correct expectations can help you push back more effectively than constantly having your (overly-optimistic) hopes dashed. ie, I'm not just saying "everything sucks, be cynical."
I don't take issue with the fact that he's naive or that his ignorance of corporate dysfunction has been shattered. You don't know what you don't know until you do.
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.
Being aware is totally irrelevant. Their incentives are not about rewarding the right person. Their incentives always are to protect themselves at all costs.
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.
It depends who you work for and what they are like.
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.
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.
It's just it's stupidity or incompetence more often than malice; but, of course you should judge on the case-by-case basis and if somebody repeats certain (evil) behavior it's malice
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.
> 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.
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.
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
I don't know. I agree with the advice even if they are not 100% correct.
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.
Agreed. For example, if 90% of C-Suite at corporation are only interested in extracting capital from their subordinates and riding trends, then it’s malice, not incompetence.
In general, some incentive structures allow managers to retain stock and 3% of unspent division budget as a year end bonus. Thus, they naturally cut every possible cost rather than risk growth liabilities.
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
One of my coworkers made up a totally bogus story about me to show her "management potential" about how she managed a situation with uncooperative team member on a project.
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.
Both stupidity and malice happen. It can often be difficult to tell the difference as we arent as objective as we think we are.
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.
Over the past decade, I've been dealing with sorting out a rare and difficult to diagnose medical issue with a family member. Over this decade, I've learned what I consider a very important lesson and one that I often find myself having to re-apply and to have discussions with providers over.
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.
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!
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.
> "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.
Exactly. I left high school over abuse. Another student spent the whole period sitting next to me staring at me muttering about how he was going to tie me up in the middle of the desert, and all the things he was going to shove up my ass, serious serial killer vibes, and the teacher just acted helpless, despite seeing everything. When they started stalking me after school, and it started getting physical, and the school did nothing, I left.
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.
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.
Dyscalculia means that you should probably avoid situations that require you to do your own arithmetic, but there's way more to math than arithmetic, and most professional mathematicians aren't that great at arithmetic either.
Wow. I have never heard of this. Thank you. I just Googled it and while not all of the symptoms fit, a good number of them do. It's rather interesting, I know how to use numbers- I've done several types of analyses over the years, professionally. And my own budget/savings is done in my own self-designed spreadsheet, calculated/balanced down to the cent.
I want to disagree with 2, but OTOH it's also so easy to do that I've just accidentally done it my whole life.
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.
I do agree high level math isn't as useful for dev work. I have a masters in math and started working as a data analyst. I moved to programming years ago and I basically never really need to use the math stuff I know anymore.
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.
> 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.
You're probably using math without knowing it. Debugging through a piece of code is the same as finding a hole in a proof. "This method HAS to return the right value because C. C is always true because B. B is true because A. Ohh... but A isn't true if the record passed in is for a legacy user with no org manager. The method needs to be changed to work for inputs that don't satisfy the current assumptions."
It's not the math facts you learn so much as getting lots of practice with that kind of reasoning.
I sit here, pondering whether that type of logic is math or philosophy. Most likely, it is the intersection of the two. Of course, spending even a few minutes pondering such things tells me that I personally need to avoid the math and embrace the philosophy.
Philosophy includes the study of mathematical reasoning, but you don't get practice at it while you're studying it. It's like taking a music theory class versus learning to play an instrument.
Hm. When I was studying philosophy, we did have logic classes, and did diagram out the logic of arguments. It was a critical component for success in later courses, so I'd say we absolutely practiced it.
I own a modal logic textbook used by a course in a philosophy department, and on any given page it looks an awful lot like a math textbook except that the presentation is far friendlier and the explanations are better than are in 99% of math books.
OK, but I've never been anything but complete shit at proofs, and I'm really good at debugging. They don't feel like the same activity to me at all.
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 seems at least in the same ballpark (ha, ha) as claiming that professional sports players use lots and lots of complicated trigonometry.
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.
All of these are interesting analogs to each other, in that they involve a critical "thinking about" aspect paired with an intuitive, creative, active mental process.
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.
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
"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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
It sounded as if they had the next 10 years planned out with little room for anything else.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
As someone who transitioned from industry to full-time teaching at a community college, I sympathize. The boom-driven influx of people in the industry who are not passionate about technology but are passionate about money has affected even those who are passionate about technology, because what happens when a company's management and executives are only motivated by money at all costs?
I'm currently one of those "management ppl" you are referring, or at least on track to be one, but I swear its not my fault! The industry pays a lot better than any other job I could swing, and my background is very relevant and I know for certain that some of these projects wouldn't run without me. And also, there is no "balance" here, being dorky or "autistic" does not make you a good programmer. There are many brilliant engineers who are also very sociable. Being able to work with others is an important skill and, all else being even, in a highly competitive industry having that kind of skill will get you ahead.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes and no. On the flip side, you now have the means to have a much more comfortable and pleasant life than the high school dropout classmate you haven't seen in six years.
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.
You say no but you're not disagreeing - you're saying that there's enough space in the middle of the pyramid for all the people who didn't drop out of school which AFAICT is orthogonal to GP's point, that there's not enough space at the tip of the pyramid for all the talented people who work very hard.
There’s obviously can’t be enough space for every moderately above average person who works very hard… since that adds up to tens of millions to hundreds of millions of people across the world.
I disagree that competition among fellow high-achievers is the primary obstacle. Maybe, very early on, when you're in a class of investment banking recruits or first-year law associates, etc. But that gets sorted out in the first few years.
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.
> [...] top 1% achiever in education. Most of them by far (like really far) will not be MD or CEO.
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...
One addendum: The pyramid has a top by construction; The top exists no matter what.
In a sports tournament: Someone is going to win, no matter how good the participants are.
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.
It depends a lot on where you end up. There are niches where you can live by market forces alone, and breeze through life being almost unaware of politics - but that's the exception.
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.
Says the 19 year old startup founder who drops out of college and has it made before most people even start thinking of what they want to do.
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.
>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.
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.
> It is the only thing that matters.
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.
This is a little tricky. I think it's more about understanding the philosophy. Lets say you make washing machines. The "academic" will say, great, for next year's model, let's fix the most common failure point and improve reliability so our customers love us while the "psycopath" or "savvy employee" will say, no, our brand is still strong, let's make cheaper machines and save money and we can manipulate some of the review sites and anyway, better for us if they fail after 6 years than 10 years, the customers don't have many choices anyway.
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.
Even if you "make it" in the context of your career and organization, you will lose in the housing market of any metropolitan area where such careers are on offer, simply because other people were there first.
The pyramid is mostly a question of incorrect perspective or viewpoint.
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.)
I was quite surprised how different work was from school. There are a few specific considerations I never really see discussed:
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.I have the same experience, but would like to clarify that almost everything on this list is mostly only true of middle class employment. You absolutely can "fail" if you are on the bottom rung of the political-economic ladder -- this looks like a life in and out of prison, homelessness, despair, and an early death. You don't get endless chances from your landlord or your parole officer. If your area of weakness is "money" (earning enough of it, knowing how much to spend and how much to save, etc.), then you are still fucked. To someone with a poor education, filling out a job or EBT or WIC application is indeed a high-stakes test with disastrous consequences for failing. Your boss in the restaurant kitchen does not want you to question their methods of dishwashing -- he will fire you instead for being lippy if you try to negotiate around it.
That's a fair point. My first job was retail, and I was accidentally late for a shift _once_ and I got put on probation for weeks and wasn't even allowed to take sick leave during the probationary period. The better the job the less you're treated like trash. People float all sorts of explanations for why this would be, but I think fundamentally people just don't know how to move away from class hierarchy. I think it's built into us.
I believe it's because if you are easily replaceable, then screwing up means you're not worth the trouble. If you aren't easily replaceable (whether it's because you have demonstrated you're a good employee or you're working a high-demand role), you are worth the trouble and you'll get more chances. There are other reasons too, such as jurisdictions where suing after being laid off is more common, which makes more chances, PIP and severance packages more likely.
>I believe it's because if you are easily replaceable, then screwing up means you're not worth the trouble.
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.
Well, then they're not easily replaceable. Which implies those workers have other options. And thus employers that treat workers worse than other employers will see workers leave and/or find it harder or more expensive to hire. So it all works out.
It all works out, unless everyone is doing it, and then entire swaths of the economy just burn down.
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!
Well, maybe fast-food restaurants were a low-interest-rate phenomenon or whatever the equivalent term is (a high-labour-supply phenomenon?). If that kind of business can't afford good enough working conditions to get a decent supply of labour while selling its products at a decent price, then yeah, the whole industry will burn. But if there's a demand for it then sooner or later someone will start offering it. I think that probably looks like a decoupling between middle-class-oriented (e.g. Costco or Chipotle) and working-class-oriented.
During COVID a new kind of food business sprung up called a virtual restaurant (or a ghost kitchen), where instead of having to rent a restaurant space and hire wait staff, they just had a kitchen and delivery drivers. Lower expenses, fewer staff.
Eventually, those delivery drivers will be replaced by delivery drones.
I promise I’m not that whiggish when it comes to automation, but there was a time when a good portion of human labour was washing clothing, and now that’s become much less of a thing for much of the world.
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.
Most of the automating in retail isn't even automation, it's just corporate laziness. They're passing their job off to their own customers.
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.
Sometimes we do our own laundry, sometimes we pump our own gas, and sometimes we prepare our own meals. Not having a servant to do those things for us doesn’t make us destitute; it makes us human.
It's not a "servant", it's a service.
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.
Often I hear "I wouldn't take a higher paying job. It's not worth the stress". But I find the opposite to be true. The better paid the job, the less that's expected of you.
This is what you say when you don't want to tell your boss that moving into management means becoming a class traitor.
Most of the examples you gave seem focused on life outside of work aside from the last one, so I’m curious which of them you’d say don’t also apply to lower-income jobs. There are lots of ways for middle-class people to “fail” too outside of work.
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.
That's fair, but I don't totally agree that there is a "work sphere" that is different from the "life sphere" in this regard. That distinction between politics and economics is a synthetic big-L Liberal one that only goes back to approximately Napoleon. The fact that some people have worse jobs, worse working conditions, and worse pay is fundamentally related to the fact that they rent, struggle with money, and have a poor education. Our society has bucketed them into this life, which is a package deal, just like the middle class package is.
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.
Sure, but these are all true of middle-class employees as well:
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?
We can quibble about where to draw the markers, but my point is that these "lessons" that people in these comments are decrying as mostly not true about the "real world", are in fact true for some people, likely even some of the people that you went to school with. You and I heard our asshole math teacher say "It's not gonna be this easy in the real world, cats and kittens!" and probably now regard that as the opposite of true. Many others wish life was as easy as high school. Thanks for the engagement but I don't see any point in "arguing" this point -- that we appear to both agree on -- any further.
I don’t think we do agree, but fair enough. I’ll “disagree and commit”.
Worth probably underlining in heavy ink that if you find that any of these points are not accurate where you are, then you are likely in a bad place.
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.
> 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.
>school was a prison full of torturing peers,
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.
There's perhaps more pressure in a way because you're now responsible for fixing any problems, but kids are exposed to the exact same risks of adult life and employment via their parents, plus some extra ones that adults aren't subject to (parents can be abusive, for one thing—adults can abuse other adults in their household, but getting out is a lot easier for an adult than a kid, especially young kids).
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).
Are you a young adult who is not responsible for anyone but themselves, perhaps? Many adults have to take care of children or their own parents, manage teams, work jobs with serious consequences on other people's lives, deal with having cancer, etc. High school was tough in its own way but I think mostly due to everyone being young and having no life skills yet.
Solidly in middle age, three kids, plenty of other problems.
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)
"Teacher, will we ever use this in real life?" "You won't even get to ask that question in real life."
You may enjoy https://humaniterations.net/2018/10/24/the-first-prison
Now try grad school when you run out of money.
on god
> You get nearly endless chances to fail at work...
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.
I also find really interesting how we frequently talk about how different the two are yet also reinforce the divergence.
I'm not saying what you learn in school doesn't matter (I think it does. It forms the foundation) but we often talk as if the knowledge is completely disjoint and then hire using academic pedigrees as the primary signal. I had an interview last week where a guy was saying "this is an engineering role. It's very different from academia" and then was fixated on my publication record. This seems quite common. This was clearly originally inspired by the traditional engineering interview but it's become optimized where all we do is study these problems. Instead of building more things and expanding our portfolios. Maybe we should go back to whiteboard interviews and in person. It'll put the focus back on evaluating how a candidate thinks and you can't use GPT on the whiteboard (without easily being caught)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?
Maybe mandatory schools and merging education with certification need to change.
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%.
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.
Male instructors are more objective.
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-gen...) but not anything on the rates of objectivity itself
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.
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.
> 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.
I would imagine that the author is young, very intelligent, and just really starting to pick up real-world career experience. What the author points out is true, but I cannot imagine most HN readers are thinking "I'm expecting my workplace to be totally fair and merit-based, just like school was."
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'm expecting my workplace to be totally fair and merit-based"
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.
I'll bet we agree more than you think. Understanding reality isn't the same as capitulating to it. Correct expectations can help you push back more effectively than constantly having your (overly-optimistic) hopes dashed. ie, I'm not just saying "everything sucks, be cynical."
I don't take issue with the fact that he's naive or that his ignorance of corporate dysfunction has been shattered. You don't know what you don't know until you do.
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 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
That kind of behavior is far less successful than many would expect. Higher ups are pretty aware of who does what, at least at 1 year+ time frames.
That being said, I’ve seen many outrun their own incompetence. Getting incentives right in large organizations is difficult.
Being aware is totally irrelevant. Their incentives are not about rewarding the right person. Their incentives always are to protect themselves at all costs.
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.
It depends who you work for and what they are like.
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.
That was my management philosophy.
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.
It's just it's stupidity or incompetence more often than malice; but, of course you should judge on the case-by-case basis and if somebody repeats certain (evil) behavior it's malice
"sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from stupidity."
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.
> 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.
> 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
It is not mutually exclusive, as people can be both pernicious and stupid if they choose to be...
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
This said, most HR folks are head deep in their own ass with their own drama, so there's that.
External staffing agencies are a set of problems unto themselves.
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 don't know. I agree with the advice even if they are not 100% correct.
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.
Agreed. For example, if 90% of C-Suite at corporation are only interested in extracting capital from their subordinates and riding trends, then it’s malice, not incompetence.
In general, some incentive structures allow managers to retain stock and 3% of unspent division budget as a year end bonus. Thus, they naturally cut every possible cost rather than risk growth liabilities.
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
Some people get through the week by abusing other people.
One of my coworkers made up a totally bogus story about me to show her "management potential" about how she managed a situation with uncooperative team member on a project.
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.
Both stupidity and malice happen. It can often be difficult to tell the difference as we arent as objective as we think we are.
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.
Over the past decade, I've been dealing with sorting out a rare and difficult to diagnose medical issue with a family member. Over this decade, I've learned what I consider a very important lesson and one that I often find myself having to re-apply and to have discussions with providers over.
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.
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!
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.
> "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.
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.
> 8) Abuse is abuse, and people negligent in doing anything about it are participating in it. Get toxicity out of your life.
This needs to be taught more actively in school. Negligence in stopping abuse, or fostering abuse = just as immoral as abuse.
Exactly. I left high school over abuse. Another student spent the whole period sitting next to me staring at me muttering about how he was going to tie me up in the middle of the desert, and all the things he was going to shove up my ass, serious serial killer vibes, and the teacher just acted helpless, despite seeing everything. When they started stalking me after school, and it started getting physical, and the school did nothing, I left.
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.
I’m with you except for 2. Knowing math is great.
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.
Dyscalculia means that you should probably avoid situations that require you to do your own arithmetic, but there's way more to math than arithmetic, and most professional mathematicians aren't that great at arithmetic either.
dyscalculia is it's own thing too.
Wow. I have never heard of this. Thank you. I just Googled it and while not all of the symptoms fit, a good number of them do. It's rather interesting, I know how to use numbers- I've done several types of analyses over the years, professionally. And my own budget/savings is done in my own self-designed spreadsheet, calculated/balanced down to the cent.
But ask me to do subtraction? Forget it.
I want to disagree with 2, but OTOH it's also so easy to do that I've just accidentally done it my whole life.
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.
I do agree high level math isn't as useful for dev work. I have a masters in math and started working as a data analyst. I moved to programming years ago and I basically never really need to use the math stuff I know anymore.
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.
> 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.
You're probably using math without knowing it. Debugging through a piece of code is the same as finding a hole in a proof. "This method HAS to return the right value because C. C is always true because B. B is true because A. Ohh... but A isn't true if the record passed in is for a legacy user with no org manager. The method needs to be changed to work for inputs that don't satisfy the current assumptions."
It's not the math facts you learn so much as getting lots of practice with that kind of reasoning.
I sit here, pondering whether that type of logic is math or philosophy. Most likely, it is the intersection of the two. Of course, spending even a few minutes pondering such things tells me that I personally need to avoid the math and embrace the philosophy.
Philosophy includes the study of mathematical reasoning, but you don't get practice at it while you're studying it. It's like taking a music theory class versus learning to play an instrument.
Hm. When I was studying philosophy, we did have logic classes, and did diagram out the logic of arguments. It was a critical component for success in later courses, so I'd say we absolutely practiced it.
I own a modal logic textbook used by a course in a philosophy department, and on any given page it looks an awful lot like a math textbook except that the presentation is far friendlier and the explanations are better than are in 99% of math books.
It contains lots and lots of exercises.
OK, but I've never been anything but complete shit at proofs, and I'm really good at debugging. They don't feel like the same activity to me at all.
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 seems at least in the same ballpark (ha, ha) as claiming that professional sports players use lots and lots of complicated trigonometry.
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.
All of these are interesting analogs to each other, in that they involve a critical "thinking about" aspect paired with an intuitive, creative, active mental process.
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.
440Hz is an A (and most people don't have perfect pitch anyway). Otherwise, I completely agree.
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
High school was toxic, and so were my first few jobs. Lessons learned the hard way.
> If you stay focused and just do you, you'll succeed despite other people's drama and your personal pains
Can't agree, I know people who got more work because they focused and did the work
These weren't universal truths, they were my personal truths.
"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.
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.
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
"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.
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.
> 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.
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).
> 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.
Damn. That's quite early to be teaching the test. And specializing in niche extra curriculars. Competition must be fierce.
It sounded as if they had the next 10 years planned out with little room for anything else.
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).
> This is a myth
Citation?
I want to see that too; because OP is saying between the lines that "public school kids" are lazy dorks by birth.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
As someone who transitioned from industry to full-time teaching at a community college, I sympathize. The boom-driven influx of people in the industry who are not passionate about technology but are passionate about money has affected even those who are passionate about technology, because what happens when a company's management and executives are only motivated by money at all costs?
I'm currently one of those "management ppl" you are referring, or at least on track to be one, but I swear its not my fault! The industry pays a lot better than any other job I could swing, and my background is very relevant and I know for certain that some of these projects wouldn't run without me. And also, there is no "balance" here, being dorky or "autistic" does not make you a good programmer. There are many brilliant engineers who are also very sociable. Being able to work with others is an important skill and, all else being even, in a highly competitive industry having that kind of skill will get you ahead.
> Being able to work with others is an important skill
Are we seriously claiming that average office socials/politics is no more than being able to play nicely with people?
Idk where you work but you’d be surprised how bad some people are at it.
do you mean this when you say 'good at politics'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
relevant -> https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
> 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.
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.
Everything is more complicated than you learned in 3rd Grade.
I always assume malice until otherwise proven and I let my enemies believe that I'm well-intentioned towards them.
> 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.
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.
"no one is out to get you" yeah... no.
What a load of dung.
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.
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.