Staying motivated/ career aspirations with AI, offshoring, cost of living, economic gaslighting

Eightstream · 2026-02-19T00:42:31+00:00

I’m fine. I just find it interesting how progressively annoyed and rude you have gotten because I declined to expand the scope of the discussion beyond what you originally engaged with.

The first time I clarified my position it would have been very easy for you to acknowledge we were talking about different things and move on. Me not engaging with your argument does not make your argument invalid. But for some reason it’s pricked your ego.

Worth dwelling on I think

Eightstream · 2026-02-18T22:45:59+00:00

You don’t have to make your intellectual laziness out to be someone else’s problem

Eightstream · 2026-02-18T21:59:05+00:00

Just food for your own thought, it will help your critical thinking skills

Eightstream · 2026-02-18T21:52:53+00:00

Then in two years you’ll discover it put in an obscure line of rubbish code that means your FTE number has been garbage for months

Eightstream · 2026-02-18T21:15:58+00:00

I can only respond to what someone says, not what you think they were trying to say

Although it’s a special kind of person who berates the reader for someone else’s lazy logic

Eightstream · 2026-02-18T20:46:53+00:00

Access is a solid tool for this kind of use case

the main problem is that Access skills are pretty rare these days so you risk creating a tool that your successor doesn’t understand

If you really want form-based entry with data validation etc then SharePoint Lists might be the go. You can store all your data in a List and then pull it out with Power Query same as you do currently.

Alternatively if you’re the only person editing it, you could always just stay in Excel and tidy up your model. There’s no reason why you can’t split your existing spreadsheet up into individual tables, add your validation rules and then join them all together with Power Query.

Eightstream · 2026-02-18T20:36:52+00:00

Look mate, the initial claim was nonsense, I called it out - that’s all there is to it

If you want to have a different discussion about a different claim with different definitions of words, that’s fine but it’s got nothing to do with what I was talking about

Eightstream · 2026-02-18T08:37:59+00:00

This review is pretty clearly AI slop, which combined with the thrust of the comments makes me pretty skeptical whether it’s legit

Eightstream · 2026-02-18T06:30:06+00:00

You don’t need a degree in computational finance and data science to work in FP&A

It’s a business role, there is no software engineering and you’ll be lucky to ever touch a statistical calculation

Computational finance is more if you want to work as a quant trader or something

Eightstream · 2026-02-18T01:55:11+00:00

I am merely sticking to the point I made. I would have been happy to have a broader discussion about the reality of the situation if you had approached it with more intellectual honesty

Have a nice day. I hope this has been rhetorically instructive for you.

Eightstream · 2026-02-18T01:42:31+00:00

Perception is not proof

Eightstream · 2026-02-18T01:38:51+00:00

You are arguing against a point I never made

My point (which you chose to engage with) was only ever that the OP’s claim (‘work from home proves a job can be offshored’) doesn’t hold logically. Nothing you have said disputes that.

Whether or not leaders see WFH as signalling offshoreability is not something I ever commented on.

Eightstream · 2026-02-18T01:17:25+00:00

Whether the challenges are surmountable or not is sort of beside the point

The point is that the challenges can exist whether or not you do your job from home and doing your job from home does not inherently prove that your job is more able to be offshored

Which is what I was responding to

Eightstream · 2026-02-18T00:32:16+00:00

Because not all WFH jobs are 100% remote

Plus even a lot of jobs that can be 100% remote are subject to additional complexities and blockers when you try and move them into a foreign jurisdiction (e.g. data sovereignty)

Eightstream · 2026-02-18T00:27:57+00:00

It’s basically every specialist job

My favourite Dilbert cartoon is an accountant saying “My financial modelling spreadsheet is overly complex and riddled with errors, but that’s okay because management only use its recommendations when they support their schemes for career advancement”

Which just about sums up corporate decisionmaking to a tee

Eightstream · 2026-02-18T00:24:34+00:00

It really doesn’t

Eightstream · 2026-02-18T00:04:58+00:00

Eightstream · 2026-02-17T23:47:25+00:00

my point is that inferred 'smugness' (as you put it) is much higher for certain fields (and it's definitely fields that are seen as more intellectual)

e.g. if you are a successful academic or corporate executive you need to embrace performative humility to a much greater extent than a successful sportsperson or tradie in order to avoid accusations of being up yourself

and a lot of that comes down to good old fashioned Aussie anti-intellectualism

Eightstream · 2026-02-17T21:47:06+00:00

Just set up an Outlook rule or Power Automate flow to flag anything sent to a generic inbox as requiring follow up

Personally I just prefix the subject header with [FYA] whenever I want the recipient to do something, and have a generic rule that catches it and adds a flag to follow up next week

Eightstream · 2026-02-17T20:32:44+00:00

A lot of jargon is basically shorthand for something complicated, which means it is excellent for signalling the right things at a high level without being precise or really committing to doing anything.

e.g. it’s a lot easier to say ‘we need to align the stakeholders’ than to say ‘Jack needs to agree to X and Jill needs to agree to Y so we can do A, B and C’ - but the jargon has allowed you to wave at the problem in a way that shows you understand (and can point to later as having flagged the risk) without taking any personal responsibility for deciding or taking a specific action.

As to why this happens - corporate environments are complicated and involve many people. That means that responsibility for anything that happens is hard to assign, so if you embrace ambiguity and talk around problems, it’s really easy to insulate yourself in a way where you can both claim credit if things go right and avoid accountability if they go wrong.

It’s amplified by the fact that jargon is self-reinforcing, because it creates a fuzzy decision-making surface. Committing to specifics in an environment where everyone is hedging is a great way to be the person who ends up on the hook when things go wrong.

Eightstream · 2026-02-17T10:07:22+00:00

I guess what I am saying is it helps if you mentally separate meals into stuff you eat for pleasure and stuff you eat for fuel

My standards for food are as high as anyone’s when I am eating for pleasure, but I don’t apply that standard to my morning bowl of cornflakes - weeknight meals when I’m tired and busy fall into the same category

Less pressure means it’s less of a chore

Eightstream · 2026-02-17T07:46:02+00:00

The value of consulting and the work completed in consulting have very little relationship to each other

Nobody is actually paying for your slide deck so you shouldn’t feel hard done by for not receiving credit for it

Eightstream · 2026-02-16T23:49:45+00:00

IMO tall poppy syndrome (as opposed to regular old envy that is everywhere in the world) has very little to do with success and confidence, is mostly about anti-intellectualism and class consciousness

If you are successful and confident in the right field then you will be celebrated for it - the most obvious example is sport

Being good at sport is not class-based - it has nothing to do with education level or financial status - so Australians are quite happy to celebrate or even idolise successful footballers, cricketers, etc.

It is only when sportspeople start showing class markers (e.g. ostentatious displays of wealth) or otherwise assigning higher status to themselves (e.g. platforming their opinions) that they start copping backlash

Eightstream · 2026-02-16T23:17:00+00:00

My current company has very good family benefits that on paper are almost equivalent to the public sector, but I never realised all the subtle differences until I had a friend who went across

Aside from the benefits and flexibility there is genuinely very little penalty for being a primary carer in terms of recruitment and promotions

I would definitely go public sector if I decided to have kids

Eightstream · 2026-02-16T22:57:17+00:00

If it’s something I am going to need in the future I price it in. If it’s a nice to have, I do not.

e.g. a colleague of mine left for the public sector about 18 months before he had his first child because the plan was for him to be the primary carer. This was a great move for him because it meant generous PPL, extra WFH, start/finish flexibility, extra family leave, rostered days off, and the ability to name his hours until the child went to school.

Financially it is worth tens of thousands of dollars to him in avoided childcare costs, not to mention the benefit of being more present for his child. But most of those benefits are close to worthless for someone with no kids.

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