When it comes to walking, I believe in just putting one foot in front of the other.
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This is pretty typical in middle management across the board.
Mark Carney’s Davos speech in a nutshell.
That was your takeaway? Not the “
rulesbased international order”?
Hmm, I find it comforting that at least one C-suite type knows the definition of progress. It would have been worse if he said his idea of progress was “leveraging synergy to add value for all stakeholders”
Let’s parking lot that for now and circle back the next stand-up. Don’t forget to Slack the SME taking point on this vision.
I’m now angry for no reason. Thank you for the PTSD, lmao
This is basically how evolution works. It’s goal is not necessarily ‘better’ or some goal- it’s just iterating forward. Always just forward. Sometimes better, sometimes worse, always forward.
Upper management decides the direction. Selective pressure determines if ‘forward’ is good or bad. In the absence of competition, selective pressure is eliminated and the only pressure is maximuze profit- leading to enshittification.
This reminded me of something. When I was in college, I was forced to buy several incompetently-written textbooks. One of them was on death and dying. A chapter on funerary customs had in the first paragraph the observation that in most societies, when a person dies, they are removed from their home.
Most nonfiction books I have read would have been better written if they were ¼ the amount of words
Brevity is a sign of good writing.
What’s wrong with that? In some cultures, when someone died, they were prepared and then buried under the floor boards. In others, relatives were mummified and kept on display for years.
I’m curious which societies are not part of “most”
Sometimes it’s temporary - they cremate you and bring you back in a bit more compact form factor.
Now that’s progress / moving things forward!
Ireland. I don’t know specifics, but I heard about it.
I remember borrowing a friend’s MBA textbook just for laughs. I particularly remember the chapter on “Negotiating”, which included a boxed section that said “Your skill at negotiating will affect the outcome of the negotiations.”
Dont take Flatulia if you’re allergic to the ingredients in Flatulia. Ask your doctor about taking Flatulia
“I don’t recommend Flatulia.”
“Why not, doc?”
“They haven’t sent a 30-something hottie around to take me to lunch yet.”
This reads like a loading screen tip
“You can use your backpack to store things”.
To shoot things press the shoot button.
“How good you are at something will dictate how good you are at that thing.”
Get this person a promotion!
Mind blown!
No way!
I know someone who told me (in French) M.B.A stands for “Moins Bon qu’Avant”, that translates to “less good than before”.
That does make sense in a The Art of War way. There is no magic thing you can do that will automatically finish the negotiations in your favour, you need to actually use your own skills.
I’m not following. If there was some magic set of things that you could do, you would call that set of skills negotiating.
If there was not some magic set of things you could do, then the personal skills you implement are referred to as negotiating skills.
Credit: Adult Children
There’s a lot of anime and hero stories that have a speech like this, a tautology about moving forward when the characters are unsure about their actions.
The worst part is, it can be destructive. Like, when one Nazi says to another, “Hey…should we really be killing all these Jews instead of just deporting them like we originally planned?” And this kind of phrase, when given in response, is meant to inspire some form of persistence to the current course, no matter how stupid or horrible it is.
The explanation that I heard was that Hitler was originally trying to get rid of all of the Jews in the countries that he conquered, but he eventually decided that he wanted to conquer the entire planet.
From my knowledge it was just a logistics problem, mass killings are far easier to do then sending millions of people to a faraway country. And probably cheaper.
And yes, this has some grim implications about the current situation in the US.
You could replace this man with ChatGPT and his company would be more successful.
With the experiment that I believe Anthropic made I wouldn’t even be sure of that
Was that the one where the AI couldn’t even manage a vending machine?
To be fair if humans couldn’t directly fuck with the bot and it only had sales data and a catalogue, I think it could competently run the vending machine.
The issue is that the
unholy drink cloacacoke freestyle machines do it better without AI.
One of my old jobs had me trying to turn the word salad our business lead told our clients into web apps. It’s truly amazing how someone can say so much and yet so little while convincing people to pay money for it. I ended up just having to best-guess what their business needs were on my own. That experience was honestly valuable in seeing through the blather - Jensen Huang with DLSS 5 the other day was a good example.
It’s by design.
If you “best guess” up a success based on no actionable guidance, they take all the credit, you only did what you were told, like any common peon, they had the “real vision”.
If your best guess falls, well your execution failed their brilliant insight. Not their fault, circumstances failed to get them the right people.
Yup, that’s why I left that job. Was sick of being berated by clients. Now I work in the games industry… I may be a masochist.
One of my old bosses complained I asked too many questions about requirements. They’d give me poorly defined tasks and I’d be like “what do you want it to do when the user has no name in the system?”. Then they’d get annoyed.
But if I just made a decision, like sorting my ID, they’d be like “that’s stupid why didn’t you sort by sign up date?”
C suites are now infested with a circle jerk of MBAs, business minded people who dont understand or care about the product or how its made. MBAs are a plague, let the engineers who know a damn thing sit at the table please…
Wdym now it’s always been like this
This is why Boeing builds planes whose wings regularly fall off.
As in, it’s literally the reason. They replaced all of their engineer managers with business managers who don’t understand the process.
Engineering undergrad with a MBA. That’s how I got my seat at the table. It’s very beneficial having both perspectives. They’ve called me “chaotic good” because of my education and experience. 😂😂😂
Engineers: Hmm, maybe we should get someone with a bit of market knowledge to the table.
MBA: Shit, I have no clue what they’re talking about. I need someone who speaks my language.
MBA 2: Man, these engineers really have no clue what we’re talking about, huh.
Engineers: removed
Plenty of engineers struggle to care about the right things too though. You can witness this in Linux communities. The engineers will engage in passion-project rewrites of core systems any day of the week over fixing that one annoying UI bug that thousands of users complain endlessly about.
The key part there is that they’re not paid. So working on a passion project is all that matters.
As an aside though, those core system rewrites are often undertaken by businesses rather than the individuals. A lot of businesses view Linux as a tool rather than a consumer OS, so the core systems are the only part that matters.
The key part there is that they’re not paid. So working on a passion project is all that matters.
No, it isn’t. That’s not how it worked on the playground as little kids and it isn’t how it works in the open source community.
Think of it like this: if you’re playing by yourself in your own personal sandbox in the back yard of your house, you’re free to do whatever you want with the sandcastles you build. But, as soon as you invite all the neighbourhood kids to join you, it doesn’t matter if you built the biggest sandcastle before anyone else arrived: you’re now in a social environment where social rules and etiquette apply.
If the other kids politely critique the sandcastle and suggest improvements that you don’t agree with (or don’t think are important), then you’re faced with a dilemma: either compromise and work out a way forward that’s satisfactory (if not perfect) for everyone, or ignore them and face a potential breakup of the community as well as the ostracism which tends to follow. Even worse is something like deciding “no, this is my sandbox, everybody get out!”
Now, if you’ve got the foresight to post a sign by the sandbox which lays out all the rules and expectations for participation, then you have a lot better chance of getting everything to work out. But the idea that “this is my passion project” trumps everything else is not gonna fly in basically any community above a handful of people.
So you expect people to work for free on what you think is important, rather than on what they think is important?
A different analogy: I invite you over to a BBQ that I’m throwing. You show up and say you don’t want to eat what I’m preparing. You don’t want to bring anything or contribute because you can’t cook, and I invited you, so it’s rude to ask you to contribute and now I owe you food that you want that I’m not interested in making.
You don’t want a “community”, you want to be provided with high quality low cost software.
Even in your sandbox example: if I’m building a sand castle you don’t get to demand I build it the way you want just because I said you could play too. I don’t want to build that into the castle. If you want to add that bit, you can do it. I’m sharing by letting you play in my sandbox and that doesn’t entitle you to dictate how I play in the sandbox. We can play together, but that doesn’t mean I have to do what you want.Remember that what you’re doing under the auspices of “community” is justifying telling other people how they should give you free stuff that takes a lot of work that they don’t want to do unpaid in their free time.
Let’s continue with the barbecue analogy. I come to your barbecue and you drop my steak on the ground and then just put it on my plate covered in dirt and tell me “it’s a free steak, if you don’t like dirt on it, then leave!”
See how it works? You don’t want a community, you just want an adoring fanbase for your passion project!
Yeah but that’s the thing. You don’t have to eat the steak. This isn’t just a 5 person bbq, there’s tens of thousands of people here that want to have my steak, and I’m the only person cooking in the whole town that isn’t burning the whole thing black . There’s plenty of food, sorry there’s some dirt on that one, but I’m not going to derail the whole event for you. Enjoy the barbecue. You don’t like it? Leave. But I don’t care about a little dirt on my steak because I still seared it the way I’m proud of and clearly it’s better than most of the other steaks around or you and everyone else wouldn’t be here.
I’m here to cook steaks because having a barbecue is what I like doing. If I feel like the dirt is a problem, I’ll fix it, but I’m trying to make the best steaks possible and to me that means focusing on the cooking, not the dirt that got on yours.
Don’t like it? Leave. Wanna bitch at me until I stop cooking? Fine by me. I’ll go inside and cook my steaks there.
That’s not quite right because we’re all getting the exact same thing. I’m giving you a free steak and you’re complaining about the cut of meat. Everyone is getting the same cut, and I bought the steak that I’m giving away so I get to pick what I buy. If you don’t like it you’re more than welcome to bring your own steak and I’ll get it on the grill, or pay me to get you what you want, or hope that I remember to grab one for you the next time. You’re not entitled to a free steak though.
Even backing up and looking at your interpretation as you presented it: you’re complaining that your free steak got ruined and asking for a new one. You might not always get a new gift just because the one given to you went wrong.
Sorry you didn’t get a free steak. Do you want me to take one from someone else?You don’t want a community, you just want an adoring fanbase for your passion project!
Here’s the thing though: so what if I do? If “I” get what I want, then you get something you like for free. At worst, you get nothing for the grand total of no cost.
You might be forced to go pay for some commercial software, where it’ll cost more and you’ll probably also not get your feature on demand.
Those are software people. I wouldn’t really consider them engineers in the sense being discussed here. Lots of software people are ready to rewrite the entire code base in a refactor bcz they think they can decouple a few systems in a better way, all the while introducing bugs while they do it. I dont know a lot of engineers willing to do that. It’s not zero, I do know a few, but it’s a lot less.
There’s no professional organization that all software engineers belong to, the way we have with civil engineers. This leads to a ton of ambiguity about who is a true engineer and who are software people, as you call them. This is an issue even among people who know how to write their own software.
So then should we really be surprised that non-technical MBAs can’t tell the difference between true engineers and software people?
This isn’t a no true scottsman thing. An engineer is someone who also does engineering work in addition and not just software. It can be anything from structural stuff like FEA simulation, fluid dynamics, to manufacturing. That’s the distinction, that’s it.
How does that pertain to the above issue of businesses and MBAs and software which was nothing to do with physical engineering work? Like if you’re saying only people who understand fluid dynamics know how to build business software and the people who engage in passion project rewrites on Linux software don’t, then what? I have no idea what you’re really arguing here.
So then should we really be surprised that non-technical MBAs can’t tell the difference between true engineers and software people?
You made a statement about engineers vs software people.
Yes, because you invented the term “software people” and I took the ball and ran with it. If you’re now going to deny such a distinction then I don’t know what else to tell you.
I didn’t invent anything. Why are you getting offended by a simple statement?
Well, I’d argue they’re focused on the right things from their perspective, which is usually trying to optimize a thing for a purpose. Engineers are pretty good at engineering and not so good necessarily at other stuff, like every other job.
But if you tell them what you want and why, and what limitations you have, clearly. They can typically engineer the thing you want. The complications are normally money, suppliers, manufacturing, etc
Everyone is focused on the right things, from their own perspective. One of the biggest challenges with large projects is getting everyone on the same page about what’s important.
Look, I’m not saying software engineers are clueless or whatever. I think this issue occurs throughout large projects and organizations: people working on one specific part tend to see that part as the most important but people working on other parts tend to see it as less important than it is. We’re all naturally biased by our own perspectives.
I do agree that MBAs as a concept are broken. You can’t train people to be experts in all things business. The needs of specific businesses are learned only through hard experience in that business.
are those paid positions?
Why does that matter? People always say that about open source! “If you don’t like it then fix it yourself!” And then they complain that no one wants to use it!
You can’t have it both ways. If you’re just building it for yourself then keep it to yourself. If you open it up to the public then people are going to complain if there’s issues (or just ignore it outright if it sucks).
Having said all that, I do have a lot of sympathy for volunteer devs who promise to fix issues after they complete some core rewrite or major refactor, as long as they’re open about it and make a good case for it being necessary. I have a lot less sympathy for developers who are forever bored of fixing issues and just want to endlessly break things by doing rewrites and other fun hobby stuff. If you’re going to do that then don’t present your project as if it were part of the open source community; it’s your hobby, not a community project.
are they paid?
yes or no
Many of them often are, through donations / Patreon / etc.
so no
there’s your answer and I suspect you understand this as we’ve struggled to arrive here
if you want people to do non passion projects you need to pay them for those parts specifically
as much as I love patreon as a concept (not the company it is shit) the work agreement I’ve always seen is rather open
Jack Welch hollowed out and destroyed one of the largest conglomerates in the world, but he was able to hide the damage until after he retired and he made a ton of money doing it.
So obviously his methods became the standard for the business world, even after GE’s collapse and the countless postmortems laying the blame on him.
Also engineer here. Please, listen to engineering. I’m so tired of product coming in with ideas fully detached from reality.
At one job, they got it into their head that “our system has no concept of an account. There’s just projects floating around, and nothing unifying them. We need to do a bunch of work to create this”. I said to myself, that’s crazy. There is an account. Every project has a foreign key relationship with it. It’s just not named “account” for some reason.
Listening to me took what could’ve been a clusterfuck of wasted weeks into a one day find-and-replace project. Personally, I would’ve just left it with the slightly weird name and called it a win, but I think product needed to feel like they were adding some value somehow.
Or the time they wanted to fully rewrite the internal tool for scheduling work. We had operations people that managed the field workers schedule, using some home-grown tool written years ago and never really updated. They wanted a full rewrite. I talked to the people who actually use the thing and asked them what their biggest pain points were. Looked at the code. Yeah, one of those can be fixed today, the other in a couple days. This doesn’t need to be a two month project. We did it my way and operations was delighted.
One time I wasn’t in the room, and product and one less good engineer got it into their head that there’s no way to tell which work orders go with which set of outputs. They thought that the output just appeared, and you couldn’t tell where it came from. Unfortunately, this spun up into a “we need to rewrite the entire system!” project. Some months later (of delivering no value to anyone) there were layoffs, and at great personal cost I was able to convince them that yes, there is a foreign key, and we can make significantly smaller changes to solve the actual problems. I regret not killing that initiative earlier, but I think people wanted it as a big line item on their resume.
That’s all startup land.
At the megacorp I worked at, trying to convince management that we should have automated tests is like trying to speak french to someone who only speaks italian. I think they understand some of what I’m saying, maybe, but most of it’s not getting through. A good chunk of the IC engineers know the system is bad and has a bunch of “we could improve this in a day” tasks we could do, but management doesn’t understand. So we keep having multi-day deploys with “omg it’s broken again”.
Y’know what, let’s circle back on this, cuz at the end of the day, we’re a family here.
Now, give me 50 million dollars.
when they started selling MBA degrees on the internet, it was only a matter of time for them to infiltrate office spaces with their stupid ideas and inflated egos.
Lol “now”.
Engineer here. No, we refuse. Yes we hate the decision making people too, but I also have no interest in doing accounting and project management and all that bullshit, how about they just pay us to engineer shit good and then listen
”To increase profit we need to make more money”
This was said by a C-level suite at my work. Yeah, no shit Sherlock.
I know Scott Adams is not someone to be promoted for his personal views, but Dilbert is so much a reflection of reality it’s unreal.
It’s because Adams just drew the stories other people sent him.
And the stuff he saw himself. He mentioned in an interview once that he kept his office job for a long time after making it big with Dilbert because he got so much material.
Same when they interview coaches after a game.
“What do you think went wrong, and what can you do to improve it”
“Well, I think mainly our problem was, we didn’t score more points than the opposing team. That was a major contributing factor to our loss. I think in the future, we need to focus more on scoring more points, and not allowing the opposing team to score more points than us.”
Seriously, sports interviews are the worst!
Chess interviews are pretty good occasionally
Well except in that case the coaches and players don’t actually give a fuck. They are contractually obligated to be there and say something to morons trying to bait them into viral clips
They respond by spitting out canned responses
This is not a problem with sports, if sports was left alone I promise you the coach wouldn’t be volunteering to go give a recap of a 3 nothing loss to a team outside the division in the middle of the season
Fun fact it’s crap like this that makes me not care about sports. Like the core is interesting but everything around it is just fluff I don’t care for and can’t care for. Unironically I’ve watched folks play sports video games and have been thoroughly invested because it’s just the meat of it all l.
The more common way these guys increase profit is by lowering costs, and the only way they’ve figure out how to do that is by laying off a bunch of people, so this is actually a step in the right direction at least.
Now I’m wondering whether their solution is to appeal to more customers or to raise prices. What am I saying. Of course it’s the latter.
the only way they’ve figure out how to do that is by laying off a bunch of people
Weirdly enough, another way to lower costs would be to have everybody work from home so you don’t have to pay for office space. Yet the overwhelming trend is away from WFH.
Because that decreases the value of their commercial real estate investments
I know that’s usually given as the reason, but I think most companies rent. I dunno.
Because they’re also power-hungry assholes who like to watch people scurry around an office on their whim. That and they figure that they’d slack off at home and do nothing, so of course their workers will too, and how would they know?
They ended up laying off a bunch of people either way. Still unprofitable though.
“because of inflation, costs are rising”
It’s so hard to refute this one. They’re obviously closely linked, but that makes associations so much stronger in people’s minds.
I remember physics class. Our teacher was desperately trying to explain that, in circular motion, the resulting force is THE RESULT of adding all others, and that resulting force results in circular motion, not some magical additional force because something is turning. Just like your quote, cause and effect were reversed. (Resp. rather, instead of cause, rising costs are inflation.)
Literally begging the question!
I mean, if “making money” = revenue, then increasing revenue, assuming you’re making a profit, will increase profits…but you could also work on your costs and increase profits while keeping revenue constant
This is like the tips on a loading screen.
“If you are dying often, try using healing potions” “Try focusing on an enemy’s weak points”
Reminds me of Peggy Hill:
The day before Thanksgiving is, in my opinion, one of the busiest travel days of the year.
The MBA class
