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I think it's bullshit advice. It sounds like the remnants of a dying mysogynist corporate culture where appearances mattered more than substance. Working peopl

I think it's bullshit advice. It sounds like the remnants of a dying mysogynist corporate culture where appearances mattered more than substance. Working people are smarter now than they were at any point in history. They're just pretending to be stupid in order to fit into existing social power structures. But they can't continue to pretend forever. The notion of a working class which is smarter and better informed than the ruling class is a new situation which did not exist before and it's going to be interesting to see how it unravels as the intelligence and ambition gap widens. We are currently in a transition period; a dark age for progress. Smart people are being suppressed and coerced by a powerful class of ruling idiots who are using any means necessary to maintain a highly unstable status quo which is the enemy of progress itself.

venantius 8y ago
I strongly disagree. Leadership is fundamentally emotional-political-strategic, which are not skills that most engineers invest in. You can argue that more engineers should and do have those skills, but when someone says something like take an executive/leader lens rather than an engineering lens, they're trying to imply that you're only thinking about solving a logic puzzle rather than trying to win sales.
Theodores 8y ago
It is a capitalist world order that we live in. The masses are not going to rise up and demand worker cooperatives. It is essential to the system of wage slavery that the managers don't know what they are doing. In tech there is this veneer of having some power and ability to negotiate pay due to having the tech skills. Hence nobody in tech thinks of things like collective bargaining, everyone's pay level is secret. People in tech are just skilled craftsmen, the thing about YC is that it is about getting beyond being a hired hand. Get it right and you could be in the capitalist ruling class, hiring managers to keep people in their places so maximal wealth can be extracted from them. Work all your life to pay off the mortgage to the bank, make your bosses rich and retire quietly is what is expected. Some individual rights are given along the way, you can now have non standard dress codes and ping pong tables at work. But the premise is capitalism. Once people have the mortgage, the car, the two weeks of holiday and some tow word job title they are quite happy. There is no pretending about it, it is a system which is considered normal and the only way.

venantius 8y ago

I strongly disagree. Leadership is fundamentally emotional-political-strategic, which are not skills that most engineers invest in. You can argue that more engineers should and do have those skills, but when someone says something like take an executive/leader lens rather than an engineering lens, they're trying to imply that you're only thinking about solving a logic puzzle rather than trying to win sales.

Theodores 8y ago

It is a capitalist world order that we live in. The masses are not going to rise up and demand worker cooperatives. It is essential to the system of wage slavery that the managers don't know what they are doing. In tech there is this veneer of having some power and ability to negotiate pay due to having the tech skills. Hence nobody in tech thinks of things like collective bargaining, everyone's pay level is secret. People in tech are just skilled craftsmen, the thing about YC is that it is about getting beyond being a hired hand. Get it right and you could be in the capitalist ruling class, hiring managers to keep people in their places so maximal wealth can be extracted from them. Work all your life to pay off the mortgage to the bank, make your bosses rich and retire quietly is what is expected. Some individual rights are given along the way, you can now have non standard dress codes and ping pong tables at work. But the premise is capitalism. Once people have the mortgage, the car, the two weeks of holiday and some tow word job title they are quite happy. There is no pretending about it, it is a system which is considered normal and the only way.