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The Rise of the Bullshittery

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Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#81

Post by bluGill »

sosodev wrote: post #74
eikenberry wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unaddress…

The only time layoffs work is when the go with cutting the product worked on completely from the company. Everything else should be managed by not growing too big when times are well, and not hiring when someone leaves when times are bad. There will be ups and downs in your market, figure out what they are and ensure your headcount matches that long term, ride out the bad times with no profit knowing they will get better again - cutting all other costs.

Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#82

Post by Analemma_ »

jph00 wrote: post #62

TIL HN still doesn't support rfc3492, 23 years after it was published, and so this domain is not rendered correctly on the site. :( (It should appear as: マリウス.com )

Nowhere does RFC 3492 say that browsers MUST render IDNs in the original language, so I think saying "HN does not support" this RFC is false, or at least disputable. Personally I strongly prefer having it in untranslated Punycode to avoid scams; IMO everyone should browse the web with Punycode disabled.

Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#84

Post by Henchman21 »

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…

> Not growing is completely unacceptable; it is anathema

Succinctly put and so very both unfortunate and accurate. The only other thing I can think of that grows endlessly is cancer. There’s an analogy in there if you squint hard enough.

Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#85

Post by Nathanba »

I think bullshittery is generally underestimated as a threat and not new at all. There are entire global organizations like Scientology who are founded on bullshitting. Entire product lines, food categories and industries made for no benefit to you except the thinnest layer of taste to bullshit your senses into accepting the trash into your body or life. Bullshitting just like lying isn't merely something a few percent of bad people do, the majority of individuals seems to do it every single day. It's pervasive in all of society, it's on every level, up from the lowest to the highest levels of political office.

Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#86

Post by NooneAtAll3 »

Ethee wrote: post #54
pugworthy wrote: post #23

Speaking of bullshittery, I don't really appreciate it's little game when it comes to trying to convince me to turn off JavaScript. It knows when you see it and you'll know when you see it.

As someone who likes to half read an article then come back to it later, this actually pissed me off. Messing with your favicon and the tab title so I can't actually find your article to finish reading it later feels hostile towards users like me. As such I blocked this URL entirely. I don't care what their motive behind it is, if you want to act sus then I don't want to be on your website.

have you ever needed a tab actually knowing that you've tabbed away?

disabling JS seems too large of a change, but basic privacy of "not having your tabbing habits tracked" seems to be one addon away (and it's scary that it isn't an option of the browser)

Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#87

Post by slopinthebag »

simianwords wrote: post #20

Been noticing this new phenotype of tech bro who writes with an air of superiority, subtly belittling all those beneath him. Also ardently believes in - bullshit jobs - enshittification - kubernetes being a psyop - tech landscape was best exactly during his career peak and has gone down since

Yes, give or take a couple of those points.

Some additional ones:

- believes SWE is now fundamentally different because of AI

- repeatedly belittles people who aren't on the AI hype train

- believes slop bans and distaste of AI art is gatekeeping

Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#88

Post by cryo32 »

Seen this a few months back. One of our "analysts" threw together a bunch of nonsensical shit and tried to pitch it as a product change to our management team. It was a powerpoint full of charts that made no sense populated by data that made no sense. After I bit I realised the text was so "normal" it was LLM generated. The guy had just made a pitch deck with an LLM after throwing some random numbers at it.

Our management team bought the idea right up.

I didn't say anything despite having professional qualifications in mathematics and statistics. 5 years ago I might have done. Now I know it's futile. Last time I tried to stand up for integrity over bullshit I got the full management language tirade thrown back at me for daring to question it. I realised after a bit that it's a fragile house of cards and if you push it the entire thing will go and they are doing everything they can to keep it standing.

This was so soul-crushing that I decided I was just going to fuck around and get paid until I get fired. See how long I can stretch it out. By doing that I'm doing less damage than they are.

Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#89

Post by DanielHB »

I think a lot of this sentiment comes from the human size of modern institutions and corporations. A lot of us have lived through that small fraction of time where software engineering was done in small isolated groups working on top of small foundations. These days it is much harder for small groups of excellent people to achieve a lot more than their mediocre peers in already established fields.

Fact is large institutions inevitably lead to these kind of inefficiencies, we just moved on to larger projects and companies. If anything this phenomena is better explained by reduction in productivity growth than social media, in a realm of low productivity growth there is a tendency for consolidation which leads to larger companies and thus more BS.

Governments and institutions also have grown a lot more BS but I believe it is mostly tied to high population growth in the previous 100 years than low productivity growth. After all governments don't consolidate like companies do (war vs mergers/acquisitions/bankrupcies).

It is a common trope of history how big institution grows so big they crumble under their own weight of inefficiencies. All the way back to the roman empire and probably countless more examples even earlier.

Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#90

Post by mnemotronic »

sublinear wrote: post #80
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.

Well, foo. My comment about President Facade torpedoed before it set sail.
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