Work Is Not School: Surviving Institutional Stupidity

> 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.

Yeah, in work it's all about who you know. What your connections and background are. Everything is like that, including school, but I guess the person who wrote this article didnt realize that.

Someone downvoted you and it's against the spirit of HN to challenge this because it makes for boring reading but

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.

I'm currently one of those "management ppl" you are referring, or at least on track to be one, but I swear its not my fault! The industry pays a lot better than any other job I could swing, and my background is very relevant and I know for certain that some of these projects wouldn't run without me. And also, there is no "balance" here, being dorky or "autistic" does not make you a good programmer. There are many brilliant engineers who are also very sociable. Being able to work with others is an important skill and, all else being even, in a highly competitive industry having that kind of skill will get you ahead.

As someone who transitioned from industry to full-time teaching at a community college, I sympathize. The boom-driven influx of people in the industry who are not passionate about technology but are passionate about money has affected even those who are passionate about technology, because what happens when a company's management and executives are only motivated by money at all costs?

Yeah I think “don’t attribute to malice what can be explained be stupidity” is applied too broadly these days. There is absolutely malice behind some decisions/actions, and it’s dangerous to just shrug it off. Even more concerning, often the malicious people will hide behind stupidity.

It's just it's stupidity or incompetence more often than malice; but, of course you should judge on the case-by-case basis and if somebody repeats certain (evil) behavior it's malice

Agreed. For example, if 90% of C-Suite at corporation are only interested in extracting capital from their subordinates and riding trends, then it’s malice, not incompetence.

I would imagine that the author is young, very intelligent, and just really starting to pick up real-world career experience. What the author points out is true, but I cannot imagine most HN readers are thinking "I'm expecting my workplace to be totally fair and merit-based, just like school was."

This statement is pretty interesting and revealing; school is very much not like that for a lot of people, and I suspect this means that the author was in a strict STEM curriculum where there can really be said to be correct vs. incorrect answers. (vs. something like English, social sciences, etc.) As noted, this likely also means that the author is just recently out of school, and is just figuring out how the real world works and how few people are capable of stepping back and judging objectively. (alternately, maybe the author has known this for years and is just writing for a younger audience)

It depends who you work for and what they are like.

One of the nicest things a boss has done was when it looked like I was getting the blame for something was to email everyone connected with it saying he had done it, not me.

I have worked with a lot of people like that too.

That kind of behavior is far less successful than many would expect. Higher ups are pretty aware of who does what, at least at 1 year+ time frames.

That being said, I’ve seen many outrun their own incompetence. Getting incentives right in large organizations is difficult.

Some people get through the week by abusing other people.

I don't take issue with the fact that he's naive or that his ignorance of corporate dysfunction has been shattered. You don't know what you don't know until you do.

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.

I don't know. I agree with the advice even if they are not 100% correct.

Yes, there are shitty people at work who take action out of malice and actually are out to get you, but in my experience, that's a small minority of the time. It's fundamental attribution error.

He's got a program to sell you, he's focused on the problem he addresses.

He's not helping people solve toxic workplaces, he's helping people shift their thinking as they move higher in org

Over the past decade, I've been dealing with sorting out a rare and difficult to diagnose medical issue with a family member. Over this decade, I've learned what I consider a very important lesson and one that I often find myself having to re-apply and to have discussions with providers over.

What you call something matters a lot less than what you do about it.

What I mean by this is when you're in the weeds of "not in the first few options for diagnosis", a lot of conditions have a lot of overlapping symptoms. You might get a diagnosis for some condition, and then as new evidence comes to light, that diagnosis may change. After a while you start to doubt any possible diagnosis and even when you get one, you spend your time worrying about "What if I'm wrong? What if I don't have X?". The thing that's important to remember though is that for a good chunk of the symptoms that all of these conditions have, the treatment for them is exactly the same. It doesn't matter if you have condition X, Y or Z if the treatment for symptom Q is the same for all of them. That doesn't mean an accurate diagnosis isn't important, it very much is. But it's only important where the treatment options would differ. But if you want to resolve symptom Q and the treatment is the same, it just doesn't matter what you call it.

The same thing applied to malice vs stupidity. Unless there's a very different action to take to mitigate the problem, it doesn't matter which one it is. Lets take your example of someone taking credit for your work in front of upper management. If this was stupidity what would you do to mitigate the issue? You'd do more to document what you're doing. You'd make sure you have a chance to speak for your own efforts. You'd make sure that your contributions are more visible. You might get a neutral party involved in keeping an eye on things. You might gently correct your co-worker if doing so was appropriate in the moment.

So what would you do if it was malice? Probably all of the same things right? About the only difference in what you do might be whether you talk to the co-worker about it, or talk to HR. But beyond that, everything you'd do to mitigate the issue is more or less the same. And whats important is that the issue you have is that credit was taken for your work. Really in the end it doesn't even matter whether it was stupidity or malice because learning which it was doesn't get your credit back. And accurately labeling it doesn't stop you from losing credit in the future when it happens again.

But there is one personal benefit from assuming stupidity, you can feel less anger. It's a lot easier to be objective, and stay focused on your real goal and the problem you really want to solve when you don't feel like you're actively being attacked. So whenever there is ambiguity, and the actions you would take to mitigate the real issue are the same, why choose the label that increases your own stress and anger levels and makes you more likely to retaliate in a way that actually back fires on you because you're reacting in anger.

Which again isn't to say that you should be a doormat. But you can set boundaries for yourself and take actions to accomplish your goals without getting mired in judgements of other people's actions. Their feelings about it and their motivations aren't my concern, my concern is taking care of myself. I don't need them to see things my way, or admit to wrong doing to enforce my boundaries and take care of myself. And I can take care of myself a lot better if I'm not angry and stressed out.

Both stupidity and malice happen. It can often be difficult to tell the difference as we arent as objective as we think we are.

However, accidentaly attributing stupidity to what is malice is generally not too bad. If its malice it will happen again and you can revise your opinion.

Accidentally attribute malice to what is stupidity is an easy way to start grudges. This can blow back on you and turn someone who just made a mistake into someone who does actually hate you, and make third party observers think you are unreasonable.

So erring on the side of assuming stupidity is generally a good call.

5) Yes - but even if not popular, competent people are always respected 6) I would say that there's correlation, but it's not 1.0, more something like 0.5 - 0.7; other factors matter as well.

Sometimes these do not hold true, but then you have a truly toxic organization - one that you should run from, as fast as possible

I’m with you except for 2. Knowing math is great.

> If you stay focused and just do you, you'll succeed despite other people's drama and your personal pains

Can't agree, I know people who got more work because they focused and did the work

> 8) Abuse is abuse, and people negligent in doing anything about it are participating in it. Get toxicity out of your life.

This needs to be taught more actively in school. Negligence in stopping abuse, or fostering abuse = just as immoral as abuse.

Seconding all this.

I'm worry that somewhere out there there are kids hearing adults go "high school has to do [shitty thing] to get you ready for the 'real world', which is even harder!" (LOL no it fucking isn't) or "enjoy it, these are the best days of your life, adult life is so much harder" (what the actual shit are they smoking? Harder stuff than weed, for sure)

I had a relatively good high school experience, and even so, if people saying that stuff had been correct I'd have surely killed myself by now, probably before age 30. There is no possible way I could have tolerated decades more of life as unpleasant as high school, let alone worse. Harsh and short deadlines, general inflexibility of expectations, begging to be allowed to take a piss, the equivalent of multiple hour-long presentation meetings every single day, very-early starts, lots of rooms with shitty lighting and no windows, terrible seating that you're in all day long, complete assholes common and you're just stuck with them, they're not gonna get kicked out (this goes for teachers and students alike), and no realistic ability to leave and find something better.

Luckily, I had a part-time tech job in high school (I did later work a couple very-low-paid non-tech jobs for a while, so I'm not writing this "no really high school is far worse than adult life" perspective from an entirely privileged perspective) and could see that something was wonky about what these people were saying. Then I go to college and it's like a goddamn vacation. On to the "real world" and there are hard times but it's nothing like the 4-year marathon rigid-schedule grind of high school. Those tend to be more like, oh this week is rough, or this month, or perhaps this quarter. And I have so very much more freedom of action to fix things that aren't going well.

Adult life is far easier than high school. High school is insane. Like it's an actually-crazy thing to subject kids to.

I have the same experience, but would like to clarify that almost everything on this list is mostly only true of middle class employment. You absolutely can "fail" if you are on the bottom rung of the political-economic ladder -- this looks like a life in and out of prison, homelessness, despair, and an early death. You don't get endless chances from your landlord or your parole officer. If your area of weakness is "money" (earning enough of it, knowing how much to spend and how much to save, etc.), then you are still fucked. To someone with a poor education, filling out a job or EBT or WIC application is indeed a high-stakes test with disastrous consequences for failing. Your boss in the restaurant kitchen does not want you to question their methods of dishwashing -- he will fire you instead for being lippy if you try to negotiate around it.

> You get nearly endless chances to fail at work...

One of the more refreshing things to me about the working world is how failure actually has consequences. If you have a habit of bungling projects, disrupting coworkers, or otherwise engaging in antisocial behavior, I probably won't have to work with you for long.

I'm sure it's different elsewhere, but in the US you are never expelled (fired) from grade school simply for failing. Not only that, you can intentionally disrupt the education of those around you and effectively nothing will happen, and one poorly behaved student can derail an entire semester. Nothing short of repeated violence or actual crime is cause for dismissal in school.

Worth probably underlining in heavy ink that if you find that any of these points are not accurate where you are, then you are likely in a bad place.

I also find really interesting how we frequently talk about how different the two are yet also reinforce the divergence.

  What you learn in school doesn't apply to the job
    Yet we still:
      - fixate on GPA instead of having a sufficient threshold. E.g instead of considering anyone above a 3.0 we prefer a 4.0 student over a 3.8 student.
      - we prefer hiring students with prestigious pedigrees

I'm not saying what you learn in school doesn't matter (I think it does. It forms the foundation) but we often talk as if the knowledge is completely disjoint and then hire using academic pedigrees as the primary signal. I had an interview last week where a guy was saying "this is an engineering role. It's very different from academia" and then was fixated on my publication record. This seems quite common.

  We test applicants based on leetcode and academic like problems

This was clearly originally inspired by the traditional engineering interview but it's become optimized where all we do is study these problems. Instead of building more things and expanding our portfolios. Maybe we should go back to whiteboard interviews and in person. It'll put the focus back on evaluating how a candidate thinks and you can't use GPT on the whiteboard (without easily being caught)

But I think we like to say things and act a different way. Academia has lots of politics, but so does work. Navigating these is something I find challenging and exhausting.

My last job my boss told me "this isn't academia, we care if things work." I was confused, because in my academic research the primary goal was to make things work. Just at a more fundamental level. I also used that knowledge to 20x the performance of one of their systems. They left the PR on read as it wasn't as flashy as the larger more complex model that I out performed.

Honestly, I think just no one knows what they're doing and we're all trying to figure it out. But we're talking confidently about causality and then don't walk the walk. I mean the first part is fine, the world is complex, but do we need to pretend that things are so easy? Maybe if we didn't they'd actually become a bit easier. Instead of having the complexity of the world and the complexity of (business and cultural) politics and navigating all the double speak we would just have the complexity of the world. Idk, I feel like half our problems (or more) are created because we want to pretend things are easier than they are, because not knowing is scary?

Maybe mandatory schools and merging education with certification need to change.

Is it weird that I have a totally different perspective on this? Then again I dropped out of college at 19 to start working in Big Tech (tm) after exiting my startup and have been there 15+ years now.

It doesn't matter how fast you spin your wheels working on things unless those things are aligned with delivering value to actual paying customers. Politics also doesn't really matter. Well, it matters to idiots, there are certainly a lot of those out there, and there's some truth that if you piss off the wrong idiot you're likely to be kicked out to the curb. But at the end of the day the times I or anyone else I know has created real business value, it has been heavily rewarded with promotions, money, etc.

The problem I see with a lot of academics is, like you mentioned, even if they are smart and spend a lot of time on interesting and hard problems, if they can't draw a straight line from their project to whatever business problem they are actually solving they don't last particularly long.

Yes and no. On the flip side, you now have the means to have a much more comfortable and pleasant life than the high school dropout classmate you haven't seen in six years.

You have already made it very far, in that sense.

You put effort in, you've gotten rewarded. The washouts from the up-or-out places have lots of soft landing places available compared to most people.

Whether you crash yourself against the rocks of having to be the top of the absolute whole world... that's a personal thing. Being aware of the structure is probably good for informing your decision, but you might've noticed it earlier too.

Other people have gotten rewarded more than you. And this is probably not new to you. There are almost always teacher's pets, spoiled brats whose parents gave them way more than you, beautiful people who get things handed to them for existing, easily-charismatic assholes who coast by or fail upward because everyone likes them, etc. One of the dirty secrets of elite high schools and higher education is already that not everyone worked as hard as you to get there.

The pyramid is mostly a question of incorrect perspective or viewpoint.

Of course there are fewer CEOs, managing directors or whatever your current fantasy is. But there are millions of them on the planet - it's not that small of a class.

- Many of which are in their 20s or 30s because they created their own business or joined a tiny team or found an employer with just the right yearning (which would be half their fault but also half yours for looking for it).

- Learning how the world works is a life's work. It's fine if you couldn't hierarchy in your 20s, there is still time to learn.

- "Not with that attitude, you won't". If you are still obsessed with anti-corporate political ideas (as a random example), just perhaps that won't help you. That will seriously constrain how or if you continue learning about how the world really works. If you find a different obsession as things go (like a family, say), there is nothing wrong with that - but don't blame it on the pyramid. "The world" is a complex dynamic system of billions of people, interactions and ideas. It has NOTHING to do with your current preconception.

- As you continue growing up, you might find very different interests: public interest, scientific, engineering prowess, family time again, a completely different career direction, self-employment, technical or management consulting, art or craft - and there is nothing wrong with any of these. Your yearning of "top 1% recognition" that you identified with in school - or wished you identified with in school - will have changed and that's fine.

And this is true for everyone in that specific pyramid that you think is in front of you. If the top - some top - is truly your purpose in life, very few people in that pyramid are truly your competitors in your own race.

But this is hard to internalize. Most schools do not train for this. And school was presenting you with convenient easy(? lol) hurdles which work life does NOT. In life after school, you have to manage your own scoreboard, year in year our, decade in decade out - and this can be wearing. And there again, you can find mentors who WILL help open your eyes - if you bother to (easy right? no still not - but feasible for the people who try.)

And this is triple true if you switched country during or after your studies. You are now in an environment that you didn't even grow up in and you have far more to learn. A very serious disadvantage that will take additional energy to overcome - but will also help open your eye to this idea that you do have a lot to learn about how the world works (while the natives assume they already know.)

> [...] top 1% achiever in education. Most of them by far (like really far) will not be MD or CEO.

It's called the Dilbert principle [1], and also Putt's law [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putt%27s_Law_and_the_Successfu...

One addendum: The pyramid has a top by construction; The top exists no matter what.

In a sports tournament: Someone is going to win, no matter how good the participants are.

Even if you "make it" in the context of your career and organization, you will lose in the housing market of any metropolitan area where such careers are on offer, simply because other people were there first.

I disagree that competition among fellow high-achievers is the primary obstacle. Maybe, very early on, when you're in a class of investment banking recruits or first-year law associates, etc. But that gets sorted out in the first few years.

The next 25+ years of your career are often dealt navigating corporate politics, financiers' M & A, industry developments, etc. And it's here that lots of smart, academically excellent people struggle. You can be the world's greatest data scientist, but if you are revealing truths that your boss (or boss's boss) doesnt like, you're probably going to get bounced. You could be doing a great job managing a large group of employees and operating your division efficiently, but some private equity fund buys your owners out and strip-mines the company. Many, many more scenarios. But these aren't "hopeless" situations, there is opportunity to succeed, but that opportunity is based upon people skills as opposed to the academic ideal of right answers vs wrong.

Agreed. I’ve actually tried quite hard for decades now and I wish I had just chilled — that extra effort rarely turns into a commensurate reward

Male instructors are more objective.

Yeah the idea i that school is somehow a bastion of meritocracy is misguided.

Academia is better at setting clear requirements and measuring those goals, but whether these requirements have anything to do with being successful or useful in the real world is an entirely different matter.

School isn't reality, its mostly not even trying to simulate reality. School breads a lot of "Why was I not rewarded? I did everything they said i should do" disappointment in the real world.

Funny enough, I was an academic for close to a decade before I resigned in disgust; and I feel like OP's article could be Work is not Academia. As an academic, all I needed to do is write papers and get grants, metrics that are easy to game and fairly clear to achieve.

Now in industry I had to learn the hard way that my fancy academic skills are mostly useless, and that my visibility within the organisation counts far more towards my career progression than my skills or what I actually contribute: co-workers who objectively produce trash but spend time selling it internally raise far faster through the ranks than me. My technical skills aren't that important, working towards visibility is. And OP's article is a great summary of that conundrum.

(I do not work in a US-style tech company, FWIW)