Flying parachutes are cool and all, but if I'm getting airborne, I'm satisfying my need for speed. Frankly, I'm not really interested in light aircraft until I can get to the 250MPH+ mark (which, of course, means I may never be able to afford one) - with drive time to/from the airports, the plane needs to be able to move pretty quickly to make it worth the hassle and expense.
Two kids, dogs, and luggage put you into negative fuel capacity. This is the first model, if it has any success, I'm sure they could fit a bigger engine, take a bigger check and have a little more range and capacity.
Everyone worries that the skies will become a deathtrap when flying cars, driven by people without pilots' licenses, hit the market. But the collision-avoidance solution is simple if they're all flying autonomously. In 2009, it's trivial for inexpensive consumer devices to communicate with each other wirelessly. Similarly, flying cars need to broadcast their positions and velocities to all other aircraft within a few km radius (via WiMAX or similar technology).
Taking a consumer technology like GPS and making it air-worthy (redundant fail-safe certified testable and periodically tested) can jack up the price by 10x and more. High volume production will bring costs back down some, but there's still a tremendous continuing airworthiness certification cost cost even if the hardware were free.
When a '69 pickup truck stalls, worst case you get another truck to push you out of the way and nobody else is even inconvenienced. When a '69 Cessna stalls, the passengers and crew are looking at double-digit percent probability of death, and even innocent bystanders on the ground are put at (unacceptably high, by today's standards) risk. That's why the '69 Cessna goes through costly annual inspections and re-certifications.
So, if you think today's cars are too expensive with their air-bags, OBD computers, etc. just imagine the cost of owning and operating an annually certified flying machine where self guidance electronics are part of the life-safety certified system. It won't be enough to use GPS and WiMax, both of these periodically fail due to RFI, lightning, etc. You'll need alternate systems which are reliable in case of primary system failure, or you won't be operating over my house.
I think it's a waste of time. The logistics involved with actually having a non-trivial number of these things up in the air over urban areas without mass casualties are just too difficult.
For self-driven vehicles, it would be nice to be able to hover for better impromptu traffic handling.
At the present price point, and with no VTOL capability, I don't think crowding the skies will be a problem (i.e. the number of these things flying will be trivial.)
The answer to our traffic woes is probably not flying cars, but rather something like self-driving cars on defined tracks.
I think we're likely to see designated robot flying lanes before we get them on the ground. Construction costs are many orders of magnitude lower for new "flying lanes."
That's not really this product's niche, but there's a great deal more airspace to expand into, and the traditional (human piloted) traffic can route around the robot areas.
I think you might be missing the scale of the deployment... when I get my mosquito frying laser battery, it will operate 24/7 on 1/2 acre in my back yard, killing millions of mosquitoes a year, in that 1/2 acre. I might make a slight depression in the population of 5-10 acres nearby. The 7000 acres of wetland park a few miles from my house won't feel any effects at all.
If you're worried about the natural order of things, worry about my cat. She kills more "apex predators" in my yard than a lack of mosquitoes ever could.
What I really need (after the uber-cool laser shishkebab) is a nano-bot army to kill the chiggers without a bunch of nasty chemicals.
"Josh" is clearly not the ideal employee, but if you've hired him and you accept the way he works, you get what you deserve.
I've seen more than one company hire in a cowboy to "fix things" whether in code, or processes, or whatever, they might be a consultant, or even a new Director, but whatever the case, they come in and screw things up for 6 months to a year, take their fat compensation package and head for the horizon. People bitch about them for years, but it's really the morons who hired them that deserve all the credit.
Regardless of where I have been, the negotiation goes like this:
How long will it take?
About 12-18 months.
Now, if we do X, Y, or Z, can we speed that up from 12 months to 6?
X and Y might help, Z will only make things worse, but you're still looking at 10-18 months.
Well, what if we restrict the scope, not do this, not do that, etc. Can we get it down from 10 months to 5?
Freezing the scope now would be the best thing you can do, if we don't have any feature creep, and we get resources X and Y in here right away, I'd say we can be done in 9-15 months.
O.K. then, we'll get right on X and Y, and we'll set an aggressive tentative goal for 8 months delivery.
3 months later, X comes in, 3 months after that Y arrives...
Total project scope expands by about 50%, regardless of reminders about schedule impact.
Month 7 rolls around and the old delivery timetable for next month is dusted off and we sit around and have a vaguely recriminating session with some veiled finger pointing asking why we're missing our goal. A new schedule is laid out based on available resources, new scope, etc. Additional resources are offered and usually refused because they would do more harm than good at this point. At this point, really bad management forces the additional resources into the mix anyway. A new goal is set for delivery at month 10.
Scope increases another 25%, Y turns out to be a liability, more or less canceling the advantage of X.
Month 9 rolls around and the status review meeting happens again. Bad management will now set an arbitrary deadline at month 11 based on the company's needs, reasonable management will listen to the projection that another 5 to 7 months are required, and set a goal for month 12 anyway.
Month 10, monthly status updates have begun. A few days after the status meeting, another 10% is added to the project scope.
Month 11, weekly status updates, scope creep is down to +1 or 2% per week now.
Around month 13, the scope creep stops when it finally becomes apparent (to management) that each new feature is setting the project back more than a week, the weekly status meetings are good for something afterall. The "new" project is starting to cook on the back burner.
Month 14, weekly status meetings are starting to be canceled more than half the time. Increased interest in the "new" thing.
Month 15 - project delivers. By now it's a total anti-climax, 7 or 8 months late, depending on who you ask, and anyway we really need to get cracking on the new thing.
the culture slowly driving me insane as well. As far as I can see after a few promotions is that it is is turtles all the way up and the problem is coming from somewhere above 5 levels of management above me.
If you're in a livable spot, maybe it's time to just learn to enjoy where you are.
When I was in a "culture of molasses" I was actually worried about forgetting how to work. I could please more people and make more promotion points for myself by being an obstructionist jerk than I could by actually accomplishing anything.
It is equally amazing how programmers of average ability insist on branding brilliant code they have trouble understanding as convoluted and obscure.
My high school comp-sci class had a semester project of "doing base conversion", and the teacher had them write out special input/output cases (in BASIC) for base 2-10, 2-16, 10-16, 16-10, 16-2, and 10-2. The whole lot of 'em coded like rabid beavers for weeks and weeks.
I hope more than one person here knows how to convert any number (up to the integer size restriction) from any base (2-36) to any other base in about 4 reasonable lines of BASIC?
Some solutions are orders of magnitude "more brilliant" than what run of the mill coders come up with. Their elegance makes them more maintainable and useful than the "obvious" solutions. If your company does a lot of algorithm development, it needs people who can do these things, and whether the run of the mill coders like it or not, these people are indeed rare. As far as I can tell, run of the mill coders who do a decent job are also pretty rare.
The real genius comes in taking the people you've got and getting the best out of them as a team, while still meeting critical needs (documentation, maintainability, etc.) There are actually people who are perfectly happy doing the documentation end of things without the pressure of coming up with solutions out of the blue. Pair these different personalities up well, and you've got a much stronger team than a bunch of guys who do a "decent job" at all aspects.
Depends on your contract - not just the paper one with a job description written 12 years ago by a manager who only worked for the company for 6 months - but the social contract you develop with your co-workers as the relationships evolve.
I think most people here are pissed at "Josh" because they let him get away with "his crap" for so long that they can't imagine how to fix things without firing him.
Sometimes you need a solution NOW, and you will have time to clean it up (or re-implement it more carefully) later.
Except, cleanup (or re-implementation) never happens.
I'd say that's clearly not Josh's fault. If you hire a team of paratroopers to build you a bridge, then you try to use it as critical infrastructure for the next 30 years, it won't be the paratroopers' fault when a bunch of trucks fall in the river.
I, too, can write obfuscated code and appear "genius-like." It is a whole lot harder to bring *everybody* along than to rocket yourself ahead, make yourself appear to be esoteric and "invaluable,"
I had a kid who tried this - he lasted about 4 months before he was on the way out. The simple answer was: "if your co-worker can't make sense of it, it's worth nothing to the company and must be redone." "But, but, it works." "No, it worked yesterday, we need something that works tomorrow."
I was sent to Zurich with a weekend included, so I paid for my own train fare to the mountains and did 2 days of snowboarding... A couple of years later I had a trip with a layover in Paris, rather than doing a 6 hour layover, I extended it to 6 days and took a TGV (+Oberalp Bahn) back to the Alps for another few days there.
It's called "personal time" for a reason, if you're working in the US, you get precious little of it each year, don't be afraid to use it to your best advantage. Your overseas colleagues will likely think better of you if you admire their country enough to take a little vacation there.
Keep in mind, when you're being taught to code in University, that self-taught coders tend to write stuff that mostly works but is hell to maintain, because of poor style, lack of comments, poor design, or whatever.
Get enough real-world experience and you can self-teach maintainability too. The tough part is convincing the new kids that it's really worth it to clean out all the warnings, restructure for an elegant solution rather than hack it quickly, document your structures and interfaces, etc.
Self teaching, didactic learning, etc. is actually quite rare in society in general. It's what (good) artists do, and it is a necessity in fields like programming where things change so rapidly.
Most people don't learn this way, and I've encountered more than one IT manager who seemed to believe it was impossible to self-teach something like (simple) SQL programming in a timeframe of a week or two. Of course, they couldn't do the SQL programming themselves, so....
They've been systematically lied to. Western youth has been aggressively fed a vision of fun, laid back jobs that inexplicably pay huge amounts, coupled with an excessive consumer lifestyle.
Sickly, sadly, these jobs do exist, and they're mostly filled with narcissistic do-nothing jerks. Almost by definition, we can't all have do-nothing jobs that allow us to afford waterfront real-estate and exclusive consumer goods - so they pretty much have to go to a lucky few, many of whom believe that "they earned it" somehow.
If it's any consolation, I know a couple of "Senior Managers" at fat corporations earning near $200K/year for doing not much who aren't exactly happy in their lives. The money doesn't buy happiness, but it does buy a whole lot of comfort.
I heard this a lot: "man, I wish I could work like you do."
And I ask--why the fuck can't they?
I'm nothing special, I've just been using computers and programming for a long time. I learned BASIC when I was 7. Not to just print "HELLO WORLD" on the screen, but to do stuff.
(Most) people are amazingly good at compensating for deficiencies, getting by when they can't do things that others can. Maybe they could learn to do what you can do, often times they probably can't, but even if they can learn, it's easier for them to just compensate around the actual learning (for instance, getting on your team and letting you do the work.)
By extension - narcissistic people do best within larger organizations where they can take credit for others' work. In a small place, they've got noone to draw from.
you end up spending so much time actually working that I got very little time to actually go look at the historic European city I was sent to.
If at all possible, schedule a week, or even just a few days, of personal time off during your travel. If you're lucky, you can schedule your trip to include a weekend, but if you're getting sent to Europe for the first time in 15 years, I'd really look into the possibility of scheduling several days off to enjoy the place before packing up to come home.
I have been sent exciting places like Indianapolis.
Oh, I used to lie awake at nights, dreaming of being sent to Indianapolis. Or was it nightmares.
Little Rock was my favorite.... I actually have enjoyed not traveling for the last 3 years. Airports suck, economy class seats suck, most hotels - even the $250/night variety suck, rental cars suck, the food can be good, and it's interesting to meet the people sometimes, but hardly worth the rest. Side trips can be nice: Big Sur, the Swiss Alps, Oahu, those were cool, but on the whole, I'd rather stay home.
It never occurred to them that there's a hell of a lot more jobs that are sheer drudgery than are a thrill a minute.
I think there's something fundamentally wrong with "the system" that creates all the drudge. There's a whole ecosystem developed around the arcana medical billing codes, and another around HIPPA compliance, and on and on in the world - vast legions of people making a living doing what? Mostly just making trouble for other people.
What we need is a "new Marxism" that doesn't eschew Capitalism, but does find a way to reward people for helping other people accomplish things, and penalize those who make a living of obstruction.
A lot of bosses have Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
How can I get this? Are there courses I can go on?
Lesson one: Never let your boss know you might be as smart as him - don't even allow the possibility that you might be smarter.
Lesson two: Suck up - whatever they want to hear, tell them that. Never forget lesson one.
Lesson three: As you begin to rise through the organization, mold yourself in the image of those who control your promotions. Play golf if they do, wear the same style of clothes, etc. but always maintain a respectful deference to their superior position, don't have the same or better clubs, play at cheaper courses (allow them to do you the favor of inviting you to their "better" club), tone the clothes down just a notch to reflect your lower salary, if they drive a BMW 7, you buy a used 3, you can still talk BMWs... if this is sounding a lot like lesson 2, it is - and never forget lesson 1.
Lesson 4: if you still have a soul, lose it. Anyone you have power over who might possibly compete with you in the future must be repressed or eliminated, discretely.
If you've gotten this far, I'm sure you can figure out the rest for yourself. It doesn't hurt to job hop 4 or 5 times so you can have an impressive resume story to tell on introductions, nothing is as boring as someone who left school, started as a mid-level tech and worked their way up to Vice President at the same company after 8 years - what could this person possibly have to offer, they've never "been" anywhere else....
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Flying parachutes are cool and all, but if I'm getting airborne, I'm satisfying my need for speed. Frankly, I'm not really interested in light aircraft until I can get to the 250MPH+ mark (which, of course, means I may never be able to afford one) - with drive time to/from the airports, the plane needs to be able to move pretty quickly to make it worth the hassle and expense.
Put them together with these guys and you might have a chance.
Two kids, dogs, and luggage put you into negative fuel capacity. This is the first model, if it has any success, I'm sure they could fit a bigger engine, take a bigger check and have a little more range and capacity.
Nobody is interested in an airplane the super-rich can drive to their villas after their day trip to the Bahamas.
Au contraire! If I can start a company that separates the super-rich from their money in large quantities, I am very interested.
Everyone worries that the skies will become a deathtrap when flying cars, driven by people without pilots' licenses, hit the market. But the collision-avoidance solution is simple if they're all flying autonomously. In 2009, it's trivial for inexpensive consumer devices to communicate with each other wirelessly. Similarly, flying cars need to broadcast their positions and velocities to all other aircraft within a few km radius (via WiMAX or similar technology).
Taking a consumer technology like GPS and making it air-worthy (redundant fail-safe certified testable and periodically tested) can jack up the price by 10x and more. High volume production will bring costs back down some, but there's still a tremendous continuing airworthiness certification cost cost even if the hardware were free.
When a '69 pickup truck stalls, worst case you get another truck to push you out of the way and nobody else is even inconvenienced. When a '69 Cessna stalls, the passengers and crew are looking at double-digit percent probability of death, and even innocent bystanders on the ground are put at (unacceptably high, by today's standards) risk. That's why the '69 Cessna goes through costly annual inspections and re-certifications.
So, if you think today's cars are too expensive with their air-bags, OBD computers, etc. just imagine the cost of owning and operating an annually certified flying machine where self guidance electronics are part of the life-safety certified system. It won't be enough to use GPS and WiMax, both of these periodically fail due to RFI, lightning, etc. You'll need alternate systems which are reliable in case of primary system failure, or you won't be operating over my house.
I think it's a waste of time. The logistics involved with actually having a non-trivial number of these things up in the air over urban areas without mass casualties are just too difficult.
For self-driven vehicles, it would be nice to be able to hover for better impromptu traffic handling.
At the present price point, and with no VTOL capability, I don't think crowding the skies will be a problem (i.e. the number of these things flying will be trivial.)
The answer to our traffic woes is probably not flying cars, but rather something like self-driving cars on defined tracks.
I think we're likely to see designated robot flying lanes before we get them on the ground. Construction costs are many orders of magnitude lower for new "flying lanes."
That's not really this product's niche, but there's a great deal more airspace to expand into, and the traditional (human piloted) traffic can route around the robot areas.
I think you might be missing the scale of the deployment... when I get my mosquito frying laser battery, it will operate 24/7 on 1/2 acre in my back yard, killing millions of mosquitoes a year, in that 1/2 acre. I might make a slight depression in the population of 5-10 acres nearby. The 7000 acres of wetland park a few miles from my house won't feel any effects at all.
If you're worried about the natural order of things, worry about my cat. She kills more "apex predators" in my yard than a lack of mosquitoes ever could.
What I really need (after the uber-cool laser shishkebab) is a nano-bot army to kill the chiggers without a bunch of nasty chemicals.
"Josh" is clearly not the ideal employee, but if you've hired him and you accept the way he works, you get what you deserve.
I've seen more than one company hire in a cowboy to "fix things" whether in code, or processes, or whatever, they might be a consultant, or even a new Director, but whatever the case, they come in and screw things up for 6 months to a year, take their fat compensation package and head for the horizon. People bitch about them for years, but it's really the morons who hired them that deserve all the credit.
Regardless of where I have been, the negotiation goes like this:
How long will it take?
About 12-18 months.
Now, if we do X, Y, or Z, can we speed that up from 12 months to 6?
X and Y might help, Z will only make things worse, but you're still looking at 10-18 months.
Well, what if we restrict the scope, not do this, not do that, etc. Can we get it down from 10 months to 5?
Freezing the scope now would be the best thing you can do, if we don't have any feature creep, and we get resources X and Y in here right away, I'd say we can be done in 9-15 months.
O.K. then, we'll get right on X and Y, and we'll set an aggressive tentative goal for 8 months delivery.
3 months later, X comes in, 3 months after that Y arrives...
Total project scope expands by about 50%, regardless of reminders about schedule impact.
Month 7 rolls around and the old delivery timetable for next month is dusted off and we sit around and have a vaguely recriminating session with some veiled finger pointing asking why we're missing our goal. A new schedule is laid out based on available resources, new scope, etc. Additional resources are offered and usually refused because they would do more harm than good at this point. At this point, really bad management forces the additional resources into the mix anyway. A new goal is set for delivery at month 10.
Scope increases another 25%, Y turns out to be a liability, more or less canceling the advantage of X.
Month 9 rolls around and the status review meeting happens again. Bad management will now set an arbitrary deadline at month 11 based on the company's needs, reasonable management will listen to the projection that another 5 to 7 months are required, and set a goal for month 12 anyway.
Month 10, monthly status updates have begun. A few days after the status meeting, another 10% is added to the project scope.
Month 11, weekly status updates, scope creep is down to +1 or 2% per week now.
Around month 13, the scope creep stops when it finally becomes apparent (to management) that each new feature is setting the project back more than a week, the weekly status meetings are good for something afterall. The "new" project is starting to cook on the back burner.
Month 14, weekly status meetings are starting to be canceled more than half the time. Increased interest in the "new" thing.
Month 15 - project delivers. By now it's a total anti-climax, 7 or 8 months late, depending on who you ask, and anyway we really need to get cracking on the new thing.
Be very afraid if there is no "new thing."
the culture slowly driving me insane as well. As far as I can see after a few promotions is that it is is turtles all the way up and the problem is coming from somewhere above 5 levels of management above me.
If you're in a livable spot, maybe it's time to just learn to enjoy where you are.
When I was in a "culture of molasses" I was actually worried about forgetting how to work. I could please more people and make more promotion points for myself by being an obstructionist jerk than I could by actually accomplishing anything.
It is equally amazing how programmers of average ability insist on branding brilliant code they have trouble understanding as convoluted and obscure.
My high school comp-sci class had a semester project of "doing base conversion", and the teacher had them write out special input/output cases (in BASIC) for base 2-10, 2-16, 10-16, 16-10, 16-2, and 10-2. The whole lot of 'em coded like rabid beavers for weeks and weeks.
I hope more than one person here knows how to convert any number (up to the integer size restriction) from any base (2-36) to any other base in about 4 reasonable lines of BASIC?
Some solutions are orders of magnitude "more brilliant" than what run of the mill coders come up with. Their elegance makes them more maintainable and useful than the "obvious" solutions. If your company does a lot of algorithm development, it needs people who can do these things, and whether the run of the mill coders like it or not, these people are indeed rare. As far as I can tell, run of the mill coders who do a decent job are also pretty rare.
The real genius comes in taking the people you've got and getting the best out of them as a team, while still meeting critical needs (documentation, maintainability, etc.) There are actually people who are perfectly happy doing the documentation end of things without the pressure of coming up with solutions out of the blue. Pair these different personalities up well, and you've got a much stronger team than a bunch of guys who do a "decent job" at all aspects.
"I'm not paid to document things."
Well, actually... you are.
Depends on your contract - not just the paper one with a job description written 12 years ago by a manager who only worked for the company for 6 months - but the social contract you develop with your co-workers as the relationships evolve.
I think most people here are pissed at "Josh" because they let him get away with "his crap" for so long that they can't imagine how to fix things without firing him.
Except, cleanup (or re-implementation) never happens.
I'd say that's clearly not Josh's fault. If you hire a team of paratroopers to build you a bridge, then you try to use it as critical infrastructure for the next 30 years, it won't be the paratroopers' fault when a bunch of trucks fall in the river.
I, too, can write obfuscated code and appear "genius-like." It is a whole lot harder to bring *everybody* along than to rocket yourself ahead, make yourself appear to be esoteric and "invaluable,"
I had a kid who tried this - he lasted about 4 months before he was on the way out. The simple answer was: "if your co-worker can't make sense of it, it's worth nothing to the company and must be redone." "But, but, it works." "No, it worked yesterday, we need something that works tomorrow."
I was sent to Zurich with a weekend included, so I paid for my own train fare to the mountains and did 2 days of snowboarding... A couple of years later I had a trip with a layover in Paris, rather than doing a 6 hour layover, I extended it to 6 days and took a TGV (+Oberalp Bahn) back to the Alps for another few days there.
It's called "personal time" for a reason, if you're working in the US, you get precious little of it each year, don't be afraid to use it to your best advantage. Your overseas colleagues will likely think better of you if you admire their country enough to take a little vacation there.
Keep in mind, when you're being taught to code in University, that self-taught coders tend to write stuff that mostly works but is hell to maintain, because of poor style, lack of comments, poor design, or whatever.
Get enough real-world experience and you can self-teach maintainability too. The tough part is convincing the new kids that it's really worth it to clean out all the warnings, restructure for an elegant solution rather than hack it quickly, document your structures and interfaces, etc.
Self teaching, didactic learning, etc. is actually quite rare in society in general. It's what (good) artists do, and it is a necessity in fields like programming where things change so rapidly.
Most people don't learn this way, and I've encountered more than one IT manager who seemed to believe it was impossible to self-teach something like (simple) SQL programming in a timeframe of a week or two. Of course, they couldn't do the SQL programming themselves, so....
They've been systematically lied to. Western youth has been aggressively fed a vision of fun, laid back jobs that inexplicably pay huge amounts, coupled with an excessive consumer lifestyle.
Sickly, sadly, these jobs do exist, and they're mostly filled with narcissistic do-nothing jerks. Almost by definition, we can't all have do-nothing jobs that allow us to afford waterfront real-estate and exclusive consumer goods - so they pretty much have to go to a lucky few, many of whom believe that "they earned it" somehow.
If it's any consolation, I know a couple of "Senior Managers" at fat corporations earning near $200K/year for doing not much who aren't exactly happy in their lives. The money doesn't buy happiness, but it does buy a whole lot of comfort.
I heard this a lot: "man, I wish I could work like you do."
And I ask--why the fuck can't they?
I'm nothing special, I've just been using computers and programming for a long time. I learned BASIC when I was 7. Not to just print "HELLO WORLD" on the screen, but to do stuff.
(Most) people are amazingly good at compensating for deficiencies, getting by when they can't do things that others can. Maybe they could learn to do what you can do, often times they probably can't, but even if they can learn, it's easier for them to just compensate around the actual learning (for instance, getting on your team and letting you do the work.)
By extension - narcissistic people do best within larger organizations where they can take credit for others' work. In a small place, they've got noone to draw from.
you end up spending so much time actually working that I got very little time to actually go look at the historic European city I was sent to.
If at all possible, schedule a week, or even just a few days, of personal time off during your travel. If you're lucky, you can schedule your trip to include a weekend, but if you're getting sent to Europe for the first time in 15 years, I'd really look into the possibility of scheduling several days off to enjoy the place before packing up to come home.
I have been sent exciting places like Indianapolis.
Oh, I used to lie awake at nights, dreaming of being sent to Indianapolis. Or was it nightmares.
Little Rock was my favorite.... I actually have enjoyed not traveling for the last 3 years. Airports suck, economy class seats suck, most hotels - even the $250/night variety suck, rental cars suck, the food can be good, and it's interesting to meet the people sometimes, but hardly worth the rest. Side trips can be nice: Big Sur, the Swiss Alps, Oahu, those were cool, but on the whole, I'd rather stay home.
Hey, I recognize the quote, but I have trouble moderating, sometimes the palsy causes me to select Redundant when I meant Interesting, etc.
It never occurred to them that there's a hell of a lot more jobs that are sheer drudgery than are a thrill a minute.
I think there's something fundamentally wrong with "the system" that creates all the drudge. There's a whole ecosystem developed around the arcana medical billing codes, and another around HIPPA compliance, and on and on in the world - vast legions of people making a living doing what? Mostly just making trouble for other people.
What we need is a "new Marxism" that doesn't eschew Capitalism, but does find a way to reward people for helping other people accomplish things, and penalize those who make a living of obstruction.
A lot of bosses have Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
How can I get this? Are there courses I can go on?
Lesson one: Never let your boss know you might be as smart as him - don't even allow the possibility that you might be smarter.
Lesson two: Suck up - whatever they want to hear, tell them that. Never forget lesson one.
Lesson three: As you begin to rise through the organization, mold yourself in the image of those who control your promotions. Play golf if they do, wear the same style of clothes, etc. but always maintain a respectful deference to their superior position, don't have the same or better clubs, play at cheaper courses (allow them to do you the favor of inviting you to their "better" club), tone the clothes down just a notch to reflect your lower salary, if they drive a BMW 7, you buy a used 3, you can still talk BMWs... if this is sounding a lot like lesson 2, it is - and never forget lesson 1.
Lesson 4: if you still have a soul, lose it. Anyone you have power over who might possibly compete with you in the future must be repressed or eliminated, discretely.
If you've gotten this far, I'm sure you can figure out the rest for yourself. It doesn't hurt to job hop 4 or 5 times so you can have an impressive resume story to tell on introductions, nothing is as boring as someone who left school, started as a mid-level tech and worked their way up to Vice President at the same company after 8 years - what could this person possibly have to offer, they've never "been" anywhere else....