lol what a load of bullshit
Happened to me… Except that before last step I quit.
Left a job of 10 years, project lead senior engineer, because fuckers FAFO’d an RTO. Of a team of 5, I was one they expected to stay because I was “close to the office”. I was the first one to find a new, full time remote job.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
AI bullshit!
I’m sure there is a little truth to it sometimes but one big thing this ignores is that many of us have always had remote coworkers because our employer has multiple offices in different cities, countries, and continents around the world. I’m not worried about someone who’s in the office with my boss passing me by because that’s a tiny minority of everyone we work with anyway.
Interestingly, this is also why WFH has held up at the company where I work. Even when you go in to the office, you spend half the day on zoom. Our company has consolidated floors, closed whole offices and entire campuses to reduce the amount of real estate it pays to maintain. There’s a lot of savings in it for them. And our CEO has said that he likes how remote work makes it trivial to get the entire leadership team together for a conversation because they aren’t all flying around the world constantly, inaccessible for days at a time because they’re traveling. They do make in person visits, but don’t live on planes like they used to. They also did the math and they exceeded their 10 year goal for climate reduction overnight just by going to remote.
There are so many benefits for the company as well as the employees that I’m really confused why some companies go all RTO. Probably they just don’t have good systems in place to know who’s doing their job. We do.
How is that bullshit? People do like to give promotions to other people they like, sometimes irrelevant of talent. Look at literally all non-democratic governments.
And it’s no secret random conversations not about work happen a lot more in person. These are the kind of conversations that make friendships, not the 1 on 1 with your manager on teams.
This is why most sane companies don’t force you to do 4 days but instead make it so that if you only have to do 2 days at the office, they’re the same 2 days of the week for everyone to avoid the situation in this post.
So incompetent management promoting the people who suck up to them (their “friends”) rather than based on results and how well people are competing their tasks.
Sounds like a shit company/manager to work for. Better off finding another job.Also, people tend to get promoted faster by switching employers. Don’t fall for the lie of “company loyalty”.
Love it when they state so clearly that promotions are a byproduct of office politics, not actual work performance.
This isn’t exactly news.
But it also misses what a “promotion” means in theory (more autonomy and control, resources to pursue projects, underlings) versus what it means in practice (a token title change and a small raise with a ton of extra responsibility in an underperforming section of the firm).
So much of how you make progress in a business is to turn lemons into lemonade and sell that lemonade to your bosses.
Whoever came up with this has probably always used ‘optics first, actual results last’ in their shitty career so far.
Considering this was made with AI, yes, absolutely
Fitting. LLM feels like working with that coworker that his core skills are actually convincing everyone (especially management) that he provides value, when in reality he drags everyone’s performance down.
Fake it til you make it
Fake it till others believe your bullshit.
Not having a conversation with my supervisor for months at a time is literally the dream.
If I didn’t have to explain the same exact shit I did last week in the 4th different way and have you still not understand, BUT still want to…
I appreciate that you want to understand, but I recognize you won’t and that is okay. You don’t need to know the details to take credit for the work. Your insistence to understand is wasting all of our time and most of my productivity.
Year 1: “incredibly productive”
Year 5: “not about the work”
I love how they freely admit that it has nothing to do with being good at your job and everything to do with schmoozing.
Like that’s really the purpose of the company… manufacturing schmooze, so we need good schmoozers
The secret to this is not believing in the promotion fairy.
If you want a promotion, apply for it at another company. If you get it, awesome, if you don’t, try at a 3rd company.
At my current job, the agreement is I do the job you hired me for, and you give me the money and benefits we agreed upon.
oh I believe in the promotion fairy. Just not the raise fairy.
More responsibility, same salary…
xactly. promotions and title changes are given out like candy.
Promoted twice since I last saw my boss in person. I asked him if would see any issue himself or for the company if I relocated myself back across the country closer to family; he was confused as to why I even asked.
He’s not even a particularly good boss in most ways, but tons of people want to work for him because he stays the fuck out of their way.
he stays the fuck out of their way.
That’s like, 70% of good management.
What’s that old quote from some famous guy “I just surrounded myself with people who were smart and interested in the company success then got out of there way”… It was something like that
Another 20% is keeping everyone else out of the way too.
Honestly, this is the real underrated trick. A great manager removes blockers. Their job is first and foremost to get shit off the train tracks.
I had a manager who wanted to know what we did. Understand it. Really get into the info, because only then could she really lead us, she thought.
Worst manager I had for a long while. She didn’t understand anything and was easily annoyed by it. We were software engineers, she some media marketing whatever person. That ain’t gonna happen.
Yeah. The one time you actually need a manager is when you have some fuck-up of a coworker who’s making things worse for everybody.
Another 25 is keeping other people out of your way also. The last 5? Going to bat for you when needed.
All I see reading this is that managers and CEOs have never reached the object permanence phase of brain development, and need to be constantly visually reminded their employees exist or they’ll never promote them regardless of the work they do.
But then, I guess no manager of a multi-office company has had a team member in another location prior to COVID, so how could they possibly have planned for what to do in that situation.
My takeaway is that internal promotions aren’t based on merit and you gotta schmooze.
I mean, yes, that’s true.
My first thought was, how do you work at a company with literal toddlers at management level and above and expect it to end well? I just started at a job where my boss is planning on slowing down and stepping back. A key part of getting the job was a willingness to work independently and with little to no direct supervision.
But then my boss is in touch with his business and aware of what’s happening without having to actively spy on us. Also finding he loathes progress reports for the sake of progress reports. I’m still adjusting to no longer being actively micromanaged but it’s clear that I need to check in when something is too much for me or when it’s finished, anything else is wasting time.
Ding ding ding ding
Got it. Show up to work so you can kiss your bosses ass often and in person so that they give you a promotion solely based on your in person ass licking.
Sounds to me like a broken system that promotes based on the wrong metrics…
Only way your gonna get anywhere is if you eat ass
Year 3: From your home office, you spearhead multiple high level projects which triple the billable hours of your department. You are not in the office enough to lick the asshole of your manager so Bob the intern gets the promotion. Bob will be paid entry level salary and really knows how to get the tongue deep in that brown hole.
Year 4: Enough is enough. You quit that stupid job and secure a job with a company that values performance based promotions and raises. No one knows anything about your projects and when you leave they whither on the vine.
Year 5: You run into Bob at the pub. He says management converted the office to AI and everyone got fired.
Year 6: You chuckle when you drive by that company you used to work for and find the building is now for lease and the company is in bankruptcy.
“You got the promotion, yet somehow your quality of life is shittier because you are spending 1/4th of your net pay on gas and eating out and child care and you had to get rid of your dog because you are not around enough to properly handle an animal, plus you have 10 hours less free time during the week because of your commute.”
And let’s be fair, no one is getting the promotion.
LinkedIn is such wanker filled trash
I find it interesting how “the promotion” is an end in itself. No context, no details, just “the promotion”. And you didn’t get it! Tsk, tsk, tsk.
Of course, because promotion is the only way to get ahead, by taking on more responsibilities and managing other people, god forbid you’d get a raise just for being really good at what you do.
My last company had a cool pathway where you could become a “distinguished engineer” instead of a manager and get the same sort of huge salary and stock options. Unfortunately, my last company also liked to lay off huge swaths of engineers, particular those who were a year away from being eligible to become “distinguished engineers”.
Find a company that has it. The evil silicon Valley tech bros almost all offer it. Senior, staff, senior staff, principal, distinguished, fellow…
This “promotion as next obvious thing you want” needs to die. I don’t want to go manage people and have told my manager that I’m happy in my current role and I don’t want a promotion. He was quite happy to know he did not have to worry about that.
Well ok then, in their own words, managers are incompotent morons who lack object permanence and have no idea how to gauge the usefulness or productivity or worth of any employee… without being able to invade their personal space and randomly question them.
Replace them with LLMs, LLMs would do a better job, these people don’t deserve to be paid anything, they do literally nothing useful that a hopped up autocomplete algorithm can’t do to the same effectiveness.
There was an experiment where they simulated LLM performing various company roles. The higher you put it, the more effective it was… xD
LLMs are great at being generalists.
They’d be better CEOs and VPs than most CEOs and VPs.
They read reports that more competent specialists make, and talk with other high level generalist/aggregator people who do the same.
AKA, they summarize complex data into a narrative and chat.
LLMs probably cost less than CEOs and VPs do.
So why are we trying to jam LLMs in to do the much more complicated jobs they are not so great at doing?
Oh, right, its because the owner class are delusional narcissistic sociopaths who just want to feel appreciated and superior to others… and none of this is about making a better run company.
Its about enforcing a social caste system.
IIRC article well enough, pros were that they were able to talk to anyone at company at the same time, had all data available constantly and were great at drawing normal from data so in standard scenarios they could easily lead the company.
They hallucinated sometimes, but research found that not more than actual CEO’s lol.
What they failed at was exceptional, bad situations. Too little data resulted in choices that ended with the simulated board firing them.
They hallucinated sometimes, but research found that not more than actual CEO’s lol.
This is exactly what I mean.
They just actually can do these kinds of tasks as well as people.
… and they’d be less expensive to run, in those roles, than the humans that currently have those salaries and stock options.
What they failed at was exceptional, bad situations. Too little data resulted in choices that ended with the simulated board firing them.
Unrealistic, boards haven’t fired or assasinated Elon yet, this is blatant anti-clanker bias.
Well ok then, in their own words, managers are incompotent morons who lack object permanence and have no idea how to gauge the usefulness or productivity or worth of any employee… without being able to invade their personal space and randomly question them.
Uhhhh… yeah? Have you never had a job before? XD
Half this thread is delusional raging against uncomfortable truths. Just because you dislike the reality before you isn’t a reason to pretend it doesn’t exist.!
… Your comment doesn’t make any sense.
You act as if its very obvious that managers are broadly like this. Yes, ok, we agree on that.
But, if you think these are real behaviors from many managers… then raging against them is not delusional.
Also… as opposed to only raging… I proposed a practical plan of action… replace these idiot managers with LLMs. This is essentially the opposite of pretending the problem does not exist.
Are you perhaps suffering from heat exhaustion, or are you normally this stupid?
Ah, I wasn’t clear enough, sometimes I forget the platform serves all manner of reading comprehension levels!
Let me explain, implications laid bare so you might get it: Managers, as humans, aren’t magic omnipotent boxes that automatically perceive value clearly. Much like all the other interactions with humans outside of a screen, basic social abilities go far! Strangers incapable of forming human connections tend to not go as far as acquaintances.
You don’t want to hear this, but being a stranger, or worse yet, a confirmed dickhead, means you’re first on the chopping block and last on the promotion list.
LLM management where profitability/second is constantly evaluated against everyone else might suit a social darwinian, ready to tread on the back of their fellows. I personally prefer civilization, where a 5 minute daily chat with someone I genuinely respect is a pretty nice price to pay for not having my throat slit because my productivity fell 7% when grandma died.
If it isn’t about the work then TF is it about?
I go to work for MONEY. You pay to make you MONEY. For me to make you money, you need me to WORK
It is about the work.
Now pay me more
It’s about an AI generated sense of accomplishment.
It’s not wrong, but what it describes is ethically wrong in my opinion. Raises and promotions are less about work performance and more about performative theatre. Being chummy with management is often a better predictor of upward career trajectory.
Any decent manager knows better, but many managers became such by schmoozing their way up, so the cycle of incompetence continues.
Upper management isn’t only about the work.
Yeah you can do the work, but also probably the person in the office can also do the work.
If the person in the office is the one interacting with the upper management more and the work is being done equally well between them and some unknown person that works remotely why would they hire the person you do not know?
The management position / next level probably entails more people skills and dealing with people so someone you have hardly ever spoken to might not have those skills but the person in the office they know can at least deal with people well.
