The drawing of the pyramid addresses something I've been saying to people for years on this topic:
School is conveyor belt. Everyone can be educated, everyone can learn what they teach you in school. Depending on where you went, you can all be high quality or you can all be terrible. You can pretend to compete, but in the end, nobody is really stopping you from anything.
Work, and by that I mean high-achievement work that is the type of thing that the top kids end up applying for, is a pyramid. You can have the cream of the crop starting a new analyst class, every single one of them a top 1% achiever in education. Most of them by far (like really far) will not be MD or CEO. Whether you are the guy who makes it rarely depends on anything you have control over.
I need to tell people this, because if you go to a top uni, you've run into a lot of people who were studious, ambitious kids. They think "hey, if I put more effort in, I get rewarded". Which is true for these non-rivalrous things like science exams.
Then they graduate, and if you were an ambitious kid there's a fair chance you gravitate towards certain careers. And in those careers, the game is different. If you think being a good kid will help you, you will be frustrated. Other young professionals have got the same plan, to stay up until the early hours working. Or spending time playing the politics game. IMO you can't really win at the pyramid game, even if you make it to the top there's a lot of sacrifice and a lot of nervousness about whether you get there and how long you can stay.
Yes and no. On the flip side, you now have the means to have a much more comfortable and pleasant life than the high school dropout classmate you haven't seen in six years.
You have already made it very far, in that sense.
You put effort in, you've gotten rewarded. The washouts from the up-or-out places have lots of soft landing places available compared to most people.
Whether you crash yourself against the rocks of having to be the top of the absolute whole world... that's a personal thing. Being aware of the structure is probably good for informing your decision, but you might've noticed it earlier too.
Other people have gotten rewarded more than you. And this is probably not new to you. There are almost always teacher's pets, spoiled brats whose parents gave them way more than you, beautiful people who get things handed to them for existing, easily-charismatic assholes who coast by or fail upward because everyone likes them, etc. One of the dirty secrets of elite high schools and higher education is already that not everyone worked as hard as you to get there.
You say no but you're not disagreeing - you're saying that there's enough space in the middle of the pyramid for all the people who didn't drop out of school which AFAICT is orthogonal to GP's point, that there's not enough space at the tip of the pyramid for all the talented people who work very hard.
I disagree that competition among fellow high-achievers is the primary obstacle. Maybe, very early on, when you're in a class of investment banking recruits or first-year law associates, etc. But that gets sorted out in the first few years.
The next 25+ years of your career are often dealt navigating corporate politics, financiers' M & A, industry developments, etc. And it's here that lots of smart, academically excellent people struggle. You can be the world's greatest data scientist, but if you are revealing truths that your boss (or boss's boss) doesnt like, you're probably going to get bounced. You could be doing a great job managing a large group of employees and operating your division efficiently, but some private equity fund buys your owners out and strip-mines the company. Many, many more scenarios. But these aren't "hopeless" situations, there is opportunity to succeed, but that opportunity is based upon people skills as opposed to the academic ideal of right answers vs wrong.
Is it weird that I have a totally different perspective on this? Then again I dropped out of college at 19 to start working in Big Tech (tm) after exiting my startup and have been there 15+ years now.
It doesn't matter how fast you spin your wheels working on things unless those things are aligned with delivering value to actual paying customers. Politics also doesn't really matter. Well, it matters to idiots, there are certainly a lot of those out there, and there's some truth that if you piss off the wrong idiot you're likely to be kicked out to the curb. But at the end of the day the times I or anyone else I know has created real business value, it has been heavily rewarded with promotions, money, etc.
The problem I see with a lot of academics is, like you mentioned, even if they are smart and spend a lot of time on interesting and hard problems, if they can't draw a straight line from their project to whatever business problem they are actually solving they don't last particularly long.
It depends a lot on where you end up. There are niches where you can live by market forces alone, and breeze through life being almost unaware of politics - but that's the exception.
For most people, politics will be a dominant force - if not THE dominant force - that they live or die by. Once more than 2 people are involved, you by definition have politics (albeit weak politics). It then grows slightly until it suddenly becomes much more important at about 150 people or so. By the time you're at 1000 it's a major force, and at 5000 it's the only force that matters anymore.
And even if it's not your organization that's this big, a small company selling to Amazon will only succeed if they know how to play Amazon politics.
This is a little tricky. I think it's more about understanding the philosophy. Lets say you make washing machines. The "academic" will say, great, for next year's model, let's fix the most common failure point and improve reliability so our customers love us while the "psycopath" or "savvy employee" will say, no, our brand is still strong, let's make cheaper machines and save money and we can manipulate some of the review sites and anyway, better for us if they fail after 6 years than 10 years, the customers don't have many choices anyway.
You can say the academic isn't solving the business problem, which isn't, how to make the best washing machine, but how can we make the most money by embracing enshittification. But that's probably not why he was hired.
Says the 19 year old startup founder who drops out of college and has it made before most people even start thinking of what they want to do.
We’re all supposed to believe what? That the extremely rare 19 year old startup founders of the world believe the world is meritocratic? Uh, of course they do.
Even if you "make it" in the context of your career and organization, you will lose in the housing market of any metropolitan area where such careers are on offer, simply because other people were there first.
The pyramid is mostly a question of incorrect perspective or viewpoint.
Of course there are fewer CEOs, managing directors or whatever your current fantasy is. But there are millions of them on the planet - it's not that small of a class.
- Many of which are in their 20s or 30s because they created their own business or joined a tiny team or found an employer with just the right yearning (which would be half their fault but also half yours for looking for it).
- Learning how the world works is a life's work. It's fine if you couldn't hierarchy in your 20s, there is still time to learn.
- "Not with that attitude, you won't". If you are still obsessed with anti-corporate political ideas (as a random example), just perhaps that won't help you. That will seriously constrain how or if you continue learning about how the world really works. If you find a different obsession as things go (like a family, say), there is nothing wrong with that - but don't blame it on the pyramid. "The world" is a complex dynamic system of billions of people, interactions and ideas. It has NOTHING to do with your current preconception.
- As you continue growing up, you might find very different interests: public interest, scientific, engineering prowess, family time again, a completely different career direction, self-employment, technical or management consulting, art or craft - and there is nothing wrong with any of these. Your yearning of "top 1% recognition" that you identified with in school - or wished you identified with in school - will have changed and that's fine.
And this is true for everyone in that specific pyramid that you think is in front of you. If the top - some top - is truly your purpose in life, very few people in that pyramid are truly your competitors in your own race.
But this is hard to internalize. Most schools do not train for this. And school was presenting you with convenient easy(? lol) hurdles which work life does NOT. In life after school, you have to manage your own scoreboard, year in year our, decade in decade out - and this can be wearing. And there again, you can find mentors who WILL help open your eyes - if you bother to (easy right? no still not - but feasible for the people who try.)
And this is triple true if you switched country during or after your studies. You are now in an environment that you didn't even grow up in and you have far more to learn. A very serious disadvantage that will take additional energy to overcome - but will also help open your eye to this idea that you do have a lot to learn about how the world works (while the natives assume they already know.)
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 and gainfully employed indefinitely. They might have to take a less prestigious job, but they can find their niche and their place. This one really surprised me. You just don't have freedom of movement in school the way you do at work, and so anyone who is observant and hard working can pivot to a relatively-good situation for themselves. This just is not true at school.
- You get nearly endless chances to fail at work, and you usually have a PIP period of weeks or months to parachute to another job if you actually encounter failure. I know some people who have been failures for an entire 30-40 year career.
- If you're bad at writing essays in school, it doesn't matter; you simply need to write essays and getting better or worse at writing essays won't modify the number of essays you need to write. With work on the other hand you can specialize and minimize your weaknesses and play to your strengths. Yes, you can more easily change positions to accomplish this, but even within a single position you can just find ways to focus on the parts of the job you're best at and and excel at that area.
- Very, very few jobs have anything which resembles testing. In the real world you must understand _why_ certain things need to be done, but almost everyone has the opportunity to pause and look up the details via references. Testing really does not represent this whatsoever. It's also the case that some tasks at work will be done over and over again, and in real depth, and via this depth and repetition you will actually memorize things via real behavioral reward mechanisms that are just not possible in a classroom environment.
- You can always seek more clarification in the real world, and can even negotiate your own limitations. Your boss has asked you to do something? Have a conversation with them and explain the limitations in the approach and what sort of partial approach you think might work. This works great in the real world but is much, much more limited in a classroom environment.
I could go on, but I was honestly shocked when I got my first job and I was actually a pretty good employee. This has been true ever since, but I was screwing up in school all the time.
I have the same experience, but would like to clarify that almost everything on this list is mostly only true of middle class employment. You absolutely can "fail" if you are on the bottom rung of the political-economic ladder -- this looks like a life in and out of prison, homelessness, despair, and an early death. You don't get endless chances from your landlord or your parole officer. If your area of weakness is "money" (earning enough of it, knowing how much to spend and how much to save, etc.), then you are still fucked. To someone with a poor education, filling out a job or EBT or WIC application is indeed a high-stakes test with disastrous consequences for failing. Your boss in the restaurant kitchen does not want you to question their methods of dishwashing -- he will fire you instead for being lippy if you try to negotiate around it.
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's built into us.
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 dishwashing, if you have some way of dishwashing that halves utility costs, someone would listen to you.
The answer might also be “who cares, get back to work” but that’s also true of a lot of middle-class employment. Your manager won’t give a shit if you think the expense reporting system sucks. Amazon’s famous for “disagree and commit” which is just a corporate way of saying the same thing.
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, and even so, if people saying that stuff had been correct I'd have surely killed myself by now, probably before age 30. There is no possible way I could have tolerated decades more of life as unpleasant as high school, let alone worse. Harsh and short deadlines, general inflexibility of expectations, begging to be allowed to take a piss, the equivalent of multiple hour-long presentation meetings every single day, very-early starts, lots of rooms with shitty lighting and no windows, terrible seating that you're in all day long, complete assholes common and you're just stuck with them, they're not gonna get kicked out (this goes for teachers and students alike), and no realistic ability to leave and find something better.
Luckily, I had a part-time tech job in high school (I did later work a couple very-low-paid non-tech jobs for a while, so I'm not writing this "no really high school is far worse than adult life" perspective from an entirely privileged perspective) and could see that something was wonky about what these people were saying. Then I go to college and it's like a goddamn vacation. On to the "real world" and there are hard times but it's nothing like the 4-year marathon rigid-schedule grind of high school. Those tend to be more like, oh this week is rough, or this month, or perhaps this quarter. And I have so very much more freedom of action to fix things that aren't going well.
Adult life is far easier than high school. High school is insane. Like it's an actually-crazy thing to subject kids to.
> 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 flexibility, and ultra-high-stakes tests that to a large extent determined your future. Whereas work is a paradise and a breeze in comparison. And as life goes on, I make more money, can optimize my way further and further up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and things get better and better. This is an ultra privileged scenario though, and we have to admit that.
For many (most?) people, school was lower stakes and less pressure. You fail a test? No problem. You get a B or C on your report card? Not the end of the world. You don't get into Harvard? I wasn't trying anyway... Then you start adulting, and the pressure is on! You gotta gets some kind of job now and make some money every week so you can avoid homelessness and starvation. You've got a boss on your ass and threatening to fire you (or worse) every day. Your family can't help you anymore, and you're on your own to figure out the world. I know a lot of people who just can't deal with adulthood and hate it, and wish they were back in high school.
> You get nearly endless chances to fail at work...
One of the more refreshing things to me about the working world is how failure actually has consequences. If you have a habit of bungling projects, disrupting coworkers, or otherwise engaging in antisocial behavior, I probably won't have to work with you for long.
I'm sure it's different elsewhere, but in the US you are never expelled (fired) from grade school simply for failing. Not only that, you can intentionally disrupt the education of those around you and effectively nothing will happen, and one poorly behaved student can derail an entire semester. Nothing short of repeated violence or actual crime is cause for dismissal in school.
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?
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%.
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.
I've read that male instructors are expected to be more objective, and that female instructors are rated more poorly when they are more objective (https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/what%E2%80%99s-name-exposing-gen...) but not anything on the rates of objectivity itself
"It also means that staying the course when things don’t go your way isn’t just a virtue but a practice. To play the long game, you have to keep showing up even after crushing disappointment without getting cynical of the process. Put differently, you need high levels of frustration tolerance."
Stoicism helps, or any form of resilience training. Leaders need high frustration thresholds to reach the top, because the view from up there doesn't get any better.
Hmm, this does not sound like an accurate interpretation of work culture. Perhaps this is true in an ideal job environment. The word "Work" says it all. It's work, labor, hard stuff, not fun and stressful. There is no actual way to manager that kind of stress unless your work is what you normally do for fun, and you enjoy. This does not describe the average work environment.
In my experience, everybody that I've worked with has been stressed, by the job, the managers, co-workers, and their client base. The worse the economy is, the higher the likelihood of people getting let go, so of course everyone is weary of everybody else and making sure that if somebody's head is heading for the shopping block, it's not themselves.
> 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 different organizations).
One example: people take credit for other people's work in front of higher management. You think someone would accidentally make a mistake and forget what they actually did themselves? Is that even possible? No, they know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing that. They are not trying to be friends with you.
I would imagine that the author is young, very intelligent, and just really starting to pick up real-world career experience. What the author points out is true, but I cannot imagine most HN readers are thinking "I'm expecting my workplace to be totally fair and merit-based, just like school was."
This statement is pretty interesting and revealing; school is very much not like that for a lot of people, and I suspect this means that the author was in a strict STEM curriculum where there can really be said to be correct vs. incorrect answers. (vs. something like English, social sciences, etc.) As noted, this likely also means that the author is just recently out of school, and is just figuring out how the real world works and how few people are capable of stepping back and judging objectively. (alternately, maybe the author has known this for years and is just writing for a younger audience)
"I'm expecting my workplace to be totally fair and merit-based"
i don't know where you worked, but i have been working for a few decades now, and i still expect exactly that. even more so than school was. the point is, even if my expectations do not match reality everywhere, not expecting that would be like giving up. instead, because of this expectation, i do my best to create a work environment where this is actually true, and i do not allow others unfair behavior deter me from my belief and expectation of fair treatment of everyone around me.
I don't take issue with the fact that he's naive or that his ignorance of corporate dysfunction has been shattered. You don't know what you don't know until you do.
What I take serious issue with is that there's a whole ecosystem of not identical but comparable dysfunction in academia and yet he didn't spot it or is ignoring it. That to me is indicative of bigger problems.
Being aware is totally irrelevant. Their incentives are not about rewarding the right person. Their incentives always are to protect themselves at all costs.
You are screwed if a higher up perceives you as threat. real or imaginary. you won't even know about your status till you get laidoff.
It depends who you work for and what they are like.
One of the nicest things a boss has done was when it looked like I was getting the blame for something was to email everyone connected with it saying he had done it, not me.
Management 101. It's shocking how few managers know this simple motivational technique. The team appreciates it, because they know you have their back, and your managers appreciate it, because it's easy to fix the blame, and they [may] respect you, for doing it.
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
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.
> Even more concerning, often the malicious people will hide behind stupidity.
yeah a lot of people that get ahead seem to be intentionally ignorant (to the point of fooling themselves) to provide a kind of plausible deniability. It's obviously put on because you see they are shrewd political operators and and "errors" are always in their favor. But there's this game of who can appear the most aloof and thus impossible to ascribe any malice to.
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 best-of-the-best special... they tend to truly believe the rhetoric as they slowly indenture themselves.
Most HR folks quickly tire of entitled peoples petulance, as no matter how conventionally "smart" a applicant may be... no office wants to deal with drama everyday. =3
I don't know. I agree with the advice even if they are not 100% correct.
Yes, there are shitty people at work who take action out of malice and actually are out to get you, but in my experience, that's a small minority of the time. It's fundamental attribution error.
Agreed. For example, if 90% of C-Suite at corporation are only interested in extracting capital from their subordinates and riding trends, then it’s malice, not incompetence.
In general, some incentive structures allow managers to retain stock and 3% of unspent division budget as a year end bonus. Thus, they naturally cut every possible cost rather than risk growth liabilities.
Perhaps someone will come up with a better incentive structure, but those people were fired years ago. As process-people often eventually win over creatives due to their singular focus. lol =3
One of my coworkers made up a totally bogus story about me to show her "management potential" about how she managed a situation with uncooperative team member on a project.
ofcourse our middle manager knew that it was bs but she was the one mentoring this person so she ran with it.
i didnt even know about this when all of a sudden i saw it my review with hr.
i considered this person my friend and we even hung out with each others families over holidays.
Both stupidity and malice happen. It can often be difficult to tell the difference as we arent as objective as we think we are.
However, accidentaly attributing stupidity to what is malice is generally not too bad. If its malice it will happen again and you can revise your opinion.
Accidentally attribute malice to what is stupidity is an easy way to start grudges. This can blow back on you and turn someone who just made a mistake into someone who does actually hate you, and make third party observers think you are unreasonable.
So erring on the side of assuming stupidity is generally a good call.
Over the past decade, I've been dealing with sorting out a rare and difficult to diagnose medical issue with a family member. Over this decade, I've learned what I consider a very important lesson and one that I often find myself having to re-apply and to have discussions with providers over.
What you call something matters a lot less than what you do about it.
What I mean by this is when you're in the weeds of "not in the first few options for diagnosis", a lot of conditions have a lot of overlapping symptoms. You might get a diagnosis for some condition, and then as new evidence comes to light, that diagnosis may change. After a while you start to doubt any possible diagnosis and even when you get one, you spend your time worrying about "What if I'm wrong? What if I don't have X?". The thing that's important to remember though is that for a good chunk of the symptoms that all of these conditions have, the treatment for them is exactly the same. It doesn't matter if you have condition X, Y or Z if the treatment for symptom Q is the same for all of them. That doesn't mean an accurate diagnosis isn't important, it very much is. But it's only important where the treatment options would differ. But if you want to resolve symptom Q and the treatment is the same, it just doesn't matter what you call it.
The same thing applied to malice vs stupidity. Unless there's a very different action to take to mitigate the problem, it doesn't matter which one it is. Lets take your example of someone taking credit for your work in front of upper management. If this was stupidity what would you do to mitigate the issue? You'd do more to document what you're doing. You'd make sure you have a chance to speak for your own efforts. You'd make sure that your contributions are more visible. You might get a neutral party involved in keeping an eye on things. You might gently correct your co-worker if doing so was appropriate in the moment.
So what would you do if it was malice? Probably all of the same things right? About the only difference in what you do might be whether you talk to the co-worker about it, or talk to HR. But beyond that, everything you'd do to mitigate the issue is more or less the same. And whats important is that the issue you have is that credit was taken for your work. Really in the end it doesn't even matter whether it was stupidity or malice because learning which it was doesn't get your credit back. And accurately labeling it doesn't stop you from losing credit in the future when it happens again.
But there is one personal benefit from assuming stupidity, you can feel less anger. It's a lot easier to be objective, and stay focused on your real goal and the problem you really want to solve when you don't feel like you're actively being attacked. So whenever there is ambiguity, and the actions you would take to mitigate the real issue are the same, why choose the label that increases your own stress and anger levels and makes you more likely to retaliate in a way that actually back fires on you because you're reacting in anger.
Which again isn't to say that you should be a doormat. But you can set boundaries for yourself and take actions to accomplish your goals without getting mired in judgements of other people's actions. Their feelings about it and their motivations aren't my concern, my concern is taking care of myself. I don't need them to see things my way, or admit to wrong doing to enforce my boundaries and take care of myself. And I can take care of myself a lot better if I'm not angry and stressed out.
At work, data, metrics, and KPIs are great for "fishing expeditions"—looking for reasons to fire you in case you start to become too expensive to want to keep around, or if middle/upper management just doesn't like you.
With that in mind, remember that corporate IT department knows everything you do on your work computer. Every email sent, every process started, every keystroke. Good luck!
I am much later in my career than the audience I assume this is intended for, but I have struggled to mentor junior colleagues on many of the major bullet points here so succinctly.
This should be recommended reading for new college grads entering a more traditional (I.e. non-startup) work environment. Definitely keeping a bookmark of this for that reason.
Readit News
School is conveyor belt. Everyone can be educated, everyone can learn what they teach you in school. Depending on where you went, you can all be high quality or you can all be terrible. You can pretend to compete, but in the end, nobody is really stopping you from anything.
Work, and by that I mean high-achievement work that is the type of thing that the top kids end up applying for, is a pyramid. You can have the cream of the crop starting a new analyst class, every single one of them a top 1% achiever in education. Most of them by far (like really far) will not be MD or CEO. Whether you are the guy who makes it rarely depends on anything you have control over.
I need to tell people this, because if you go to a top uni, you've run into a lot of people who were studious, ambitious kids. They think "hey, if I put more effort in, I get rewarded". Which is true for these non-rivalrous things like science exams.
Then they graduate, and if you were an ambitious kid there's a fair chance you gravitate towards certain careers. And in those careers, the game is different. If you think being a good kid will help you, you will be frustrated. Other young professionals have got the same plan, to stay up until the early hours working. Or spending time playing the politics game. IMO you can't really win at the pyramid game, even if you make it to the top there's a lot of sacrifice and a lot of nervousness about whether you get there and how long you can stay.
You have already made it very far, in that sense.
You put effort in, you've gotten rewarded. The washouts from the up-or-out places have lots of soft landing places available compared to most people.
Whether you crash yourself against the rocks of having to be the top of the absolute whole world... that's a personal thing. Being aware of the structure is probably good for informing your decision, but you might've noticed it earlier too.
Other people have gotten rewarded more than you. And this is probably not new to you. There are almost always teacher's pets, spoiled brats whose parents gave them way more than you, beautiful people who get things handed to them for existing, easily-charismatic assholes who coast by or fail upward because everyone likes them, etc. One of the dirty secrets of elite high schools and higher education is already that not everyone worked as hard as you to get there.
The next 25+ years of your career are often dealt navigating corporate politics, financiers' M & A, industry developments, etc. And it's here that lots of smart, academically excellent people struggle. You can be the world's greatest data scientist, but if you are revealing truths that your boss (or boss's boss) doesnt like, you're probably going to get bounced. You could be doing a great job managing a large group of employees and operating your division efficiently, but some private equity fund buys your owners out and strip-mines the company. Many, many more scenarios. But these aren't "hopeless" situations, there is opportunity to succeed, but that opportunity is based upon people skills as opposed to the academic ideal of right answers vs wrong.
It's called the Dilbert principle [1], and also Putt's law [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putt%27s_Law_and_the_Successfu...
In a sports tournament: Someone is going to win, no matter how good the participants are.
It doesn't matter how fast you spin your wheels working on things unless those things are aligned with delivering value to actual paying customers. Politics also doesn't really matter. Well, it matters to idiots, there are certainly a lot of those out there, and there's some truth that if you piss off the wrong idiot you're likely to be kicked out to the curb. But at the end of the day the times I or anyone else I know has created real business value, it has been heavily rewarded with promotions, money, etc.
The problem I see with a lot of academics is, like you mentioned, even if they are smart and spend a lot of time on interesting and hard problems, if they can't draw a straight line from their project to whatever business problem they are actually solving they don't last particularly long.
For most people, politics will be a dominant force - if not THE dominant force - that they live or die by. Once more than 2 people are involved, you by definition have politics (albeit weak politics). It then grows slightly until it suddenly becomes much more important at about 150 people or so. By the time you're at 1000 it's a major force, and at 5000 it's the only force that matters anymore.
And even if it's not your organization that's this big, a small company selling to Amazon will only succeed if they know how to play Amazon politics.
Really doesn't matter. I promise you. It might score you some points, sure. But it's not required or necessary.
>Politics also doesn't really matter.
It is the only thing that matters.
You can say the academic isn't solving the business problem, which isn't, how to make the best washing machine, but how can we make the most money by embracing enshittification. But that's probably not why he was hired.
We’re all supposed to believe what? That the extremely rare 19 year old startup founders of the world believe the world is meritocratic? Uh, of course they do.
Of course there are fewer CEOs, managing directors or whatever your current fantasy is. But there are millions of them on the planet - it's not that small of a class.
- Many of which are in their 20s or 30s because they created their own business or joined a tiny team or found an employer with just the right yearning (which would be half their fault but also half yours for looking for it).
- Learning how the world works is a life's work. It's fine if you couldn't hierarchy in your 20s, there is still time to learn.
- "Not with that attitude, you won't". If you are still obsessed with anti-corporate political ideas (as a random example), just perhaps that won't help you. That will seriously constrain how or if you continue learning about how the world really works. If you find a different obsession as things go (like a family, say), there is nothing wrong with that - but don't blame it on the pyramid. "The world" is a complex dynamic system of billions of people, interactions and ideas. It has NOTHING to do with your current preconception.
- As you continue growing up, you might find very different interests: public interest, scientific, engineering prowess, family time again, a completely different career direction, self-employment, technical or management consulting, art or craft - and there is nothing wrong with any of these. Your yearning of "top 1% recognition" that you identified with in school - or wished you identified with in school - will have changed and that's fine.
And this is true for everyone in that specific pyramid that you think is in front of you. If the top - some top - is truly your purpose in life, very few people in that pyramid are truly your competitors in your own race.
But this is hard to internalize. Most schools do not train for this. And school was presenting you with convenient easy(? lol) hurdles which work life does NOT. In life after school, you have to manage your own scoreboard, year in year our, decade in decade out - and this can be wearing. And there again, you can find mentors who WILL help open your eyes - if you bother to (easy right? no still not - but feasible for the people who try.)
And this is triple true if you switched country during or after your studies. You are now in an environment that you didn't even grow up in and you have far more to learn. A very serious disadvantage that will take additional energy to overcome - but will also help open your eye to this idea that you do have a lot to learn about how the world works (while the natives assume they already know.)
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 dishwashing, if you have some way of dishwashing that halves utility costs, someone would listen to you.
The answer might also be “who cares, get back to work” but that’s also true of a lot of middle-class employment. Your manager won’t give a shit if you think the expense reporting system sucks. Amazon’s famous for “disagree and commit” which is just a corporate way of saying the same thing.
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, and even so, if people saying that stuff had been correct I'd have surely killed myself by now, probably before age 30. There is no possible way I could have tolerated decades more of life as unpleasant as high school, let alone worse. Harsh and short deadlines, general inflexibility of expectations, begging to be allowed to take a piss, the equivalent of multiple hour-long presentation meetings every single day, very-early starts, lots of rooms with shitty lighting and no windows, terrible seating that you're in all day long, complete assholes common and you're just stuck with them, they're not gonna get kicked out (this goes for teachers and students alike), and no realistic ability to leave and find something better.
Luckily, I had a part-time tech job in high school (I did later work a couple very-low-paid non-tech jobs for a while, so I'm not writing this "no really high school is far worse than adult life" perspective from an entirely privileged perspective) and could see that something was wonky about what these people were saying. Then I go to college and it's like a goddamn vacation. On to the "real world" and there are hard times but it's nothing like the 4-year marathon rigid-schedule grind of high school. Those tend to be more like, oh this week is rough, or this month, or perhaps this quarter. And I have so very much more freedom of action to fix things that aren't going well.
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 flexibility, and ultra-high-stakes tests that to a large extent determined your future. Whereas work is a paradise and a breeze in comparison. And as life goes on, I make more money, can optimize my way further and further up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and things get better and better. This is an ultra privileged scenario though, and we have to admit that.
For many (most?) people, school was lower stakes and less pressure. You fail a test? No problem. You get a B or C on your report card? Not the end of the world. You don't get into Harvard? I wasn't trying anyway... Then you start adulting, and the pressure is on! You gotta gets some kind of job now and make some money every week so you can avoid homelessness and starvation. You've got a boss on your ass and threatening to fire you (or worse) every day. Your family can't help you anymore, and you're on your own to figure out the world. I know a lot of people who just can't deal with adulthood and hate it, and wish they were back in high school.
You may enjoy https://humaniterations.net/2018/10/24/the-first-prison
One of the more refreshing things to me about the working world is how failure actually has consequences. If you have a habit of bungling projects, disrupting coworkers, or otherwise engaging in antisocial behavior, I probably won't have to work with you for long.
I'm sure it's different elsewhere, but in the US you are never expelled (fired) from grade school simply for failing. Not only that, you can intentionally disrupt the education of those around you and effectively nothing will happen, and one poorly behaved student can derail an entire semester. Nothing short of repeated violence or actual crime is cause for dismissal in school.
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?
- 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%.
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.
I've read that male instructors are expected to be more objective, and that female instructors are rated more poorly when they are more objective (https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/what%E2%80%99s-name-exposing-gen...) but not anything on the rates of objectivity itself
"It also means that staying the course when things don’t go your way isn’t just a virtue but a practice. To play the long game, you have to keep showing up even after crushing disappointment without getting cynical of the process. Put differently, you need high levels of frustration tolerance."
Stoicism helps, or any form of resilience training. Leaders need high frustration thresholds to reach the top, because the view from up there doesn't get any better.
In my experience, everybody that I've worked with has been stressed, by the job, the managers, co-workers, and their client base. The worse the economy is, the higher the likelihood of people getting let go, so of course everyone is weary of everybody else and making sure that if somebody's head is heading for the shopping block, it's not themselves.
> 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 different organizations).
One example: people take credit for other people's work in front of higher management. You think someone would accidentally make a mistake and forget what they actually did themselves? Is that even possible? No, they know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing that. They are not trying to be friends with you.
This statement is pretty interesting and revealing; school is very much not like that for a lot of people, and I suspect this means that the author was in a strict STEM curriculum where there can really be said to be correct vs. incorrect answers. (vs. something like English, social sciences, etc.) As noted, this likely also means that the author is just recently out of school, and is just figuring out how the real world works and how few people are capable of stepping back and judging objectively. (alternately, maybe the author has known this for years and is just writing for a younger audience)
i don't know where you worked, but i have been working for a few decades now, and i still expect exactly that. even more so than school was. the point is, even if my expectations do not match reality everywhere, not expecting that would be like giving up. instead, because of this expectation, i do my best to create a work environment where this is actually true, and i do not allow others unfair behavior deter me from my belief and expectation of fair treatment of everyone around me.
What I take serious issue with is that there's a whole ecosystem of not identical but comparable dysfunction in academia and yet he didn't spot it or is ignoring it. That to me is indicative of bigger problems.
He's not helping people solve toxic workplaces, he's helping people shift their thinking as they move higher in org
That being said, I’ve seen many outrun their own incompetence. Getting incentives right in large organizations is difficult.
You are screwed if a higher up perceives you as threat. real or imaginary. you won't even know about your status till you get laidoff.
One of the nicest things a boss has done was when it looked like I was getting the blame for something was to email everyone connected with it saying he had done it, not me.
I have worked with a lot of people like that too.
If things go good, the team gets the credit.
If things go bad, it's my fault.
Management 101. It's shocking how few managers know this simple motivational technique. The team appreciates it, because they know you have their back, and your managers appreciate it, because it's easy to fix the blame, and they [may] respect you, for doing it.
yeah a lot of people that get ahead seem to be intentionally ignorant (to the point of fooling themselves) to provide a kind of plausible deniability. It's obviously put on because you see they are shrewd political operators and and "errors" are always in their favor. But there's this game of who can appear the most aloof and thus impossible to ascribe any malice to.
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 best-of-the-best special... they tend to truly believe the rhetoric as they slowly indenture themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect
Most HR folks quickly tire of entitled peoples petulance, as no matter how conventionally "smart" a applicant may be... no office wants to deal with drama everyday. =3
Yes, there are shitty people at work who take action out of malice and actually are out to get you, but in my experience, that's a small minority of the time. It's fundamental attribution error.
Perhaps someone will come up with a better incentive structure, but those people were fired years ago. As process-people often eventually win over creatives due to their singular focus. lol =3
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ofcourse our middle manager knew that it was bs but she was the one mentoring this person so she ran with it.
i didnt even know about this when all of a sudden i saw it my review with hr.
i considered this person my friend and we even hung out with each others families over holidays.
i was totally shaken by the whole situation.
However, accidentaly attributing stupidity to what is malice is generally not too bad. If its malice it will happen again and you can revise your opinion.
Accidentally attribute malice to what is stupidity is an easy way to start grudges. This can blow back on you and turn someone who just made a mistake into someone who does actually hate you, and make third party observers think you are unreasonable.
So erring on the side of assuming stupidity is generally a good call.
What you call something matters a lot less than what you do about it.
What I mean by this is when you're in the weeds of "not in the first few options for diagnosis", a lot of conditions have a lot of overlapping symptoms. You might get a diagnosis for some condition, and then as new evidence comes to light, that diagnosis may change. After a while you start to doubt any possible diagnosis and even when you get one, you spend your time worrying about "What if I'm wrong? What if I don't have X?". The thing that's important to remember though is that for a good chunk of the symptoms that all of these conditions have, the treatment for them is exactly the same. It doesn't matter if you have condition X, Y or Z if the treatment for symptom Q is the same for all of them. That doesn't mean an accurate diagnosis isn't important, it very much is. But it's only important where the treatment options would differ. But if you want to resolve symptom Q and the treatment is the same, it just doesn't matter what you call it.
The same thing applied to malice vs stupidity. Unless there's a very different action to take to mitigate the problem, it doesn't matter which one it is. Lets take your example of someone taking credit for your work in front of upper management. If this was stupidity what would you do to mitigate the issue? You'd do more to document what you're doing. You'd make sure you have a chance to speak for your own efforts. You'd make sure that your contributions are more visible. You might get a neutral party involved in keeping an eye on things. You might gently correct your co-worker if doing so was appropriate in the moment.
So what would you do if it was malice? Probably all of the same things right? About the only difference in what you do might be whether you talk to the co-worker about it, or talk to HR. But beyond that, everything you'd do to mitigate the issue is more or less the same. And whats important is that the issue you have is that credit was taken for your work. Really in the end it doesn't even matter whether it was stupidity or malice because learning which it was doesn't get your credit back. And accurately labeling it doesn't stop you from losing credit in the future when it happens again.
But there is one personal benefit from assuming stupidity, you can feel less anger. It's a lot easier to be objective, and stay focused on your real goal and the problem you really want to solve when you don't feel like you're actively being attacked. So whenever there is ambiguity, and the actions you would take to mitigate the real issue are the same, why choose the label that increases your own stress and anger levels and makes you more likely to retaliate in a way that actually back fires on you because you're reacting in anger.
Which again isn't to say that you should be a doormat. But you can set boundaries for yourself and take actions to accomplish your goals without getting mired in judgements of other people's actions. Their feelings about it and their motivations aren't my concern, my concern is taking care of myself. I don't need them to see things my way, or admit to wrong doing to enforce my boundaries and take care of myself. And I can take care of myself a lot better if I'm not angry and stressed out.
With that in mind, remember that corporate IT department knows everything you do on your work computer. Every email sent, every process started, every keystroke. Good luck!
I am much later in my career than the audience I assume this is intended for, but I have struggled to mentor junior colleagues on many of the major bullet points here so succinctly.
This should be recommended reading for new college grads entering a more traditional (I.e. non-startup) work environment. Definitely keeping a bookmark of this for that reason.