[X] Form 123-AB has been signed
[X] Project duration less than 2 years
...
[ ] Company financials have been audited and confirmed
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.
The degree to which everything runs on this sort of system is kind of horrifying, once you're exposed to enough things like this for that to sink in.
Relatedly, I guess my contribution to the broader thread would be:
Almost no-one knows what they're doing, let alone is much good at it—so few, in fact, that society and the economy (and everything else) basically run on a massive and super-serious game of playing pretend. Yes, even that big important organization (public or private) where you expect everyone to be pretty damn competent. The difference between them and some normal place is that 5% of their people are impressively good at their jobs, rather than 2%.
Growing up, I had this idea that adults always know what to do, at least within their specialities, or at least know how to figure out what they don't know. So far from true. The vast majority is just winging it. To the best of their abilities, of course, but it's still all improv.
50% of the work is done by the square root of the number of people in your organization.
There are definitely games that get played, but for the most part people are playing it to get around silliness from other parties.
I agree that the non-joke variety not getting the serious treatment it deserves is scary, I just don't agree that it happens as often as you were implying.
So? It clearly works.
People want everything to be high quality master craftsman type work but almost nothing is and it almost never matters. People like to think that the auditors are going over the papers with a magnifying glass and that their landscaper is applying exactly the right fertilizer for the soil conditions. In reality the auditors are skimming the papers and the landscaper is just using whatever brand has worked decently in the past.
Most work done most of the time is little more than the minimum and that's all the world needs. You can either look at that as sloppy and low effort or efficient allocation of resources.
Perhaps the best thing that can be said for pro-forma processes is that they usually put people on notice that they may be held accountable for their actions -- though, of course, that is not always the case.
The "even rare failures are unacceptable" line of reasoning is simply too conservative to permit our modern society to exist. The resources we would have to dedicate to preventing these kinds of things (don't forget the 90/10 rule) in every case would be astronomical. Imagine if every bit of software had to be written the way NASA rights their software for human carrying vehicles and if every financial transaction had to be strictly scrutinized. Software would be so expensive that it would be used far less than it is today and all the good that brings would not exist. Credit would be far, far less accessible to just about everyone you could fill a library with books that have been written about why that is bad. And those are just two industries(!!!!).
It's really east to say "But the MAX" or "but the mortgage crisis" but occasional failures like that are simply the price of a reality where normal everyday people can travel thousands of miles in a day and have access to credit.
Either is unacceptable, of course, but the boots on the ground are rarely to blame.
Clearly it doesn't and when it does, it's despite this, not because of it.
The economic crisis of 2008/9 could have easily been prevented.
Misinformation about WMDs led to useless wars.
The war on drugs is a huge waste of resources because why?
Ticking checkboxes is a big cause of our problems.
If it didn't work, we would all be starving and dodging lions in a jungle somewhere, instead of writing posts on an internet forum about how a few well-known things were sloppily done, yet didn't really cause that much damage in the great scheme of things.
Incarceration and systemic discrimination against an entire class of people does not count as "well enough", in my opinion.
And it's specious reasoning to conclude that if a society made up of untrustworthy actors committing fraud isn't starving and dodging lions, then it's worked out fined. One can go live in a country with low societal trust to see what that's like (Brazil, India, Pakistan, Somalia, etc).
I posit that it's the proportion of trustworthy actors in the system, along with a healthy dose of conveniently timed technological advances as well as luck providing resources at the right time that leads to a prosperous society. There are countless examples in history of a society doing well enough, and every time there is a tipping point where sufficient trust is lost and it starts degrading, or in some cases, collapses.
I suppose we are. I'd argue that mine corresponds to reality in every modern nation that currently exists on the planet. I think they're all doing pretty well indeed overall, compared to the historical record and the current conditions of some of the countries and places that aren't doing so well. Comparing current reality to an imaginary utopia is a whole different ballgame.
There's nothing wrong with recognizing the problems, mistakes, and injustices that we do have now and working to fix them. We just need to keep a little perspective - despite the problems, things are still going pretty well one the whole. Plans that talk of tearing the whole system down to fix a few small problems aren't a good idea, and have historically mostly led to things getting much, much worse.
How do you put people in power without corruption ?
You give them a tight set of rules to follow and limit their power.... with something like a constitution.
You see how it took a mere 200 years for that to get corrupted ?
The only way to stop or slow corruption is by shining light on it. I support all efforts to increase transparency. Put all those spreadsheets online so people can audit each other. Perhaps it is inevitable still, but it’s the best chance we have.
That's not clear at all. There are systemic changes one might have made that could have reduced the impact at the margins, but ultimately the cause was too much much money chasing too few assets and I have yet to see any plan that would have changed that.
Old manager coined it "the power is in the template", big difference in response rate between an informal handwritten request & a proper looking 'official' request to comply.
Edit: Or, were you joking? ;)
Nope. This is real.
> what documentclass do you use
dinbrief.cls (the most fitting one IMO since I'm German)
> what do you mean by "companies" and "inquiries"
Mostly subscription cancellations and asking for refunds.
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.
Yes.
https://ideas.ted.com/why-do-so-many-incompetent-men-become-...
None the less I do find it a valuable source of information, in particular identifying bugs and deficiencies.
Yes, once that program has been working for 10 years, it's likely that any bugs are easily worked around, but while the software is in development, it's likely there are no work arounds and customer support can take a beating from the customer and try to make the customer feel better, this stretches out the timeline for fixing the issues.
This is because management is ultimately a job about people, and manager to manager relationships demonstrate one's skill on that axis. I think all of us would rather work with a coworker or boss with middling competence but who is nice to us, rather than a brilliant asshole.
It's better to fail as a good person than to succeed as a charlatan, and a bit of money can't plaster over the faculties of the mind drying up, among that the ability to resist charlatans in other contexts, including the political. "Business sophistry" is simply sophistry, brownnosing your boss is just brownnosing, and either you feed sophistry and naked emperors, or you don't. Everybody has "reasons", but more importantly, every day new people come into the world, and they deserve a clean shot at life more than crooked people deserve respect and comfort. Save your soul, you just have the one.
> Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.
-- Kant
Wars of colonialism, soldiers paid in plunder and rape, massacre of those only trying to defend their besieged home? Fine or even righteous when we do it. When others do they are foul invaders.
Meanwhile, anything remotely lurid or new culturally is treated as an apocalyptic issue and the well of all sins. A streamer making money selling bathwater and being widely mocked doesn't even belong on the map of moral problems even when compared to petty examples of actual problems like parking ticket fixing rings. While limited in impact they are a clear warning sign of growing corruption.
Personally I'm more worried about this, which I suppose makes me a hateful bigot: 'Asian grooming gang free to roam streets because officers were told to 'find other ethnicities' to investigate, detective claims '
- 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:
"10x your attractiveness to women - Click Here" "Accidental discovery reveals the exact body type women want - Click Here"
followed by a full-width picture of 10 naked models barely covered with what looks like a furry blanket.
Blackpill is a derogatory term for a similar pattern - people who are bad at something and respond by being 'woke' and dismissive.
I suppose the classic English term is "sour grapes".
From a quick research:
Blue pill - believe what society says, have okaysh life and ordinary dreams driven by collective narrative, zeitgeist, then burn to the ground later when somebody catches you off-guard and takes advantage of you
Red pill - be a selfish bastard you are supposed to be, use other blue pill people because they allow you to, argue using other people is what they truly want (mainly related to women, i.e. assuming women are attracted to emotionless men that are using them then throwing them away once no longer attractive), have a firm and rational grip with actual technical aspects of reality around you with good behavior prediction rate, often practicing stoicism/Zen Buddhism
Purple pill - mix of blue and red pill, having some societally-injected ideals while adhering to solipsistic consequentialism in using other people, but still being driven by societal rewards and the need of approval by others
Black pill - nothing matters, you or other people could be already dead, it won't change a thing, universe is random/pointless or created by an evil demiurge in order to torture conscious beings; whatever you do, whether good or evil, is pointless; people use each other all the time, given large enough reward there is no moral rule that couldn't be bent, there is no point in generosity and ideals, just in interests, and they are pointless anyway
White pill - universe was created for a reason that is good and everybody wants to get into a meaningful state/end, assuming overcoming obstacles by practicing virtues is necessary in order to reach some noble goal, likely maximizing utility/happiness of everybody, often associated with religion
Honestly, I am not sure how one could fight either of those pills as all historical civilizations had their own share of unrealistic myths and there were always groups of people seeing through their facade and taking advantage of better information, validating many of these perspectives and making them common meta-strategies of life.
This is, thankfully, not true. The truth is that you need to have some baseline level of competency to survive in corporate world. Sometimes it's quite low (for scrum masters, business analysts etc.), but still, these people know a lot more about software than say random person from the street outside the building.
The sad part is that, beyond this baseline level of competency, further competency does not help nearly as much as the being good at company politics.
In all honesty, this pill stuff is crap.
Yeah, but a depressing one ;-)
:P
(P.S.: Yes, I know that it is not what it means...)
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 100x 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 10-year-old software without support can still sell like candy if it solves a real and valuable business problem.