221–230 of 270 posts
I'm 17 pages in and I am wondering if the paper itself is bullshit and that's the joke.
Your comment was published 20 minutes after the submission. If you were 17 pages at that point, it makes me wonder if you were just pointing out that you found the paper somewhat insulting.
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The problem is not the bullshitters. They are usually a sign of deeper problems that no one more competent wants to deal with. Does Bill Gates want to be President? Nope. What a hassle, too busy, other interests etc etc etc. The higher up you climb no issue is black and white. And the more ambiguous things get in terms of cost to self and everyone else, the less the number of people willing to stick their neck out. T…
"Thats when you locate a master bullshitter and invite him into the room with all the best and the brightest present and hand him all power. It shakes everyone up. And sooner or later someone will step up" Could you explain the social reason for why this is? Is it because everyone else think they're better off sharing on the upside created by the Bullshitter, while not being as exposed to the downside? Do they think…
> Is it because everyone else think they're better off sharing on the upside created by the Bullshitter, while not being as exposed to the downside?
Some within any group will think this way (and help in propping up and supporting). Some just don't want the job, don't want to deal with more shit, want to work on other things etc etc.
All this creates a space for the bullshitter to exist.
Whether the bullshitter gets there by his own enterprise or someone puts him there, it creates a tension within the group. Good managers try to channel that towards positive outcomes. It's why they get paid what they do.
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I'm familiar with this scenario. It took a while to find the right approach and build the confidence to challenge a room of people with this mindset. It is definitely possible to stand up to this mentality and succeed in a workplace, but it is a constant challenge. After a long time fighting these battles I realised I had gained a lot of skills in dealing with narcissists and sociopaths in the mission to simply be go…
Thanks for sharing your story. What screening methods would you recommend for identifying those great companies / micro-societies?
If you end up looking for it you do so because you’ve learnt what you need.
“Different people, different needs”, to quote the great leader David Brent.
If you end up here eventually — interview the hiring manager and members of the team. You are the one looking!
For me personally I’ve realized that a company being listed or near IPO is usually a problem.
I’ve recently turned down a couple of interesting offers due to looming IPO. Some might think this is odd, but the track record of my “career” is all I have to go by.
The best places I’ve worked at is where the CEO was the founder and company not listed.
This could indicate that there’s proper heart involved and in my experience usually a lot less politics, hence less bullshit.
No truths here, just my own path.
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Do you believe a Phd student should risk questioning his supervisor? Which could likely end a planned career in science right there?
i cant imagine an academic group environment that toxic. Most groups ive interacted with in the sciences actively encourage everone to ask difficult questions of each other to further the collective understanding. One of the first things my advisor told me as a new student was to make sure i independently understood what was going on because he doesnt know everything. Now that im more experienced i also see the upsid…
Most labs I've been in and seen are 180 the opposite. Due to Dilbert/Peter principal dynamics, most advisors at R1 universities aren't selected based on their management and teaching skill, but on their research publications. As such, they tend to be very lacking at many skills required to be 'good' at running a lab. In the hunt for tenure, they get very stressed out and tend to take it out on others, typically the students and staff as they are physically the closest people to them.
I may or may not have been around MeToo style situations, more germane management abuse and screaming, direct sabotage of students' work and presentations. On the light side were 6 hour long lab meetings, 2 am lab check-ins, requests to journals to reject student's papers, and complete mystification at why students and staff aren't sleeping in the lab (safety be damned).
That, in my limited US based experience, is the 'norm'.
The notion of bullshitters needs to be brought to the front of our industry's consciousness. Our industry is one where the impostor complex is rife and anyone who sounds confident must know what they're talking about, since even the PhD's aren't half as confident in their field of expertise as a bullshitter is at anything. The tech industry is increasingly inundated with these types of people who manage to get placed…
This is a crazy naive take and Id argue almost the opposite. Id say if you want to cut down anti-intellectualism, that might be more of a founded hot take. Start-ups are foundationaly bullshit. It's almost always some person with some type of observation and a relative level of blind faith for an idea or system that MAY work. Worse than that, almost every major breakthrough or improvement ends up looking completely d…
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A colleague of mine put the problem more succinctly “what other industry is there where the top decision-makers have never done the basic work of the company?” Most executives in finance have done some form of financial analysis and reporting, construction company owners have almost always done a hard day’s worth of labor, and a lot of directors have had to do some acting / camera work and whatnot. In tech (especiall…
> “what other industry is there where the top decision-makers have never done the basic work of the company?” Most? Sorry for the blunt answer, but I really don't know how this can even be a question. The "I worked the assembly line and now I'm the CEO" is Hollywood fiction or outright lies in 99% of the cases.
The notion of bullshitters needs to be brought to the front of our industry's consciousness. Our industry is one where the impostor complex is rife and anyone who sounds confident must know what they're talking about, since even the PhD's aren't half as confident in their field of expertise as a bullshitter is at anything. The tech industry is increasingly inundated with these types of people who manage to get placed…
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Yeah, but I find I usually take a social hit by asking the question. A good 80% of those listening will think that you simply don't understand something. The other 20% are either indifferent or actively threatened by the observation. It doesn't pay to speak up about anything, you just get talked down to by those who are bullshitting.
I once stood up, as an intermediate level software engineer, in a meeting with executives and senior managers and senior engineering leadership, and identified multiple areas where a consultancy, who we were entering into a partnership with, was utterly full of shit. Isolating not only where the technical solutions wouldn't meet the technical challenge, but also in areas of outright legal / regulatory violation. You…
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"Fake it till you make it" is often about jumping at a market opportunity on borrowed time, money, or experience. Like Bill Gates licensing MS Basic before he had written it.
> Like Bill Gates licensing MS Basic before he had written it. That's actually an interesting case because, although he didn't have MS BASIC at that point, he knew he'd be able to deliver it by the time he needed it. So, was he really faking it?