[HN Gopher] Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
___________________________________________________________________
Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
Author : enigmatic02
Score : 136 points
Date : 2022-02-10 08:49 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (xsrus.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (xsrus.com)
| j7ake wrote:
| "In school, you are given the lesson, and then the test.
|
| In life, you are given the test, and then the lesson."
| Archelaos wrote:
| Non vitae sed scholae discimus. (Seneca, epistulae morales ad
| Lucilium 106, 11-12)
| Claude_Shannon wrote:
| Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
| [deleted]
| OJFord wrote:
| Er, mutatis mutandis!
| qzx_pierri wrote:
| Waka waka - shiggy diggy doo wop!
| [deleted]
| thenerdhead wrote:
| I think there's two things.
|
| 1. The school system has been broken for many years. Learning
| from people who are not passionate about what they teach is the
| main concern I have. You can easily tell the difference of
| "engaged" students who have a great teacher they will remember
| forever vs. "disengaged" students who will be able to tell you
| how bad their teacher was. I think Montessori-esq / curiosity
| driven schooling is the future given 2/3 the world is on the
| internet and there's actually exciting, inspiring, and engaging
| teachers around the world doing an amazing job. (i.e. Khan from
| Khan Academy really paved the way here)
|
| 2. These rules work because there's a significantly smaller
| portion of the population who truly knows themselves and embraces
| their eccentric characteristics. We typically lose our identity
| when going through a formal means of schooling because we want to
| fit in and thus be "average". Even those valedictorians are quite
| "average" outside of working harder to get perfect grades. How
| many do you know that went on to do the amazing things expected
| of them? Usually it's the people who were eccentric and didn't do
| so well in school.
| FastEatSlow wrote:
| I agree that it's very easy to tell between the students of a
| great teacher and a bad teacher. I've found that the best
| teachers are ones that came from industry, they did their work,
| and then went into teaching. That's why my school's engineering
| department is great, as is one of the physics teachers who
| sadly only teaches me once every 2 weeks.
| vikingerik wrote:
| These ring true for me. I had both of these experiences you
| describe, and I feel like my life approach is a mix of them. I
| went to a Montessori school for preschool and kindergarten,
| then regular public school after that, and was in fact my high
| school valedictorian.
|
| The Montessori "curiosity-driven" approach definitely stuck
| with me. I'm always interested in reading and learning about
| how anything works, and to get my hands on some introductory
| way of doing it myself. But I don't have the drive to turn that
| into any bigger successes. I skated through public school and
| never really learned to work hard, and I'm now that "average"
| valedictorian as you describe - pretty good 9-to-5 software
| job, but I'm not going to be achieving anything bigger.
|
| I find my greatest satisfaction in small self-contained
| challenges. Things like competitive board games, Rubik's-cube
| type puzzles, juggling. Where I can hold the entire activity in
| my head. But then I lose interest when it reaches a level of
| complexity that requires a more disciplined and organized
| approach. I ascribe these tendencies to having the Montessori
| education early to be curious and hands-on about everything,
| but then the public school education which just teaches to the
| next test and doesn't train for anything bigger.
| alexktz wrote:
| Would you have preferred to stay in Montessori for longer?
| vikingerik wrote:
| I'll never know, but in hindsight I think so. I probably
| would have been better off going at my own pace for longer,
| rather than becoming accustomed to the rigid pace of public
| school.
| greenonions wrote:
| I struggle with this as well. I would describe myself as very
| curious, and love to read about new subjects.
|
| I wish though, that I was more organized and ambitious. I
| always want to accomplish more instead of just dabbling in a
| million different things and never producing anything very
| large.
| whoibrar wrote:
| > You can easily tell the difference of "engaged" students who
| have a great teacher they will remember forever
|
| Have you ever come across some topic of history or biology that
| just seemed soo boring at the time it was taught in school. But
| only years later watching some random YouTube video explaining
| it and now you realise how interesting it has always been.
| folkhack wrote:
| Often.
|
| I do know YouTube-based learning has it's flaws, but I find
| it much more enjoyable to engage with vs. the 9-5
| teachers/professors I had growing up. The YouTube essayists
| are often way more passionate and informed on their topics as
| well.
|
| Then you get the value of a community coming along for the
| ride... In school there wasn't a comments section where
| discourse can happen regarding the subject being
| discussed/instruction. I get that YouTube comments are often
| horrible, but for many of the educational stuff I've watched
| good/insightful/corrective comments do seem to trickle to the
| top.
|
| Also - there's the "my time" aspect of it. This is _huge_ in
| comparison to normal education. I can move the slider back
| and listen to a part over and over again - sometimes topics
| are tough for me and I need to hear it 3-4 times. I can put
| the video on 1.25/1.5x if I want to bump the pacing up. I can
| study/learn when I personally learn best which tends to be
| late at night.
|
| Finally there's the technical aspect of it. I didn't go to a
| nice college - I went to a very expensive private school in
| the midwest. I went for both design and computer science.
| With 100% confidence I can say that every topic that I
| studied from math, to programming, to electronics, to art
| history, Adobe Suite... _all_ of it has more up-to-date and
| functionally better instruction on YouTube available 100% for
| free. This sounds like an exaggeration - I promise you it is
| not.
|
| Yes - YouTube learning has it's problems... but anecdotally I
| have learned so much. I have saved money fixing my own cars.
| I have jumped into topics that would have _never_ interested
| me before. I have improved skills professionally. It's a
| resource that I now can't imagine going without!
| kqr wrote:
| Yup. Schools are really designed to crank out people from the
| factory worker template. Obey, don't question, meet your
| targets, and then disconnect.
|
| It's in every part of the design:
|
| - The focus on getting things "right" rather than exploring why
| things are wrong.
|
| - The grading the discourages exploration and challenging
| oneself.
|
| - The endless back and forth about how children fail
| assignments. Other than in very special circumstances, the
| teacher is the one having failed if the children on aggregate
| are not performing as well as they should.
|
| - The way "learning" is defined as "remembering what the
| teacher wants to hear".
|
| I could go on. It's crazy. When the children of today become
| adults, they won't, generally, need to become obedient factory
| workers. They will need to be creative free thinkers in
| knowledge jobs. School robs them of opportunities to learn
| that.
|
| Montessori is a small win, but my years in Montessori was also
| plagued by some of the above. In particular, even though
| teachers were not allowed to set formal grades on assignments,
| they came up with their own pretty transparent improvised
| grading systems. (For example, it was clear that "Excellent" >
| "Outstanding" > "Great" > "Very good" > "OK". I still have a
| deeply rooted sense of this hierarchy and feelings connected to
| it, some 25 years later.)
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| > 2. These rules work because there's a significantly smaller
| portion of the population who truly knows themselves and
| embraces their eccentric characteristics. We typically lose our
| identity when going through a formal means of schooling because
| we want to fit in and thus be "average". Even those
| valedictorians are quite "average" outside of working harder to
| get perfect grades. How many do you know that went on to do the
| amazing things expected of them? Usually it's the people who
| were eccentric and didn't do so well in school.
|
| I don't know if I agree. If you look at many of the most
| influential positions in many institutions, it's far and away
| majority filled by valedictorians, first-in-class, degree
| havers. Very few times will there be a highschool drop out
| neurosurgeon, or never graduated college politician. Even the
| technical geniuses in code of our time often came from wealthy
| backgrounds, attended MIT or another well regarded technical
| school or had direct tutelage/mentorship from someone else with
| that background. You can obviously point to examples, so-and-so
| dropping out of Harvard... but at that point they were already
| _in Harvard_ which one doesn 't get to do if they sucked shit
| at school.
| minihat wrote:
| High school (in the US) is so easy for gifted students that
| they barely need even try to earn a 4.0 and be the
| valedictorian.
|
| Not all kids with good grades go on to do awesome things. But
| it makes sense that many of the best and brightest, the
| 'eccentric' ones, happen to have an easy time in school.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| I certainly learned to do the bare minimum required to get
| a 4.0. It was pretty easy in the end.
| alexktz wrote:
| And then had the shock of my life at college to the point
| where I said "screw this" and dropped out. Got a dead end
| job. Realized I did actually need to put some effort in
| and went back and graduated. The school system is not fit
| for purpose! Higher ed does OK.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| Hmm no I found college much much easier than high school.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has
| learned in school. -Albert Einstein
| ExtraE wrote:
| Not really an Einstein quote [0].
|
| [0] - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/07/forgotten/
| lordnacho wrote:
| I've long thought that schools should just let people go at
| whatever pace they want. This should be easier now with video
| classes.
|
| Just let people take the algebra or calculus or whatever module,
| when they feel like it. There would still be some sort of minimum
| requirement so that you can write a decent email, but there would
| be no reason to lock people in year groups.
|
| Year groups are still important socially, but there will be
| plenty of time with people in your year regardless, because the
| big hump of people will follow along most courses at the same
| rate.
|
| The theme the author is alluding to is the industrialization of
| education: shove a bunch of kids through, make sure there's an
| acceptable defect rate, let them out into society. But we don't
| have to live like that anymore. If you look at jobs, they don't
| really map to education these days, so there's not much point in
| making an assembly line of kids who can solve quadratic equations
| and write 5-paragraph essays.
| csee wrote:
| > Year groups are still important socially
|
| Disagree. Year groups perpetuate immaturity. They are also very
| socially unnatural, a mere byproduct of going for scale in the
| education system. That is fine, but if we can achieve scale
| without year groups (which we could under your proposal), that
| would be better.
| oaktrout wrote:
| Is everything we do not socially unnatural though? Remote
| work? Video calls, social media, online forums? What, other
| than living in hunter-gatherer societies is not socially
| unnatural for humans?
| lucic71 wrote:
| hhmc wrote:
| Young children are not famously good decision makers, and it's
| easy to imagine them making very limiting choices that they
| would later come to regret.
| twelvechairs wrote:
| Also some kids are pushed hard by their parents while others
| will do whatever they can to not look nerdy
| halgir wrote:
| Young children are also famously voracious learners. That is,
| until institutions like schools get in the way.
|
| Plunging young children into an anarchical learning
| environment with nothing but YouTube to guide them won't end
| well. But if you add guidance that encourages their strengths
| and tolerates their weaknesses, I speculate that net learning
| will exceed that of today's school system.
| brimble wrote:
| The challenge in public education reform is doing anything
| interesting/useful without doubling teacher headcount _and_
| increasing salaries (at the very least, to increase supply
| without decreasing quality).
|
| All sorts of approaches are possible with 5 students per
| teacher, but not 10, and with 10, but not with 20--let
| alone 25 or more.
| kqr wrote:
| Student-to-student mentoring is a part of the solution.
| Empirically shown to work really well. I don't know why
| more schools don't do it.
| brimble wrote:
| I do not know if it's the case for this particular
| approach, but it's _often_ the case that very effective
| reforms that don 't require increasing teacher head-count
| _do_ rely on having very good teachers and admin.
|
| Which means that a wide roll-out would require one or
| both of: more spending on training; more spending on
| salaries to increase the quality of the candidate pool.
|
| A top-quintile teacher may be _way_ more effective than a
| middle-quintile teacher, to the point that entire
| education frameworks and strategies are viable for them
| that aren 't for the middle quintile, but the trouble is
| only 20% of your teachers are top-quintile. Ditto admin.
| You'd be amazed at how mediocre admin can completely ruin
| a good plan.
| parineum wrote:
| > That is, until institutions like schools get in the way.
|
| I wouldn't be so quick to attribute those two events, which
| happen around the same time, as causal. I know a few
| teachers of young children and the things they love about
| their jobs is just that curiosity you're talking about.
| Unless you think it just takes a few years for the system
| to really beat them down, it's not exactly synchronous.
|
| When thinking back on sitting through all the boring
| classes on subjects I wasn't interested in feels like it
| was a lot more of a me "problem". I find most of that stuff
| interesting now or at least appreciate that I had the
| exposure to it. It seems to me that I was much more
| interested in play and/or social development at the time.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| What you're describing is called "mastery learning," and it is
| a thing. Essentially, you can't progress from one module to the
| next without a certain minimum score on the current module
| (that's the "mastery" part). It works well in subjects like
| math, where there are a lot of dependencies between later and
| earlier modules.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning
| mrslave wrote:
| Where can I do a (respectable) on-line degree in this
| structure?
|
| While I'm fantasizing, the second unrealistic requirement is
| affordable. ;-)
| t8sr wrote:
| The Open University. It's reputable (although by no means
| in anyone's top 10 rankings), let's you go your own pace
| and the tuition isn't too bad.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >although by no means in anyone's top 10 rankings
|
| It's always vying with Cambridge for the top place on
| student satisfaction.
|
| Also there is limited ability to vary your pace according
| to difficulty. Once you start a unit there is a schedule
| you need to follow to be ready for the end of period
| exams. In fact I'd argue that without that schedule
| pressure many people would struggle to complete each
| unit.
|
| You can vary the number of units you take in a year but
| that's before you really know how difficult the work is.
| I had to abandon one unit so I could focus on Topology as
| it was much harder than I expected. It would have been
| nice to just take a bit longer but that option wasn't
| available.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| WGU. Online, accredited, self paced (must maintain a
| minimum pace though), and relatively cheap.
|
| Wish they had math degrees.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| _I 've long thought that schools should just let people go at
| whatever pace they want._
|
| Great for high achieving, high conscientiousness kids, but it
| isn't going to work for a lot of kids, especially those without
| academic support at home. The last two years have been an
| approximate experiment in this; in the sense that kids who
| didn't want to participate had an easy out. What we saw is the
| bottom fall out.
| gwd wrote:
| > Year groups are still important socially
|
| After you left High School, was there ever a time in your life
| when you hung out with people of exactly the same age? The fact
| that everyone spends 13 years of their youth doing it now is an
| artifact only about 100 years old.
|
| > I've long thought that schools should just let people go at
| whatever pace they want.
|
| I'm pretty sure Montessori schools do something like this.
| em-bee wrote:
| montessori does exactly that. the kids are grouped into
| batches of 3 years, and each child can study the material at
| their own pace.
|
| i don't know how they handle the transitions from one group
| to the next though. maybe an extra slow kid that hasn't
| mastered the whole material in 3 years will tack on an extra
| time.
|
| and i think that faster kids will spend the extra time
| teaching younger kids.
|
| i also expect that in a 3 year period is is more likely for
| kids to catch up because they are probably not continuously
| slow. (keep in mind that montessori originally developed the
| material for kids with (learning-)disabilities) so learning
| at a slow pace is actually less of a problem, if it is a
| problem at all.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I have never seen anybody implement the exact Montessori
| idea for anybody that isn't very young children. For the
| very young, the answer is that the material isn't exclusive
| to the classroom so they will learn it sooner or later.
|
| There are plenty of people that adapt it to older children,
| but the 3 years batches are the first thing to go away.
|
| At the other extreme, I've seen attempts to get ride of the
| synchronicity at university undergraduate courses. It's
| almost trivial there and seems to have no downsides.
| em-bee wrote:
| _the 3 years batches are the first thing to go away._
|
| the term "montessori" is not protected, so many schools
| claim to use montessori, but aren't really.
|
| from https://montessori-ami.org/about-
| montessori/montessori-12-18
|
| _The school for adolescents is for young people ages 12
| through 18. Sometimes the young people are divided into
| two groups of 12 to 15 and 15 to 18 and sometimes all six
| years interact in one environment, depending upon the
| size of the school._
|
| so in fact instead of the batches going away, they may
| grow to an even wider age range. the same for elementary.
|
| _At the other extreme, I 've seen attempts to get rid of
| the synchronicity at university undergraduate courses.
| It's almost trivial there and seems to have no
| downsides._
|
| that's how universities work in austria and germany. and
| it makes a lot of sense. the older you get the less the
| actual age matters for what you learn.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I found that it expanded a lot as I got older. In the early
| years people in the year above and below were like strangers.
| By the end of high school, I knew all the people in adjacent
| years, plus siblings. At uni there's only a few years there,
| so I guess it doesn't really count. Once I started worked it
| all stopped mattering, I have retired friends as well as ones
| that have just started work.
|
| But for little kids, it seems to matter a bit. You can tell
| kids change fast, so plus minus a year at a young age
| matters.
| em-bee wrote:
| montessori groups children into age ranges spanning 3
| years. 3-6 year olds are in one class and the older kids
| teach the younger ones. there is absolutely no indication
| that the age difference is a problem. so no, plus or minus
| a year does not matter even for a 3 year old kid.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I'm not saying it's a problem, just that you're gonna
| tend to have similar kids in a clump. That clump is gonna
| have some people ahead and some behind it. But the clump
| is gonna move at some sort of pace.
|
| > so no, plus or minus a year does not matter even for a
| 3 year old kid.
|
| Anyone who has kids is going to disagree with this.
| gwd wrote:
| If GP meant "there's no difference", they're certainly
| wrong; a four-year-old is obviously 33% more advanced
| than a 3-year-old. But the question here was about
| socialization -- can a 3-year-old and a 4-year-old
| satisfy one another's needs for peer socialization? Is a
| 4-year-old who socializes with 3-year-olds and 5-year-
| olds but no other 4-year-olds being socially deprived
| somehow? I think the answer there is clearly "yes" and
| "no", respectively.
| em-bee wrote:
| _a four-year-old is obviously 33% more advanced than a
| 3-year-old_
|
| that would require that all children develop at exactly
| the same pace which is simply not happening like that.
|
| see my other comment.
|
| i do agree with the socialization.
| em-bee wrote:
| i have kids.
|
| the age difference matters for the development of each
| individual kid, but it us rather useless as a measure to
| compare the development of different kids.
|
| in the first few years, the development of each kid is so
| different that no two kids of the same age are alike. you
| can have a four year old with the maturity of a two year
| old, or a three year old going on five. a wider age range
| allows children with the same level of maturity to play
| together regardless of the individual age.
|
| also younger kids learn from older kids with allows them
| to mature faster.
|
| this difference in maturity continues, but as the kids
| are older it just matters less, because the material
| being taught in school does not depend on the level of
| maturity but only on what they already learned regardless
| of how mature they are.
| lordnacho wrote:
| This I can agree with. I benefited a lot from having
| older cousins around.
|
| At the moment I have a kid who is asking me about
| chemistry, and I can't just wait 5 years for him to get
| to that age where they teach people specifically
| chemistry (as opposed to general science). There's no
| reason I can't tell a 9 year old about valencies and that
| kind of thing, so why does school wait with it?
| em-bee wrote:
| i think once you go beyond the basics of math, reading
| and writing, the problem is to order all the remaining
| material into some sort of sequence, but it matters less
| what the actual sequence is. you could start with
| chemistry earlier, and anyone homeschooling may do just
| that, but this is going back to the exact problem that
| started this sub-thread: schools being designed to teach
| everyone at the same pace.
| brimble wrote:
| > There's no reason I can't tell a 9 year old about
| valencies and that kind of thing, so why does school wait
| with it?
|
| Not enough staff (teachers) to differentiate instruction
| that finely.
|
| A lot of stuff sounds like a great idea until you're
| looking at a classroom of 18-28 students and everyone
| else around you is trying to deal with a similar-sized
| class of their own. Special-ed kids might get help down
| to having one entire adult just to help and follow around
| that single kid all day (!) but there's no stomach for
| spending that kind of money to help kids who are ahead,
| or to reduce class sizes so regular classroom teachers
| can realistically do a better job of differentiation.
| Best most places get are very-part-time gifted programs.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The Montessory philosophy isn't that the age doesn't
| matter. It's that it matters and children of different ages
| benefit from mixing.
| nisegami wrote:
| School is glorified babysitting until university. Actually
| learning is just a convenient but ultimately secondary use of
| that time.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > School is glorified babysitting
|
| as a parent of a 12 and 9 year old i mostly agree. You really
| have to augment and reaffirm the material being taught in
| school outside of the school setting and with a different
| approach. It takes a lot of work to nurture and grow a love-
| of-learning vs just "did you do your homework? yes? good.".
| No parent is perfect though, it takes a lot of effort and
| trial/error to learn what works and doesn't work with your
| particular kid.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| In US maybe. Other countries might have or had better
| systems.
| znpy wrote:
| > School is glorified babysitting until university.
|
| This is true, this is a harsh truth.
|
| You can see the effect in actual (real world) consequences:
| no one cares if you learn nothing at school and no teacher is
| ever fired for low learning outcome in their students. But
| the immediate moment a student gets hurt, for any reason,
| then hell is unleashed on the teacher, lawyers get involved,
| a the teachers is now actually risking something.
|
| School is glorified babysitting, until university when you're
| on your own, age brackets mostly don't matter, and the burden
| of learning is onto you (professors don't care).
| dragonsky67 wrote:
| This has been evidenced by the big push to get kids back into
| face to face school during the pandemic. It is very rare for
| any discussion promoting this to even mention education let
| alone propose that face to face education is better than what
| has been happening over the last couple of years.
| Zircom wrote:
| WGU is an online, fully accredited college that does exactly
| that. You pay for 6 months at a time and can do as many classes
| as you're able to complete within that time frame.
|
| I just started at the beginning of February and have already
| knocked out an entire course in the past 10 days, it's honestly
| the best experience I've ever had with schooling. I like to
| work at my own pace because my motivation to get things done
| comes in bits and spurts, so I like to take advance of the
| upswings of my motivation levels and will manically get as much
| done as I can it fades and then take a week off to just chill,
| which did not work very well when I was enrolled at a more
| traditional university.
| lordnacho wrote:
| And WGU is short for what?
| Zircom wrote:
| Western Governors University sorry
| ltfey wrote:
| School is a flawed meritocracy, but it actually makes efforts to
| be one.
|
| Corporate is a deliberate non-meritocracy whose purpose is to
| ratify the inadequate descendants of an existing oligarchy _as_
| meritocrats. Mussolini didn 't make the trains run on time; he
| punished people who said the trains were late. Corporate is the
| same: meritocracy by assertion--and only by assertion.
|
| In school, you learn that hard work is rewarded (with some noise)
| and that cheaters eventually get caught. The system isn't
| perfect, and there's definitely some corruption in admissions
| decisions later on, due to the socioeconomic fuckery that infects
| everything... but the attempt to be a meritocracy is at least
| clearly there. If you are treated unjustly by the system, you can
| at least appeal to the concept of meritocracy, and you have a
| chance of winning.
|
| Corporate is easier, in the sense that the work is almost never
| demanding, and the evaluation thereof is invariably political...
| but if you go in expecting a meritocracy, because that's what
| 16-20+ years of schooling had you believing you would find...
| then oh boy are you going to be disappointed when you see what
| it's actually like. If a professor played favorites the way the
| average corporate manager does, he'd be fired.
|
| Corporate is also a lot noisier. In school, you might get a B
| when you should have gotten an A, once in a while, but over time
| the noise cancels out. In corporate, you can get fired, and have
| your income turned off, for all kinds of stupid political
| reasons.
| dxbydt wrote:
| Both corporate & school seek feedback. Guess who acts on it ?
|
| Here is some stellar feedback:
|
| https://google.com/search?q="worst+professor"+https://www.ra...
|
| Literally none of these fine folk have been fired. They have a
| job for life. For life. I can give you a long list of
| professors who have been utterly unethical in their dealings,
| but I could do nothing about it because they have tenure.
|
| Whereas when corporate gets blackballed on their glassdoor,
| current employees bail, future employees won't bother to apply,
| word spreads & market justice is swift, stock ticker points
| down & to the right.
|
| Now tell me who is meritocratic.
| eadmund wrote:
| I think that's needlessly cynical, and moreover does not align
| with my own experience in large and small corporations. I think
| that most folks in a corporation are trying to do well _and_ do
| good. What you don 't see is that 'politics' are one of the
| merits the corporate meritocracy is optimising for -- and that
| 'politics' is just a single word shorthand for 'dealing with
| human beings.'
|
| My experience has been that yes, both professors and managers
| have favourites: they tend to favour those who have positive,
| unselfish, engaged attitudes. And sure, that is itself selfish:
| positive, unselfish, engaged people are more pleasant to work
| with. And I have also found that those who complain the loudest
| -- I include myself in that number, in my lesser moments -- are
| those who are not engaging with the system as it is, rather
| than the system as they wish it would be.
|
| The real trouble is that in a large enough organisation the
| system as it is may be so opaque that it really does defy
| understanding and consequently engagement.
|
| Anyway, rather than assuming bad faith, try assuming good
| faith. But of course verify it, too!
| arvinsim wrote:
| > 'politics' is just a single word shorthand for 'dealing
| with human beings.'
|
| No wonder why we are so messed up if this is the bar that we
| set and condone.
| swayvil wrote:
| Social media is very much like corporate in that arbitrary
| assertion backed with absolute power (downvoting, censorship,
| banning, cancelling...) runs everything.
|
| And anything can be asserted. Up is down, black is white,
| beautiful is ugly. And you'd better go along with it or you're
| out.
|
| Call it hive-corporatism.
|
| It seems to be a natural social formation.
| ltfey wrote:
| I agree. I don't know what's "natural" because I don't think
| human nature is well-defined or stable; most humans seem to
| reflect the context they are in. Otherwise, you are
| absolutely correct, and this problem is not limited to the
| corporate adversaries or "the right". It is truly systemic.
| nsv wrote:
| At least social media has an element of democracy to it.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| >If a professor played favorites the way the average corporate
| manager does, he'd be fired.
|
| Have you been near a grad school lately?
| stared wrote:
| The critical difference is simple: for students, the hierarchy
| is flat. In particular, there is no risk that a student gets
| promoted to being a teacher (even if they know more).
|
| Even among teachers, it isn't the case - there is internal
| politics as in every workplace.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Corporate is weird. The tendency is to have an in-group and out
| group, but that is just normal human behavior. Nothing ground-
| breaking here.
|
| But to say that work is not demanding and evaluation always
| political is very big generalization. Some hard projects go to
| people that can handle them ( or can't if you don't like them
| ). When that big project is over, there seems to be a very
| clear indication, who MVPs are ( even if they do not have 'in-
| group' status ). So some level of meritocracy exists. It is
| hardly perfect, but it is there.
|
| On the other hand, school-wise I had a very wide range
| experiences, which kinda taught me that 'people tend to believe
| what they want to believe', by which I mean that teachers that
| think you are a good student will let you be a good student.
|
| I am writing this as I am sipping coffee preparing mentally for
| this year's projects.
| ekidd wrote:
| > _But to say that work is not demanding and evaluation
| always political is very big generalization. Some hard
| projects go to people that can handle them ( or can 't if you
| don't like them ). When that big project is over, there seems
| to be a very clear indication, who MVPs are ( even if they do
| not have 'in-group' status )._
|
| From what I've witnessed consulting, this varies greatly by
| company size. I once heard a Vice President of major bank
| explain it like this: "Look, beyond a certain size, almost
| nothing you can do will save or destroy a company. At that
| point, people mostly go to work to play politics.
| Occasionally, as a _side effect_ of the political
| maneuvering, work sometimes gets done. "
|
| But at a 50 person company, or even a 500 person company,
| it's possible for single person to make a huge difference.
| And yes, if the company is competent, then saving the day
| _will_ cut through the politics to a remarkable extent.
|
| To some extent, this must also be true at a Fortune 500
| company. But there, most of the people will the ability to
| "save the day" will usually be in upper management. The big
| tech companies may be an exception this: Google has their two
| "level 11s", and Microsoft had the massively talented team
| that they used to catch up to Netscape Navigator in the 90s.
| mattxxx wrote:
| > "Look, beyond a certain size, almost nothing you can do
| will save or destroy a company. At that point, people
| mostly go to work to play politics. Occasionally, as a side
| effect of the political maneuvering, work sometimes gets
| done."
|
| From working at a big company, this is accurate.
|
| > But at a 50 person company, or even a 500 person company,
| it's possible for single person to make a huge difference.
|
| That's true, and you still might be stuck fighting politics
| to do it.
| ekidd wrote:
| > _That 's true, and you still might be stuck fighting
| politics to do it._
|
| Yeah, politics are kind of built into the human
| condition. You can't avoid them _entirely,_ and even if
| you could, I 'm not sure it would actually be a good
| thing. You need to able to convince people, to recognize
| them and boost them up when they're doing good work, and
| to get groups onto the same page. And all of this
| involves "politics" to some extent.
|
| But a company's politics might be relatively healthy, or
| completely poisonous. Or anything in between. The best
| organizations are the ones where the overall goal is
| important, and where ethics are important, and where the
| politics are mostly positive-to-neutral.
|
| Finally, if you want to save the day, you have to
| convince someone to take a risk on your plan, and your
| ability to implement it. After a couple of successes,
| this can become easier the next time. But there's
| politics involved in that, too.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| "Look, beyond a certain size, almost nothing you can do
| will save or destroy a company."
|
| I wanted to reflexively say no, but then I remembered
| Equifax breach. Now that I think about it, I mostly worked
| for regional entities, but never really big ones.
| ltfey wrote:
| I agree with what you're saying. However, I disagree on one
| bit:
|
| _But there, most of the people will the ability to "save
| the day" will usually be in upper management. The big tech
| companies may be an exception this: Google has their two
| "level 11s", and Microsoft had the massively talented team
| that they used to catch up to Netscape Navigator in the
| 90s._
|
| The tech companies are not exceptions. You don't become a
| "level 11" at Google without playing political hardball. In
| a big company, the CEOs won't even know who you are,
| certainly not enough to invest in your career or give you
| opportunities (such as taking on Netscape in the '90s),
| unless you're willing to go lawful evil and collect some
| scalps.
| ltfey wrote:
| In school, you get multiple noisy grades per year but the
| noise cancels out. That's what averaging does. You might get
| a B or even a C when you deserved an A, and vice versa, but
| your grade-point average will, in the long term,
| approximately reflect what you put into your work.
|
| In corporate, there's just as much noise, but rather than
| getting smoothed out over time, it accelerates. In corporate,
| some guy can turn off your income, even though you're good at
| your job, because a manager wants to show off that he "can
| make tough decisions" and impress his own manager--either to
| get a promotion, or to get into someone's pants. It's random
| and bad things happen for no good reason, and we're prime to
| just accept that this is "just business" but we shouldn't
| have to. We can build better systems, by far, than the ones
| we've got.
| bko wrote:
| You have it exactly opposite in almost every way.
|
| Corporate attempts to be meritocratic. They have every
| incentive to be. Executives want to hire the more effective
| people to perform tasks so they can maximize profits. They can
| be greedy or stupid, but not both. They can hire their friends
| and family, sure, and sometimes they do. But they have an
| incentive to make decisions on merit otherwise they would go
| out of business and be out-competed.
|
| What incentive does a school have to reward hard work? The
| teachers and administrators don't get a bonus if they're school
| does well. Many don't even get evaluated and firing teachers is
| very difficult in the US. I knew plenty of teachers that would
| just phone it in year after year. Everyone knew this, but
| really couldn't do anything about it. Many do care because its
| the right thing to do, but it's not built into the system.
|
| > [re schools] If you are treated unjustly by the system, you
| can at least appeal to the concept of meritocracy, and you have
| a chance of winning.
|
| Yeah, I don't know your experience but I was treated unjustly
| in school. The disciplinarian (yes this was a real thing in my
| high school) was a tyrant. He would selectively yell at certain
| kids, humiliate others and apply uneven justice. What could I
| have done about it? Some parents complained sure but you're
| pretty much stuck there unless you want to pack your bags and
| move to a different town. In corporate world you just find
| another job. It's a lot easier than convincing your parents to
| move
|
| > Corporate is easier, in the sense that the work is almost
| never demanding, and the evaluation thereof is invariably
| political
|
| Not all jobs are bullshit jobs. Some jobs actually deliver some
| kind of value with a feedback loop
| ltfey wrote:
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| Just to let you know I completely agree with you.
|
| The corporations I've worked for rewarded schmoozing with
| the manager much more than competence.
|
| Maybe those other people disagreeing with you worked for
| different corporations?
|
| I have no idea but I've worked for several corporations and
| they were all a mess in this way.
|
| My current position as a software engineer with almost a
| decade of experience is a subordinate to a project manager
| who has one year of experience in tech and the project is
| millions of dollars and years behind schedule.
|
| This being a tax payer funded project to create a system
| for a few hundred people...
|
| The person in charge is friends with the manager and the
| manager is friends with the COO and on up the chain.
|
| Previous position was for DXC technologies who fired my
| entire team except me and another and then hired offshore
| workers. They were also sued by their customers for
| providing poor quality software.
|
| The business practices I've seen boggle my mind.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| DXC in New Orleans has the reputation of mud among local
| devs.
| bko wrote:
| I'm sorry, I can't take you seriously with statements like
| this.
|
| > Class solidarity and positional maintenance are the real
| objectives
|
| Who's organizing all the world's corporate leaders? Who's
| preventing from non-infiltrated people from starting
| businesses? This is extremely conspiratorial
|
| > Companies will do bad things to make a profit, and on
| rare occasions they even do good things to make a profit
|
| Really? Rare occasions? Do you deal with any private
| businesses in your every day? 99% of my interactions with
| private businesses is positive. How can this be taken as a
| serious statement?
|
| > Big companies don't go out of business because they're
| out-competed. They do so because their management loses the
| faith of the upper class and can no longer access
| investment, clients, resources, or political advantages.
|
| Who's doing this coordination? Blockbuster drops the ball
| on streaming and Netflix came out with a better product and
| consumer tastes shifted away from in-store movie rentals to
| digital. I'm sure there's some conspiracy theory that
| Blockbuster execs offended "the upper class" so it was
| decided they need to go away.
|
| I'm trying to read your comments in good-faith but I find
| it increasingly difficult to do so due to the
| conspiratorial nature of your argument.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| What the parent comment is saying does apply to large
| corporations. I will be very specific - I worked for
| Fidelity. Fidelity does not need smart people for 80% of
| their professional positions. They need someone who can
| pass the FINRA Series 7/63 to get a licenses and follow
| procedure. Without exaggeration, there are scripts for
| most of the work. You don't have to follow them to the
| letter, but you can. Standing out in most of these roles
| other than "not messing up" is hard and doesn't really
| benefit the company except on the sale side of things
| (where compensations reach FAANG level, while working 70
| hour weeks). As a result, people hire their friends and
| family. They do not care about Fidelity growing - they
| know it will continue to exist.
|
| Take a software startup I worked for later - they care
| about profits and they care about employee morale. They
| are out to make money and they need the best and the
| brightest. It affects their bottom line. A good dev can
| bring in millions in revenue. They give promotions, they
| retain. They tell their dumbass son/daughter who got
| hired to shut his/her mouth, be respectful, and not boss
| anyone around even if they do hire him/her.
|
| I also see this in emerging economies - when the USSR
| collapsed, people really hired talent, because the
| markets were competitive. (Even though former USSR is
| famous for nepotism)
|
| A lot of established companies in the US are truly not
| competitive and have the market cornered, hence some
| validity in the parent comment.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| > profits aren't the true goal...
|
| Ok, we can all stop there and go home. This person knows
| more than every economist and game-theorist on the planet.
|
| >They're all kinda the same, though, and the system is
| designed that way.
|
| I take it you haven't had many jobs I've worked at 5
| different corporations and this is just verifiably wrong.
| 'The system' you're referencing is voluntary exchange, and
| it's not designed, it emerges from the concept of private
| property.
| ltfey wrote:
| verve_rat wrote:
| Profit for the firm might be the goal for the firm as an
| entity, such that it is, but the goal for each individual
| is their own self interest.
|
| The worker wants a pay rise, the manager wants a
| promotion, the CEO wants a better gig at the next
| company. None of that is a goal of making more money for
| the company.
| pc86 wrote:
| The number one way for the CEO to get a better gig at the
| next company is to make the company they're at now wildly
| successful. The number one way for a VP to get a
| promotion to the C suite is to make the CEO look good.
| Etc. etc. down the line to the ICs.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| >The worker wants a pay rise, the manager wants a
| promotion, the CEO wants a better gig at the next
| company. None of that is a goal of making more money for
| the company.
|
| This is quite literally the definition of Adam Smith's
| Invisible Hand.
|
| "By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign
| industry, he intends only his own security; and by
| directing that industry in such a manner as its produce
| may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own
| gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by
| an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of
| his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society
| that it was not part of it. By pursuing his own interest
| he frequently promotes that of the society more
| effectually than when he really intends to promote it."
| BobbyJo wrote:
| But it is all 'profit'. Prestige is an asset some people
| pursue, money another.
|
| The challenge of corporate governance is designing it so
| that the incentives for the individuals within it align
| with the goals of the corporation itself. Every "How to
| do startups" book written has some portion of it
| dedicated to "How to get your employees' wants to align
| with the company's." This is the primary difference
| between companies that thrive over long periods and those
| that die out quickly.
|
| There are academic textbooks written on the subject. Its
| study is as old as the corporate structure itself.
| Retric wrote:
| > every economist
|
| This is well known in economics, perverse incentives is
| one example used to describe this kind of discrepancy.
| Help desk people hanging up on what is expected to be
| very long calls when average call length is considered a
| critical metric.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| Perverse incentives exist. 100%. However, they are
| studied as a failure in the system, something to fix.
| They are not designed or intentionally created as part of
| the system as the parent comment posits.
| Retric wrote:
| I don't agree with his comment and sure in a theoretical
| round cow in a vacuumed sort of way sure workers and
| managers incentives _should_ align with company profits.
|
| My point was economists spend a lot of time investigating
| the mismatch because no company gets this completely
| correct.
| francisofascii wrote:
| > But they have an incentive to make decisions on merit
| otherwise they would go out of business and be out-competed.
|
| Yeah, you would think so. To some extent you are right. But I
| think corporations are still very inefficient and get away
| with promoting or hiring less than ideal candidates. Why do
| they not get out-competed? Because the competition is also
| flawed in similar ways.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| "Many don't even get evaluated and firing teachers is very
| difficult in the US"
|
| I am a high school English teacher in the US. I have two to
| four performance reviews every school year (each entailing a
| pre & post meeting along with an in-class performance
| evaluation). I have tenure, but the only barrier to firing me
| between now and next September (barring fireable offenses) is
| a PIP which is ultimately based on subjective administrative
| reviews. If my boss doesn't want me back next year, I won't
| be.
|
| Stories about 'rubber rooms' in NYC are hardly demonstrative
| of teaching conditions nationwide.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Corporate attempts to be meritocratic. They have every
| incentive to be. Executives want to hire the more effective
| people to perform tasks so they can maximize profits.
|
| Not where I work. They hire people who they think will make
| them look good, and it's not always by hiring the most
| productive. They'll deny promotions to their most effective
| workers out of fear they will leave. They block transfers.
|
| Companies make a show of being meritocratic, but most of
| their rewards system fall apart under the smallest scrutiny.
| On average, those who self promote are more likely to get
| rewarded than those who do the better work. Some companies
| even formalize this by insisting the managers are not
| supposed to know who is better, and you have to convince them
| by writing your semi-annual review yourself.
|
| Lots of managers who want "yes-men" who'll reward those who
| say "yes" and fail and punish those who correctly say "no".
| karmanyaahm wrote:
| > The teachers and administrators don't get a bonus if
| they're school does well
|
| They don't, but a lot of administrators like showing off
| scores and stats to their administrator friends from
| different schools. There definitely is an incentive, even if
| it's imperfect - optimized for objective stats not subjective
| learning.
| austinl wrote:
| > Looking back on it, most of our essays were not good. They were
| rubbish.
|
| It makes me cringe to look back at my high school essays, like I
| was trying to write with a thesaurus. Thankfully, senior year, a
| friend who went on to write professionally edited one of my
| essays. He crossed out almost every adverb, and over words like
| "utilize", he wrote "use".
|
| It made me realize that myself, along with many students, mask
| their points with language because they have nothing to say, or
| are afraid to say it clearly (which is a separate problem
| altogether).
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| I think this also applies to failure.
|
| You can have many failures without much consequence on your life
| but a few have massive consequences on your life.
| magicloop wrote:
| I think one of the best things about school is the timetable. You
| don't need to be there too much of each day, and there are
| generous periods of holiday. What this means is that you have
| lots of time on your own to go deep and explore the thing you are
| most interested in, whilst having enough broad knowledge of the
| stuff you should know via the school curriculum. School kind of
| offers you a taste of so many things, so you get a chance to see
| what your inclinations are.
|
| People seem to think teachers can just deliver into you
| excellence, but excellence comes from within, and hopefully you
| are in an environment which permits you to grow and develop under
| your own personal efforts and dedication (i.e. stable home
| environment, warmth, food, etc.).
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| well, English (and not only) word "School" comes from greek, via
| latin. And it has also another teutonish meaning of "crowd", i.e.
| Schooling as in school of fish... Few languages have another word
| for it, closer to "Learn". But.. the overall system rots there
| too.. slowly turning into existing for the sake of existing.
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