181–190 of 192 posts
I am sick and tired of pressure to get into management once you get older and lack of other opportunities to be rewarded. If I can do job of 5 other people, I can be compensated like two others and the company is still ahead. Or if that's just my arrogance talking, there can be an objective system to measure work accomplished and set rewards accordingly. Instead all of my questions about advancement are met with dema…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disagree. Openly offer a million dollars a year and the extra competent people you get will be buried under a neigh uncountable number of additional pretenders. So no matter what you pay it's never easy .
AND then the HR sociopaths filter out anyone not neurotypical who wouldn't have any issues doing the job, but is otherwise weird.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hard disagree here. That's what capitalism wants us to evolve into: individual enterprises. But no, there's nothing inherent in the universe or human nature that determines individualism as the true way of working. You don't have to go far to see people contributing to bigger causes that are not owned by someone else. Open source is a great example of this. The main reason people idolize entrepreneurs is because th…
> The main reason people idolize entrepreneurs is because they symbolize capitalism's perfect individual That's some deep revisionism right there. Humans have worked for themselves, for no master, since before we became Homo Sapiens. The big societal achievement of capitalism is killing any entrepreneurial spirit and telling you you need to go to a good school and then find a good employer that takes care of all of y…
Sure, humans worked for themselves, but that was not what ultimately got us here. Humans only survived and thrived by working together. Homo Sapiens won the evolution race because they managed to grow tribes more than others, not because of more individualism compared to other species.
I get that working alone is an absolute joy and for many tasks that's the most efficient way of doing something (I certainly prefer that for programming). But that's not true for every task or the way it was "meant" to be, like I refuted in the first place.
> The big societal achievement of capitalism is killing any entrepreneurial spirit and telling you you need to go to a good school and then find a good employer that takes care of all of your needs.
That's one aspect of it. But capitalism is inherently paradoxical and also would LOVE to not think of humans as... humans. If everyone was an enterprise they can profit a lot more. It's what we see today with the gig economy. A race to the bottom where everyone is their "own employer" with zero benefits, all the risks and easily replaceable. It's a wet dream for pretty much every capitalist. How many startups we have/had describing themselves as "Uber for X"?
Another aspect is that fostering entrepreneurial spirit is actually profitable. Whoever already has capital will pretty much always win, so if a naive person wants to bet all of their savings in a business that fails, that capital is transferred to the existing capitalists. It's a win for them. If they somehow succeed, the most likely outcome is that at some point this enterprise will be acquired by a larger company. It's a win/win for them.
IDK if we live in very different bubbles (it certainly seems like it) but I see an extreme amount of push from society towards entrepreneurship, not against it. It's simply a very good way to funnel money from the bottom to the top.
When adults can't be responsible for themselves they need to be managed. When adults can be responsible they need more than one other adult to address issues and challenges with. To learn from and to teach to. Management is a industrial and corporate construct. Its put in place to force labour intense industries to tell others what they need to do. Tell is often a monologue. There is indeed need for adults to be arou…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making software is a bit special in that you can't really make use of people like that. In e.g. a supermarket you can.
Of course you can. Managing people mean having to deal with people of various skill levels and with different things motivating them. You have to find way to make it work and that means finding way to get something out of people who are not intrinsically motivated. No one said it was easy.
15) Meetings. I look at my director and senior directors schedule in Outlook. It is 6 to 10 hours of meetings per day. They often start at 6am and might go until midnight because the company is worldwide. Meetings with people in India, China, Singapore, Israel, Europe, east and west coast US. I get annoyed if I have more than 2 hours of a meetings a day. I get really annoyed when they interfere with my personal life…
Those managers sound like pushovers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your experience is very, very different than what the article was about. Starting your own company means you have ownership and pride of everything going on in the business. That motivation and entrepreneurial spirit will obviously paint everything in pink, at least for a while. Imagine having those responsibities, but nearly no decision-making power. All those messy human behaviors are now coming at you from above a…
Thanks. That's a useful perspective. I read it as a general screed on managers in general. Not on improperly structured environments that don't enable managers to do good work which I understand is what you read from the article.