Made a lot more money than I could have on my own.
"Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say 'YES'!!"
It's unethical and it's wrong and I won't participate in it. I stopped working there.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230302211534im_/https://assets...
IMO sweatshops are a necessary part of the ecosystem, but only until you grow out of them.
For context, I'm early in my career (3 YOE) and I don't deal with management that much yet (I'm still shielded by my tech lead and PM), so I'm always looking for advice on how to navigate these things. I really can't just say "YES, YES, YES" when I know *very well* that something won't be possible.
Maybe it is just a sign of being too junior?
"no, I won't be able to make it in time" would be "I can confidently deliver in time if I have X, and we save Y and Z for later."
And then I'd sit down and bust my ass trying to find out if it was feasible or not. :)
If it wasn't, we could always come back with a lesser approach and people seemed to be happy with that. ("It turns out Android doesn't widely support [feature x] so we recommend [feature y] instead.")
My answer won't be "no, we can't do it." It'll be a form of "we have to use this alternate method to get to the goal, how does that affect your budget?"
A naive junior shouldn't stump them, but it really does happen all the time. If all they have to do is ask what it takes to flip it to a "yes", the same information is communicated. The only thing ever truly at stake was someone's ego.
Nonsense. The client that made me a job offer as CTO listed the fact that I wasn’t afraid of saying ‘no’ to unreasonable requests or unrealistic deadlines one of the things he valued the most in my work. He had plenty of experience with contractors that would always say yes, promise anything and then find themselves unable to deliver because they underestimated the complexity of the task.
Saying no is what makes a professional so valuable. Of course you always want to offer alternative approaches.
Frankly, that's toddler level thinking.
While there are certainly people who are rich enough and spoiled enough that they have probably never been meaningfully refused anything in their lives, that produces terrible people, and absolutely everyone needs to learn how to accept being told "no" when "no" is the correct answer (or a reasonable one).
If you're up front honest, they'll think you're being lazy - even if you have good reasons.
If you say "Yes", and then fail for all those reasons while providing regular reports, the manager views you as "Someone who is willing to do things".
They often don't care about your actual success/failure rate, but instead use your attitude as a proxy for the actual success/failure rate.
Also, as the project is moving to failure, he'll usually intercept with "OK, how about we changed the requirements to ...?"
If you asked for that change in the beginning, the same rationale as the above applies.
Great engineers focus on the customer or business need and find/propose alternatives that are possible.
Please consider this input from my YOE battle scars:
1. Don't contradict your team while in a meeting with outsiders, but then you're obligated to follow up with your team offline, to try to mitigate any damage, and try to make sure it doesn't keep happening. For one example of why, I've seen one person consciously "mis-promise" things to customer, and when I talked with them offline about we couldn't be saying that, because it wasn't true, their response was "they won't remember". Narrator: "They did remember." And that's possibly why that person and a few others aren't very wealthy today.
2. Not everyone believes in "lie a bit on your CV" nor similar dishonesty. You'll probably meet colleagues, who you respect, who react to that with surprise and disappointment. You could also get fired for it, with cause. Especially if you're calling yourself an engineer, since determining and telling the truth is much of your job.
3. Though, on the other side of CV honesty, be careful about always using team-speak/think when in an interview context. Out of habit, you might naturally say "we" when talking about something you were instrumental in. But some people who think lots of people lie on their CV are going to hear that "we" as you generously including yourself in the accomplishments of others. I've started switching modes a little more for interviews, expressly claiming more credit, such as by saying unambiguously when I was the sole designer and implementer of something.
> For context, I'm early in my career (3 YOE) and I don't deal with management that much yet (I'm still shielded by my tech lead and PM), so I'm always looking for advice on how to navigate these things. I really can't just say "YES, YES, YES" when I know very well that something won't be possible.
It depends on a lot of things, like how big the company is, how critical the project, culture, management style, etc. - but you'd be surprised at what is actually possible that may sound impossible. I've had those "this is impossible" thoughts a lot early in my career and more often than not I was wrong. The few times I wasn't wrong, I made sure to highlight risks I saw at the outset, and when the risks materialized, point them out at the retrospective or whatever for CYA purposes.
The things you do want to avoid at all costs are death marches, impossible deadlines with consequences at the end of it, maintenance slogs which will tie you to a very annoying treadmill for your entire tenure - it's hard without experience to know where these things lie, but if all else fails, you can do what everyone else does, try the impossible thing, and either surprise yourself, or when it becomes clear it won't happen, toss it to some overly ambitious sucker (I don't condone this, I just have seen it happen far too often).
The key to surviving in such an environment is to let go of your ideas of the truth. The customer doesn't want to hear it, and doesn't want to know it. Deliver the lies that will make them happy and only those lies. The lies themselves are usually reasonably realistic; it's only when you combine them with your common-sense notions of truth that they become stressfully unrealistic. So give up your common sense and just deliver the lies the customer is asking for.
A less cynical way of putting this is to adopt the customer's frame of mind. The stress comes from the tension of your internal beliefs vs. the customer's internal beliefs; because they are coming from two different people, they are frequently incompatible. When you are working for a customer, you are working for a customer.
This is exactly it!
Like you might think "the promised features are not feasible." No, the features you will soon deliver are feasible, on account of you're about to go build them! If you fail, that is still very bad. But the point of rule 1 is you don't have to act like you signed up to deliver exactly X feature on exactly Y date. Instead you can think a little bit, and then you calmly set off on a process that should reasonably end up with the customer being happy. To many people this strategy feels like lying.
You do need to understand the customer's perspective so you can reframe the reality in a way that they will agree with.
Fuck that nonsense.
2 Timothy 4 (NLT), circa 65 Anno Domini
Lie to others, lie to yourself (spiral together; either fantastically poor or spectacularly rich)
Lie to others, tell yourself the truth (manipulation, morally broke, but materially rich)
Tell others the truth, tell yourself the truth (integrity, barely scrape by)
Tell others the truth, lie to yourself (be used by the system, usually end up poorly)
His father's saying may have been: "There are three honest ways to make a living".
The fourth option is where scams and fraud live.
For the downvoters, have you ever tried to explicitly map your externalities?
> "there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know."
The fourth corner is unknown knowns, things that we don't know that we know. Bureaucracies have that one in spades.
They Want Lies They Want Truth
+--------------+---------------+
You Tell Lies | become rich | ??? |
+--------------+---------------+
You Tell Truth | go broke | make a living |
+--------------+---------------+
Maybe telling lies isn't such a great business idea after all?
if you can sell someone on a second report to verify the first you can make a lot of money too.
"a man with one watch always knows what time it is, a man with two watches is never quite sure"
That filter is crucial in any kind of advisory/consulting work. You're there to confirm biases, in 95% of the cases.
When I worked at BigCo [1], we were interviewing a candidate for a position. He was pretty good, and we were in the process of making him an offer, but he was asking for more money and trying to negotiate his salary higher.
I don't have an issue with this, BigCo has plenty of money, but other people, including a manager, were complaining. They felt that this is a good job and he shouldn't be doing this for the money.
I, not realizing that this was controversial, said "yeah, but come on, we all do this for the money."
Some people got defensive, explaining that they love the job. I responded "sure, it's good to like your job and your coworkers, I'm not trying to discourage that, but if BigCo stopped paying you then you'd probably stop showing up for work. At least I would hope so."
They kind of begrudgingly agreed, and the day went on as normal. The next day, I have an impromptu meeting scheduled with my manager's manager, explaining that I have a "bad attitude" and he mentioned that specific comment as a reason that this meeting was being called.
Now, to be fair, at the time I did have a bad attitude (in no small part due to at-the-time-undiagnosed sleep apnea), but the fact that I got in trouble for mentioning something that is objectively true really confused me. We weren't working for a charity, we weren't trying to cure cancer, we were working for a for-profit corporation. Of course we were doing it for the money, just like the corporation hired us so that they could make more money.
But I guess people just like to believe a collective lie.
[1] I'm sure you might be able to go through history and find the specific BigCo, and that is fine, but I politely ask that you don't post it here in relation to this comment.
A pretty high level one is that our jobs are meaningfully making a positive difference in the world, when in fact, most white collar jobs are just producing bullshit to grease the corporate wheels of modern society. Most people don't like to admit that though, so we tell ourselves little lies and go along with the corporate narrative. That's what you experienced.
But it goes deeper the more truthful you try to be. Down near the bottom of this pile of self deception is that humans are making the world a better place, when in fact we're ruining the world, causing environmental damage at an unprecedented rate in geological history, all the while exhausting the readily-accessible non-renewable resources, like hydrocarbons and minerals, that'll make the chance of a better future civilization on Earth highly unlikely.
I just think it's important to be honest with yourself, and realize that a job is transactional. When I work for BigCo, I am selling my time and/or expertise for money and/or benefits (e.g. health insurance). If the company doesn't feel like they're getting their money's worth out of me they might fire me. If I feel like I'm getting a reasonable enough compensation then I might go to another company.
Such is the way with capitalism; I don't love it, but until we change to a different system that's just how it is. I absolutely hate when companies say "we're a family here", because that's simply not true. I don't get cut from being my parents' son because I'm not meeting some bottom line this quarter.
Some examples:
- Russians (or insert any other dictatorship trying to appear otherwise) faking "democratic" elections. Who are you kidding, yourselves? No one believes it. Just tell the west: to hell with your democracy. Like, I just don't see why they need to go though that charade that everybody can see through.
- A country where pretty everybody is stealing from each other, and they all know it, and are still trying to fake uprightness to each other. I guess most countries fit this scenario. Like, we all know what's going on. The world does not end if you come right out and say to the effect of, yeah, we steal from each other (if not in so direct a fashion). But for some weird reason, people seem to feel it is important that the elephant in the room remain unacknowledged.
- The world is a very shitty and harsh place, especially to those with seemingly little status. Injustice abounds. Stupidity and absurdity reigns. And yet, almost all of us are expected to put on a happy, confident, optimistic face. Those unable to keep all the horror in are labeled freaks, anti-social, maladjusted, etc. People that fail are labeled lazy, not driven, etc. And yet, we pretty much all know the truth, but we like to lie to each other.
It's hard to understand.
1. Our society is a complex system of independent actors, most of which are willing to lie for their personal benefit. It's not hard to argue that given enough time, there will emerge lies that most people do believe.
2. Most people aren't capable of holding a thought in their mind without being emotionally affected by it. This means that if some problem isn't immediately actionable, they don't want to discuss it, because that makes them feel bad.
3. Most people are simply stupid and do not think logically.
Because there is a conspiracy of rich elites who are trying keep you down. They don't even hide it, and they've been so successful at it that they have bought their way into the highest levels of government. They actively campaign to ensure regular peoples' taxes subsidize their lavish lifestyles and then actively try and turn us against each other instead of us collectively realizing that we need the people who actually do the work much more than we need the people who leach off of it.
- The candidate was asking for more than what the others on the panel made, which was a no-no.
- The candidate was asking for what they currently make while being younger/less tenured than the others; also a no-no.
- The others on the panel had cost savings to the company as a performance target.
- They had beef with you and the candidate.
- They preferred another candidate, and they were fine with the comp.
I don't dispute that they probably had a beef with me; my manager's manager wasn't completely wrong to say I had an attitude problem at the time. I'm going to blame undiagnosed sleep apnea a bit, but I think there was a lack of maturity on my end as well.
The reason I blame the sleep apnea is that multiple people have commented how much nicer I see to be after I got treatment for it. I've also probably just grown up a bit since then as well.
AI notwithstanding, of course.
My father, who died in 1981, was an inexhaustible font of wisdom and wit. I don’t know when he told me this particular three-part rule, but I’ve never forgotten it. I tweeted it three years ago, but people keep asking for it in one place, so here it is. There are three ways to make a living:
1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
The rest is commentary.
---
That last line is undoubtedly a reference to:
> When someone challenged Hillel the Elder (b. 110 BCE) to teach the entire Torah while his listener stood on one foot, he famously replied, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the entire Torah, and the rest is commentary. Now go and study.”
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/5410546/jewis...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillel_the_Elder
Aside, I've always seen it spelled "fount of wisdom", but either spelling is acceptable and this seems to mostly be an American/British spelling difference:
https://www.cjr.org/language_corner/font-knowledge-fount-wis...
I've always like the idea of taking it a step further and trying to do unto others as they would like done unto them. However, the current state of the world has made me realize that lying to people that want to be lied to creates a flywheel of negative outcomes.
I guess the better way to improve the golden rule is to use empathy to internalize and understand the things other people are looking for, that way you can keep the golden rule simple, while not assuming that others want the same as you.
...we find that we may misjudge a man's attitude, his background knowledge, his aims, his standards ; and we may learn from our mistakes and take care even beyond the golden rule. (Karl Popper)
It is not the length of a price of writing that determines how good it is, the same way lines of code does not an effective program make. To be able to say a lot with fewer words is impressive
But yeah, when I seek truly "intellectually gratifying" material I usually log off of HN and read a book.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48368059
There’s basically no content in that one
At least this one has reasonable content
It wasn’t until many years later that I realized the clients actually wanted to be lied to, and that if you weren’t willing to do that you wouldn’t succeed.
She'd heard that if you made a video game and sold it, you would make a lot of money, so she'd decided to take her life savings, $200k, and hire someone to make a game. She didn't know what kind of game or anything, just "make a game".
I was really worried about her and spent two hours on the phone with her trying to educate her and help her protect herself and her savings.
At the end, she just got sort of mad at me and I could tell she was just going to get someone else to do it.
Was so sad. Wish I could have helped her more.
Every spiritual tradition on the planet rejects material wealth as undignified and immoral
It then goes on to say that the third way will make you "go broke", which seems somewhat contradictory.
From searching the text, it seems it hasn't been published on the WSJ.
ftfy
Took me a second. The reference "replace with found url" is a lie if the URL is not found.
> Are paywalls ok?
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here.
The link literally says "There are three ways to make a living."
A job is one way to make a living, in which these ways may apply, but a job doesn't necessarily have to pay at all and can be entirely volunteer, if we're being pedantic. Jobs are often very bad ways to make a living these days.
It's an aphorism. I enjoyed it. It's not a proof of the Universe.
- Garbage collector, zoo keeper, lifeguard: As honest jobs, you can hopefully make a living doing these. To leverage these skills to become rich.. I don't know, but would imagine there might be some big lies along the way.
- Tennis player: How do they become rich, endorsements? Does associating yourself with a racket, shoe or energy drink count as telling truth or lying? Since ads aren't an analysis of the racket's technical properties, nor its contribution to your playing... I'd say it's lying.