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Oh yeah, there are lots of loads of shit out there. But then again it's easy to get drunk your smartness and decry everything you don't understand or trust as a load of shit. A good example is all "this crap" about "feelings and shit". You think it's dumb so you ignore it for a couple years, and continue being an asshole to everyone around you--not noticing because you are just being "rational" and stuff. Then a couple years later, usually after your team suffers silent attrition for a while and churns over a few times with new people, something goes wrong and you despearately need help. Nobody wants to help you because you've been an asshole to them out of your own self-assured ignorance. And then you find out this "feelings and shit" was not "crap" but people a lot smarter than you knew what the hell they were talking about when they stressed the importance of building relationships and soft skills.

Not accusing you of this, just an example.

The world is full of hidden complexity, so be prepared for an education at any moment, I'd say.

> The world is full of hidden complexity, so be prepared for an education at any moment, I'd say.

Wonderful words! Added to my quotes list :)

All I've got is your word that he's crooked. There are totally reasonable ways that people can have a fancy looking Aston Martin and be dead broke at the same time (used cars, financing, underwater on loan, etc).

Estimates are guesses by nature, and it's not surprising you know nothing about them.

If you hate your job that much, what are you doing about it?

It's weird to see the top post on HN be an immature and empathy-barren rant that is completely irrelevant to the article.

>It's weird to see the top post on HN be an immature and empathy-barren rant that is completely irrelevant to the article.

That sense of entitlement is endemic across the internet, honestly.

The problem with the scenario described above isn't that the CEO's situation is implausible, it's that it's presented entirely without evidence, and none was additionally demanded. The whole reason for having accountants is because it makes lying much harder to have to have a story for where every dollar goes. You can track it down if you're skeptical.

Yes it's a rant. It's born entirely out of frustration on a bad day.

I called him crooked because he dealt drugs to his favourite staff, or gave them coke as a reward. He was eventually on Crime Watch UK for fraud. The pay rise was to get people up to minimum wage.

Not that that matters - it was still a rant. I'm not going to apologise for that, though. Sometimes it happens.

For anyone interested: https://www.mirror.co.uk/opinion/money-opinion/p-s-investiga...

Exactly. That Aston Martin could be part of why he is broke.

You never know what someone is going through. In fact, odds are the more you percieve a person has having "it all together", the further off the mark you likely are. This is true for the simple reason that everyone struggles with something.

"Empathy" is a good word here. I think we tend to decide how much of our empathy we believe a person deserves based on our own perception of "how well they're doing", particularly relative to ourselves. The truth is, we should always start with empathy and grace, though that's often easier said than done.

So, thanks for inserting that word. Needed the reminder myself.

Since I happened to know a boss who had a shiny new car while not being able to give out huge raises, let me tell you the other side of the story:

That company had been broken in to, with extremely valuable equipment stolen. The insurance company promptly paid for it, replacements were bought - all's well in the world, right?

Not quite. It turns out, due to tax law quirks, the new equipment's cost as a tax deduction needs to be spread out over years (6 IIRC), but the payout from the insurance company is taxable as a lump sum. So, while the balance sheet is net even after the break-in, the tax man wants a huge chunk of money that he's then willing to return, in small increments, over the next years.

But the company is cash poor. And a loan is not feasible, because it's already stretching the limits. A call to the accountant is in order. And, as it turns out, second quirk of tax law, if you buy a car on a loan, you can claim the entire expense in the same tax year, but you can spread the paying back over the next several years.

And so the car was bought, at significant long term cost to the owner, but it fixed the tax/cash shortfall problem for the current year.

Step two after learning to keep your mouth shut: Learning that the situation is always more complex than you can see from the outside.

> Step two after learning to keep your mouth shut: Learning that the situation is always more complex than you can see from the outside.

Rather step two that the CEO should have done: Explain these quirks of the taxation laws, so that any rational person has to come to the same logical conclusion based on the evidence.

A step that the CEO certainly would have done, if it happened, which it most probably didn't.

I'm not saying it couldn't happen, or that it has never happened, just that you'll need some serious arguments to convainc me it's more probable than the CEO being simply a crook.

Yeah, totally. "Our cash flow is bad enough that I need to move debt into the future to - barely - make your salaries" is just the thing you as a boss should say to your people.

You write it satirically, but I believe that being honest to your employees if such a type of problem occurs, is indeed an important virtue of a good leader.

This depends on the industry you are in, and the kind of people you are leading. Many industries are low-margin and have constant cash flow issues.

Telling your employees achieves nothing, in that case - their next job won't be less precarious, they just lose a little bit of piece of mind. You make the active choice that some (who want to see you as a crook anyways, see other replies) think slightly worse of you, while the vast majority can go home and sleep in relative peace.

It's a very different situation if cash flow crunch is completely unexpected, or highly likely to be fatal, with stable businesses around.

As I said above, the situation is always more complex. You make decisions accordingly :)

Seems to me this is kind of the opposite of impostor syndrome which is a kind of anxious humility in which we fear that everyone else is smarter and wiser than ourselves.

In the case you describe, you are divided between a suspicion that everyone else is an idiot (and you are wise) or that everybody is equally aware, but you've all learned to live the lie.

The absolute worst is when you do point something out, and people laugh and say, "haha! yeah it's always been like that! ha!"

Like - so we should do something about it, right? This thing that would dramatically improve our lives that is really obvious to everyone. Shouldn't we do it?

Turns out, nope. It's always been like that.

This goes back to hidden complexity. The answer is no. You should not "do something," you should do "the right thing." And figuring out what the right thing is, and staffing it through everyone that has some equity in the problem space, and taking their feedback to iterate over the solution, is immensely time-consuming -- maybe more time-consuming than just dealing with the less optimal system that more or less works.

I play in a pickup soccer game on Saturdays.

First time I went was a couple weeks ago. I noticed that they didn’t play with any out of bounds - whoever kicked it out, got to keep going with the ball. Made no sense.

I asked the organizer of the group about it. His reply? “We’ve been doing it like this for 10 years. That’s just how it is.”

I asked him if he personally enjoyed playing like that (him being the organizer for literally the last decade...)

He slowly turned and looked at me with a blank stare, as if he had never thought of it like that before. “No I don’t,” he said.

He still refused to do anything about it.

> Seems to me this is kind of the opposite of impostor syndrome [...] > you are divided between a suspicion that everyone else is an idiot [...]

Not at all: you can be painfully aware that 90% or even 99% of your peers are not that good and yet you are still light years away from being in the top 0.0001%. It's the same type of awareness.

Compare it with income only for the sake of having a numerical benchmark. With a salary of 32k$/year you are in the world top 1% yet you might feel you should be earning 100x that.

In such a case, let's imagine a programmer in a department of 100 people. I take that case because to me Impostor syndrome relates to a peer group that one is actively engaged with - not to an abstraction.

Anyway, in this case, he believes that 98 people in the office are no good. 1 is amazingly good. He is both better than the 98 but much much worse than the 1. To my mind that is not impostor syndrome.

Perhaps I don't really understand the term.

Wikipedia does a better job: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

Always a good reminder but by that definition it seems insanely broad and also poorly named. I think I'll park my use of it.

Not directly related to your personal anecdote, but a confident feeling of "I know better" is the easy part; actually stepping in and doing something about what you think you know better is hard. Because most of the time, while you might think you know better, stepping in and replacing the CEO for example is a career path you don't actually want to do.

So yes, being cynical about stuff, especially bullshit from the higher-ups, is perfectly normal and such, but unless you actually step in and fix things it's wasted cynicism / anger / energy.

(source: I'm cynical all the time but don't envy the person saying the things)

> Not directly related to your personal anecdote, but a confident feeling of "I know better" is the easy part; actually stepping in and doing something about what you think you know better is hard. Because most of the time, while you might think you know better, stepping in and replacing the CEO for example is a career path you don't actually want to do.

The problem rather is: In some points (those where I am really knowledgeable about) I really do know better and if some of these points are on the agenda, I would love to be the CEO to handle these. But for many other points, the CEO surely does a better job than me.

Would the world be a better place if I were the CEO just when such points are decided upon (and otherwise the "old" CEO may decide)? Probably yes.

Would the world be a better place if I were the CEO full-time? Rather not.

You see the problem: You make being "being allowed to decide" (being CEO) an all-or-nothing decision. The solution in my opinion is rather to give authority to make decisions if someone knows a lot about a topic.

Reading your comment is reassuring, as I sometimes feel like I'm the only sane one at work. Farcical training sessions, management-speak with zero content..I could go on. I don't so much mind all that - I accept it as part of working for a large organisation - but it drives me crazy when I joke about it later and nobody has any idea what I'm on about.

Maybe it's me..

> "am I the only one who sees what a load of shit this is?"

Disillusionment.

Not really. Experience induced clarity.

I'm like OP. I've been in the tech industry for a stupid amount of years, and I swear I can improvise a CEO grade speech for any circumstance.

> I swear I can improvise a CEO grade speech for any circumstance.

Ouch, watch out with that attitude. CEOs are full of bluster and no action, so you might be risking becoming what you hate.

Or he was just proving his point on the spot?

Disillusionment: "a feeling of disappointment resulting from the discovery that something is not as good as one believed it to be."

> Not really.

How so?

Well, it's not disappointing really, it's just recognition.

I have no problem with how the system works, it's silly, it's unbalanced, it's all based on illusions, but here it is...

You can either feel disappointed and become all bitter and twisted, or you can just play the game. In many ways, it's fun, especially when you get that perception of clarity -- compensates for all these years you were the pawn.

You and I both, buddy.