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!
"Study hard, get good grades, follow the formula and ultimately merit wins."
That's really funny, I remember the day I watched a kid's femoral artery get slashed in a fight and watched my teacher use his belt as a tourniquet, thankfully the kid lived because of that.
Most of my schools were taught by burnt out underpaid angry folks who wanted you to stay in line, that's it, any other behavior would be met with derision, verbal abuse, and targeted violence by other students.
Meanwhile rich kids get into good schools because they can afford after school activities and tutors since birth.
it used to be that tech provided somewhat a safe space for autists like me to hide out. now its full of management ppl who would've gone into other industries but were lured in by high pay in tech.
i miss the days where tech pay only slightly above average and ppl in tech were considered losers and dorks.
> 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 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.
"Meanwhile, subjective decisions are constantly happening behind the scenes. The decisions about who to trust, or who gets a shot are made through informal reputations and shared stories about your value. Then the “data” is used to justify them in retrospect."
True; as long as humans are humans, this will remain to be the case.
"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.
I have seen really inept people given manager positions because they were out going and then crash after six months in the position and expecting that we fix all the management issues for some reason.
Honestly, I have no energy to be as social as the work life needs me to be, maybe that is ok. Maybe no.
> "When you assume stupidity instead of malice, you stay above the fray, stop taking slights personally, or turning misjudgments into betrayals. This way we retain agency and choice."
I'd never thought of it this way explicitly, but it makes sense.
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.
Sorry but I'd rather not play politics at work. If they don't value me, I'd rather just go where I'm valued for the time that I'm valued. I don't want to serve an undeserving organization. Playing politics at work implies avoiding adversity, which in turn means not actually growing transferable skills.
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.
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.)
> Assuming malice turns you into a cynic. In contrast, assuming stupidity keeps you curious.
Curiosity is a superpower that you can leverage. It keeps you out of fight/flight and helps you reason when the stakes feel high. It demonstrates your willingness to collaborate instead of being reactive. Success at work comes from collaboration and communication.
I prefer just doing my job, while putting my limits in the energy and time I dedicate on it. And I just look for a new job when I get fed up and/or want a rise.
This whole mastermind bullshit just seems mentally exhausting.
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%.
> Study hard, get good grades, follow the formula and ultimately merit wins
I don't think "winning" at school has anything to do with those things. That sounds like a waste of time. Winning at school is about building knowledge and relationships which further goals that you set for yourself, not that the school sets for you. Sometimes good grades are a side effect.
I run into a fair number of good undergraduate students who are terrible phd students.
Same problem. They did well solving problems that someone already knows the answer to, applying concepts that were explained to them in class. Suddenly they face problems no one knows the answer to - otherwise we wouldn’t be trying to solve them. And they fall apart.
I think this is one part missing from the OP - some people just can’t seem to work without fairly rigid requirements. They do well in undergrad or a professional MS program, and there’s a place for them in a lot of big organizations, but there are a lot of jobs (phd student being one) for which they just aren’t a match.
> You can call it organizational absurdities. Or more bluntly, institutional stupidity.
Sure, there is plenty of that, but some of what the author is describing can be chalked up to another principle: realpolitik. Every organization has values and practices that can become lip service when practical realities intrude. The inefficiency that is causing you a burden might be benefiting someone else who is working hard to keep it in place.
29 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 58.4 ms ] threadWith 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!
That's really funny, I remember the day I watched a kid's femoral artery get slashed in a fight and watched my teacher use his belt as a tourniquet, thankfully the kid lived because of that.
Most of my schools were taught by burnt out underpaid angry folks who wanted you to stay in line, that's it, any other behavior would be met with derision, verbal abuse, and targeted violence by other students.
Meanwhile rich kids get into good schools because they can afford after school activities and tutors since birth.
i miss the days where tech pay only slightly above average and ppl in tech were considered losers and dorks.
> 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.
1) I am a dork, embrace it
2) Avoid Math
3) Scientific method = troubleshooting with purpose. Use it.
4) People in charge can be total idiots, but they're still in charge
5) Popularity and Competence are not related
6) Competence and compensation are not related
7) If you stay focused and just do you, you'll succeed despite other people's drama and your personal pains
8) Abuse is abuse, and people negligent in doing anything about it are participating in it. Get toxicity out of your life.
9) People who believe in you are right. Ignore the rest and allow yourself to thrive despite them.
School sucked.
True; as long as humans are humans, this will remain to be the case.
"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.
Honestly, I have no energy to be as social as the work life needs me to be, maybe that is ok. Maybe no.
I'd never thought of it this way explicitly, but it makes sense.
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.
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.
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.)
Curiosity is a superpower that you can leverage. It keeps you out of fight/flight and helps you reason when the stakes feel high. It demonstrates your willingness to collaborate instead of being reactive. Success at work comes from collaboration and communication.
This whole mastermind bullshit just seems mentally exhausting.
- 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%.
Plenty of dumb stuff can happen on the inside with no penalty.
That’s the game you’re in.
I don't think "winning" at school has anything to do with those things. That sounds like a waste of time. Winning at school is about building knowledge and relationships which further goals that you set for yourself, not that the school sets for you. Sometimes good grades are a side effect.
Same problem. They did well solving problems that someone already knows the answer to, applying concepts that were explained to them in class. Suddenly they face problems no one knows the answer to - otherwise we wouldn’t be trying to solve them. And they fall apart.
I think this is one part missing from the OP - some people just can’t seem to work without fairly rigid requirements. They do well in undergrad or a professional MS program, and there’s a place for them in a lot of big organizations, but there are a lot of jobs (phd student being one) for which they just aren’t a match.
Sure, there is plenty of that, but some of what the author is describing can be chalked up to another principle: realpolitik. Every organization has values and practices that can become lip service when practical realities intrude. The inefficiency that is causing you a burden might be benefiting someone else who is working hard to keep it in place.