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.
This is a myth - most non-legacy admissions kids getting into good colleges aren’t spending on these things in the way that you think. They’re getting there because they’re actually smart and hard working and have a stable environment (like two parents). It doesn’t take much to get a very high test score for example - most of them aren’t even paying for group classes let alone tutors.
Citation?
The bigger difference is that successful parents are constantly acting as role models, giving their children cues to follow, and passing on important knowledge that schools don't whether they realize or not. Many poor kids miss out on those things entirely, and as a result end up spinning their wheels later in life due to misplaced efforts and fumbled attempts. They may eventually figure things out on their own, but it'll happen several years down the road, and while they can narrow the gap closing it entirely becomes more difficult the further they ascend (feels a bit like Zeno's Paradox).
i miss the days where tech pay only slightly above average and ppl in tech were considered losers and dorks.
I AGREE
PEOPLE tell me WHY you find this thought distasteful or disturbing
tech used to be a safe hiding spot for geeks to, idk, hack on something with total disregard for social norms and personal hygiene; now we have assholes weaponizing this by promoting RTO, hustle culture and "hurrr we are all one family" but it's fucking fake performance theatre and noone cares about computers anymore, only about number go up.
> 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.
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.
The people who are actually hard to ascribe any malice to are often politically very inept, i.e.
- (nearly) "everybody" knows these people are not malicious
- but since people want to be manipulated, such people don't make any career
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.
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.
Sometimes these do not hold true, but then you have a truly toxic organization - one that you should run from, as fast as possible
Can't agree, I know people who got more work because they focused and did the work
This needs to be taught more actively in school. Negligence in stopping abuse, or fostering abuse = just as immoral as abuse.
Thankfully that level of toxicity did not follow into the workplace, but I did have a car vandalized by a coworker.
Truth be told I was a bit of a punk, and had a knack for pissing off the wrong people. We all have our flaws, but nobody deserved what I went through. I'm a man now, not the insecure boy who tried to act like he was better than others to compensate, and I reject toxicity immediately. No room for it. Hard lessons to learn when you grew up with abuse.
- 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.
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.
bitwize•1h ago
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!