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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

> What I’ve come to conclude is that my leaders are NOT thinking about these things until someone or something catastrophic forces them to.

No one gets paid for preventing problems. They get paid for increasing profit, either by increasing revenue and/or reducing costs. I would bet your leaders are consciously trying to skate by and reap the short term rewards and hoping someone like you fills in the gaps. As long as the problem can’t be pinned on them, or they can bounce before it causes sufficient disruption to the business to affect compensation, their goals are met.

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> No one gets paid for preventing problems. They get paid for increasing profit

This is not a law of nature. Different cultural norms yields different business priorities. The fact of the matter is that money is only a surrogate for value, it is not the actual thing. Current business teaching has ideologically put the money hoarders in charge where increasing their profits is the only appropriate moral behavior. This yields a legitimacy and incentive for shortermist thinking.

Equating money with value builds a distorted view of what humans actually value. Money is not ideal in representing the value of stability, fairness or compassion. these are very basic human values which are shared by most of us, yet money cannot encode these faithfully.

We shouldn't accept the side effects of our choice to use money as surrogate for value as some form of natural law.

Probably. Maybe. I have no clue. I only recently found out there have been three people in this middle management role before me; not a single one of them stayed around for two years. I’m on month 14 and started working on the resume this morning. :/

Certain middle management positions are setup to be “fall guy” positions. Technically, everyone is a fall guy for the person above them, but some more than others.

For example, the budget gets decided a few levels up, but the the immediate manager knows they aren’t being given the resources to succeed. Then their strategy, if they have the ability, might be to hire someone who they can point a finger to when it inevitably fails.

Semi-related but I also wonder much longer we’ll be hearing the use of “the pandemic” as reasons for leadership decision making.

Time to make 3 envelopes: http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/Prepare_three_envelopes

This is great.

The morale of the story is that it takes a year to figure out that organization-person fit is bad?

No one gets paid for preventing problems.

That may be true now but it seems like a recipe for disaster (check 3-4 ongoing disasters outside my window, yep). I assume in earlier eras society prepared for disasters, paid people to prevent disasters and so-forth. Has something changed?

I think the point being made here, is that it is difficult to gain recognition for counterfactuals.

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