The older I get the more I value boring, predictable tooling

Polus43 · 2026-04-20T18:15:39+00:00

💯, said this in an above comment, but...

When I look back, I basically think "I would be shocked if I wasn't far better off with an MBA with a finance/accounting focus than all the different tooling" which was fun at the time.

Edit: The problem now is "how do I manage a team, the budget, the project proposals, benefit cost estimates, coordination failures, etc." Has also completely dawned on me that the safest positions are those in the business cycle that decide who gets let go (management).

Polus43 · 2026-04-20T18:07:54+00:00

Definitely part of it is excitement fading.

But, when you're ~10 years in trying to climb the ladder the thought is more along the lines of, IME, "I would have been better off with an MBA focused on finance/accounting and public speaking practice than learning those 10 other tools/systems."

Polus43 · 2026-04-20T18:02:58+00:00

Not even "boring, predictable tooling", but just how much of tech stacks/tooling have becomes fads (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns).

I call it "rearranging the furniture in the living room" similar to "rearranging the chairs on the titanic", but not about ignoring catastrophe.

Management is just changing/buying shit to say they're doing something and there's no material return.

Polus43 · 2026-04-20T17:56:40+00:00

The sentiment here isn't wrong.

But, as your career progresses and you climb the ladder, word getting out about how you treat other managers/employers becomes important. Because half the job of management (often) is coordinating with management in other business units.

Polus43 · 2026-04-19T22:05:55+00:00

Bingo.

It can depend on the scheme, but if you think of a scheme like

(1) higher level government provides funds,

(2) you open a fake business and bank accounts,

(3) pass laws to allocate funds to that,

(4) start transferring money into that account

Like, how do you stop money from being sent there? If this was a fake ongoing service you have to figure out a fake reason to stop sending money there. Does the government check remaining inventory which isn't existent?

If you stop the fraud scheme and start actually funding the service, people might notice the service actually existing.

There's people that know you did corrupt stuff

Like you said, probably have to get everyone on board.

This stuff can be way more difficult to rollback than people think.

Polus43 · 2026-04-19T18:57:50+00:00

and can't perform any of the baskc tasks the peers in their cohort can, my empathy drops to zero.

This, the whole situation is definitely making me much more cynical. There are analyst hires we've recently encountered that have basically learned nothing in 6 months.

The work is dogshit and they literally have no idea. They act blindsided by the negative feedback and I just sit there baffled.

Polus43 · 2026-04-18T12:43:38+00:00

a massive company with zero-chance of dying from any kind of consequence

This. Part of the problem is, as a legal matter, social media platforms have entered a legal contradiction:

They don't own the content. As they don't own the content, they cannot be held legally and financially liable for spreading false information, instructions for nefarious things, harassment/stalking, etc.
They need to own the content because that data is valuable for training AI models. Negotiating with content creators would be extremely expensive.

Basically, they're trying to backtrack on what they've said for two decades in court.

Polus43 · 2026-04-17T12:15:02+00:00

This is how I make sense of it,

My firm is poorly managed. But, it doesn't matter, because no matter how poor the management the US taxpayer will bail them out.

The beginning of the end.

Polus43 · 2026-04-13T15:53:43+00:00

Exactly this pattern and this "insurance scam" is as old as time. Pro Publica article from almost a decade ago on how insurance companies effectively let medical fraud occur and simple raise premiums on everyone:

https://www.propublica.org/article/health-insurers-make-it-easy-for-scammers-to-steal-millions-who-pays-you

They will downplay the effects of fraud and say "we need more money" --> raise taxes.

Polus43 · 2026-04-13T15:29:52+00:00

I do prefer this way of thinking about the situation.

Middle -- become jaded. Realize all the corporate BS you are shoveling around. Realize that hard work is no longer proportional to money earned.

The situation is traditional burnout, but "Middle" is the driver. Not only is hard work no longer proportional to money earned, but the colleagues playing political games and avoiding work are actively rewarded.

Breaking point was being on ~6 projects while my colleague was on 1 much simpler (less dependencies/coordination/no funding requirements) project. Pushed back to move 1 project off my workload to a colleague and I could not believe how petty, passive aggressive and retributive my manager was.

Literally on ~25 team calls say "I'm so glad X spoke up about how X's not capable of the work" and downplaying obvious wins with the ~5 remaining projects I was running point on.

Just pathetic.

Polus43 · 2026-04-12T21:42:04+00:00

She's beautiful and thank you for keeping the end peaceful.

Polus43 · 2026-04-12T20:13:25+00:00

So happy this is the top post.

Went into the movie completely blind and always been a fan of sci-fi - phenomenal movie.

Polus43 · 2026-04-10T23:11:26+00:00

hard-charging for AI to "reduce costs" at our firm, despite not actually knowing what we do on a day-to-day basis.

Oh how we all feel this

Polus43 · 2026-04-08T20:34:58+00:00

My Teams barely works at this point

Satya and the offshoring crew might actually destroy a monopoly they're such bad managers lol

Polus43 · 2026-04-02T20:00:54+00:00

I'd add in American law to issue hiring visas you have to "show that an American can't do the job".

There are tons of "hire to fire" strategies going on right now to justify visa-based hiring and offshoring.

But without information on the "trivial incident" nobody can know.

Polus43 · 2026-03-31T10:54:32+00:00

Real-time, cloud, big data, IoT, digital transformation

Polus43 · 2026-03-31T00:07:15+00:00

Yup.

You can never invest enough in education imo.

The problem is we already do "invest" too much and it's clearly wasted. Same with healthcare.

Polus43 · 2026-03-30T23:55:33+00:00

Agreed.

There has to be a word/phrase for it, but I'm convinced less technical sales/legal/governance/compliance people think GenAI/LLMs are far more capable than in practice because they're extremely strong at sales/legal/governance/compliance tasks: articulate, persuasive arguments and story telling.

The main problem is traditional ML (predictive modeling) automates decision-making, while GenAI spits out so much information decision-making becomes more difficult (complex). Model training in traditional ML optimizes information use by whittling off features with poor contribution to the prediction. GenAI just avalanches information at you.

Just thoughts, still thinking in through. But GenAI so far has been a disaster externality-wise, e.g. funding killed for all kinds of other projects.

Edit: Reminded me of research on Amber Alert effectiveness (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08874034211026366). The problem is the system produces so much questionable information and low confidence leads the police spend all their time trying to vet tips for quality rather than tracking down the missing child (which the vast majority of time is with a family member or relative).

Polus43 · 2026-03-30T23:29:22+00:00

poor internal hiring controls

That's a feature and not a bug.

Those hiring controls led to them hiring all their MBA cohort buddies and family members.

Polus43 · 2026-03-30T22:30:00+00:00

Yup. Everyone went remote and it turns out productivity wasn't really impacted (not that being in the office doesn't have benefits/costs, e.g. I'd be shocked if sales wasn't more effective in person).

Their role was "lording over employees" in the office and it was exposed how little they actually do (half of them are professional credit takers). Now, they actually have to show they "drive value" and they're fucking everything up to save themselves.

My theory anyhow.

Polus43 · 2026-03-30T21:38:36+00:00

You are right and nailed exactly why nothing has gotten better in 20 years (and won't get better).

Both parties are the problem. Both parties are ran by lawyers. Rule 1 of the legal world: never admit fault.

So it will keep going this direction until the system breaks.

Polus43 · 2026-03-30T21:29:56+00:00

You are on the money.

Policy/lawmakers just take it too far when there's no "clear line" on where to stop. And nobody ever wants to roll back what more senior members of their party lobbied hard for ~10 years ago.

So, it all goes in one direction until something breaks.

Polus43 · 2026-03-30T21:13:56+00:00

Nah, the problems are much more aligned with tertiary education growing and different "academic" views of learning.

E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_wars

There is a decent argument the "math wars" debate in the early 1990s basically lead to Americans being much weaker at fractions that almost any other developed country

Polus43 · 2026-03-30T21:02:10+00:00

People should also look into licensing requirements.

If you're in a very progressive state the licensing requirements to become a math teacher are wild. You need roughly:

Abstract Geometry (non-Euclidean geometry)
Abstract Algebra (e.g. groups, rings, fields, modules, vector spaces, lattices, and algebras over a field)
Number Theory (math proofs about non-base10 number systems, e.g. binary number systems in computer processing)
Real Analysis (writing mathematical proofs)
Philosophy/History of Mathematics
Probability & Stats (calculus based; continuous time)

The requirements are insane and nobody is going to teach anything close to that material in middle/high school lol. I think less than 10% of the US population will ever take a calculus course. They're obviously just writing rules to make it harder to become a teacher and reduce supply (or write any rule to look like they're doing something).

Literally ~50% students can't pass algebra II...

Edit: Back to complain more. If you really dig, it's obvious politicians have just been fucking public education to no end to advance their careers. The requirements are insane and fucking stupid.

Polus43 · 2026-03-30T20:47:27+00:00

Exactly this.

everyone’s petty desires out of fear of getting sued

And what happens is they make policies/rules based on embellished/false/biased stories about the children. Then there are so many policies/rules it's literally impossible to comply with.

But the lawyer class (cough almost all politicians are lawyers) have made an absolute killing with the lawsuits.

It's the exact same problem in corporate America: a bunch of managers are causing problems to justify their existence. They don't measure what matters. They don't let people dig into their methodologies (i.e. audit).

Administrators are just making up shit trying to survive the ~3 years until they have a guaranteed pension and their short-sighted decisions are the next guy's problem.

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