117 karma · joined September 18, 2021
One of the issues with academia and academic training is it defines intelligence very narrowly. For example, it teaches people that simply having the right answer (or even just saying the right answer) is enough to be "smart". And then these smart people get out in the world and struggle because they learned a lot of "correct answers" but they didn't learn bigger things like: how to solve a problem, how sometimes people don't like you when you seemingly have the correct answer, how to account for all sorts of things you don't know outside the confines of a test question or assignment, or how to get the social buy in to actually do the correct thing (because "people liking you enough to do what you suggest" can be just as important as actually knowing what to do, if not moreso).
The other thing is the academic environment teaches a competitive intelligence but in many business situations you need many kinds of intelligence. If you are not good at sales but you're selling something, a social butterfly sales person can make or break you. An actual project manager that knows how to run a project can be worth more than gold. An accountant can keep your books better than you can even if you are broadly better at math in general because tax law is its own thing.
Further, intelligence overall isn't broadly applicable to many areas. Think of the doctors and lawyers who don't know how to open a PDF or the many programmers who blow off license agreements and legal documents until they get sued.
Academia gives you a narrow definition and scope of intelligence. The world is much more complicated.
2. Remembering when I was a lad in the late 90s that there was a common thread of wisdom that all the IT and techie and programming jobs were just going to be outsourced to India anyway so everyone was doomed.
Hell, you don't even have to go that far back. Remember when we were all going to be working and playing in the Metaverse on our fancy headsets after the bigbrains all went to Burning Man or whatever and came back talking about it and then decided nope?
Also I can't wait for these same articles about AI everything.
A few SV types hit the lotto, some do well for themselves, all of them make LinkedIn posts about how all you have to do is hustle and stay on your grindset mindset (because you never hear about all the people that fail, of course), etc. And one day you too will be rich and successful.
Leaving out of course it's extremely helpful if you already come from a rich family like so many "self made" Silicon Valley types.
They want to integrate it into desktop PCs? Lel. I did some training courses grad school classes and a lot of kids do literally everything on phones and tablets and maybe a chrome book. They use chatgpt to cheat and write papers because it's easy but nobody is using it for the kind of things starry eyed dorks are imagining using it for.
Nobody actually wants this except nerds and VCs trying to find the next gold rush. It's fancy spellcheck/suggestion/guessing and nobody gives a duck. I work with normies and half my team doesn't even have a modern enough smart phone to install recent apps. One guy just has a flip phone because he doesn't want to be bothered.
Remember how SV was pushing the Metaverse a couple years ago and now we all wear headsets and work in our Metaverse office using our NFT avatars with no legs? Exactly.
Silicon Valley isn't even worried about solving problems anymore except "the problem is I don't have enough money and I'd like to fix that". Nobody outside San Francisco and Austin is yearning for a fancy chatbot.
Only the business world runs on quarterly results and shareholder value and being able to say "yes, we are shipping 10 great new features next quarter, we have a $20 million marketing campaign, new user acquisition campaign, outreach to lapsed users, and PR campaign all ready to go" gets you bonuses and increased stock prices and new investment rounds.
Saying a bunch of Agile gobbledygook gets you...a job as a product manager or lead but you still gotta hit those milestones
And a lot of executives like LARPing Big Important Business Guys and walking the parapets to survey their domain which is much harder to do when everyone is on Zoom.
Here is a true story from several jobs ago: it was a small company and the CEO was fond of saying "people don't work when they work from home."
One day they were doing some construction on the building and the workers literally cut through the internet cable to the office. It was going to take a few days to repair.
Even then we still had to come sit in the office even though we were an internet based company with an internet based product and even things like our code repos and all that were online so we couldn't do much of anything.
He very begrudgingly let the customer service people go work from home but the rest of us had to sit in the office without internet just in case it came up.
I, of course, had to say something.
"Surely in this case," I say, "if we were to go home and do literally any work, it would be an improvement over the 0 work we can do right now. Like any work at all is an improvement, yes?"
He sighed and shook his head because I, a fool, just didn't get it.
"But you could work if we had internet," he said, and then grew larger and larger as he powered up to destroy me, "and anyway, people don't work when they work from home".
On the other hand given the consensus that the current AI models can only copy based on existing objects and it is fields that require a human touch that will be resistant to AI intrusion, perhaps the correct advice is now: "learn to human".
To be slightly less snide: when I was born, there were tens of thousands of nuclear weapons on a hair trigger all pointed across the globe, enough to wipe out life on earth many times over. We came close, sometime very close, sometimes to the point of "one guy deciding not to launch"...but here we are.
On the other hand there are actual threats you could worry and do something about like being in car accidents, heart disease and stroke, COVID is still going around and does have a long term health impact, but those are the less sexy and less all over hacker news threats. Those are Boring but much more likely to kill you than AI models achieving sentience.
Bet against the apocalypse. If you win, you make money. If you lose, you won't care because you will be dead.
You can see that has proven to be 100% accurate.
What you should be afraid of is someone having the same idea or realizing the same need and moving faster while you worry about someone stealing it.
Now the truly truly savvy thing to wonder is: if this is such a great idea, why hasn't anyone done it before? Because a lot of times, someone has but hadn't pursued it for good reasons. Or they did and found out why no one was competing in the space.
"How to Win Friends and Influence People" is the kind of thing the crowd here will sneer and roll their eyes at but for me it felt like the missing manual I never got for socializing and functioning in a work environment once I aged out of the early 20s startup/tech thing where frat house behavior is encouraged.
Like anything, socializing is a skill and you're going to have to fumble through the awkward stages to develop it. Toastmasters or if your business is large enough to have interest groups (veterans! Parents! They might even have Toastmasters! Etc. Etc.) Gives you something in common to talk about.
Greet people in the morning, especially if you see them regularly. Even if they groan or are grumpy its still nice to be acknowledged.
A lot of people like to sneer about smalltalk but I'm absolutely not going to leap into a discussion of Machiavallian ethics or particle physics or whatever with a dude I've never talked to before.
Have some business safe Normal People things to talk about. I do genuinely like sports but I made lots of friends with sales/marketing/execs/finance/etc. When I could ask them how their team was doing (or whatever) vs. The 10,000 technical weirdo of the day. It doesn't have to be sports. I have cats. That is what work people know about me. They don't need to know how much I play vidya or that I'm really into RPGs or whatever right up front unless they are obviously into that.
Ask questions. Not in an annoying way. But a lightly curious way. People leave signs all the time. Maybe their wallpaper is pictures of their kids or pet or car or boat or I dunno, whatever. Ask about it, just "oh is that your kids/dog/boat/etc.?" Ask a couple questions like how old they are. And then ask how they are doing every now and then when you talk to that person.
Pick people's brains. If someone is working in a job you want or are curious about or working with a technology or something you find interesting, ask them if you could have coffee or lunch and pick their brain sometime.
Humor: Humor in the workplace is a good way to get fired if you don't know what you're doing, and if you're asking this, you don't.
Money is infinite in that you can earn more or get a second job or get a better paying job or whatever. (Obviously only to a point but stay with me).
Also: your time does have value or it should since it is limited.
What would you pay for an hour of your life "back"? Or an hour to do whatever you wanted?
The truly smart play is trading money for time.
I've been a freelancer for a while but there was a point when I got laid off from my full time job so I ramped up to make ends meet. And I was fortunate enough that I was basically able to work for myself full time...
But when you are doing that, especially in the early stage...like I know that if I burn a couple hours at my billing rate of $50 an hour trying to save a few dollarydoos on a TV by standing in line for a big sale, am I really saving that much money when I effectively paid $100 to stand in line for two hours, something I don't like doing anyway, instead of just paying a bit more and getting a TV right away and not having to do that?
Another example. Changing the oil on my car. Could I? I'm pretty sure I could. I know the process. I'd probably want to watch some YouTube videos and there's tools I'd need to pick up, but I could be a real manly man and change my own oil and not get screwed by the shop.
But...
Let's say it costs me $40 at Autozone for oil and filter.
Let's say it costs $80 at the shop. A real shop not a jiffy lube. PFFT THOSE GUYS ARE SCREWING YA JUST DO IT YOURSELF.
I'd save $40 doing it DIY.
Most people would be on their way to Autozone...but on the other hand, I am not a mechanic that does 20 of these a day. Between watching videos and trying to figure out where everything is and inevitably covering myself in oil and whatnot.
Let's say it takes me 2 hours and the shop 1 hour. Doesn't matter, I saved 40 bucks! Whadda ripoff!
Would you pay 40 bucks for an hour of your life back? Maybe you like tinkering on cars and thats legit. Satisfaction is another benefit.
But for me, I am effectively paying some other person $40 to get dirty and bang his knuckles and whatnot while I sit in the AC and watch cable and dick around on my phone (which I enjoy much more) AND a lot of places will check and top up your other fluids and top off your tires and do an inspection to see if anything else will need work, which I don't know how to do and obviously they know what they are looking for.
AND because the guy knows what he's doing, it's done faster.
So effectively, yes, I will absolutely pay 40 bucks to hang out and watch basic cable in the air conditioning and make sure my car is good to go and all my fluids are topped off and also I get a whole hour of my life for doing whatever I want.
Don't trade time for money. Trade money for time.
Optimism bias is also a thing. People assume bad things won't happen to them. (This is a psychological phenomenon not just an IT thing). So if you're an exec, you could advocate for spending the money or you could just pocket your bonus for cutting costs and go "pfft nothing is going to happen".
And there's the old "if it's cheaper to deal with breaches if they happen than to pay security staff most places are just going to assume nothing bad will happen and deal with the cost if it ever comes up".
The services that do this for old people think I'm insane. None of the car services will do it.
Go.