Not necessarily. I’ve predicted bad outcomes for decisions in a few cases and been ignored but stuck around regardless. Mostly because I like my job and the goals of my organization even if it makes bad decisions.
Of course to remain productive and improve my influence in future decision making it is absolutely critical that when predictions come true, I do not go anywhere near an “I told you so mentality.”
Instead I do what I can to clean up the mess with a “how can I help?” attitude. And increasingly over time people take my opinions and analysis much much more seriously.
I wouldn’t say that’s the path everyone should take, especially because some work environments are just too toxic for any progress at all (I ran away, fast, from two jobs like that). And some people cherish having an entirely new type of challenge every few years instead of shepherding something through longer periods of time. All valid paths.
Keep in mind that Musk intentionally turned Twitter completely upside down. Anything that people there liked about it before Musk is likely gone—coworkers, WFH, perks.
It’s a difficult balance: <Y> is in fact necessary to continually achieve <X> but there are times where decisions focus exclusively, or at least too much, on <Y>. But we live in the real world, and sometimes that’s necessary. (<Y> is not money though it has an impact on our financials) And also sometime people with a broader view see further than I do and those choices that seem wrong come around a few years later and it turns out <X> is actually better off for it. It keeps me humble, skeptical of my own certainty even when it seems faultless.
But I’m also at a point now where people who pop up and start shouting <r>! or <f>! or something completely random like “Well how about <~€€€~>?” I can easily deal with: I go back, do a bit of the work I do, show it to the right people, and those shouts -disappear. Sometimes one gets through and it’s annoying, but whatever, nothing is perfects.
Of course the above vastly oversimplifies things. There are many, many more variables to juggle along the way. But I hope it gives a reasonable sense of things.
And I’m sure the “<X>” style notation of things in my explanation makes it harder understand what I mean, but I value my privacy, hence the abstractions of the factors involved.
I guess the way you abstracted will probably reduce your privacy (a tiny bit). At least I have not seen anybody write "<X>" instead of just X in this usecase.
So either this is very specific to you, or is very common in your circles so you do it too. Both of which reduce the number of potential candidate if somebody tries to doxx you.
Additional you (or your editor) uses “” over " which also reduces the number of candidates.
(Not trying to attack you here, just thought it was notable)
The goals of the organization are mostly a facade. The people running the organization, and their actions, are what the goals of the organization actually are.
Nobody good stays during ALL of this.
If you can’t refer to “last time this was disaster” (aka “I told you so”) how do you prevent it.
Iirc word histograms almost uniquely identify authors. Of course this is on larger amounts of text, but I guess you could identify users over seperate platforms this way.
E.g. Intend to use ellipsis (...) to separate thoughts in online conversation a lot. But I try to not do that in reddit, where I try to stay somewhat anonymous.
Still, I assume that it would be possible to correlate my reddit and HN account just by comparing the word histograms (ie which words I use and how often).
Sounds far fetched, but it's really not that hard. Quite recently somebody hacked this for correlating HN accounts with each other and found alt accounts of people with high accuracy. Which people confirmed. And that wasn't even a serious attempt, just a little hack on a sunday night.
In a sense, it's all too late now since all your writing is already out there. But could be good to know for the future.
Or, as I do, consider everything posted to HN to be linked to me. My handle is actually an abbreviation of my full name. I consider HN to be "professional" correspondence.
GP wrote:
> Enough so that I, given such a situation, would wait around a little bit to see how things played out before jumping ship.
That means "nobody" is talking about the group of people who have the option of "waiting around a little bit to see how things played out before jumping ship". H1B visa holders aren't included in that earlier group, so I didn't think a further qualification is necessary.
Deportation is a different legal event. It's a forceful expulsion which occurs because you did something seriously negative like break the law. Deportations are a big deal and a bad thing to have on your record in any country when it comes to your future prospects with that country.
To use a super rough analogy it's kind of like an honorable vs dishonorable discharge from the military.
Obviously. Are you suggesting that one can’t appreciate those? Or that this is some secret? Maybe the communication in the orgs you’ve been with has been poor?
Which runs against every good piece of advice that has ever been uttered about leadership. Musk far overpaid for twitter because he wanted to be the center of attention and what better way to do that than to buy the network which gets the most attention from "important" people?
He then took the Michael Jordan trope of "I never asked anyone to do anything I was unwilling to do" and tried to turn that into reality by sleeping in his office every once in a while. The problem with this sentiment is that the only employees who are going to stick around long-term in such a ridiculous working arrangement are those who either can't find jobs elsewhere or are terrified that they won't be able to find jobs elsewhere.
So now you've got a highly toxic work environment full of people who are unconfident in their own abilities to get the work done, and Elon constantly pretend like he's some sort of business genius from the movies who just walks into a meeting, throws a bunch of turds on top of the agenda without having a firm grasp of anything, and storms off to light the next fire.
It's fucking insane.
The twitter engineers were presented with an opportunity to jump ship and also get 3 months of severance. I think the rational ones, who had a choice took it, leaving employees who didn't consider it rationally, as well as employees on H1Bs who didn't have the luxury to quit without something else lined up
But I do work in an industry where even the C-level people usually (not always) have at least a little interest in truly pursuing mission <X>
I know this for a fact because even though I am not at all C-level or even the manager of a large team, I often have a seat of the table in the meetings where such people come together. Those meeting can be ugly, they can reveal how the sausage is made, to borrow that analogy. And I’ve seen how many (not all) truly are trying to get <X> done but doing so may require a bit of ugly sausage making to get there.
And I’m not a wide eyed 4th year either. I’m a grizzled and usually cynical veteran in my field. My job is often to put out fires, or produce analytical tools or output of strategic importance, and also to sometimes to plug a major gap in operational capabilities. I’m not really a manger but I’ve earned a seat at the table when the highest people get together as well as when they interface with counterparts at other organizations.
Don’t take that that to mean too much though: I may have a voice, but it is by far, very far, the smallest voice in the room.
(As a complete aside, that program of study also included Forensic Linguistics which truly fascinating. And of course the work of Claude Shannon and information theory, though not in any great depth)
I know that the site guidelines discourage that, but what can you do.
In practice, the immigration authorities have enforcement priorities, and deporting overstating H1B is very far from being one.
As long as you don't cross a border, no one will come looking for you.
Source, my immigration lawyer when I was in danger of overstaying my H1B.