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The Rise of the Bullshittery

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Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#71

Post by CobrastanJorji »

the_42nd wrote: post #19

Using a throwaway for this comment, but my first experience with this kind of thing was in 2013 when I joined a major international company with over 100k employees worldwide and realized that there were entire departments and organizations dedicated to delivering no value at all. Departments with 100s of people, with middle managers making several times the average salary in my country, where after years of work not…

Imagine that you decide that you would like to try farming, and you buy some geese. One of the geese, for whatever reason, begins to lay golden eggs. Your little farm is now unbelievably profitable. It is as profitable as your thousand closest neighboring farms combined. So naturally, you hire guards for the goose and experts on golden geese veterinary science to make sure that the goose is fed and healthy and is maximizing egg mass per day, and you hire people who figure out how to turn gold into wealth as profitably as possible, but at some point, you run out of ways to significantly improve the magic goose pipeline.

At this point, you've stopped growing. Not growing is completely unacceptable; it is anathema. So you start spending a lot of the money on long shot bets. Maybe try buying lots of geese to see if any lay golden eggs. You heard that somebody found a hen that lays golden eggs because of some magic beans, hire some bean farmers and see if that gets you more gold egg poultry. Jack who was the manager of goose calisthenics has really wanted a chance to grow, and he's dating your cousin, so let's put him in charge of the beans.

The only way to grow is long shot bets. Most of them will fail. All of them will be expensive. But the alternative is not growing. That can't ever happen.

Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#73

Post by dataviz1000 »

Aurornis wrote: post #63
dataviz1000 wrote: post #29

> I found myself in one of the rare situations in which I was mindlessly doom-scrolling on LinkedIn Yet, the biggest bullshittery, is every company that almost each of you work at requires a link to a LinkedIn account on every job application, not optional. It has become a form of social credit. LinkedIn isn't completely meaningless either. A huge portion of the posts are also propaganda. Finding a new job is tied to…

Having a LinkedIn profile and doomscrolling the LinkedIn feed are two entirely separate activities. Most people create a profile and update it when they're job searching, but they don't visit LinkedIn or interact with the feed at all.

I'm getting old.

I miss the good ol' days when they would look at my resume, call the places to make sure I worked there, and invite me in to prove I know the skills that I put on my resume.

Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#74

Post by sosodev »

eikenberry wrote: post #45
the_42nd wrote: post #19

Using a throwaway for this comment, but my first experience with this kind of thing was in 2013 when I joined a major international company with over 100k employees worldwide and realized that there were entire departments and organizations dedicated to delivering no value at all. Departments with 100s of people, with middle managers making several times the average salary in my country, where after years of work not…

Everyone knows this is true of every large enterprise shop and is one of the reasons that wall street rewards layoffs.

If Wall Street was so wise they would only reward meaningful layoffs. Laying off 10% of a company by stack ranking every team accomplishes nothing. Particularly if the company just hires the same number of cut people next quarter.

If a tree has a dead branch, you cut it off. Cutting off 10% of the leaves evenly distributed among branches will remove some dead leaves, but it leaves the source of the problems unaddressed.

Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#75

Post by nickff »

Aurornis wrote: post #53

> If you want to see the cleanest expression of this, the place to look is LinkedIn. It's funny how easily you can convince people that social media is not real life. Those influencers posting content 24/7 are a minority of people putting on a show, not a reflection of the real world. It's such an obvious feature of social media. But when the topic changes to LinkedIn they completely forget that. They act like the Li…

You're describing a sort of Gell-Mann Amnesia: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect

Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#76

Post by [deleted] »

dataviz1000 wrote: post #73
Aurornis wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a LinkedIn profile and doomscrolling the LinkedIn feed are two entirely separate activities. Most people create a profile and update it when they're job searching, but they don't visit LinkedIn or interact with the feed at all.

I'm getting old. I miss the good ol' days when they would look at my resume, call the places to make sure I worked there, and invite me in to prove I know the skills that I put on my resume.

[deleted]

Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#77

Post by fny »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #71
the_42nd wrote: post #19

Using a throwaway for this comment, but my first experience with this kind of thing was in 2013 when I joined a major international company with over 100k employees worldwide and realized that there were entire departments and organizations dedicated to delivering no value at all. Departments with 100s of people, with middle managers making several times the average salary in my country, where after years of work not…

Imagine that you decide that you would like to try farming, and you buy some geese. One of the geese, for whatever reason, begins to lay golden eggs. Your little farm is now unbelievably profitable. It is as profitable as your thousand closest neighboring farms combined. So naturally, you hire guards for the goose and experts on golden geese veterinary science to make sure that the goose is fed and healthy and is max…

The responsible alternative to not going is to return capital to your share holders who can then do the goose hunting themselves, and management should in invest their personal stock into other companies.

For very human reasons, they thing they have a better chance of finding the goose themselves.

Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#78

Post by tolerance »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #56
kmacdough wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This formatting is intolerable on mobile.

> This formatting is intolerable on mobile. Yeah, people really need to stop prefixing lines with 4 spaces when quoting something on HN. It needlessly forces a fixed width font with fixed width columns. Just prepend a > to show you're quoting something. There's already precedent for it from e-mail and newsgroups, and most forums already use it for quoting. Make it italics if you want it to stand out a bit more.

Noted. Sorry.

Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#80

Post by sublinear »

Aurornis wrote: post #53

> If you want to see the cleanest expression of this, the place to look is LinkedIn. It's funny how easily you can convince people that social media is not real life. Those influencers posting content 24/7 are a minority of people putting on a show, not a reflection of the real world. It's such an obvious feature of social media. But when the topic changes to LinkedIn they completely forget that. They act like the Li…

I increasingly feel the same about the comment quality of HN in recent years.

There are three topics that inevitably get injected into every discussion: AI, politics, and nostalgia. The thing is, I don't understand the goal. This isn't reddit. Few people on here are that broke, uneducated, or impressionable. This site is also deliberately designed to not reward any interaction.

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