131–140 of 165 posts
> You have to feel it. The corporate machine does not feel it. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead.
This is why small companies still stand a chance. They can build something that would fail the corpo test of metrics and surveys.
I've learnt that just about everything in life boils down to feelings, which is interesting. No matter how rational a person or people claim to be, usually it comes down to feelings... Life choices? Business decisions? Who gets promoted? It's all vibes and feelings. People will deliberate and argue over facts but ultimately there will be some "weighting" factor which is feelings and will make or break the outcome. Yo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Feeling some moderate positive emotion as a result of your work is not incompatible with 9 to 5 work. The bigger problem is usually the opposite: nagging negative emotions, feeling annoyed, feeling contempt towards some parts of the work that one is bound to do. These emotions are unbecoming, so the psychological defenses hide them, as if there's no feeling at all. This is what "mind-numbing" work often is.
There's a related problem I see in academic review, but I think it applies far more broadly. The easy part of review is recognizing flaws. One should always acknowledge the flaws, but the authors tend to already be aware of them[0]. The difficult part is determining if the flaws undermine the research or if despite the limitations that the work pushes progress forward. (All but a few works are incremental) I think th…
The academic conference situation will implode under its own weight. As more and more people enter, the quality of reviews suffers, there is less and less illusions about any form of duty, responsibility, honor etc. and it's all a game of turf wars, citations rings, just slipping through the cracks by submitting enormous numbers of papers and resubmitting in a few months those that get rejected, without even fixing the typos that the first reviewers pointed out. And observing this just makes the few who did care also become jaded and put in less energy. Just as you have people in college who want to put in the absolute minimum work in order to get the piece of paper, you have the same happening in academia. Pump out the most papers with the least works, and the reviewers are just an obstacle in that view.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He was someone who played games and manipulated his way through his career. He could say the right things and navigate his way through office politics unscathed while causing damage to everything he touched. Not the one you're replying to, but is the above quote not enough to explain why they were a mis-hire?
Not really, the parent was asking for specifics while these are generalities.
I've learnt that just about everything in life boils down to feelings, which is interesting. No matter how rational a person or people claim to be, usually it comes down to feelings... Life choices? Business decisions? Who gets promoted? It's all vibes and feelings. People will deliberate and argue over facts but ultimately there will be some "weighting" factor which is feelings and will make or break the outcome. Yo…
Rationalists cannot get away from empiricism. There's nothing to rationalize about without observation of the empirical.
Western philosophy has always tried to carve out very precise lanes of thought like empiricism and rationalism, but one requires the other.
There's no nature or nurture debate. It's all emergent aspects of nature.
Humanoids went centuries learning to adjust to internal feelings of enough water and food. Strived to find balance.
Language came along and agrarian warlords focused effort on made up balancing acts of gods; He will be mad if we don't do things right. Lame projection
Two sides of the same coin. Humans have an internal need to see that their work output is valuable and they are useful to society/community. This is not some unrealistic expectation. For most of history, it was fairly easy to see how one's work directly results in value. Farming, butchering animals, making clothes and shoes, paving roads or building houses or whatever it may be. People could feel satisfaction of jobs well done, applying their experience and being valued for it. It is normal. Pointless drudgery eats away at one's soul and leads to burnout, much more than simply being "overworked". If much of your work-related mental energy goes towards timing when to jump ship before it sinks, that won't be sustainable. Working on some pointless project that you know will get axed, but for some internal politics reason it has to remain up and running for a few more months to get someone promoted before killing it, etc.
When people say that a job is a job, and you wouldn't get paid for it if it was enjoyable, it's just not right. If you produce value, you do deserve the pay, it's not supposed to be compensation for being miserable.
On the flipside, when MBAs internalize this message, what they take away is that "passion" and "motivation" makes employees more productive and prone to put in extra effort. So they come up with the genius idea to test whether you are "passionate" before hiring you. Resulting in a dreaded and ugly song and dance ritual where you have to exaggerate your passion and talk in unrealistic language, and grifters and smoothtalkers win in that.
That's not the kind of passion that is needed, the outwardly, enthusiastic-glowing passion. Just something where you feel that it's neat, it's a net positive for the world even if small, and you left the world a bit better when you go to sleep at night compared to when you woke up in the morning. Even extra money can't compensate for that in the long term (short term yes).
The only thing you have to do is pay taxes and die. It does help to feel good about the project and the work, but it is not a requirement for a fulfilling life. Looking back at most times I have felt horrible in the depth of adversity, resistance or burnout I realize those were the times of greatest potential for achievement, learning and growth. Those are the memorable chapters, the things that define my character.…
Happiness is basically equivalent to feeling steady (even if slow) progress in response to one's own effort towards valued goals.
Oh, i thought it was a satirical critique of how arbitrary promotion criteria can be. Turns out someone is seriously claiming that someone else "doesn't not feel the right way" about the work they do, and THAT is their core problem. Ha. Well, at least the author feels that they are feeling the right way, good for them I guess.
When you follow a cult/religion's instructions to the letter and still fail, this is the excuse every time. It's manipulative and unverifiable.
I land on the point of the tradeoff spectrum where you have some "instructions" and rules, but it's also a "spirit of the rules" kind of thing, and someone has the means to exercise subjective judgment, instead of trying to fully eliminate subjectivity in favor of ever growing rules with ever growing exceptions that become a maze to navigate, and can become its own form of tyranny, especially if someone has the power to arbitrarily decide which set of rules to choose to apply for each case.
You can have the best processes and rules, if the people are bad. You can't compensate for that. And if you have good people, you can and should allow them some range of judgment.
Good thought, but corporations don't care, and a whole lot of folks that play the corporate game won't, either. Money will still be made. Careers will still be advanced. It think it was Theodore Sturgeon that said "90% of everything is crap." For myself, I enjoy what I do. I write software that I want to use, in a way that makes me feel good. I have no illusions that I would be allowed to work like this, if I were st…
there are pockets even in the corporate world where people are able to feel what they are doing in my experience, those times have been with the most talented and productive people. perhaps they don't need the crutch of process it is rare, and does not last forever. as teams scale up, this is gradually lost. regression to the mean? leading with feeling is vulnerable. it can be very rewarding when met with like or ver…
The people in those pockets will have to use their discernment to figure out where the next pocket is located. But it can't be something that everyone can easily do.