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Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

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Re: Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

#91

Post by godelski »

everdrive wrote: post #15

I was quite surprised how different work was from school. There are a few specific considerations I never really see discussed: - In school you can fail the entire class, (ie, all the students) which is less true at work. At work, you're just hiring your "section" of the bell curve, and insofar as being "successful" means "doing well at your job and not getting fired" then a C or D student can potentially be happily…

I also find really interesting how we frequently talk about how different the two are yet also reinforce the divergence.

  What you learn in school doesn't apply to the job
    Yet we still:
      - fixate on GPA instead of having a sufficient threshold. E.g instead of considering anyone above a 3.0 we prefer a 4.0 student over a 3.8 student.
      - we prefer hiring students with prestigious pedigrees
I'm not saying what you learn in school doesn't matter (I think it does. It forms the foundation) but we often talk as if the knowledge is completely disjoint and then hire using academic pedigrees as the primary signal. I had an interview last week where a guy was saying "this is an engineering role. It's very different from academia" and then was fixated on my publication record. This seems quite common.

  We test applicants based on leetcode and academic like problems
This was clearly originally inspired by the traditional engineering interview but it's become optimized where all we do is study these problems. Instead of building more things and expanding our portfolios. Maybe we should go back to whiteboard interviews and in person. It'll put the focus back on evaluating how a candidate thinks and you can't use GPT on the whiteboard (without easily being caught)

But I think we like to say things and act a different way. Academia has lots of politics, but so does work. Navigating these is something I find challenging and exhausting.

My last job my boss told me "this isn't academia, we care if things work." I was confused, because in my academic research the primary goal was to make things work. Just at a more fundamental level. I also used that knowledge to 20x the performance of one of their systems. They left the PR on read as it wasn't as flashy as the larger more complex model that I out performed.

Honestly, I think just no one knows what they're doing and we're all trying to figure it out. But we're talking confidently about causality and then don't walk the walk. I mean the first part is fine, the world is complex, but do we need to pretend that things are so easy? Maybe if we didn't they'd actually become a bit easier. Instead of having the complexity of the world and the complexity of (business and cultural) politics and navigating all the double speak we would just have the complexity of the world. Idk, I feel like half our problems (or more) are created because we want to pretend things are easier than they are, because not knowing is scary?

Re: Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

#92

Post by pixl97 »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #34
yoyohello13 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think “don’t attribute to malice what can be explained be stupidity” is applied too broadly these days. There is absolutely malice behind some decisions/actions, and it’s dangerous to just shrug it off. Even more concerning, often the malicious people will hide behind stupidity.

It is not mutually exclusive, as people can be both pernicious and stupid if they choose to be... https://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidi... Engagement is mostly derived from upset people, and thus algorithms or clowns behave in unsustainable ways to make millions of pennies. Academic bias arises from the ivory tower phenomena in a walled garden, and if some naive kid is often told they are the b…

This said, most HR folks are head deep in their own ass with their own drama, so there's that.

Re: Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

#93

Post by Joel_Mckay »

pixl97 wrote: post #92
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not mutually exclusive, as people can be both pernicious and stupid if they choose to be... https://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidi... Engagement is mostly derived from upset people, and thus algorithms or clowns behave in unsustainable ways to make millions of pennies. Academic bias arises from the ivory tower phenomena in a walled garden, and if some naive kid is often told they are the b…

This said, most HR folks are head deep in their own ass with their own drama, so there's that.

External staffing agencies are a set of problems unto themselves.

One usually exchanges Faustian contractual consistency with creative talent that drove initial success.

Politics is rarely about the technology itself, and there are always skeletons next to pirate treasure boxes. lol =3

Re: Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

#94

Post by ElevenLathe »

BoxFour wrote: post #85
ElevenLathe wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aga…

We can quibble about where to draw the markers, but my point is that these "lessons" that people in these comments are decrying as mostly not true about the "real world", are in fact true for some people, likely even some of the people that you went to school with. You and I heard our asshole math teacher say "It's not gonna be this easy in the real world, cats and kittens!" and probably now regard that as the opposite of true. Many others wish life was as easy as high school. Thanks for the engagement but I don't see any point in "arguing" this point -- that we appear to both agree on -- any further.

Re: Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

#95

Post by BoxFour »

ElevenLathe wrote: post #94
BoxFour wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aga…

We can quibble about where to draw the markers, but my point is that these "lessons" that people in these comments are decrying as mostly not true about the "real world", are in fact true for some people, likely even some of the people that you went to school with. You and I heard our asshole math teacher say "It's not gonna be this easy in the real world, cats and kittens!" and probably now regard that as the opposi…

I don’t think we do agree, but fair enough. I’ll “disagree and commit”.

Re: Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

#96

Post by rmah »

pixl97 wrote: post #87
orisho wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, then they're not easily replaceable. Which implies those workers have other options. And thus employers that treat workers worse than other employers will see workers leave and/or find it harder or more expensive to hire. So it all works out.

Re: Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

#97

Post by quelsolaar »

aidenn0 wrote: post #89

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 tha…

Yeah the idea i that school is somehow a bastion of meritocracy is misguided.

Academia is better at setting clear requirements and measuring those goals, but whether these requirements have anything to do with being successful or useful in the real world is an entirely different matter.

School isn't reality, its mostly not even trying to simulate reality. School breads a lot of "Why was I not rewarded? I did everything they said i should do" disappointment in the real world.

Re: Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

#98

Post by astrobe_ »

bigyabai wrote: post #9
SilverElfin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile rich kids get into good schools because they can afford after school activities and tutors since birth. This is a myth - most non-legacy admissions kids getting into good colleges aren’t spending on these things in the way that you think. They’re getting there because they’re actually smart and hard working and have a stable environment (like two parents). It doesn’t take much to get a very high test scor…

> This is a myth Citation?

I want to see that too; because OP is saying between the lines that "public school kids" are lazy dorks by birth.

Re: Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity

#100

Post by array_key_first »

rmah wrote: post #96
pixl97 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Well, then they're not easily replaceable. Which implies those workers have other options. And thus employers that treat workers worse than other employers will see workers leave and/or find it harder or more expensive to hire. So it all works out.

It all works out, unless everyone is doing it, and then entire swaths of the economy just burn down.

In lower level jobs like retail and food service, nobody can retain workers.

You would think then "oh, labor market, the cost of labor goes up"

But no. Everyone is greedy, stubborn, and stupid.

Instead, you just run your business with half the labor. Does it work? Not really.

So then you think, "oh, well free market dynamics. These companies will go out of business because their product or service sucks"

But no! Because everyone is doing it! And now everything just sucks!

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