Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

cutlefish.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 259 posts

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#191

Post by nickff »

imzadi wrote: post #65

I don't know if this is related, but growing up there were certain values instilled in me that went something like "don't toot your own horn," "it's better to be seen and not heard," "keep your head down," etc. The main gist being that I should just do my job quietly, competently, and stay out of the way. In practice, this resulted in me being effectively invisible to management, even when I was out-performing everyo…

I obviously don't know enough about your particular situation to be an informed judge, but... it really sounds like the management team is operating in a reactive mode, rather than a proactive one, and as a result, they don't understand what's really going on inside the company. It doesn't bode well for their understanding of what's going on outside the company either. This kind of disconnect is often costly, sometimes fatal.

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#192

Post by bb88 »

ryandrake wrote: post #117
lucianbr wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some useful insight here even if the percents are wrong. Whatever the numbers, even if 10% are Marias, they're still an untapped resource, if not "the biggest". And the fact that some of us have been this person proves the percentage is not zero. Feels like you found a small inaccuracy in the text, and jumped up "Aha! Everything you said is wrong!". Also an appealing narrative.

Yea, everyone is nit-picking the numbers... Where's the evidence? Where's the citations? Not everything is a paper in an academic publication. The quadrants themselves hold up and anecdotally match my experiences over decades of work. I can easily remember people I've worked with in each quadrant, and yes, the lower-right (whatever percent they are) are totally underutilized and mostly invisible.

Hacker News never is, and never was a place for academic arguments.

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#193

Post by icedchai »

twojobsoneboss wrote: post #145
ryandrake wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this highly depends on the manager. Some know (Manager A), and either work to correct it, or get their ducks in a row to fire them. Plenty of managers, though, (Manager B) have no idea what a reasonable amount of work output is, and can be easily convinced that what took 1-2 hours to do constituted an entire 40 hour week. You get some developer who's good at "managing upward" and they'll bullshit/charm and wa…

To be clear, there’s a big difference between taking 4x as long to do something useful, vs actually doing nothing, or something of negative value ;-) If you’re fast and working remote, you can still achieve seemingly normal output while reclaiming much of your time

The negative value is the worst. I was working on a project with someone. I'd check in periodically. After a couple weeks, he fesses up and tells me he hasn't been able to get very far, but things are "mostly done", I "just" need to test it for him and integrate it with the rest of the system. By mostly done, he meant the code had no tests and was never even run manually. In fact, the code would not even execute due to syntax errors.

I had to spend another week and a half reworking things. I got it to work well enough, but it would've gone smoother if he hadn't been involved at all. The result was crap.

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#194

Post by ghaff »

mulmen wrote: post #173
ghaff wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a comment on some other thread but there's just a lot of wrong place/wrong time at an individual level. If a company is doing a substantial layoff there just isn't the time, energy, or resources to train and fit people who may be generically "better" at some level into roles that already have people presumably doing adequate jobs filling them. People are not fungible. Someone can be in a role where they're re…

Ok then why do we still have recruiters and HR? If their job is impossible why do we pay them to pretend otherwise? If people aren’t fungible why do we force them into fungible roles? If the reality is that people are fungible and leadership is just out of touch and made bad decisions then they’re the ones that should be canned. Hiring people is expensive. Firing people is expensive. Reorganizing people requires comp…

You're cutting a division. You're cutting a project. Yeah, if you were hiring into a new position, you might hire some of the people you're cutting. But you probably aren't. So, yeah, you might try to retain some specific people but you mostly aren't interested in doing a large-scal rewizzle which will probably disrupt things even more than the layoff is already going to do.

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#195

Post by 22c »

JohnMakin wrote: post #42

I'd categorize myself as a "Barry" - which he seems to define in part II of this blog post as someone who is willing to take great personal and career risks to rock the boat, and will even risk getting fired to get their job done - it has usually cost me a lot in whatever organization I end up in. I think these people eventually become skilled pragmatists when burnt out, but I'm not sure he has any insight in these p…

I enjoyed part 1 of the article and began reading part 2 where it mentions Barry a few times, but when I read and re-read part 1 I see no mention of Barry.

FWIW I think that Barry becoming a Maria is entirely possible and consistent with the age old "5 Monkeys" office fax meme.

https://i.snipboard.io/kdu77.jpg

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#196

Post by voxl »

adra wrote: post #190
luisgvv wrote: post #7

I began as a junior dev and climbed up the ranks til the point where I became the SME in some areas of the product. Got laid off because sales goals were not met while they retained people which I think were incompetent in their work. Even some guys which I think were better and more critical to the projects were dumped. I'm not climbing that ladder by being proactive and "pragmatic" again... Call me a paycheck steal…

And in the end, the terrible people won. Because you stopped caring seeming about anything, you're likely living a worse more jaded life, and your next company isn't getting a good employee. Learning an important lesson isn't about flushing your aspirations down the toilet. That's just cementing your destiny as someone who will never achieve moderate success. If that's your goal, shrugs ?

Life is more than your job.

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#197

Post by globalnode »

adra wrote: post #190
luisgvv wrote: post #7

I began as a junior dev and climbed up the ranks til the point where I became the SME in some areas of the product. Got laid off because sales goals were not met while they retained people which I think were incompetent in their work. Even some guys which I think were better and more critical to the projects were dumped. I'm not climbing that ladder by being proactive and "pragmatic" again... Call me a paycheck steal…

And in the end, the terrible people won. Because you stopped caring seeming about anything, you're likely living a worse more jaded life, and your next company isn't getting a good employee. Learning an important lesson isn't about flushing your aspirations down the toilet. That's just cementing your destiny as someone who will never achieve moderate success. If that's your goal, shrugs ?

> flushing your aspirations down the toilet

hmm, i seem to have made this a hobby of mine.

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#198

Post by ryandrake »

icedchai wrote: post #193
twojobsoneboss wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, there’s a big difference between taking 4x as long to do something useful, vs actually doing nothing, or something of negative value ;-) If you’re fast and working remote, you can still achieve seemingly normal output while reclaiming much of your time

The negative value is the worst. I was working on a project with someone. I'd check in periodically. After a couple weeks, he fesses up and tells me he hasn't been able to get very far, but things are "mostly done", I "just" need to test it for him and integrate it with the rest of the system. By mostly done, he meant the code had no tests and was never even run manually. In fact, the code would not even execute due…

I'm sure there are a surprising number of Brillant Paula Beans[1] still employed in software roles. No idea how you can pass a technical screen and multi-day interview loop without knowing anything about writing code, but it keeps happening.

1: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_brillant_paula_bean

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#199

Post by jbm »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #53
klabb3 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’ll be you ten bucks they got rid of people who bring up bad news and kept the yes-men I’m pretty cynical and assumed this was how layoffs worked but at least in faang and even smaller (maybe 500 people) SV companies, I actually don’t think this is the case anymore. Most I’ve seen have been extremely random – it seems like they cut teams/orgs very differently but on an individual level it seems random. I got the i…

That’s how salesforce did it. One way you can tell how terribly uninformed the layoff choices were is that there were people who were actually rehired immediately.

When I got laid off at SFDC, I found out that they wanted to get rid of certain localities. Heroku was always a remote friendly place, which apparently irritated some of the new Microsoft-derived management; the story I heard was they wanted to consolidate Canada's talent in my branch in Toronto and Vancouver.

I'm glad I left as I got a large pay raise and didn't have to move to Toronto; but I wouldn't say it was random, just based on metrics unrelated to the individual's contribution.

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#200

Post by interroboink »

adra wrote: post #190
luisgvv wrote: post #7

I began as a junior dev and climbed up the ranks til the point where I became the SME in some areas of the product. Got laid off because sales goals were not met while they retained people which I think were incompetent in their work. Even some guys which I think were better and more critical to the projects were dumped. I'm not climbing that ladder by being proactive and "pragmatic" again... Call me a paycheck steal…

And in the end, the terrible people won. Because you stopped caring seeming about anything, you're likely living a worse more jaded life, and your next company isn't getting a good employee. Learning an important lesson isn't about flushing your aspirations down the toilet. That's just cementing your destiny as someone who will never achieve moderate success. If that's your goal, shrugs ?

> the terrible people won ... you're likely living a worse more jaded life

Respectfully, I think this is rather judgemental (I realize the irony that I am judging you, too :)

It doesn't have to be a battle, there doesn't have to be a winner. Everybody is free to explore their limits and boundaries, and put energy into the areas of life that they find most fruitful.

Maybe OP really does want a kick-in-the-pants "get back in there and fight!" pep talk — in which case, ignore me. But maybe they just decided that it was not their particular hill to die on. It takes all kinds.

Post reply on HN