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Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize ?, Hacker News


            

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How much feel good and drinking relationships matter in upper management. And on the downside, how little facts weight in when compared to a manager’s gut feeling.

Enthusiastically presenting a (factually wrong) solution can be a winning strategy. In high school, I thought I was a math genius because all of my solutions were judged as correct. Turns out, I was just a good presenter and nobody made any effort to check my results.

Managers in big companies will be happy to buy your product if it helps themselves save face, even if it is a net negative for the company. That’s how they end up with so many useless initiatives that get canceled after a year of burning money.

Consultants are paid to be a straw man parrot. You tell their coworkers what your contact wants them to hear, so that they can blame it on you if their idea goes wrong.

(The same source code given to different product and marketing teams can be a 100 x difference in revenue. If the sales team is not rich, run. They either cannot sell the product, or they could not sell themselves to get commission.

Customer support matters a lot less than people think. A buggy 17 -year-old software without support can still sell like candy if it solves a real and valuable business problem.

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BTW, I just remembered another consultant story the other way around. I was trying to do a banking deal and they sent me a draft that had the requirements listed as checkboxes.
[X] Form – AB has been signed

[X] Project duration less than 2 years

[ ] Company financials have been audited and co nfirmed

and the offer was timed to expire within days. At first, I thought this was a joke in bad faith, as there would be no way to have all company financials audited and legally confirmed by a certified accountancy within 7 days. But then I just called some random accountant offices, told them my story of needing a quick audit for the bank and asked for a quote and their time frame.

One company offered to do it as same-day service. I faxed them the documents in the morning, then his assistants would check them, then the certified accountant (the guy running the company) would confirm that everything was in order and then I’d get my result in the evening.
When I drove there in the afternoon with my paperwork for them to confirm and stamp it, I was told that their head guy was on vacation and had never been in the office. But one helpful assistant stamped and signed all of my documents “i.A.”=”in absence”. The whole audit cost me less than my usual daily rate.

Next day, I told my contact at the bank how things had gone and he chuckled and just said: Yes, they know that we just need the audit to tick a checkbox in our liability insurance form.
In other words, while I considered what the accountant guy did to be a rather low-effort incomplete job, he did exactly what was expected of him by the bank and what I needed to get my deal done.

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>Consultants are paid to be a straw man parrot. You tell their coworkers what your contact wants them to hear, so that they can blame it on you if their idea goes wrong.
I’m not sure I follow. Is “you” the consultant in the above scenario? A consultant is hired to pitch the idea of ​​someone who’s hired them, to the person’s who’s hired you colleagues. If the idea ultimately falls through, the person who’s idea it was originally gets to shift blame on you. Oh, ok. While writing this I figured out what you meant by straw man parrot.

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No, I did not mean things in that sort of “nothing you can do about the sad truth” way. Instead, I consider this actionable advice.

– Spend time hanging out with other guys talking about shared hobbies
– When you like your results, make sure people can see your enthusiasm
– Help people look good in front of their peers and they will buy

– As a contractor, do what the customer wants, not what you like best

– Before you spend the time to build something, research that your intended customer can and will buy it

– Don’t worry if people complain about your stuff. They always do, even if they get rich by using your tools.

BTW, googling for Blackpill sure yields odd results:

“What Is The Black Pill? A Closer Look Inside The New Red Pill”

followed by 2 huge advertisements:

17 x your attractiveness to women – Click Here ” “Accidental discovery reveals the exact body type women want – Click Here”

followed by a full-width picture of naked models barely covered with what looks like a furry blanket.

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I think it’s an expansion on Matrix’s blue pill red pill analogy, except black seems an even more forceful and grim color than red.

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What’s a blackpill? Is this a twist on the Matrix’s shtick with red and blue pills, but with a black one, signifying that this truth is somehow morbose or dark?

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Everything is a system. The economy, society, relationships, nature, traffic.
You don’t need math to reverse engineer a system. You just need to pay attention to it. You can say the right words to make a date happy. You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can. You don’t need an app or data – your brain is a wonderful data processing machine.

Don’t be angry at the people who are benefiting from a system, or at the system itself. Most just end up that way, the same way a river meanders towards the sea, or an electrical current tries to find ground.

Fixing / improving a system often requires deep understanding of it. An action here will cause a response there. People often document it, but few will do a proper design.

If you don’t fix a system, few will. Most people are reactive to it and try to live with it as background noise.

If you don’t control a system, it will control you. You don’t have to change its fundamentals, just move out of the way of harm.

Neatness / order is a way to understand a system. All systems tend to fall to disorder. Disorder is not always a bad thing. Order is very expensive, and only serves as better documentation to those who do not understand it. Very often, excessive order is a symptom of someone who does not understand or control it.

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Life is fleeting. Most of us here are 1/3 or more of the way done. Divest yourself as much as possible from your job. Find other sources of identity. You don’t need that fancy car or to buy a boat as much as you need that ejector seat savings account.
And when you realise that conditions have evolved to a point where you’re not having fun anymore (and they always eventually do), eject yourself and go spend far more time with family, friends and your other sources of identity.

Everyone _wildly_ undervalues ​​their time.

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(Definitely agree, and this is even more of a problem in the United States than most other western nations. Work life balance should be a priority for all human beings, and Americans have much to learn to catch up in this area.

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I agree. Americans get almost religious if you propose to only work a day per week. Much better to claim that the rest of your week was already fully booked, even though in reality you just don’t need the additional money.

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Regarding the “ejector seat savings account”, Do I receive something like unemployment benefits when I quit my in the United States? If yes, does it matter whether I quit or was fired? Sorry if that question sounds naive, but from what I read here on HN I’m often not quite sure how the system works in the US.

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generally speaking, if you quit or were fired you would not be eligible for any unemployment assistance. It’s different state to state, but quit is your decision, and ‘fired’ is usually for something negative / bad. I’ve been ‘laid off’ – terminated but it was reported as no fault of mine – and received unemployment assistance – this has happened to me twice.

the ‘ejector seat savings’ the GP was referring to just means ‘have enough savings that you can walk away from any situation if you want to’. GP probably wasn’t meaning ‘walk away from all work forever’. I can say in my case even when I qualified for unemployment assistance, it was pretty small, and took a couple weeks for me to even get a check, then another few days for the check to clear. Mind you this was years ago – the situation might be ‘faster’ now, but … having savings now means I wouldn’t care one way or another, but at the time, I had very little, and it panicked the heck out of me not having a ‘regular check’ coming in.

(years ago, I was earning … about $/ week. The upper cap on unemployment assistance paid out around … $ 2010 / week (and I didn’t even qualify for the full amount, IIRC). I had been earning $ 823 / week, but then had to wait close to 3 more weeks to get a check from the state for around $ 500. It was close to a sustainable situation.

            

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Thanks for the detailed response. Tbh that sounds pretty hard to me. I guess for people who can easily find a new job (eg tech) that might not be a big deal, but I feel sorry for all the people who don’t have that luxury (eg unskilled blue-collar worker). (******************************

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I’m in a position now where I have … probably months or more of living expenses lined up that I can tap whenever I need to, so I don’t think I’ll ever have to be in that situation again. BUT … I still remember have $ 0, owing money, having no job / income. Scary as a single person, probably doubly so if you have a family to support.

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yep. Again, my experiences were from over a decade ago – I’m sure a bit has changed, but probably not all that much. That was from 2 different states as well.
https://fileunemployment.org/unemployment-benefits /unemploym…

            

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I believe you have to be involuntarially let go (ie, fired or downsized) in order to collect unemployment. If you depart of your own decision, including them talking you into doing so, you do not get to collect unemployment.

            

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Excellent advice. I would also suggest reading the book “Your money or your life” by Vicki Robbin about achieving financial independence as early as possible.

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the taxonomy of jobs that most people have in their minds is extremely simple (doctor, lawyer, teacher, builder, engineer, window cleaner, garbage collector, astronaut, …) and is mostly based on a grade-school understanding of what kind of jobs people do. But the reality is that there are millions (of) **************************************************************** (types) ********************************************************* of jobs, with incredible variety and specialisms, and the real content of a job is rarely captured in a job title.

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Not only that, but the incredible depth of pretty much every field. Not every practitioner dives deep, but the masters of any job leave me speechless.

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I worked a stint in fast food. I thoroughly underestimated the skill ceiling. Everything from burger wrapping, cleaning, taking orders and inventory could be optimized for time. It took almost a year before I was comfortable and by then I was doing things quickly, consistently and a few at the same time.

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Having worked filling shelves in a supermarket, I disagree that it applies to every field.
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Don’t confuse

            

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Supermarket logistics, which (or seems to me) system is built to put things on shelves in the way that creates most profit, is surely one of the essential defining advances in the last few decades of retail? I’m thinking short logistics chains and JIT?

Not my field, but perhaps you need to widen your view a little.

I’ll bet there was someone at your store who was the Shiva of Stacking too?

I only worked checkouts (pre barcode scanning, other stores had it).

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Having worked with filling shelves, that job felt sometimes a lot more complex than my development job nowadays. The store I worked for did in general allow anything extra to be stored in the warehouse. This lead to the filling load sometimes having excess products that you had to fit somewhere. I really enjoyed making space by moving and rearranging products on the shelves. The products came in wrapped in big rollers that contained random products so looking at the roller product list and how they were packaged you had a puzzle to find a nice path that visited all the correct shelves. Occasionally you would have campaigns and such where you could be quite creative in setup and arrangement.
It was the job I have been most satisfied with in my working life. However, I did only do it for 8 months for 6 hours a day. Maybe in the long run it gets more boring.

The variety between shelf filling between different store brands and even different stores of the same brand made me really think no two jobs are the same.

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I used to have a job in the back warehouse of a white goods store. I was moving around fridges all day long. It was a really good job. The best part was I couldn’t take any fridges home with me in the evenings. I’d get home and my fridge would be already where it’s meant to be. Also no one wanted me to do a fridge moving side project in the evenings.

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When I had my pickup truck, friends would ask me for help in moving fridges when moving between rentals. Typical payment was beer and pizza so not too bad.

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I would imagine the depth there is in determining. what goes where on the shelf. You as shelf-filler probably did not get to make this decision though. ****************************************************

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there is a “science” behind shelf placement. decisions and it has to do with height, location on the aisle, colors, lights, and of course the “fee” that the outlet asks for the premium spots. Someone who just fills shelfs (I’ve done that for a toystore a few decades ago, for aa couple of months).
Depends whether someone gets to just fill the shelf as per plan or has the curiosity to ask “WHY”, noticing why X things fly off the shelf why Y things two shelves lower stay there forever. This curiosity builds the critical thinking ‘muscle’ and can motivate a shelf-filler to switch into marketing (hypothetical scenario has to do with a yo working part time and then deciding to studio marketing) ((I did not study marketing):)
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People can master nearly anything and stand out; boring physical labor is actually one where there are obvious things to be amazing it. It may not earn people a pay raise, but there will be a noticeable and impressive difference between an expert shelf-stacker and someone killing time for money.

That being said there are a lot of jobs where I have difficulty imagining what mastery looks like; say in an automated, low choice style field like bus driving. I couldn’t recognize an expert bus driver from a relative novice. But that probably only reflect my lack of knowledge about bus driving.

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When driving a car, I tend to optimize (my wife would say overoptimise) for everyone’s efficiency, and I am sure a lot of that can be applied to bus driving – for instance, many of them will stop too close to a red traffic light, so cars in adjacent lanes can’t see them when they are only on the that side of the street. **************************

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Having dated someone who specialized in developing and enforcing visual merchandising guidelines for an international cosmetics brand, I have to suggest that it just might.

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Someone working in the very bottom rung of a field not having to deal with any of the complexity of that particular field is not a valid negation.


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There is a massive differences between a well- stocked shelf and a poorly stocked shelf. The science behind the product decisions, brand placements, etc, is well-studied and practiced. The store-shelf-stockers themselves have a major impact with their level of detail-oriented work.
I’m sure you could measure it financially, and that a nicely done shelf stock makes more money than a poorly done one.

            


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Very true. Therefore I always suggest people look at the organization more than the specific role and learn how to evolve the starting position.

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I fixed my mum’s computer a few years back (cleaned up some adware and other stuff that was making it awful to use) and did a bunch of virus scans and cleanup etc. After a while she asked “Is this what you do for a job?”

The conception of what happens inside our industry just isn’t present in the wider population, and I imagine we’re not unique in that.

            

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I’m a developer like many people here . One thing that people who don’t program don’t realize is that its a laborious job. It seems like its a fun job with lots of ‘hanging out’ but its more like 4-5 hours a day / 5 days week looking at a text editor and a terminal trying to focus and not be distracted. At the end of the day, I’m exhausted

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I’ve done all kinds of jobs. I’d take a 14 hour physical labor job over a 8 hour mental labor job anytime. Mental labor is painful … in the form that stalling the main thread of something is.
But that’s data entry. Development is much less mental labor, and I’d agree with the 4-5 hours / day assessment.

Most people can’t actually do this, which is why a lot of people hate math. Math class is dealing with intense focus on a poorly documented thing. Development has little to do with it, but it’s the same soft skill.

            

                  

Related to that: On many people’s mental maps , programming seems to be closeby other things like installing a driver, changing configuration and such. That it is an powerful tool for anything that you do with your mind completely escapes the bystanders.

            

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I find the programming part Ok. It’s the meetings and constantly being interrupted by managers that sends me batty.

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That people sometimes do shitty things, make mistakes or let me down, and no matter what, if I squint – I can see myself.

That I’m not always right, or always better than Joe. And that: I’m not always wrong, and Bob is not always better than me.

That we might hit our deadline. And the world will still be there if we don’t.

That people do things I don’t understand, for reasons I will never see or be able to anticipate. And that’s simply the way it is.

Dark corners are found in, or emerge from all positives. Great things are found in, or emerge from all negatives. Nothing is black and white, despite it’s appearance. Everything is wishy-washy gray. What was right yesterday may be wrong tomorrow and vice versa.

Or, in summary: things are easier when I’m easier going

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(preface: I worked a string of manual labor jobs before and during college)

A lot of the (now) coveted trade jobs can seem like a very tempting alternative to crushing college debt and volatile job security, but truth be told, many of these trades are plagued with physical injuries, sudden unemployment, and what not.

Furthermore, you deal with A LOT more shady people (employers, customers / clients, suppliers, you name it) than you do in white-collar sectors.

I say this because for the past few years , I’ve seen an increase in people advocating for people to choose trade jobs over college-educated jobs, like it’s the most obvious and risk-free thing in the world.

It’s not, and I’d even go as far as arguing that the downsides of trade jobs can be worse than the downsides of a cushy white-collar job.

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The downside of trades is that most people are there only for the money. From this you can derive the rest.

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And unfortunately it’s difficult to scale your work. You get paid for the hours you put in, and there’s only so many hours. Of course, if you’re lightning fast you could increase volume, but that’s about it.
I know lots of people in trade jobs that make a good salary, not too far away from what their company engineers make – but the downside is that they work hour days, 6 days a week to earn that kind of money. While the engineer has a cushy 8 hr workday, 5 days a week.

Work and overtime culture completely depends on the owner. I’ve been at shops where you were expected to work OT every single day. Start 7, mins lunch (*********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************, ************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************ min dinner around 3-4, then back to work and keep working until 7-8-9 in the evening. repeat. 6 days a week, sometimes 7.

It’s one of the few places where people have pissing matches over who’s worked the most. Guys would come in and brag about only getting 3 hours of sleep, or working 16 hr days the whole week. Weird culture.

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Guys would come in and brag about only getting 3 hours of sleep, or working 16 hr days the whole week.
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