111–120 of 135 posts
1. Being too good in an organization makes you a threat to those above you. 2. When an organization must downsize, you want to make sure once the dust settles that no one under you is able to take your job. 3. These decisions are political, so you need political power to defend against them.
Can't we keep politics out of software?
It is an interesting subject - but so much have been written about it in the past. I would like to read what are the new angles. And for the past discussions see: HACKER NEWS DISCUSSION LINKS THE GERVAIS PRINCIPLE * The Gervais Principle Main Submission (October 2009) https://ycombinator.com * The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to "The Office" (August 2024) https://ycombinator.com MORAL MAZES * Moral Maze…
can you fix the links? they all point to YC
We would rather a known variable, even if it is not the best instead of an unknown that might be better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why don't people take accountability for their actions? This is not my experience. People who are in positions of power, e.g. managers, are the kind of people who are incapable of admitting fault. They can't lose face so the shit is rolled downhill. It's narcissism.
Clearly that trait is selected for.
Because corporations are autocratic. All power is top down. Make corporations democratic with bottom up power structures, and the opposite will happen. Leadership will face blame for everything, and the bottom rung will never.
Yeah but why does it always end up in such autocratic behavior? On paper, I'd naively argue, any team or organization, or even individual, who continues to actually deliver value for the company, shouldn't they get to have a say in where the ship could go to avoid sinking it?
2) Cooperatives are what you are looking for. Why aren't there more of them? No founder ever wants to share the initial investment. Is it a universal human weakness? I don't know. Why aren't the very few that exist growing to be more successful than a small local niche thing? Probably because democracies work best for small groups and progresively degrade as the number of people increase.
3) It works as indended. The people that are (temporarily) interested in the success of the organization, and with the power to change it if it looks like it's failing, are not interested in long-term success. As long as company's stock can be sold, only short term profits matter.
Owners of family businesses are more likely to listen to low level employees, but they're still autoritarian.
I've seen a fair share of personalities in middle/upper management. My hypothesis is that in large organizations, people that operate at that level often exhibit more survival skills that are ruthless than moral. A common characteristic I've seen is they manage "up" well and are often not good managers themselves. So if they control the narrative with their management, even when they screw up everything, its articula…
Everyone knows object lookups (hash maps) are generally O(1) complexity and thus more performant than arrays for looking up values.
And that becomes a rule of thumb - codified as law.
But it’s not always true. For example if you know the index, the array lookup is significantly faster in virtually all languages.
But I answered in a way that sounded like it was exactly wrong. And it was treated as such.
To me, it sums up the problem with corporate intelligentsia. And it gave me yet another reason to be fake and lie all the time.
While I think the nuance should separate the strong from the weak, instead you just get snapped to a grid of mainstream talking points anyway, so you have to stick to that grid up front if you know what’s best! Choose the right paths and they are rigid
>how do these people consistently survive their self-inflicted disasters? There's a lot of good answers here. One supplement I would make to a few of them is it is harder to fire or punish someone the more they resemble you. A lot easier to see the fault in a woman a couple of rungs down than a guy your age who looks a lot like you and you've had beers with for a decade. The (truly) wealthy aren't like me and you. An…
No matter how big a wizard/rockstar, they can't truly compare to a dragon.
There's a fallacy that we all fall into: We think that our job is about turning the crank, and that the best crank turners will stay around the longest. It's not: I've been involved in quite a few projects that get abandoned, (or otherwise miss their target) for one reason or another. There's a few things that you (or your partner) can do to protect yourself. Most important: Make sure that your role (as an engineer)…
All good advice, I do disagree with one statement, however, mainly because I've seen this getting violated many times now: > "Make sure that your role (as an engineer) in your company is in the most critical part of the company as you can handle." The main problem here is how much the organization wants to think it can continue without those crucial parts, I've seen wild things go down in this regard, and I think we'…
A trillion dollar company can lose 99% of its value and still end up a multi billion dollar business. And I don't think many cuts come close to that kind of bloodbath.
They can survive the cuts because leadership isn't fundamentally affected by 99.99% of day to day operations. And their compensation at that level isn't on simply "make good product and accrue revenue". That's a big part why we've been in this irrational market for quite a few years now.
I've seen a fair share of personalities in middle/upper management. My hypothesis is that in large organizations, people that operate at that level often exhibit more survival skills that are ruthless than moral. A common characteristic I've seen is they manage "up" well and are often not good managers themselves. So if they control the narrative with their management, even when they screw up everything, its articula…
I’m not sure it’s true that being a bad middle manager makes you a bad director or exec.
I definitely agree that the most effective upper management (directors and execs) would mostly make terrible middle managers.
Idk how you “prove” you’re anything beyond middle management anyway as an external hire outside of network tbh which is maybe why some of those positions go for over $1M/year which equally boggles the mind - to cite an example, why is an HR director at Netflix making $1.2M/year