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Comment by austin-cheney | Hacker News Reader

There are several logic violations with your comment:

* I never described anyone as lazy.

* Incompetence and laziness are completely orthogonal. A lazy person can still achieve higher than average productivity while an extremely hard working person can under deliver.

* People are not generally protected from layoffs by moving into management. Furthermore, movement into management is sometimes not voluntary.

* The excuse mentioned by one employer does not describe or qualify conditions in the industry either on average or as a whole.

* A person’s common sense personal opinion is not an objective qualifier.

Your comment completely lacks an objective perspective.

> And finally, who and why hired those bad people in the first place? Or did they become bad after they were hired?

If your comment were limited to just that one quote it would have been much better as it alludes a deeper cultural failure.

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> * I never described anyone as lazy.

I never said you did, I just added another bogus reason CEOs use to justify why layoffs are necessary, when really, the only reason is the market is bad and we want to have more profits and we thought we needed more people but really we don't. Or we just like to keep people in line with a 5% culling like facebook (?) now does -- things we could not do in the market conditions before but we can now do with impunity.

But all that shines a negative light on management, and people are generally empathetic to other people losing their livelihoods and why do that when it's so much easier to scapegoat.

>Your comment completely lacks an objective perspective.

But you feel your original perspective is objective?

> But you feel your original perspective is objective?

This is what I call first person problem. I have had two separate careers spanning decades each: software and military. Then because of community connections and decades spent talking with military members who themselves have other primary professions it seems clear software has a problem of self orientation that I don't see in any other profession except education. Entertainment may have this too, but I don't have any exposure to that industry.

Extreme self orientation is the inability to perceive the world outside of what is immediately limiting or gratifying to the person in question. This impacts perceptions of risk, statistics, measures, power distance, empathy, social intelligence, and much more. Convicted criminals acting in their own interests convicted of white collar crimes in industries like law and finance demonstrate this first person problem less than the average participant in education and software, which could be horrifying except many of those guys are sociapaths with high social intelligence and learned masking behaviors.

Outside of employment extreme self orientation is typically associated with a variety of anti-social behaviors like: autism, narcissism, sociopathy, and more. These are mental health concerns because they are limiting to the person in question and/or harmful persons around them.

The difference between our comments is that your comment was littered with first person pronouns. It was all about what you witnessed in limited contexts and what affects you. My comment was about the industry at large absent any participation from myself.

> The difference between our comments is that your comment was littered with first person pronouns. It was all about what you witnessed in limited contexts and what affects you. My comment was about the industry at large absent any participation from myself.

But we are both humans, limited by our own experiences. I have no problem admiting these are my own deductions about the world and my own perspective.

Unless I had scientific data to back the generality of my statements, I see no reason to use such a third person view.

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