Not accusing you of this, just an example.
The world is full of hidden complexity, so be prepared for an education at any moment, I'd say.
Wonderful words! Added to my quotes list :)
Estimates are guesses by nature, and it's not surprising you know nothing about them.
If you hate your job that much, what are you doing about it?
It's weird to see the top post on HN be an immature and empathy-barren rant that is completely irrelevant to the article.
I called him crooked because he dealt drugs to his favourite staff, or gave them coke as a reward. He was eventually on Crime Watch UK for fraud. The pay rise was to get people up to minimum wage.
Not that that matters - it was still a rant. I'm not going to apologise for that, though. Sometimes it happens.
That sense of entitlement is endemic across the internet, honestly.
You never know what someone is going through. In fact, odds are the more you percieve a person has having "it all together", the further off the mark you likely are. This is true for the simple reason that everyone struggles with something.
"Empathy" is a good word here. I think we tend to decide how much of our empathy we believe a person deserves based on our own perception of "how well they're doing", particularly relative to ourselves. The truth is, we should always start with empathy and grace, though that's often easier said than done.
So, thanks for inserting that word. Needed the reminder myself.
That company had been broken in to, with extremely valuable equipment stolen. The insurance company promptly paid for it, replacements were bought - all's well in the world, right?
Not quite. It turns out, due to tax law quirks, the new equipment's cost as a tax deduction needs to be spread out over years (6 IIRC), but the payout from the insurance company is taxable as a lump sum. So, while the balance sheet is net even after the break-in, the tax man wants a huge chunk of money that he's then willing to return, in small increments, over the next years.
But the company is cash poor. And a loan is not feasible, because it's already stretching the limits. A call to the accountant is in order. And, as it turns out, second quirk of tax law, if you buy a car on a loan, you can claim the entire expense in the same tax year, but you can spread the paying back over the next several years.
And so the car was bought, at significant long term cost to the owner, but it fixed the tax/cash shortfall problem for the current year.
Step two after learning to keep your mouth shut: Learning that the situation is always more complex than you can see from the outside.
Rather step two that the CEO should have done: Explain these quirks of the taxation laws, so that any rational person has to come to the same logical conclusion based on the evidence.
I'm not saying it couldn't happen, or that it has never happened, just that you'll need some serious arguments to convainc me it's more probable than the CEO being simply a crook.
Telling your employees achieves nothing, in that case - their next job won't be less precarious, they just lose a little bit of piece of mind. You make the active choice that some (who want to see you as a crook anyways, see other replies) think slightly worse of you, while the vast majority can go home and sleep in relative peace.
It's a very different situation if cash flow crunch is completely unexpected, or highly likely to be fatal, with stable businesses around.
As I said above, the situation is always more complex. You make decisions accordingly :)
In the case you describe, you are divided between a suspicion that everyone else is an idiot (and you are wise) or that everybody is equally aware, but you've all learned to live the lie.
Like - so we should do something about it, right? This thing that would dramatically improve our lives that is really obvious to everyone. Shouldn't we do it?
Turns out, nope. It's always been like that.
First time I went was a couple weeks ago. I noticed that they didn’t play with any out of bounds - whoever kicked it out, got to keep going with the ball. Made no sense.
I asked the organizer of the group about it. His reply? “We’ve been doing it like this for 10 years. That’s just how it is.”
I asked him if he personally enjoyed playing like that (him being the organizer for literally the last decade...)
He slowly turned and looked at me with a blank stare, as if he had never thought of it like that before. “No I don’t,” he said.
He still refused to do anything about it.
Not at all: you can be painfully aware that 90% or even 99% of your peers are not that good and yet you are still light years away from being in the top 0.0001%. It's the same type of awareness.
Compare it with income only for the sake of having a numerical benchmark. With a salary of 32k$/year you are in the world top 1% yet you might feel you should be earning 100x that.
Anyway, in this case, he believes that 98 people in the office are no good. 1 is amazingly good. He is both better than the 98 but much much worse than the 1. To my mind that is not impostor syndrome.
Perhaps I don't really understand the term.
So yes, being cynical about stuff, especially bullshit from the higher-ups, is perfectly normal and such, but unless you actually step in and fix things it's wasted cynicism / anger / energy.
(source: I'm cynical all the time but don't envy the person saying the things)
The problem rather is: In some points (those where I am really knowledgeable about) I really do know better and if some of these points are on the agenda, I would love to be the CEO to handle these. But for many other points, the CEO surely does a better job than me.
Would the world be a better place if I were the CEO just when such points are decided upon (and otherwise the "old" CEO may decide)? Probably yes.
Would the world be a better place if I were the CEO full-time? Rather not.
You see the problem: You make being "being allowed to decide" (being CEO) an all-or-nothing decision. The solution in my opinion is rather to give authority to make decisions if someone knows a lot about a topic.
Maybe it's me..
Disillusionment.
I'm like OP. I've been in the tech industry for a stupid amount of years, and I swear I can improvise a CEO grade speech for any circumstance.
Ouch, watch out with that attitude. CEOs are full of bluster and no action, so you might be risking becoming what you hate.
> Not really.
How so?
I have no problem with how the system works, it's silly, it's unbalanced, it's all based on illusions, but here it is...
You can either feel disappointed and become all bitter and twisted, or you can just play the game. In many ways, it's fun, especially when you get that perception of clarity -- compensates for all these years you were the pawn.
An example: years ago my old crooked boss brought everyone in to his huge office to tell us why he couldn't afford to give people the pay rise they'd been asking for. With a straight face and with his Aston Martin parked in plain sight behind him. He gave some sob story about how a friend had come round his house to ask for a loan and how he was so poor he could only afford to lend the guy £800, even though his wife didn't want him to. It was pathetic. At the end of the meeting I walked out and duly started laughing, only for people to reprimand me, "he's doing his best for us! Didn't you hear the story about his friend?!"
So since then I've learnt to keep my mouth shut. Just yesterday I was in a meeting where we were giving estimates on things we knew nothing about. On the way back I glanced at people's screens and there must have been a hundred people pushing numbers around on excel spreadsheets for presumably no reason.
Quite possibly everyone else is just keeping their mouths shut too. And now we all go around doing pointless shit all day, every day.
Just now I saw a hare run across the field outside the office and thought, "you lucky bastard."