My boss walks in and hands me a project that I don't really want to do.
Now, suppose those are the only types of projects offered, and the boss is using them to try and get the employee to quit (so they don't have to pay extra benefits).
Shall we adapt ourselves or become a tool of the Man?
What you want is to pick the compromises that benefit you the most.
But you have given no option to "choose" a compromise. Your only option is to "Take the work and do well on it." There is no option to maximize benefit. There is no negotiation or compromise. The options for the employee are "to do as they're told or risk 'annoying' the boss," whereupon the boss will begin the process of firing them.
Despite the fact they require highly educated, "self-starter" candidates with page after page of state-of-the-art accomplishment on their resume, companies want employees who will sit quietly and do as they are told.
There are plenty of supremely brilliant people doing quite well in this world... I even work with some of them. The Einstein-level braniacs who can't keep a steady job (yes, there are plenty) like to blame society for not being in tune with their greatness.
Then there are the rest of the people who have above-average intelligence and know enough to simply follow the instructions. Those are usually the ones first out the door when mass layoffs are announced. The "Einstein-level" people never get hired, as they are clearly more intelligent than the hiring managers.
This is factual information. There is no argument here.
a) you're not as smart as you think you are...
Which is what, another way to say "you're not smart because some middle manager says so?" Please.
or b) people don't feel stupid around you, they feel annoyed.
Which, naturally, gives them the right to fire the "smart guy" and destroy his career.
It's not that those people feel that layoffs are necessarily unfair. It is that the "annoyed" are blameless. Nobody EVER points out or addresses those who actively work (on company time) to destroy someone else's career. They are usually too busy processing the exit interviews for the "smart people."
Quit. Idiot co-workers are usually in the manager's office bright and FUCKING early, bitching, griping and whining about how the intelligent people aren't being "team players" because the idiot co-worker couldn't understand a few technical terms.
What if it's a client, who's in charge of your budget?
A client's eyes glaze over? Don't they want me to be intelligent if I'm spending their money?
That's no reason to treat them like idiots because they may not know the meaning of a 3+ syllable word.
Using three syllable words is not "treating someone like an idiot."
There is a difference between being socially intelligent and driven by office politics.
People who engage in office politics have the goal of destroying other people's careers to advance their own.
I'm very socially intelligent. I have an above-average sense of humor and I am well spoken. I have many friends and I get along with people quite well.
I just don't participate in the greed-soaked cesspool of office politics, which disqualifies me from the race to the corner office.
Yes, you may have a prodigious vocabulary, but it doesn't impress anyone.
Oh, yes it does. When $70,000 a year journalists can't tell the grammatical difference between their, there and they're, having a prodigious vocabulary helps a lot.
Learn to recognize when someone's eyes glaze over.
Then leave. Working for that person will be an exercise in anguish.
I think you'll see a lot of bitterness in the replies -- many men (especially) feel this way when they see that their opportunities are not all they are cracked up to be
No. They feel this way when their years and years and YEARS of hard work are crammed into a shitpipe by some lying cheat fuck middle management bastard.
you need to learn how to adapt yourself to the world. This doesn't mean surrendering your individuality and becoming a tool of The Man
Yes it does. Why is it so common for statements to be followed by their own contradictions? "Adapt yourself to the world" is a euphemism for "Wal-Mart and a broom."
Unusually bright people are not welcome in day to day society.
Popular culture goes out of its way to make people who are intelligent, well-spoken and aware appear to be strange. Very often those people are excluded as quickly as possible from the societal "cocktail party on the patio deck."
The reason for this is that people who are not unusually bright mistakenly believe that intelligent people make them look stupid. The intelligent people must therefore be removed from the stage as quickly as possible, otherwise they might begin to have some political influence which would reduce middle management's ability to stuff their own pockets.
Smart people are the first ones ridiculed, the first ones argued with, the first ones made fun of, the first ones fired. Smart people often have little or no use for office politics, which is why it is so easy for lying cheat fuck middle management bastards to outmanuever them and get them fired.
Bright people usually begin their careers believing the quality of their work will enable them to succeed. What they later find out is that there are two choices: spend your career wading through a swamp of bubbling, wet shit with liar cheat rat bastard fuck "supervisors," or start your own business with a couple of other bright people and bypass the cubicle bullshit factory. The quality of someone's work is absolutely irrelevant to success in the workplace. In fact, the higher the quality of someone's work, the more likely it is they will be fired.
Business encourages office politics and people who are liar cheat fuck bastards always win. Bright people mistakenly believe that being a liar cheat fuck bastard should disqualify someone from competent professional discussion. It does not. In fact, it usually gives the liar cheat fuck bastard an insurmountable advantage. So, the smart people get fired, leaving entire floors full of liar cheat fuck bastards who are paid exorbitant amounts, do no work, yet can't be fired because they have mastered the arts of office politics and being a liar cheat fuck bastard.
Mediocre, visionless, imaginationless, dull people are usually the first to buy a home, first to raise a family, first to get promoted, first to drive the expensive car, first to put in a pool, first to take the vacations. They can't be fired either, because they never say anything except "there's cake in the conference room" and "are you on the morning donut list yet?"
So, if a bright person expects to enter the workplace, expect to find four groups:
1) Upper management, pockets already stuffed with tall dollars, ordering lunch from a golf cart, oblivious
2) Middle management, busily stuffing their pockets with whatever is left over, ordering in from the local delivery deli.
3) Dull, witless drones, talking about their weekend trip to "the river" or "the canyon," what color their new Navigator will be, and the landscaping on their palacial four-acre estate, financed because they have never been fired, ever, and ordering lunch as a group from the menu at the local "yuppie grill" which is the only place in town where one can order an $11 bacon cheeseburger. They can afford it, after all, because they have never, EVER opened a bill without a matching paycheck.
4) One or two smart, intelligent people, quietly working through lunch on a brilliant project, unaware they will be fired a few days before or after it is completed.
I have long since given up on the "job market," because after three and a half years of being unemployed, and over 400 resumes, I believe it to be a festering maggot-infested open sore on society, draining every last shred of joy and wisdom from people's careers, and destroying the educations and communities of millions upon millions of hard-working people.
Whether I traded my last two cars (and soon the one I have now) in or sold them to someone myself, I would not have received near the money I put into them.
Well, if you got more than $0 for them, then they had equity. I have traded in cars before and often found I had received perhaps a few hundred dollars for a vehicle with a few thousand dollars in actual value, after purchasing five years of payments on a piece of shit, of course. So the car dealer pockets a couple thousand on the trade-in, several thousand on the financing and several thousand on the car itself.
With a lease, they get all that and the car back.
Having a car is a losing game for most of us
True. Leasing the car makes the game totally pointless. Cars are phenomenally overpriced to begin with. There are basic consumer-level cars/SUVs now that are three times the price of a 1970s three-bedroom house.
You get to write-off the interest on the mortgage and , if you take care of it, it will (usually) appreciate in value
The first is a net negative in a standard mortgage. Writing off interest is only getting back money already paid in taxes (minus inflation). If the house appreciates in value, it must offset property taxes, capital gains taxes, maintenance and inflation before it too isn't a net negative.
how does Japan manage to stay lightyears ahead of everyone else in wireless?
Maybe they don't have risk-averse, office-politics-obsessed middle managers more interested in shitting all over other people's careers than actually building something useful?
Maybe they have found a way to put capital to work employing people and building new products instead of sitting around a table whining that they might fail.
First it was cars, then electronics, now animation. So Japan is kicking our ass again? Well boo-fuckin-hoo.
buying a car is about the worst investment a person can make.
It's not an investment, it's a purchase. Car companies thoroughly enjoy talking about major purchases as "investments" because it creates an artificial (and wrong) comparison weighted heavily in favor of the salespeople.
Cars, houses (as a residence) and appliances are not assets and they are not investments.
leasing doesn't sound too bad...
A car lease is a giant, maggot-infested, steaming rip-off.
I mean, the result of years of payments ends up being basically no equity anyways,
This is just the latest in a series of "business models" which cost jobs and waste capital.
Television programming is a good example. Although it might cost close to $10 million to develop a 26-episode series, television networks consider it an insult if they are asked to actually pay for it. They want it free and expect the producers to make up the millions of dollars in lost value and lost revenue through sales of DVDs, merchandise or something similar.
There are literally hundreds of products which can no longer be sold at retail because their competition is either free (read valueless) or sold at a loss.
Well, at least in those markets where there is actually competition.
"Heavier than air flying machines are impossible."
"There is a worldwide market for perhaps five computers."
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
"Flying faster than sound is impossible."
"Landing on the moon is impossible."
"What makes you think anyone will want to buy that product?"
"What makes you think you are qualified to work here?"
All famously repeated statements and questions by skeptics.
"It is impossible to meet the demand for electrical energy with wind, solar or tidal power."
No difference at all.
Take a group of university students and give them this problem: "we need to replace the power generation capabilities of one electrical plant using only solar, wind or tidal energy (or all three) with a similar or lower operating cost by investing no more than $1 million"
Problem was, it didn't ahhere to their simply 5 paragraph, introduction, 3 body, and conclusion. I did horrible. My second time, I wrote something that I barely called English but followed what they wanted perfectly and got top marks. I see this new computerized grading as being just exactly the same.
It is also the exact environment of the modern workplace, as designed. Results are irrelevant. Only the process matters.
Computers cannot evaluate the quality of writing. Given the "grammar checker" in word processors only seems to be set to gripe about "passive voice" (and is usually wrong), I don't think there is much else useful about having a computer read essays until, of course, a computer can write a five-page paper on the difference between prose and journalistic style.
Oh, and we can't forget that in the future, teaching will be viewed with as much contempt as every other educated profession except law and business. "Why should you be paid more than minimum wage? All you do is use a computer all day." or "why should we learn to read? The computer can read for us."
Make it a musical! Use a lot of trendy pop-culture jokes and cliched music. Obi-Wan and Anakin surfing during the lightsaber battle is brilliant! BRILLIANT!
If I can get cross-platform development for free (or close), I'll take it. The ability to create a substantial application and have it run well on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux means I can reach a greater audience.
How about Macromedia Flash? It runs on just about everything.
Oh, I forgot. Everyone hates Flash because someone made an ad with it once.
Prediction: At least one 75 message spamtastic flamebait thread arguing about the precise definition of life, with several smaller threads with varying degrees of skepticism because, well, everything new is probably crap, right?
All essentially the same technology, but just different enough to make the PHBs think those new little clicky icons were worth the upgrade, and also different enough to require the programmers to cram several months/years work in a toilet and start over.
Same thing. Oh, and game developers: you know all those tool$ that work real well with those half-million $$$$$$ DirectX-based engines? They'll be clogging the toilet too.
Slashdot Mirror
My boss walks in and hands me a project that I don't really want to do.
Now, suppose those are the only types of projects offered, and the boss is using them to try and get the employee to quit (so they don't have to pay extra benefits).
Shall we adapt ourselves or become a tool of the Man?
What you want is to pick the compromises that benefit you the most.
But you have given no option to "choose" a compromise. Your only option is to "Take the work and do well on it." There is no option to maximize benefit. There is no negotiation or compromise. The options for the employee are "to do as they're told or risk 'annoying' the boss," whereupon the boss will begin the process of firing them.
Despite the fact they require highly educated, "self-starter" candidates with page after page of state-of-the-art accomplishment on their resume, companies want employees who will sit quietly and do as they are told.
There are plenty of supremely brilliant people doing quite well in this world... I even work with some of them. The Einstein-level braniacs who can't keep a steady job (yes, there are plenty) like to blame society for not being in tune with their greatness.
Then there are the rest of the people who have above-average intelligence and know enough to simply follow the instructions. Those are usually the ones first out the door when mass layoffs are announced. The "Einstein-level" people never get hired, as they are clearly more intelligent than the hiring managers.
This is factual information. There is no argument here.
a) you're not as smart as you think you are...
Which is what, another way to say "you're not smart because some middle manager says so?" Please.
or b) people don't feel stupid around you, they feel annoyed.
Which, naturally, gives them the right to fire the "smart guy" and destroy his career.
It's not that those people feel that layoffs are necessarily unfair. It is that the "annoyed" are blameless. Nobody EVER points out or addresses those who actively work (on company time) to destroy someone else's career. They are usually too busy processing the exit interviews for the "smart people."
Well, there you go.
What if it's a co-worker?
Quit. Idiot co-workers are usually in the manager's office bright and FUCKING early, bitching, griping and whining about how the intelligent people aren't being "team players" because the idiot co-worker couldn't understand a few technical terms.
What if it's a client, who's in charge of your budget?
A client's eyes glaze over? Don't they want me to be intelligent if I'm spending their money?
That's no reason to treat them like idiots because they may not know the meaning of a 3+ syllable word.
Using three syllable words is not "treating someone like an idiot."
There is a difference between being socially intelligent and driven by office politics.
People who engage in office politics have the goal of destroying other people's careers to advance their own.
I'm very socially intelligent. I have an above-average sense of humor and I am well spoken. I have many friends and I get along with people quite well.
I just don't participate in the greed-soaked cesspool of office politics, which disqualifies me from the race to the corner office.
Yes, you may have a prodigious vocabulary, but it doesn't impress anyone.
Oh, yes it does. When $70,000 a year journalists can't tell the grammatical difference between their, there and they're, having a prodigious vocabulary helps a lot.
Learn to recognize when someone's eyes glaze over.
Then leave. Working for that person will be an exercise in anguish.
I think you'll see a lot of bitterness in the replies -- many men (especially) feel this way when they see that their opportunities are not all they are cracked up to be
No. They feel this way when their years and years and YEARS of hard work are crammed into a shitpipe by some lying cheat fuck middle management bastard.
you need to learn how to adapt yourself to the world. This doesn't mean surrendering your individuality and becoming a tool of The Man
Yes it does. Why is it so common for statements to be followed by their own contradictions? "Adapt yourself to the world" is a euphemism for "Wal-Mart and a broom."
plus it doesn't look good to an employer.
A person could graduate Summa Cum Laude with a Nobel Prize nomination and it wouldn't look good to an employer.
Unusually bright people are not welcome in day to day society.
Popular culture goes out of its way to make people who are intelligent, well-spoken and aware appear to be strange. Very often those people are excluded as quickly as possible from the societal "cocktail party on the patio deck."
The reason for this is that people who are not unusually bright mistakenly believe that intelligent people make them look stupid. The intelligent people must therefore be removed from the stage as quickly as possible, otherwise they might begin to have some political influence which would reduce middle management's ability to stuff their own pockets.
Smart people are the first ones ridiculed, the first ones argued with, the first ones made fun of, the first ones fired. Smart people often have little or no use for office politics, which is why it is so easy for lying cheat fuck middle management bastards to outmanuever them and get them fired.
Bright people usually begin their careers believing the quality of their work will enable them to succeed. What they later find out is that there are two choices: spend your career wading through a swamp of bubbling, wet shit with liar cheat rat bastard fuck "supervisors," or start your own business with a couple of other bright people and bypass the cubicle bullshit factory. The quality of someone's work is absolutely irrelevant to success in the workplace. In fact, the higher the quality of someone's work, the more likely it is they will be fired.
Business encourages office politics and people who are liar cheat fuck bastards always win. Bright people mistakenly believe that being a liar cheat fuck bastard should disqualify someone from competent professional discussion. It does not. In fact, it usually gives the liar cheat fuck bastard an insurmountable advantage. So, the smart people get fired, leaving entire floors full of liar cheat fuck bastards who are paid exorbitant amounts, do no work, yet can't be fired because they have mastered the arts of office politics and being a liar cheat fuck bastard.
Mediocre, visionless, imaginationless, dull people are usually the first to buy a home, first to raise a family, first to get promoted, first to drive the expensive car, first to put in a pool, first to take the vacations. They can't be fired either, because they never say anything except "there's cake in the conference room" and "are you on the morning donut list yet?"
So, if a bright person expects to enter the workplace, expect to find four groups:
1) Upper management, pockets already stuffed with tall dollars, ordering lunch from a golf cart, oblivious
2) Middle management, busily stuffing their pockets with whatever is left over, ordering in from the local delivery deli.
3) Dull, witless drones, talking about their weekend trip to "the river" or "the canyon," what color their new Navigator will be, and the landscaping on their palacial four-acre estate, financed because they have never been fired, ever, and ordering lunch as a group from the menu at the local "yuppie grill" which is the only place in town where one can order an $11 bacon cheeseburger. They can afford it, after all, because they have never, EVER opened a bill without a matching paycheck.
4) One or two smart, intelligent people, quietly working through lunch on a brilliant project, unaware they will be fired a few days before or after it is completed.
I have long since given up on the "job market," because after three and a half years of being unemployed, and over 400 resumes, I believe it to be a festering maggot-infested open sore on society, draining every last shred of joy and wisdom from people's careers, and destroying the educations and communities of millions upon millions of hard-working people.
So a house increasing in value is a liability?
No. The mortgage is a liability.
A house only "increases in value" if it can be sold at a higher price. It could just as easilly lose value. It's not an asset.
A bond, for example, might lose value as well, but it generates a constant income regardless of its value, which makes it an asset.
a stupid little book that puts forth the idea that unless the house is actually making you money... it's not an asset.
If that's what the book says, then it is right. Assets generate income. Houses (unless they are rental properties) are not assets.
Whether I traded my last two cars (and soon the one I have now) in or sold them to someone myself, I would not have received near the money I put into them.
Well, if you got more than $0 for them, then they had equity. I have traded in cars before and often found I had received perhaps a few hundred dollars for a vehicle with a few thousand dollars in actual value, after purchasing five years of payments on a piece of shit, of course. So the car dealer pockets a couple thousand on the trade-in, several thousand on the financing and several thousand on the car itself.
With a lease, they get all that and the car back.
Having a car is a losing game for most of us
True. Leasing the car makes the game totally pointless. Cars are phenomenally overpriced to begin with. There are basic consumer-level cars/SUVs now that are three times the price of a 1970s three-bedroom house.
You get to write-off the interest on the mortgage and , if you take care of it, it will (usually) appreciate in value
The first is a net negative in a standard mortgage. Writing off interest is only getting back money already paid in taxes (minus inflation). If the house appreciates in value, it must offset property taxes, capital gains taxes, maintenance and inflation before it too isn't a net negative.
The stock market made about 35% last year.
how does Japan manage to stay lightyears ahead of everyone else in wireless?
Maybe they don't have risk-averse, office-politics-obsessed middle managers more interested in shitting all over other people's careers than actually building something useful?
Maybe they have found a way to put capital to work employing people and building new products instead of sitting around a table whining that they might fail.
First it was cars, then electronics, now animation. So Japan is kicking our ass again? Well boo-fuckin-hoo.
buying a car is about the worst investment a person can make.
It's not an investment, it's a purchase. Car companies thoroughly enjoy talking about major purchases as "investments" because it creates an artificial (and wrong) comparison weighted heavily in favor of the salespeople.
Cars, houses (as a residence) and appliances are not assets and they are not investments.
leasing doesn't sound too bad...
A car lease is a giant, maggot-infested, steaming rip-off.
I mean, the result of years of payments ends up being basically no equity anyways,
According to the car dealer.
This is just the latest in a series of "business models" which cost jobs and waste capital.
Television programming is a good example. Although it might cost close to $10 million to develop a 26-episode series, television networks consider it an insult if they are asked to actually pay for it. They want it free and expect the producers to make up the millions of dollars in lost value and lost revenue through sales of DVDs, merchandise or something similar.
There are literally hundreds of products which can no longer be sold at retail because their competition is either free (read valueless) or sold at a loss.
Well, at least in those markets where there is actually competition.
"Heavier than air flying machines are impossible."
"There is a worldwide market for perhaps five computers."
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
"Flying faster than sound is impossible."
"Landing on the moon is impossible."
"What makes you think anyone will want to buy that product?"
"What makes you think you are qualified to work here?"
All famously repeated statements and questions by skeptics.
"It is impossible to meet the demand for electrical energy with wind, solar or tidal power."
No difference at all.
Take a group of university students and give them this problem: "we need to replace the power generation capabilities of one electrical plant using only solar, wind or tidal energy (or all three) with a similar or lower operating cost by investing no more than $1 million"
The problem would be solved within six months.
Innovative ideas are too risky for them
Amazing, isn't it? Good thing they weren't in charge of industry back in the early 1900s, or we'd still be riding horses to the general store.
Problem was, it didn't ahhere to their simply 5 paragraph, introduction, 3 body, and conclusion. I did horrible. My second time, I wrote something that I barely called English but followed what they wanted perfectly and got top marks. I see this new computerized grading as being just exactly the same.
It is also the exact environment of the modern workplace, as designed. Results are irrelevant. Only the process matters.
Computers cannot evaluate the quality of writing. Given the "grammar checker" in word processors only seems to be set to gripe about "passive voice" (and is usually wrong), I don't think there is much else useful about having a computer read essays until, of course, a computer can write a five-page paper on the difference between prose and journalistic style.
Oh, and we can't forget that in the future, teaching will be viewed with as much contempt as every other educated profession except law and business. "Why should you be paid more than minimum wage? All you do is use a computer all day." or "why should we learn to read? The computer can read for us."
Make it a musical! Use a lot of trendy pop-culture jokes and cliched music. Obi-Wan and Anakin surfing during the lightsaber battle is brilliant! BRILLIANT!
If I can get cross-platform development for free (or close), I'll take it. The ability to create a substantial application and have it run well on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux means I can reach a greater audience.
How about Macromedia Flash? It runs on just about everything.
Oh, I forgot. Everyone hates Flash because someone made an ad with it once.
Prediction: At least one 75 message spamtastic flamebait thread arguing about the precise definition of life, with several smaller threads with varying degrees of skepticism because, well, everything new is probably crap, right?
DDE
.NET
...again.
OLE
OLE2
COM
ActiveX
COM+
MSDNA
All essentially the same technology, but just different enough to make the PHBs think those new little clicky icons were worth the upgrade, and also different enough to require the programmers to cram several months/years work in a toilet and start over.
WinG
DirectX 1
DirectX 2
DirectX 3
DirectX 4
DirectX 5
DirectX 6
DirectX 7
DirectX 8
DirectX 9
XNA
Same thing. Oh, and game developers: you know all those tool$ that work real well with those half-million $$$$$$ DirectX-based engines? They'll be clogging the toilet too.
Congratulations! Time to start over...