9 ms·

How much feel good and drinking relationships matter in upper management. And on the downside, how little facts weight in when compared to a manager's gut feeli

How much feel good and drinking relationships matter in upper management. And on the downside, how little facts weight in when compared to a manager's gut feeling. Enthusiastically presenting a (factually wrong) solution can be a winning strategy. In high school, I thought I was a math genius because all of my solutions were judged as correct. Turns out, I was just a good presenter and nobody made any effort to check my results. Managers in big companies will be happy to buy your product if it helps themselves save face, even if it is a net negative for the company. That's how they end up with so many useless initiatives that get canceled after a year of burning money. Consultants are paid to be a straw man parrot. You tell their coworkers what your contact wants them to hear, so that they can blame it on you if their idea goes wrong. The same source code given to different product and marketing teams can be a 100x difference in revenue. If the sales team is not rich, run. They either cannot sell the product, or they could not sell themselves to get commission. Customer support matters a lot less than people think. A buggy 10-year-old software without support can still sell like candy if it solves a real and valuable business problem.

webew 7y ago
This is what would now be termed a "blackpill".
- fxtentacle 7y ago
  No, I didn't mean things in that sort of "nothing you can do about the sad truth" way. Instead, I consider this actionable advice. - Spend time hanging out with other guys talking about shared hobbies - When you like your results, make sure people can see your enthusiasm - Help people look good in front of their peers and they will buy - As a contractor, do what the customer wants, not what you like best - Before you spend the time to build something, research that your intended customer can and will buy it - Don't worry if people complain about your stuff. They always do, even if they get rich by using your tools. BTW, googling for Blackpill sure yields odd results: "What Is The Black Pill? A Closer Look Inside The New Red Pill" followed by 2 huge advertisements: "10x your attractiveness to women - Click Here" "Accidental discovery reveals the exact body type women want - Click Here" followed by a full-width picture of 10 naked models barely covered with what looks like a furry blanket.
  - Drakar1903 7y ago
    I think it's an expansion on Matrix's blue pill red pill analogy, except black seems an even more forceful and grim color than red.
  - jimmytucson 7y ago
    Stating it that way really brings it full circle. These sound reasonable, but may run counter your first intuition. Thanks!
- dmos62 7y ago
  What's a blackpill? Is this a twist on the Matrix's shtick with red and blue pills, but with a black one, signifying that this truth is somehow morbose or dark?
  - muzani 7y ago
    Redpill was a community of 'involuntary celibates', who were bad with women, and reacted to it with women hate, claiming that they were woke and saw women as manipulative. It took off, had a strong number of supporters. Blackpill is a derogatory term for a similar pattern - people who are bad at something and respond by being 'woke' and dismissive. I suppose the classic English term is "sour grapes".
    - have_faith 7y ago
      Redpill is a much older concept than recent incel usage. It has been around online as idea of revealing the true nature of something for a long time.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - muzani 7y ago
        Yes, but a quick internet search will highlight only the incel community. Much like how "meme" has evolved in meaning.
        ScottFree 7y ago
        A quick internet search will show you lots of dumb and incorrect things. It's a bad idea to define concepts based on what a quick internet search shows you.
      - egypturnash 7y ago
        Before "incels" it was mostly a term used by angry 4channers and MRAs, which is pretty much the same demographic as the average incel.
fxtentacle 7y ago
BTW, I just remembered another consultant story the other way around. I was trying to do a banking deal and they sent me a draft that had the requirements listed as checkboxes. [X] Form 123-AB has been signed [X] Project duration less than 2 years ... [ ] Company financials have been audited and confirmed And the offer was timed to expire within days. At first, I thought this was a joke in bad faith, as there would be no way to have all company financials audited and legally confirmed by a certified accountancy within 7 days. But then I just called some random accountant offices, told them my story of needing a quick audit for the bank and asked for a quote and their time frame. One company offered to do it as same-day service. I faxed them the documents in the morning, then his assistants would check them, then the certified accountant (the guy running the company) would confirm that everything was in order and then I'd get my result in the evening. When I drove there in the afternoon with my paperwork for them to confirm and stamp it, I was told that their head guy was on vacation and had never been in the office. But one helpful assistant stamped and signed all of my documents "i.A." = "in absence". The whole audit cost me less than my usual daily rate. Next day, I told my contact at the bank how things had gone and he chuckled and just said: Yes, they know that we just need the audit to tick a checkbox in our liability insurance form. In other words, while I considered what the accountant guy did to be a rather low-effort incomplete job, he did exactly what was expected of him by the bank and what I needed to get my deal done.
- shantly 7y ago
  > In other words, while I considered what the accountant guy did to be a rather low-effort incomplete job, he did exactly what was expected of him by the bank and what I needed to get my deal done. The degree to which everything runs on this sort of system is kind of horrifying, once you're exposed to enough things like this for that to sink in. Relatedly, I guess my contribution to the broader thread would be: Almost no-one knows what they're doing, let alone is much good at it—so few, in fact, that society and the economy (and everything else) basically run on a massive and super-serious game of playing pretend. Yes, even that big important organization (public or private) where you expect everyone to be pretty damn competent. The difference between them and some normal place is that 5% of their people are impressively good at their jobs, rather than 2%.
PavlovsCat 7y ago
That is the reason the world is burning. Instead of running from where you don't see it, run to attack where you do see it. It's better to fail as a good person than to succeed as a charlatan, and a bit of money can't plaster over the faculties of the mind drying up, among that the ability to resist charlatans in other contexts, including the political. "Business sophistry" is simply sophistry, brownnosing your boss is just brownnosing, and either you feed sophistry and naked emperors, or you don't. Everybody has "reasons", but more importantly, every day new people come into the world, and they deserve a clean shot at life more than crooked people deserve respect and comfort. Save your soul, you just have the one. > Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law. -- Kant
- growlist 7y ago
  The forces of chaos certainly seem to be in the ascendant in the West. A British woman makes thousands a month taking her clothes off online and selling her bathwater to perverts etc., yet if I call this out I'm liable to being labelled a dinosaur, misogynistic, hateful, etc. etc. In today's society possessing what were once considered traditional morals is liable to leave one at best socially isolated and at worst destitute.
  - geggam 7y ago
    Remember when a man of discriminating taste was considered good for society ?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - prometheus76 7y ago
    There are still girls in churches waiting for a faithful man to lead them to marriage and to a content life in a healthy relationship.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    There is a very good reason for that - "traditional morals" frankly are full of horrifying things accepted without comment and harmless things called the great Satan. Wars of colonialism, soldiers paid in plunder and rape, massacre of those only trying to defend their besieged home? Fine or even righteous when we do it. When others do they are foul invaders. Meanwhile, anything remotely lurid or new culturally is treated as an apocalyptic issue and the well of all sins. A streamer making money selling bathwater and being widely mocked doesn't even belong on the map of moral problems even when compared to petty examples of actual problems like parking ticket fixing rings. While limited in impact they are a clear warning sign of growing corruption.
dmos62 7y ago
> Consultants are paid to be a straw man parrot. You tell their coworkers what your contact wants them to hear, so that they can blame it on you if their idea goes wrong. I'm not sure I follow. Is "you" the consultant in the above scenario? A consultant is hired to pitch the idea of someone who's hired them, to the person's who's hired you colleagues. If the idea ultimately falls through, the person who's idea it was originally gets to shift blame on you. Oh, ok. While writing this I figured out what you meant by straw man parrot.
pmiller2 7y ago
The bit about math homework reminds me of how I started getting better grades in grad school as immediately after I started doing homework in LaTeX. It’s not that I got any smarter, and I don’t think my work improved significantly as a result of using LaTeX. IMO, it was just that my papers literally looked more convincing when they were typeset like preprints rather than handwritten.
- pgt 7y ago
  I spend a lot of time making my consulting invoices look good, because it seems to justify my rates and impresses the payroll department, who then pays me sooner.
  - mlvljr 7y ago
    This!
  - eyegor 7y ago
    How do you make an invoice look good? Fancy letter head?
    - Psyladine 7y ago
      Same way legal departments dress up what are more or less informal requests in high language and good production values. Old manager coined it "the power is in the template", big difference in response rate between an informal handwritten request & a proper looking 'official' request to comply.
    - vorpalhex 7y ago
      My go to as a freelancer was to buy a nice template (spend $50, it's worth it..) and customize it appropriately. You want something approaching "savvy yet professional" most of the time.
- majewsky 7y ago
  I like to think that companies respond to my inquiries much quicker and more diligently since I started sending them out as LaTeX-formatted letters.
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
Support is interesting, I've found that I get about one support issue for every sale. The interesting thing is most people who raise a support problem never buy the software and most people who do buy the software never raise any issues. None the less I do find it a valuable source of information, in particular identifying bugs and deficiencies.
knightofmars 7y ago
> ...how little facts weight in when compared to a manager's gut feeling. Yes. https://ideas.ted.com/why-do-so-many-incompetent-men-become-leaders-and-what-can-we-do-about-it/ https://ideas.ted.com/why-do-so-many-incompetent-men-become-...
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  Why single out managers? This is a quality of pretty much all people including arrogant tech workers who think they are better than everyone else.
  - sli 7y ago
    Because rank and file employees don't get to effect change on an entire department or company at a whim the way managers often can.
  - sangnoir 7y ago
    I was surprised by the number of times I've seen the most-voted comment on HN was outright wrong, or so off the mark it was not even wrong (in subjects at the periphery of tech where I have personal experience). I think managers & tech workers figure "Since I'm really good at X & Y, I must be good (in general). I have figured out how the world works (or can figure it out, after giving it a few minutes thought)". It's hubris.
    - starpilot 7y ago
      Take the currently most upvoted top-level comment on this thread for example, about how everything is a "system."
anywherenotes 7y ago
Customer support is super important when the product is immature. It keeps customers paying, and it produces a list of issues, clients can even help you prioritize them (at least if your clients are other businesses). Yes, once that program has been working for 10 years, it's likely that any bugs are easily worked around, but while the software is in development, it's likely there are no work arounds and customer support can take a beating from the customer and try to make the customer feel better, this stretches out the timeline for fixing the issues.
tootie 7y ago
You're not wrong, but this is the fully cynical point of view. Having good solutions and proven outcomes usually does matter. It's just that giving people confidence in your solution is also very important and can be done regardless of it's actual quality. The confidence game will eventually blow up in your face.
starpilot 7y ago
> How much feel good and drinking relationships matter in upper management. And on the downside, how little facts weight in when compared to a manager's gut feeling. This is because management is ultimately a job about people, and manager to manager relationships demonstrate one's skill on that axis. I think all of us would rather work with a coworker or boss with middling competence but who is nice to us, rather than a brilliant asshole.

webew 7y ago

This is what would now be termed a "blackpill".

fxtentacle 7y ago
No, I didn't mean things in that sort of "nothing you can do about the sad truth" way. Instead, I consider this actionable advice. - Spend time hanging out with other guys talking about shared hobbies - When you like your results, make sure people can see your enthusiasm - Help people look good in front of their peers and they will buy - As a contractor, do what the customer wants, not what you like best - Before you spend the time to build something, research that your intended customer can and will buy it - Don't worry if people complain about your stuff. They always do, even if they get rich by using your tools. BTW, googling for Blackpill sure yields odd results: "What Is The Black Pill? A Closer Look Inside The New Red Pill" followed by 2 huge advertisements: "10x your attractiveness to women - Click Here" "Accidental discovery reveals the exact body type women want - Click Here" followed by a full-width picture of 10 naked models barely covered with what looks like a furry blanket.
- Drakar1903 7y ago
  I think it's an expansion on Matrix's blue pill red pill analogy, except black seems an even more forceful and grim color than red.
- jimmytucson 7y ago
  Stating it that way really brings it full circle. These sound reasonable, but may run counter your first intuition. Thanks!
dmos62 7y ago
What's a blackpill? Is this a twist on the Matrix's shtick with red and blue pills, but with a black one, signifying that this truth is somehow morbose or dark?
- muzani 7y ago
  Redpill was a community of 'involuntary celibates', who were bad with women, and reacted to it with women hate, claiming that they were woke and saw women as manipulative. It took off, had a strong number of supporters. Blackpill is a derogatory term for a similar pattern - people who are bad at something and respond by being 'woke' and dismissive. I suppose the classic English term is "sour grapes".
  - have_faith 7y ago
    Redpill is a much older concept than recent incel usage. It has been around online as idea of revealing the true nature of something for a long time.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - muzani 7y ago
      Yes, but a quick internet search will highlight only the incel community. Much like how "meme" has evolved in meaning.
      - ScottFree 7y ago
        A quick internet search will show you lots of dumb and incorrect things. It's a bad idea to define concepts based on what a quick internet search shows you.
    - egypturnash 7y ago
      Before "incels" it was mostly a term used by angry 4channers and MRAs, which is pretty much the same demographic as the average incel.

fxtentacle 7y ago

BTW, I just remembered another consultant story the other way around. I was trying to do a banking deal and they sent me a draft that had the requirements listed as checkboxes. [X] Form 123-AB has been signed [X] Project duration less than 2 years ... [ ] Company financials have been audited and confirmed And the offer was timed to expire within days. At first, I thought this was a joke in bad faith, as there would be no way to have all company financials audited and legally confirmed by a certified accountancy within 7 days. But then I just called some random accountant offices, told them my story of needing a quick audit for the bank and asked for a quote and their time frame. One company offered to do it as same-day service. I faxed them the documents in the morning, then his assistants would check them, then the certified accountant (the guy running the company) would confirm that everything was in order and then I'd get my result in the evening. When I drove there in the afternoon with my paperwork for them to confirm and stamp it, I was told that their head guy was on vacation and had never been in the office. But one helpful assistant stamped and signed all of my documents "i.A." = "in absence". The whole audit cost me less than my usual daily rate. Next day, I told my contact at the bank how things had gone and he chuckled and just said: Yes, they know that we just need the audit to tick a checkbox in our liability insurance form. In other words, while I considered what the accountant guy did to be a rather low-effort incomplete job, he did exactly what was expected of him by the bank and what I needed to get my deal done.

shantly 7y ago
> In other words, while I considered what the accountant guy did to be a rather low-effort incomplete job, he did exactly what was expected of him by the bank and what I needed to get my deal done. The degree to which everything runs on this sort of system is kind of horrifying, once you're exposed to enough things like this for that to sink in. Relatedly, I guess my contribution to the broader thread would be: Almost no-one knows what they're doing, let alone is much good at it—so few, in fact, that society and the economy (and everything else) basically run on a massive and super-serious game of playing pretend. Yes, even that big important organization (public or private) where you expect everyone to be pretty damn competent. The difference between them and some normal place is that 5% of their people are impressively good at their jobs, rather than 2%.

PavlovsCat 7y ago

That is the reason the world is burning. Instead of running from where you don't see it, run to attack where you do see it. It's better to fail as a good person than to succeed as a charlatan, and a bit of money can't plaster over the faculties of the mind drying up, among that the ability to resist charlatans in other contexts, including the political. "Business sophistry" is simply sophistry, brownnosing your boss is just brownnosing, and either you feed sophistry and naked emperors, or you don't. Everybody has "reasons", but more importantly, every day new people come into the world, and they deserve a clean shot at life more than crooked people deserve respect and comfort. Save your soul, you just have the one. > Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law. -- Kant

growlist 7y ago
The forces of chaos certainly seem to be in the ascendant in the West. A British woman makes thousands a month taking her clothes off online and selling her bathwater to perverts etc., yet if I call this out I'm liable to being labelled a dinosaur, misogynistic, hateful, etc. etc. In today's society possessing what were once considered traditional morals is liable to leave one at best socially isolated and at worst destitute.
- geggam 7y ago
  Remember when a man of discriminating taste was considered good for society ?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- prometheus76 7y ago
  There are still girls in churches waiting for a faithful man to lead them to marriage and to a content life in a healthy relationship.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  There is a very good reason for that - "traditional morals" frankly are full of horrifying things accepted without comment and harmless things called the great Satan. Wars of colonialism, soldiers paid in plunder and rape, massacre of those only trying to defend their besieged home? Fine or even righteous when we do it. When others do they are foul invaders. Meanwhile, anything remotely lurid or new culturally is treated as an apocalyptic issue and the well of all sins. A streamer making money selling bathwater and being widely mocked doesn't even belong on the map of moral problems even when compared to petty examples of actual problems like parking ticket fixing rings. While limited in impact they are a clear warning sign of growing corruption.

dmos62 7y ago

> Consultants are paid to be a straw man parrot. You tell their coworkers what your contact wants them to hear, so that they can blame it on you if their idea goes wrong. I'm not sure I follow. Is "you" the consultant in the above scenario? A consultant is hired to pitch the idea of someone who's hired them, to the person's who's hired you colleagues. If the idea ultimately falls through, the person who's idea it was originally gets to shift blame on you. Oh, ok. While writing this I figured out what you meant by straw man parrot.

pmiller2 7y ago

The bit about math homework reminds me of how I started getting better grades in grad school as immediately after I started doing homework in LaTeX. It’s not that I got any smarter, and I don’t think my work improved significantly as a result of using LaTeX. IMO, it was just that my papers literally looked more convincing when they were typeset like preprints rather than handwritten.

pgt 7y ago
I spend a lot of time making my consulting invoices look good, because it seems to justify my rates and impresses the payroll department, who then pays me sooner.
- mlvljr 7y ago
  This!
- eyegor 7y ago
  How do you make an invoice look good? Fancy letter head?
  - Psyladine 7y ago
    Same way legal departments dress up what are more or less informal requests in high language and good production values. Old manager coined it "the power is in the template", big difference in response rate between an informal handwritten request & a proper looking 'official' request to comply.
  - vorpalhex 7y ago
    My go to as a freelancer was to buy a nice template (spend $50, it's worth it..) and customize it appropriately. You want something approaching "savvy yet professional" most of the time.
majewsky 7y ago
I like to think that companies respond to my inquiries much quicker and more diligently since I started sending them out as LaTeX-formatted letters.

tonyedgecombe 7y ago

Support is interesting, I've found that I get about one support issue for every sale. The interesting thing is most people who raise a support problem never buy the software and most people who do buy the software never raise any issues. None the less I do find it a valuable source of information, in particular identifying bugs and deficiencies.

knightofmars 7y ago

> ...how little facts weight in when compared to a manager's gut feeling. Yes. https://ideas.ted.com/why-do-so-many-incompetent-men-become-leaders-and-what-can-we-do-about-it/ https://ideas.ted.com/why-do-so-many-incompetent-men-become-...

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
Why single out managers? This is a quality of pretty much all people including arrogant tech workers who think they are better than everyone else.
- sli 7y ago
  Because rank and file employees don't get to effect change on an entire department or company at a whim the way managers often can.
- sangnoir 7y ago
  I was surprised by the number of times I've seen the most-voted comment on HN was outright wrong, or so off the mark it was not even wrong (in subjects at the periphery of tech where I have personal experience). I think managers & tech workers figure "Since I'm really good at X & Y, I must be good (in general). I have figured out how the world works (or can figure it out, after giving it a few minutes thought)". It's hubris.
  - starpilot 7y ago
    Take the currently most upvoted top-level comment on this thread for example, about how everything is a "system."

anywherenotes 7y ago

Customer support is super important when the product is immature. It keeps customers paying, and it produces a list of issues, clients can even help you prioritize them (at least if your clients are other businesses). Yes, once that program has been working for 10 years, it's likely that any bugs are easily worked around, but while the software is in development, it's likely there are no work arounds and customer support can take a beating from the customer and try to make the customer feel better, this stretches out the timeline for fixing the issues.

tootie 7y ago

You're not wrong, but this is the fully cynical point of view. Having good solutions and proven outcomes usually does matter. It's just that giving people confidence in your solution is also very important and can be done regardless of it's actual quality. The confidence game will eventually blow up in your face.

starpilot 7y ago

> How much feel good and drinking relationships matter in upper management. And on the downside, how little facts weight in when compared to a manager's gut feeling. This is because management is ultimately a job about people, and manager to manager relationships demonstrate one's skill on that axis. I think all of us would rather work with a coworker or boss with middling competence but who is nice to us, rather than a brilliant asshole.