Earlier quoted context omitted.
Non vitae sed scholae discimus. (Seneca, epistulae morales ad Lucilium 106, 11–12)
Er, mutatis mutandis!
[deleted]
Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
61–70 of 117 posts
Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
I'm sorry, I can't take you seriously with statements like this. > Class solidarity and positional maintenance are the real objectives Who's organizing all the world's corporate leaders? Who's preventing from non-infiltrated people from starting businesses? This is extremely conspiratorial > Companies will do bad things to make a profit, and on rare occasions they even do good things to make a profit Really? Rare occ…
What the parent comment is saying does apply to large corporations. I will be very specific - I worked for Fidelity. Fidelity does not need smart people for 80% of their professional positions. They need someone who can pass the FINRA Series 7/63 to get a licenses and follow procedure. Without exaggeration, there are scripts for most of the work. You don't have to follow them to the letter, but you can. Standing out in most of these roles other than "not messing up" is hard and doesn't really benefit the company except on the sale side of things (where compensations reach FAANG level, while working 70 hour weeks). As a result, people hire their friends and family. They do not care about Fidelity growing - they know it will continue to exist.
Take a software startup I worked for later - they care about profits and they care about employee morale. They are out to make money and they need the best and the brightest. It affects their bottom line. A good dev can bring in millions in revenue. They give promotions, they retain. They tell their dumbass son/daughter who got hired to shut his/her mouth, be respectful, and not boss anyone around even if they do hire him/her.
I also see this in emerging economies - when the USSR collapsed, people really hired talent, because the markets were competitive. (Even though former USSR is famous for nepotism)
A lot of established companies in the US are truly not competitive and have the market cornered, hence some validity in the parent comment.
Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Corporate is weird. The tendency is to have an in-group and out group, but that is just normal human behavior. Nothing ground-breaking here. But to say that work is not demanding and evaluation always political is very big generalization. Some hard projects go to people that can handle them ( or can't if you don't like them ). When that big project is over, there seems to be a very clear indication, who MVPs are ( ev…
> But to say that work is not demanding and evaluation always political is very big generalization. Some hard projects go to people that can handle them ( or can't if you don't like them ). When that big project is over, there seems to be a very clear indication, who MVPs are ( even if they do not have 'in-group' status ). From what I've witnessed consulting, this varies greatly by company size. I once heard a Vice P…
"Look, beyond a certain size, almost nothing you can do will save or destroy a company."
I wanted to reflexively say no, but then I remembered Equifax breach. Now that I think about it, I mostly worked for regional entities, but never really big ones.
Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
#64I think there's two things.
1. The school system has been broken for many years. Learning from people who are not passionate about what they teach is the main concern I have. You can easily tell the difference of "engaged" students who have a great teacher they will remember forever vs. "disengaged" students who will be able to tell you how bad their teacher was. I think Montessori-esq / curiosity driven schooling is the future given 2/3 the world is on the internet and there's actually exciting, inspiring, and engaging teachers around the world doing an amazing job. (i.e. Khan from Khan Academy really paved the way here)
2. These rules work because there's a significantly smaller portion of the population who truly knows themselves and embraces their eccentric characteristics. We typically lose our identity when going through a formal means of schooling because we want to fit in and thus be "average". Even those valedictorians are quite "average" outside of working harder to get perfect grades. How many do you know that went on to do the amazing things expected of them? Usually it's the people who were eccentric and didn't do so well in school.
Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But to say that work is not demanding and evaluation always political is very big generalization. Some hard projects go to people that can handle them ( or can't if you don't like them ). When that big project is over, there seems to be a very clear indication, who MVPs are ( even if they do not have 'in-group' status ). From what I've witnessed consulting, this varies greatly by company size. I once heard a Vice P…
> "Look, beyond a certain size, almost nothing you can do will save or destroy a company. At that point, people mostly go to work to play politics. Occasionally, as a side effect of the political maneuvering, work sometimes gets done." From working at a big company, this is accurate. > But at a 50 person company, or even a 500 person company, it's possible for single person to make a huge difference. That's true, and…
> That's true, and you still might be stuck fighting politics to do it.
Yeah, politics are kind of built into the human condition. You can't avoid them entirely, and even if you could, I'm not sure it would actually be a good thing. You need to able to convince people, to recognize them and boost them up when they're doing good work, and to get groups onto the same page. And all of this involves "politics" to some extent.
But a company's politics might be relatively healthy, or completely poisonous. Or anything in between. The best organizations are the ones where the overall goal is important, and where ethics are important, and where the politics are mostly positive-to-neutral.
Finally, if you want to save the day, you have to convince someone to take a risk on your plan, and your ability to implement it. After a couple of successes, this can become easier the next time. But there's politics involved in that, too.
Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
#66School is a flawed meritocracy, but it actually makes efforts to be one. Corporate is a deliberate non-meritocracy whose purpose is to ratify the inadequate descendants of an existing oligarchy as meritocrats. Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time; he punished people who said the trains were late. Corporate is the same: meritocracy by assertion--and only by assertion. In school, you learn that hard work is rew…
You have it exactly opposite in almost every way. Corporate attempts to be meritocratic. They have every incentive to be. Executives want to hire the more effective people to perform tasks so they can maximize profits. They can be greedy or stupid, but not both. They can hire their friends and family, sure, and sometimes they do. But they have an incentive to make decisions on merit otherwise they would go out of bus…
> Corporate attempts to be meritocratic. They have every incentive to be. Executives want to hire the more effective people to perform tasks so they can maximize profits.
Not where I work. They hire people who they think will make them look good, and it's not always by hiring the most productive. They'll deny promotions to their most effective workers out of fear they will leave. They block transfers.
Companies make a show of being meritocratic, but most of their rewards system fall apart under the smallest scrutiny. On average, those who self promote are more likely to get rewarded than those who do the better work. Some companies even formalize this by insisting the managers are not supposed to know who is better, and you have to convince them by writing your semi-annual review yourself.
Lots of managers who want "yes-men" who'll reward those who say "yes" and fail and punish those who correctly say "no".
Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
#67School is a flawed meritocracy, but it actually makes efforts to be one. Corporate is a deliberate non-meritocracy whose purpose is to ratify the inadequate descendants of an existing oligarchy as meritocrats. Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time; he punished people who said the trains were late. Corporate is the same: meritocracy by assertion--and only by assertion. In school, you learn that hard work is rew…
You have it exactly opposite in almost every way. Corporate attempts to be meritocratic. They have every incentive to be. Executives want to hire the more effective people to perform tasks so they can maximize profits. They can be greedy or stupid, but not both. They can hire their friends and family, sure, and sometimes they do. But they have an incentive to make decisions on merit otherwise they would go out of bus…
> The teachers and administrators don't get a bonus if they're school does well
They don't, but a lot of administrators like showing off scores and stats to their administrator friends from different schools. There definitely is an incentive, even if it's imperfect - optimized for objective stats not subjective learning.
Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
#68School is a flawed meritocracy, but it actually makes efforts to be one. Corporate is a deliberate non-meritocracy whose purpose is to ratify the inadequate descendants of an existing oligarchy as meritocrats. Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time; he punished people who said the trains were late. Corporate is the same: meritocracy by assertion--and only by assertion. In school, you learn that hard work is rew…
>If a professor played favorites the way the average corporate manager does, he'd be fired.
Have you been near a grad school lately?
Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
Just to let you know I completely agree with you. The corporations I've worked for rewarded schmoozing with the manager much more than competence. Maybe those other people disagreeing with you worked for different corporations? I have no idea but I've worked for several corporations and they were all a mess in this way. My current position as a software engineer with almost a decade of experience is a subordinate to…
DXC in New Orleans has the reputation of mud among local devs.
Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
#70School is a flawed meritocracy, but it actually makes efforts to be one. Corporate is a deliberate non-meritocracy whose purpose is to ratify the inadequate descendants of an existing oligarchy as meritocrats. Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time; he punished people who said the trains were late. Corporate is the same: meritocracy by assertion--and only by assertion. In school, you learn that hard work is rew…
You have it exactly opposite in almost every way. Corporate attempts to be meritocratic. They have every incentive to be. Executives want to hire the more effective people to perform tasks so they can maximize profits. They can be greedy or stupid, but not both. They can hire their friends and family, sure, and sometimes they do. But they have an incentive to make decisions on merit otherwise they would go out of bus…
“Many don't even get evaluated and firing teachers is very difficult in the US”
I am a high school English teacher in the US. I have two to four performance reviews every school year (each entailing a pre & post meeting along with an in-class performance evaluation). I have tenure, but the only barrier to firing me between now and next September (barring fireable offenses) is a PIP which is ultimately based on subjective administrative reviews. If my boss doesn’t want me back next year, I won’t be.
Stories about ‘rubber rooms’ in NYC are hardly demonstrative of teaching conditions nationwide.