Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. Care to elaborate?
There is a huge amount of public funding/grants/tax breaks available to small/medium enterprises. I know a lot of companies that would not function without this help.
Exactly.
Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
191–200 of 757 posts
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#192How much feel good and drinking relationships matter in upper management. And on the downside, how little facts weight in when compared to a manager's gut feeling. Enthusiastically presenting a (factually wrong) solution can be a winning strategy. In high school, I thought I was a math genius because all of my solutions were judged as correct. Turns out, I was just a good presenter and nobody made any effort to check…
That is the reason the world is burning. Instead of running from where you don't see it, run to attack where you do see it.
It's better to fail as a good person than to succeed as a charlatan, and a bit of money can't plaster over the faculties of the mind drying up, among that the ability to resist charlatans in other contexts, including the political. "Business sophistry" is simply sophistry, brownnosing your boss is just brownnosing, and either you feed sophistry and naked emperors, or you don't. Everybody has "reasons", but more importantly, every day new people come into the world, and they deserve a clean shot at life more than crooked people deserve respect and comfort. Save your soul, you just have the one.
> Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.
-- Kant
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is what would now be termed a "blackpill".
No, I didn't mean things in that sort of "nothing you can do about the sad truth" way. Instead, I consider this actionable advice. - Spend time hanging out with other guys talking about shared hobbies - When you like your results, make sure people can see your enthusiasm - Help people look good in front of their peers and they will buy - As a contractor, do what the customer wants, not what you like best - Before you…
I think it's an expansion on Matrix's blue pill red pill analogy, except black seems an even more forceful and grim color than red.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#194This thread is bleak.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#195Life is fleeting. Most of us here are 1/3 or more of the way done. Divest yourself as much as possible from your job. Find other sources of identity. You don't need that fancy car or to buy a boat as much as you need that ejector seat savings account. And when you realise that conditions have evolved to a point where you're not having fun anymore (and they always eventually do), eject yourself and go spend far more t…
Regarding the "ejector seat savings account", do I receive something like unemployment benefits when I quit my in the United States? If yes, does it matter whether I quit or was fired? Sorry if that question sounds naive, but from what I read here on HN I'm often not quite sure how the system works in the US.
generally speaking, if you quit or were fired you would not be eligible for any unemployment assistance. it's different state to state, but quit is your decision, and 'fired' is usually for something negative/bad. I've been 'laid off' - terminated but it was reported as no fault of mine - and received unemployment assistance - this has happened to me twice.
the 'ejector seat savings' the GP was referring to just means 'have enough savings that you can walk away from any situation if you want to'. GP probably wasn't meaning 'walk away from all work forever'. I can say in my case even when I qualified for unemployment assistance, it was pretty small, and took a couple weeks for me to even get a check, then another few days for the check to clear. Mind you this was 15 years ago - the situation might be 'faster' now, but... having savings now means I wouldn't care one way or another, but at the time, I had very little, and it panicked the heck out of me not having a 'regular check' coming in.
25 years ago, I was earning... about $700/week. The upper cap on unemployment assistance paid out around... $300/week (and I didn't even qualify for the full amount, IIRC). I had been earning $700/week, but then had to wait close to 3 more weeks to get a check from the state for around $200. It wasn't close to a sustainable situation.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#196Many of those who probably should know or who give the impression that they know, dont actually know or even want to know how the sausage is made. This can be both a good and a bad thing.
"Ignorance is a bliss."
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#197Life is fleeting. Most of us here are 1/3 or more of the way done. Divest yourself as much as possible from your job. Find other sources of identity. You don't need that fancy car or to buy a boat as much as you need that ejector seat savings account. And when you realise that conditions have evolved to a point where you're not having fun anymore (and they always eventually do), eject yourself and go spend far more t…
Regarding the "ejector seat savings account", do I receive something like unemployment benefits when I quit my in the United States? If yes, does it matter whether I quit or was fired? Sorry if that question sounds naive, but from what I read here on HN I'm often not quite sure how the system works in the US.
I believe you have to be involuntarially let go (i.e., fired or downsized) in order to collect unemployment. If you depart of your own decision, including them talking you into doing so, you do not get to collect unemployment.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#198(preface: I worked a string of manual labor jobs before and during college) A lot of the (now) coveted trade jobs can seem like a very tempting alternative to crushing college debt and volatile job security, but truth be told, many of these trades are plagued with physical injuries, sudden unemployment, and what not. Furthermore, you deal with A LOT more shady people (employers, customers / clients, suppliers, you na…
The downside of trades is that most people are there only for the money. From this you can derive the rest.
And unfortunately it's difficult to scale your work. You get paid for the hours you put in, and there's only so many hours. Of course, if you're lightning fast you could increase volume, but that's about it.
I know lots of people in trade jobs that make a good salary, not too far away from what their company engineers make - but the downside is that they work 12 hour days, 6 days a week to earn that kind of money. While the engineer has a cushy 8 hr workday, 5 days a week.
Work and overtime culture completely depends on the owner. I've been at shops where you were expected to work OT every single day. Start 7, 30 mins lunch 12, 45 min dinner around 3-4, then back to work and keep working until 7-8-9 in the evening. repeat. 6 days a week, sometimes 7.
It's one of the few places where people have pissing matches over who's worked the most. Guys would come in and brag about only getting 3 hours of sleep, or working 16 hr days the whole week. Weird culture.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#199How much feel good and drinking relationships matter in upper management. And on the downside, how little facts weight in when compared to a manager's gut feeling. Enthusiastically presenting a (factually wrong) solution can be a winning strategy. In high school, I thought I was a math genius because all of my solutions were judged as correct. Turns out, I was just a good presenter and nobody made any effort to check…
> Consultants are paid to be a straw man parrot. You tell their coworkers what your contact wants them to hear, so that they can blame it on you if their idea goes wrong.
I'm not sure I follow. Is "you" the consultant in the above scenario? A consultant is hired to pitch the idea of someone who's hired them, to the person's who's hired you colleagues. If the idea ultimately falls through, the person who's idea it was originally gets to shift blame on you. Oh, ok. While writing this I figured out what you meant by straw man parrot.
Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any Book recommendations ?
Checkout Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast & Slow - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqXVAo7dVRU https://paulminors.com/blog/thinking-fast-slow-book-summary-...
You might want to skip chapter 4: https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...
And take the rest with a bit of salt given that this was Kahneman's comments on the research in that chapter: "Disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true."