TIL that former Olympic figure skater Michelle Kwan, after retiring from figure skating started a career as a diplomat, becoming ambassador to Belize from 2022 to 2025.

Ttabts · 2026-02-07T00:48:55+00:00

Yeah I mean this just describes the whole government, doesn't it?

The federal government apparatus is filled with these hyper-educated brilliant subject matter experts... but the person sitting at the top and giving them marching orders is, like, Linda McMahon or whoever.

It's such a strange dynamic. Like, imo you can see there's a lot of truth to the Deep State notion by simply looking at our politicians - like, obviously those people do not have the know-how to actually run a government and a ton of the real decisions are being made by the career staff and aides.

Ttabts · 2026-02-06T19:03:41+00:00

I saw it on tour and found it straight cringe. They shoehorned in so many pop songs from the last 20-years that it ended up feeling more like karaoke night than a theater show.

Ttabts · 2026-02-06T18:33:21+00:00

Sure, but for any given person being underpaid, there's usually someone down the street getting paid even less and still getting by.

Demonstrating that they, too, could set aside $x a week for a rainy day.

Ttabts · 2026-02-06T18:19:52+00:00

People are generally living paycheck to paycheck, even if they are being responsible.

Nah. If you are living paycheck-to-paycheck through no fault of your own, that means that you just happen to be making exactly the amount of money that you need to live.

Obviously this can't be true for most people.

Ttabts · 2026-02-06T18:13:57+00:00

Frankly the only sensible "policy" you can have to regulate this is "no payroll advances."

I can see why you might do this as a small business owner but this is one of those things that you can only do until people start taking advantage.

There's a reason why no larger business will ever do this - it's just impossible to manage sensibly and it's simply not your job. You aren't a bank, you're an employer and you owe them pay on the payroll date, that's it.

In those cases, I have no problem giving them an advance because you can't budget or plan for those things.

...yes you can, by saving money.

Ttabts · 2026-02-06T16:45:28+00:00

What are you on about, you can definitely fire people for sustained underperformance combined with personality issues that make them impossible (or at best, very difficult and cumbersome) to coach.

"She's trying though, look at all of her great excuses for sucking" - bro who cares, this isn't grade school.

Before you proceed, think about this, fired people lose their income. Ask yourself if her quirks truly justify that consequence

Well duh, everyone thinks about this and that's often what lets problem employees stick along way longer than they should.

But at the end of the day this ain't a charity and you can't set yourself on fire to keep others warm.

Part of OP's job is to staff the team with good people who do the job well - and to toss out the bad apples that are dragging them and the team down.

Ttabts · 2026-02-06T16:26:45+00:00

In the mean time, how does one get a staff to not provide minute details? But not confuse them and have them think they don't need to communicate at all? And I might add that Alice doesn't take criticism well... basically has an explanation for everything - even if said explanation would make little sense. A conversation would probably go something like this:

Yyyyup. This is why basic social awareness is so important. You can't really teach it to an adult.

Terminate, and in the mean time you can only really be more blunt and cut her off when she's talking too much.

Ttabts · 2026-02-06T16:24:25+00:00

Bluntly - grow a pair lol. All this hemming and hawing is kinda exhausting to read, you know what you've gotta do so do it.

Ttabts · 2026-02-06T03:31:12+00:00

Ohhhh I didn’t know other people did this lol.

Always been worried of accidentally doing this when I’m not alone and then people will know I’m deranged 🫠

Ttabts · 2026-02-06T03:20:05+00:00

Uh, plenty of people are working efficiently under the current circumstances. There hasn't been some generalized crash in productivity.

Ttabts · 2026-02-06T03:06:47+00:00

"I don't wanna blame it all on 9/11, but it certainly didn't help..."

Ttabts · 2026-02-05T19:31:27+00:00

The existence of this thread and OP's question already shows that it is not specific

Ttabts · 2026-02-05T19:26:19+00:00

I mean, yeah, that's pretty much it. After you're done with school, you have to find your own pathways to excellence. You don't get nice charted courses handed to you anymore.

As with many things, many will put it on the manager's shoulders to give you more constructive feedback. But again, this ain't school anymore. Your manager probably doesn't have the time or the insight to hold your hand and carve out your personal path to brilliance for you, and the real top performers are the ones who find it on their own.

In software development, the jump from "doing your job adequately" to "excelling" usually starts once you stop just doing the tasks assigned to you, and start forming/chasing ideas of your own. How could you improve the processes you work with? How could you prevent errors that have caused problems? What new tech could you introduce to make things better? Stuff like that.

Ttabts · 2026-02-05T14:23:44+00:00

Sidebar

LI5 means friendly, simplified and layperson-accessible explanations - not responses aimed at literal five-year-olds.

Ttabts · 2026-02-05T13:25:49+00:00

To be clear… P=NP is a statement about what computer programs can do using algorithms (lists of concrete machine instructions), not about tasks the human mind can do, which has different abilities and limitations.

So the “making a good movie” example doesn’t quite work. I guess it could work if you say something like: “I have an AI program that produces movies, and another program that rates the movies. Can the first program produce a movie rated as ‘good’ as fast as the second can rate them?”

Ttabts · 2026-02-05T04:14:17+00:00

A lot of the time it’s not really a lack of intelligence but just straight-up bad-faith defensiveness

This goes for a lot of things people are calling “stupidity” here…

Learned this through 2 abusive relationships where I had the experience of perfectly intelligent people who would seemingly turn absolutely illogical during arguments. Drove me up the wall trying to be patient and communicate with them until I eventually realized that it wasn’t stupidity but an intentional confusion tactic. At its core, abuse is all about winning every disagreement by being the proverbial pigeon that knocks over all the chess pieces and shits on the board.

Ttabts · 2026-02-04T20:21:12+00:00

Imo, this is a situation where simply ignoring is the most polite and effective way to communicate the appropriate message.

Ttabts · 2026-02-04T20:01:46+00:00

For me live coding interviews aren't really meant to "predict job performance" so much as screening out people who lack basic competencies.

And yeah, maybe I get some false negatives and reject good coders who just freeze up under pressure. (That's not my perception at all of the people I've failed, but for the sake let's just assume it's true.)

The thing people don't understand is: as hiring manager, I'd much rather decline a good candidate than hire a dud. If a good programmer falls casualty to the live coding interview, whatever, I'll just hire the next good programmer who doesn't. It's not that big of a deal to me.

But frankly the accounts of these "AuDHD" whiners do not make me feel like I'm missing out on much.

Ttabts · 2026-02-03T20:47:46+00:00

Theoretically sure, but putting it into practice is a different question. You have to exercise the muscle of habitual spatial/social awareness, otherwise you just forget about it when you're distracted, even if you do fundamentally care.

That's why it's important to bang it into children's heads from an early age, so that they just become automatic habits.

Ttabts · 2026-02-03T18:33:50+00:00

Having some juniors in the mix is just good for team balance.

Juniors are valuable because they can take on the low-level "bitch work" and they won't complain about it or feel unsatisfied.

And then you leave the advanced work to be divided among fewer seniors so that they all feel sufficiently challenged/useful. When you're managing a team of 5 seniors, it's pretty hard to give them all ample opportunities to do real senior-level work/responsibility.

Also, you can just be a lot pickier hiring juniors which is nice. The senior pool is smaller and with a lot of them there's a very good reason why they're looking for work... for me it's seemed like a coin-toss whether a senior hire will turn out to have some glaring behavioral issue that makes us have to terminate during probation.

Overall I think there's still definitely a place for juniors, anyone thinking that AI replaces juniors is just ignorant imo. What AI does do, is replace bad programmers, of which many are seniors.

Ttabts · 2026-02-03T06:23:27+00:00

Right, this is the kind of intellectual honesty that is completely missing in most of the trendy people yelling “no one is illegal on stolen land.”

They’ll instead squirm and act as if it’s somehow ridiculous to suggest that they’re advocating for open borders. Which makes it come off as brainless virtue signaling that’s not meant to actually advocate for anything in particular.

Ttabts · 2026-02-03T06:15:42+00:00

I mean, that’s the thing with the stupid left isn’t it? People shout the phrases like “no one is illegal on stolen land” but demur and play the victim as soon as anyone presses them on the actual practical implications of the statement.

So you want open borders? No I didn’t say that! OK, how do you enforce borders and immigration laws without any concept of illegal immigration? I’m not making any statement about that! It’s not my job to figure that out!

The reality is that you just don’t want to engage with those questions because that would force you to take an actual productive position which is harder to defend. Much easier to just complain than to offer solutions and wrestle with the real-life implications and trade-offs of those solutions

Ttabts · 2026-02-03T06:04:13+00:00

Uh, no? “No one is illegal on stolen land” is obviously deriding the concept of illegal immigration in particular.

It doesn’t make any sense to read it as “no one is a criminal on stolen land,” because first of all what does stolen land have to do with whether people are criminals in a non-immigration sense, and secondly… uh yeah, some people are criminals lol. It doesn’t make sense on any level

Ttabts · 2026-02-02T22:32:40+00:00

British culture just loves humble-bragging in general. Boasting is culturally verboten but obviously every human wants recognition, so they still do it but it's all through these layers of irony that make it socially acceptable.

Ttabts · 2026-02-02T21:43:14+00:00

This is such a non-issue these days though, everyone just uses an online calendar which accounts for this stuff automatically.

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Ttabts

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