141–150 of 482 posts
> Here's the pressure if you're in the 10% of people that aren't crud at their jobs - you're surrounded by people that are crud.
I wish people stopped overusing crud. It kind of dilutes the argument and makes it less clear.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Corporations from the perspective of most employees are communists dictatorships. Think about it: you use a communal means of production, distribute profits centrally, and you don’t get to vote for who gets to be your manager.
I guess misconceptions like these are why theorists abandoned the term 'communism' in favor of 'communalism' to explain what they meant. This isn't even a no-true-scotsman argument, but if all that comes to mind when communism comes up is Soviet dictatorship, the cold war propaganda worked.
> My current organization has 8000 staff members, and I used to glance over the usage metrics of the dashboards my old team produced. I believe three dashboards were used, out of somewhere around 50 - 100. Of those being visited, it usually turned out they were being visited by members of our team checking to see if the data had refreshed for the day. I'd estimate the cost of maintaining our team was approximately $1…
Can anyone here look at " identify a change which improved employee efficiency by $125 annually " and think it isn't going to be complete bullshit? That's in the region of 50c/day. "I told employees to reuse paperclips which I predict will save the company $1M per year"[1] PR/marketing/self-promotion - surely nobody believes it?. And that saving 50 cents per day is supposed to come from a manager who can influence al…
AI is one of the big things you can see right now.
"Hey we need our chatbot to be AI powered"
"The one that has like 5 users a month and costs far too much money, we should pay an engineer to work on AI for that?"
"Yep that one, X said it's the new trend and will improve our customer relations"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess misconceptions like these are why theorists abandoned the term 'communism' in favor of 'communalism' to explain what they meant. This isn't even a no-true-scotsman argument, but if all that comes to mind when communism comes up is Soviet dictatorship, the cold war propaganda worked.
What should come to mind when communism comes up then?
I guess the point of the poster above is that the word communism just confuses things in the initial statement — it’s just a dictatorship. Socialists and communists fairly uniquely believe in workplace democracy.
I'd like to see a post like this on HN where someone revisits their organization 10 years later and decides if they were right or not. It's not that all organizations don't have disfunction, but as a younger person I was very fixated on everything I saw that was wrong and ignored either the problems I myself was introducing which were (and probably still are) numerous or the systems and programs that made the organiz…
There is systemic fault. It starts with hierarchical structuring. It doesn't mean that hierarchies are inherently bad, but there are consequences from that and the additional things that people usually imply that come with it. This can seriously hamper productivity, for example, even in the small scale. Once you start to think that through you will also see how far reaching the agile manifesto truly is and that the c…
Question for the audience: are there places where it isn't like this? Can anyone attest to having worked in places like the one that the author describes, and then escaping to somewhere that isn't like that? If so, are you hiring? Or should I just be content with spending 2 or so years somewhere and then moving on? (2 years seems to be about the natural amount of time it takes for me to fully realize the dysfunction of wherever I'm currently employed)
Thanks for writing this, it's incredibly cathartic to know that I'm not alone in feeling this way. Question for the audience: are there places where it isn't like this? Can anyone attest to having worked in places like the one that the author describes, and then escaping to somewhere that isn't like that? If so, are you hiring? Or should I just be content with spending 2 or so years somewhere and then moving on? (2 y…
I haven’t found the solution you’re looking for. I’ve refused to go back to the grindstone for about two years now. Exploring other avenues such as bizdev because I don’t think I’m physically capable of remaining healthy and being an employee software engineer anymore.
I think the prime quality for the vast majority of software developers isn’t technical skill but rather whether you can settle/give up on your ideals and just drive the bus into the wall whenever asked. If you can’t do that (I can’t), pick another occupation and keep the programming as a side gig thing because it’ll drive you insane and shave years off your life.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of the problem has to be that as an individual in an organization it seems like a better ROI for your effort to grow your share of the pie than the entire pie itself. Individual incentives are naturally going to be aligned by advancement and "being difficult" is something everyone wants to avoid. Easier to shed blame and avoid accountability than try to fix the social and political structure of your organization…
I work for a company that employs 100k people. The effects of my work strategy and behavior on the company's revenue, profit, vision, products are zero. On the contrary, the effects of my work strategy and behavior on my salary and position can be quite pronounced. My company can fire me tomorrow, they will forget my name in 5 days. To "fire" my company, I need to find another job, maybe in another city, working with…
Don't hate the player, etc.
But damn, if it isn't depressing to go to work every day and not caring about impact, just impression.
That article was a very nice surprise and apart from how crushingly accurate it is (before somebody jumps in to defend all the corporate chaos, of course) it also had me giggling several times while reading it. The answer of course is financial incentives. It is the answer 99% of the time, I know quite a few high-profile managers at this point and they are all very smart and get stuff done people and yet they allow t…
Look, I don't mind if you write about me, but it didn't have to be so on-the-nose. No chill, these HN people, no chill at all...
So TL/DR, the author works for a large org with a less than perfect culture? I’d simply move. Even in keeping to companies of similar scale, there are definitely highly successful enterprises out there that wouldn’t entertain entire departments doing meaningless work, and have a generally good culture of accountability and feedback. This before even considering smaller businesses and startups where there’s simply no…
I feel this is one of the most interesting tradeoffs of the modern day. No, seriously. Imagine the kind of flexibility an ordinary person has to build into everything else they have going on to make "I'd just move" a viable long term strategy. Buying property immediately becomes way more hassle than it's worth, because you might have to move in 6 months to the next place anyway. Providing a stable schooling situation…