Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity • Hacker News Board

Re: Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

#81

Post by svachalek » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 6:48 PM UTC

rockercoaster wrote: post #72

ryandrake wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Adult life is far easier than high school. High school is insane. Like it's an actually-crazy thing to subject kids to. This is probably not universally true. It certainly matches my life experience, but I have to admit that a life that gets easier and easier as time goes on is something that relatively few privileged people experience. For me, school was a prison full of torturing peers, strict teachers with no fl…

There's perhaps more pressure in a way because you're now responsible for fixing any problems, but kids are exposed to the exact same risks of adult life and employment via their parents, plus some extra ones that adults aren't subject to (parents can be abusive, for one thing—adults can abuse other adults in their household, but getting out is a lot easier for an adult than a kid, especially young kids). That's one…

Are you a young adult who is not responsible for anyone but themselves, perhaps? Many adults have to take care of children or their own parents, manage teams, work jobs with serious consequences on other people's lives, deal with having cancer, etc. High school was tough in its own way but I think mostly due to everyone being young and having no life skills yet.

Re: Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

#82

Post by nick486 » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 6:50 PM UTC

BinaryIgor wrote: post #14

rs186 wrote: post #7

> If you have to, blame stupidity not malice > No one is out to get you; they’re just out to get through the week. The author seems to be too naive. I don't have first-hand experience, but just hearing my friends who work at a certain company talking about what's happening, I know how terrible some people can be. And that's a widespread issue (otherwise I would not hear about similar things happening to people in dif…

It's just it's stupidity or incompetence more often than malice; but, of course you should judge on the case-by-case basis and if somebody repeats certain (evil) behavior it's malice

"sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from stupidity."

Re: Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

#83

Post by rockercoaster » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 6:50 PM UTC

yoyohello13 wrote: post #40

rockercoaster wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to disagree with 2, but OTOH it's also so easy to do that I've just accidentally done it my whole life. 20 year programming career and I've never engaged with math beyond approximately Algebra II, in the real world. Hell, I go years at a time not needing anything trickier than Algebra I. Nearly all of the math I actually use I learned in the 6th grade or earlier, overwhelmingly elementary school arithmetic—mos…

I do agree high level math isn't as useful for dev work. I have a masters in math and started working as a data analyst. I moved to programming years ago and I basically never really need to use the math stuff I know anymore. Weirdly my math background is actually more useful as a 'soft' skill in my current work. I am the go to person for talking to the data analysts in my company, and having a statistics background…

> Every once in a while I remember an algorithm for doing something I can include in our app and feel like a God, lol.

I can distinctly remember the three times this happened for a team I was on, in my couple decades of doing this, because everyone involved kinda got a thrill out of the extreme novelty of doing something resembling actual math of even a lower-end-of-undergrad level. Lasted all of a few minutes to perhaps a few hours, but still.

Re: Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

#84

Post by bencornia » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 6:58 PM UTC

> Assuming malice turns you into a cynic. In contrast, assuming stupidity keeps you curious.

Curiosity is a superpower that you can leverage. It keeps you out of fight/flight and helps you reason when the stakes feel high. It demonstrates your willingness to collaborate instead of being reactive. Success at work comes from collaboration and communication.

Re: Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

#85

Post by BoxFour » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 6:59 PM UTC

ElevenLathe wrote: post #78

BoxFour wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the examples you gave seem focused on life outside of work aside from the last one, so I’m curious which of them you’d say don’t also apply to lower-income jobs. There are lots of ways for middle-class people to “fail” too outside of work. Personally, I worked in food service for a decade (mostly as a line cook of some sort) and most of these rules still applied, maybe to a slightly lesser degree. Even with d…

That's fair, but I don't totally agree that there is a "work sphere" that is different from the "life sphere" in this regard. That distinction between politics and economics is a synthetic big-L Liberal one that only goes back to approximately Napoleon. The fact that some people have worse jobs, worse working conditions, and worse pay is fundamentally related to the fact that they rent, struggle with money, and have…

Sure, but these are all true of middle-class employees as well:

1) Many middle-class families rent and their landlords aren’t necessarily any more understanding.

2) Not to be too political, but many middle-class employees don’t enjoy a friendly relationship with police either and similarly can easily “fail”.

If your argument is that being wealthy affords you a lot of leeway to fail in life, I mostly agree (though again, there are plenty of minority groups who would disagree that wealth always affords that privilege), but “middle class” encompasses a very wide swath of people which this doesn’t apply to. Many middle-class employees in the US are a paycheck or two away from being pretty destitute.

Maybe you meant “professional” or “upper class” instead?

Re: Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

#86

Post by rockercoaster » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 7:03 PM UTC

svachalek wrote: post #81

rockercoaster wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's perhaps more pressure in a way because you're now responsible for fixing any problems, but kids are exposed to the exact same risks of adult life and employment via their parents, plus some extra ones that adults aren't subject to (parents can be abusive, for one thing—adults can abuse other adults in their household, but getting out is a lot easier for an adult than a kid, especially young kids). That's one…

Are you a young adult who is not responsible for anyone but themselves, perhaps? Many adults have to take care of children or their own parents, manage teams, work jobs with serious consequences on other people's lives, deal with having cancer, etc. High school was tough in its own way but I think mostly due to everyone being young and having no life skills yet.

Solidly in middle age, three kids, plenty of other problems.

Still way easier than high school.

If next week the world went topsy-turvy and providing for my kids now (for some reason) depended on my attending and doing tolerably well at high school for the remaining decade or so that my kids are at home, no other options, but also I'm somehow relieved from all the hard parts of taking care of them and such... frankly, I dunno if I'd make it. High school was incredibly stressful (even after I threw myself a life line and deliberately stopped giving as much of a fuck about grades) and, quite literally, depressing, as in it gave me seasonal depression that took most of my 20s to stop cycling through, and recurring nightmares that didn't end until my early 30s, and I wasn't even bullied or anything. The whole institution's a mental-health catastrophe in a way that nothing I've seen in adult life compares to (perhaps prison does, I, fortunately, am not in a position to compare them)

(Separately, yes, I'm sure—very sure, having seen it up close enough times now—that old age health problems and the process of dying are going to be extremely, perhaps incomparably, bad, but I don't think that's what people were talking about when they said schools had to be shitty in order to prepare me for even-shittier adult life, I think they meant work and paying bills and parent-teacher conferences and stuff)

Re: Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

#87

Post by pixl97 » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 7:10 PM UTC

orisho wrote: post #63

everdrive wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair point. My first job was retail, and I was accidentally late for a shift _once_ and I got put on probation for weeks and wasn't even allowed to take sick leave during the probationary period. The better the job the less you're treated like trash. People float all sorts of explanations for why this would be, but I think fundamentally people just don't know how to move away from class hierarchy. I think it…

I believe it's because if you are easily replaceable, then screwing up means you're not worth the trouble. If you aren't easily replaceable (whether it's because you have demonstrated you're a good employee or you're working a high-demand role), you are worth the trouble and you'll get more chances. There are other reasons too, such as jurisdictions where suing after being laid off is more common, which makes more ch…

>I believe it's because if you are easily replaceable, then screwing up means you're not worth the trouble.

These ideas work great when you have a large/growing labor population, we're seeing it start to fall apart in a tight/shrinking labor population. "nobody wants to work" is the drum beat of the employers that used to burn employes.

Re: Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

#88

Post by prmoustache » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 7:15 PM UTC

I prefer just doing my job, while putting my limits in the energy and time I dedicate on it. And I just look for a new job when I get fed up and/or want a rise.

This whole mastermind bullshit just seems mentally exhausting.

Re: Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

#89

Post by aidenn0 » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 7:20 PM UTC

This is somewhat funny because many of my classes in school barely even managed a veneer of objectivity in scoring, and grades for many things were far more opaque than any annual review I've had at my job.

- In general any class with subjective grading where the work was not anonymized, the name on top would affect the grade (sometimes significantly).

- Some friends actually did an experiment once; person A said that the instructor was grading them harshly because they didn't like them. Person B said "surely not, maybe they just don't like your writing style." So they wrote papers and swapped their names. The paper written by person A, but with person B's name on it got an A, the other got a B-.

- The most extreme case of this was when I pissed off my instructor and she took me aside and informed me that regardless of the quality of work I turned in, I would not be getting a grade higher than a C on any assignment, and I should expect a D for the class. In retrospect, I think the instructor was trying to get me to drop her class, but I was a freshman and didn't realize that was something you could do 4 weeks into the semester and I ended up with a D.

- I once had a paper returned scored "56/100" the only comments on the paper were "Great Job!! Almost an A paper!" The cutoff for a passing grade in that class was 60%.

Re: Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

#90

Post by pixl97 » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 7:23 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #64

rockercoaster wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconding all this. I'm worry that somewhere out there there are kids hearing adults go "high school has to do [shitty thing] to get you ready for the 'real world', which is even harder!" (LOL no it fucking isn't) or "enjoy it, these are the best days of your life, adult life is so much harder" (what the actual shit are they smoking? Harder stuff than weed, for sure) I had a relatively good high school experience, an…

> Adult life is far easier than high school. High school is insane. Like it's an actually-crazy thing to subject kids to. This is probably not universally true. It certainly matches my life experience, but I have to admit that a life that gets easier and easier as time goes on is something that relatively few privileged people experience. For me, school was a prison full of torturing peers, strict teachers with no fl…

>school was a prison full of torturing peers,

This can be quite true. My mother worked in the justice system and had kept track of the students in and around my grade. A significant portion of them ended up incarcerated a short few years after graduation. Being under 18 had protected them somewhat from the bullshit they had pulled in school.