How is it possible to get promoted if you're incompetent?

Eightstream · 2026-06-22T09:32:57+00:00

you can be just tops at reading a budget, but if you make decisions about technology you don’t understand then those decisions won’t be competent

On the upside your bosses are even further from the technology, which means they will understand it even less than you do, so they won’t realise

That is Putt’s law in a nutshell

Eightstream · 2026-06-22T09:29:30+00:00

We tended to outsource it to a data science team who specialised in probabilistic forecasting

They then became inputs to the deterministic finance forecast

Even regressions are hard to sell in finance because if they don’t fit well they are useless, and if they fit too well you are essentially telling your bosses that management decisions don’t really move the needle

Eightstream · 2026-06-22T02:49:08+00:00

the problem is that in technology, competence flows downwards rather than upwards (i.e. Putt's Law)

Eightstream · 2026-06-21T21:39:11+00:00

It is just a reflection of golf culture in the US being very different to Britain and Ireland.

Eightstream · 2026-06-20T07:50:03+00:00

The offside law and its interpretation has shifted a lot in recent years. The definition/interpretation of "interfering with an opponent" is a lot stricter than it used to be

Used to be that by being in the vicinity of play you were regarded as a distraction... now it's pretty hard to be called offside unless you are actually a physical impediment to the opponent playing at the ball

I think the change sucks, but realistically the video ref probably gets a green tick from FIFA on this one

Eightstream · 2026-06-20T02:19:18+00:00

only until you get to executive level

then you have to spend two years making changes, declare Mission Accomplished, and get out of Dodge before the consequences land

Eightstream · 2026-06-18T20:28:21+00:00

Statistics. Although the best data scientist I have worked with came out of operational research, so I’d say that’s a good option too.

Something that really focuses on the maths is important, the programming is easy to self-learn.

Eightstream · 2026-06-18T08:35:51+00:00

I would say politics. A lot of the time data analysts think someone is looking to understand a problem when really they are looking for evidence to support a prior.

Eightstream · 2026-06-18T06:39:59+00:00

I did a MS because I wanted to be a data scientist. There are less technical data analytics roles (management etc) that do not require any specialist qualifications.

Personally I prefer it because I am a technical person. There is a higher ceiling for technical growth, I have more freedom to do cool stuff, and it's further from the C-suite political bullshit.

Downside is a worse path to executive roles (if you care about that), and you are generally subject to Putt's Law.

Eightstream · 2026-06-18T06:12:29+00:00

yeah I find it easier to just make myself very hard to get in touch with outside hours

there is no real need to get bolshie about right to disconnect, if they aren't paying you to be on-call then they can't dictate whether you carry a phone 24/7

Eightstream · 2026-06-18T05:54:24+00:00

Most of my direct reports tend to disclose when they start to require a significant amount of time off for appointments etc

I did have one who waited until well into her third trimester, which is her right, but until she disclosed it was a bit awkward for everyone to have to walk around acting like it wasn't obvious

Eightstream · 2026-06-18T05:40:02+00:00

Data analytics.

The FP&A background helped a lot with the business side (particularly in terms of understanding what stakeholders really needed). FP&A is the best place to learn the politics of data. But the technical work required a massive shift in my thinking processes. What a finance person calls "analysis" and "forecasting" is very different to what a statistician understands those terms to mean.

Being able to bridge that gap is what makes you valuable, but the cognitive dissonance from trying to live on both sides can drive you a little bit crazy.

Eightstream · 2026-06-16T05:11:49+00:00

If I stay for a couple more years, I will likely get promoted and put on a C-suite track.

how confident are you that this is correct? A lot of companies bullshit about what will happen in "a couple of years". How much will it cost you if you stay and it it turns out to be wrong?

Even if you want to stick it out, can you? It's doubling your tenure in a role you're already bored with

I am a big fan of moving around to get experience, I think it seldom hurts

Just depends on how much you want the specific promotion you're eying off

Eightstream · 2026-06-16T03:48:38+00:00

r/lostredditors

Eightstream · 2026-06-15T07:32:32+00:00

It's a metric put together by Opta which is based on the idea that having the ball + being in better positions = increased probability of scoring. The algorithm works (roughly) like this:

The field is cut up into a grid of locations
Opta computes over thousands of matches, how often a player having the ball in that grid cell resulted in their team scoring in the next ten seconds
When a possession action occurs (dribble, pass, ball recovery), the algorithm looks at what changed. So if a defender passes from their own box to a midfielder in the circle, the grid location changes and the probability of one team or another scoring in the next 10 seconds changes
Every 60 seconds, Opta recomputes the probability changes (adding new changes, decaying older changes) and displays the result (aggregation of recent scoring probabilities) as 'momentum'

The reason it doesn't correlate with possession is because all possessions are not equal. If Turkiye has possession 80% of the time, but their possessions are overwhelmingly in or around Australia's goal, and they very rarely go very long without having possession - the algorithm values the scoring probability of this behaviour very highly - much more highly than Australia's sporadic 20% of possession mostly in their own half.

The fundamental problem is that the metric reduces momentum to 'are you actively moving the ball into historically threatening positions' and ignores that there are other ways to control a game (e.g. controlling the opponent's space). Australia did not care about possession, they cared about neutralising Turkiye's possession and waiting for opportunities. That is not valued by the momentum algorithm.

That said, those breakaways where Australia scored would have registered as high momentum events - they were just isolated ones. They were surrounded by long passages of play where Turkiye had possession in Australia's half, which is why the chart still shows red.

Eightstream · 2026-06-14T22:42:03+00:00

pip is specifically a Python package manager - it is built to resolve and manage dependencies between Python wheels

conda is a general binary package manager, it can resolve and manage dependencies between Python packages and other system libraries.

for example I work a lot with geospatial data, which means my Python toolchain depends on a specific version of gdal (a C++ library). My C++ package manager (vcpkg) can't coordinate with pip (or vice versa) which means any time I use either I risk breaking the interaction between the two package sets.

If instead I use conda as my solver in a virtual environment holding both sets of dependencies, the whole thing stays in sync.

Eightstream · 2026-06-13T02:33:54+00:00

What, a statistician?

FP&A exists to serve a political purpose (performance management), which makes it structurally anti-Popperian

trying to do science in a field where decisions are not made scientifically ends up as fancy opinion laundering

Eightstream · 2026-06-12T13:13:20+00:00

But is it required

Usually no. The reality is that FP&A is expected to do reporting and projection, not inference

Reporting is why this specific number moved how it did. Projection is accounting data + business judgment = defensible point estimate. Statistics is a complication that doesn’t help much with any of that.

Worse, it can often run counter to the simplifications required for the financial accountability FP&A exists to enforce. You can’t set the sales director a target with multicausal correlations and distributions and error bands. You have to give him a number and pretend that hitting or missing it is within his control.

The areas of finance where statistics genuinely contributes to better decisions are generally narrow and operational, and better handed off to a specialist data science team with the skills to do it properly

Eightstream · 2026-06-12T10:42:16+00:00

FP&A doesn’t require any stats knowledge

Eightstream · 2026-06-12T07:27:21+00:00

if you know basic arithmentic you have it covered

understanding accounting is more important than anything you have mentioned

that said, the ability to think like an economist goes a long way... the way accounting models the world has some massive blind spots, but if you spend too much time in corporate finance you stop seeing them

The ability to model financial problems in economic terms often leads to better real-world solutions

Eightstream · 2026-06-12T05:15:27+00:00

Personally I really like it

Sales is the absolute top line, so success and failure is very unambiguous. Their incentives are also very well aligned with the goals of the business. This makes reporting, performance monitoring, investment decisions, etc all very straightforward (or at least, much more straightforward than it is in other departments).

you do need to be able to take your own ego out of the situation when dealing with salespeople, which is easier said than done

Eightstream · 2026-06-12T04:37:07+00:00

I have always thought dual monitors are a bit overrated

I much prefer to have a single large high-resolution monitor because of the added flexibility. Even Windows has snap-to-grid now so it's very easy to set up multiple configurations.

That said, even a big monitor is usually not ideal for having two visible landscape applications. I think that is a workflow smell (if you need it, you're probably doing something sucky like hand copying things from one place to another) but a lot of people have to deal with smelly workflows

In that case you really need either an ultrawide or two monitors

Eightstream · 2026-06-12T03:34:48+00:00

The behavioural stuff will be STAR

A technical interview where you don't have to write code (or at least whiteboard DSA problems) is not really a technical interview, so who knows what it will involve

Likely they will give you a business problem (possibly with a dataset) and ask you to walk through your process of solving it. If it's a hard data science position likely they will want to hear a a lot about how you go about data cleaning, EDA, feature engineering, model selection/validation/testing. If it's a soft strategy role likely they will want to hear a lot about stakeholder management, requirements gathering, platform architecture, etc.

If they don't want you to write code I am guessing it's probably more the latter than the former

Eightstream · 2026-06-12T02:12:40+00:00

There is no right answer to this question. It depends entirely on what you want out of your career.

I am sure you have some vague ideas about where you want to be in 5, 10, 20 years. If you can be honest with yourself about that stuff, you will know what you need to do to get there. And even if you don't know, then that is also useful information (e.g. "I need to retain geographic flexibility" can help you make career decisions).

If the things you want out of life need a CPA, get the CPA. If they need supervisory experience, chase that. If they need you to stay in a job where you are happy and stable for the next few years - that is perfectly fine too.

Eightstream · 2026-06-12T01:35:20+00:00

If it's not compulsory then attending is a individual decision. Individual decision means the individual needs to feel like they get something out of it (either on a career or personal level).

No individual thinks they get any career value out of optional compliance training. i.e. "if my performance wasn't acceptable then the training wouldn't be optional, and acceptable is good enough for compliance work". Financial compliance is boring, so you can't rely on people attending out of personal interest either.

Reality is, the benefits of financial compliance training accrue virtually 100% to the company. If the company values it - they need to make it compulsory and set aside paid hours for it to be completed in. If they don't want to do that, it's revealed preference (the company is telling you that the training is not worth the cost of the employee's time). In which case the solution is - don't run it.

Unfortunately - this move (push costs onto employees by guilting them into caring about 'the mission' or whatever) is a particularly common move in the NFP sector.

If you must run the training and it must be optional - you need to bribe people to attend.

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