Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

My work in open source and many different-sized companies (in finance sector and outside) has taught me that there are two categories of people. Those who create value and those who capture value. Most people are on a spectrum but will lean more towards one group or the other but there are people who are more on the extreme ends of the spectrum.

- People who are fully focused on capturing value have a tendency to take everything very seriously; they are often pessimistic and will find problems in the smallest things (even trivial aspects of their daily lives) and blow them out of proportion. They don't tolerate external criticism well. They are more likely to have fits of anger. They may have narcisistic tendencies and may lack empathy and are prone to hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance. They tend to focus exclusively on social politics for self-enrichment and don't spend any time thinking about the well-being of society. They believe that personal interest is the only force which drives value creation in society. They see value creators as sheep who need a shepherd to guide them to the right path. They are unable to distinguish value capturing from value creation; to them, they are the same concept.

- People who are fully focused on creating value have a tendency to not take anything too seriously; they tend to be optimistic and may shrug off problems altogether, they rarely get angry and they appreciate criticism. They are calm, altruistic and highly self-aware. They believe that altruism is the main force driving value creation in society. They may see value capturers as parasites on the system which exploit value creators to force them towards arbitrary directions which allow value capturers to claim credit and amass profits for themselves. Value creators see a very big difference between value creation and value capturing and their ability to see the difference means less cognitive dissonance, less hypocrisy and more emotional stability.

The other thing I learned is that our fiat monetary system benefits value capturers at the expense of value producers. Since fiat was introduced, through natural selection, humans have been getting worse at creating value and better at capturing it. Value capturers are better at figuring out where to place themselves in order to capture all the new fiat money that is constantly entering the system. This is why there are so many monopolies now.

We used to have a system which benefited balanced individuals, but the current system benefits extremist value capturers.

I've learned that small businesses generally have high expectations for relatively small amounts of money. As a result, I stopped doing freelance work unless there is a lot of money involved.

That 95% of the workforce is there just to collect their checks and they will do everything in their power to protect that privilege.

How important it is to be able to inhabit another person's viewpoint and see things from their perspective. So much time and effort is saved in doing so.

Much of my job has become translating and mediating between stakeholders going around in circles, because each one believes their viewpoint represents the entirety of the issue. They can not understand one another because they assume the other understands everything exactly as they do. The engineer sees the issue as a technical problem, while the BA sees the issue as a process problem. They're both right, but each is only seeing half the issue.

Forget what you think you know about someone, shed your own views, listen very closely to what they're saying, and interpret what they're saying not through your own lens, but through theirs. Their viewpoints are formed through their experiences, not yours.

It's not easy and you'll get better at it the more you know someone, but there are plenty of shortcuts you can take based on your assumptions about them. Just be sure to update your mental model of them as you learn new information, usually gained by listening to what they're saying.

Interesting. What do you mean by "companies" and "inquiries," and what documentclass do you use?

Edit: Or, were you joking? ;)