Ask HN: Anyone else is tired of all the corporate bs?

If you're working in say automotive industry on a simulator of car tire deformation, you're so far away from the business side that they leave you alone. Whereas in a SaaS business (or, worse yet, unprofitable SaaS Business), the business types have dozens of ideas on how to improve the app, they bombard you with them, often don't care about engineering culture or long-term code viability but only about speed of delivery etc. Then there are large boring corporations which are profitable, but have so much business and manangerial overhead and those people see generating lots of meetings and ideas (don't have to be good) as a part of their job description.

where to begin. What would one say if one could speak openly?

* The vast majority of executives are paranoid, risk averse know nothings. They don’t want to take any business risks lest it harm their comp.

* Because most execs don’t understand their business, their customers, their industry, and they distrust their staff — they can’t formulate clear and concise goals and objectives. This is how orgs end up with that blitzkrieg of murky, pointless, meaningless objectives.

* Quite a lot of people in leadership roles got to where there are by making very morally and ethically questionable decisions. It’s largely due to the stupidity of the investor class that these individuals were never caught. The horrible thing is because these individuals are loaded to the gills with malintent they assume the same of everyone else. They tend to structure their organizations around mistrust.

* This is why management practice, especially in the US, appears to be a bad case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. All of management’s bureaucratic nonsense and irrational separation of duties creates self-inflicted wounds. management salves wounds (they never get at the root cause). And then management rewards itself with big bonuses for fixing the problems they created.

* The US Federal Government functions way more effectively than most large companies. The reason is that in the govt policies, procedures, and controls are well documented and maintained. In most orgs all three are usually in flux at all times. This makes unity of effort pretty challenging on a good day.

* If orgs cut a lot of their senior leadership they could pay everyone a lot more -and- see a productivity improvement whilst preserving their margin

* Investors think they’re so clever.

And of course one last thing

* most people have no idea what they’re nattering on about

I think it might be because if you just want part-time it may looks like you are not going to take it seriously.

Being freelancer is more difficult for the not long term, but the best to achieve shorter working hours I would say is, work full time for 9-12 months, then you know how things work and also have some "power" to request part-time.

The problem of course is that after 2-3 years you will most likely change job again, so it does not last too long as long as you want higher salary

Most days feel like a constant struggle between having to do my work and people getting in the way.

After 2 years I still don't know what's the functionality of my PO, basically he just pass the task from the top to poorly written tickets that constantly miss information or does not take into account or business logic, this causes a back and forth between me redefining the tickets and having to explain to him, causing him to re-explain those changes up with constant delays and blockers.

My manager is part of another team and barely interacts with my work or me in any meaningful way, we have bi-weekly 1 on 1 that are constantly cancelled for lack of topics.