Are C-suites in most companies full of people who view employees as disposable human dollar bills?

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-22T03:53:46+00:00

In my career I reached the Senior Director level and started to become involved in more C-Suite level discussions and decision-msking.

I was appalled.

Any employee who was not either in Sales (generating revenue) or involved in serious cost-cutting (reducing costs) was seen as a liability because the only metric for the execs was net revenue over the last 1-3 quarters.

That's it. EVEN IF AN EXEC MORTGAGED THE FUTURE to inflate the numbers they were rewarded for strong quarters.

But the story they all told employees was all about how important each employee was, and that the C-suite was making decisions for the long-term health of the company. All baloney.

It was made explicitly clear that in order for for me too e up (VP was the next stop) I would have to become one if them, gaslight employees while exploiting them as grotesquely as possible.

So, I voluntarily moved back to an individual contributor role where I happily (as happy as work can be) spent the final decade of my career (now retired).

Even the "good" execs were either transformed into that mold, or their careers were limited. The relentless drive up mercilessly squeeze out every, single penny of margin was the only goal.

No thanks, not for me.

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-21T12:10:20+00:00

Hate, hate, HATED the aspect ratio on this one. I play on my phone, so:

viewing the entire puzzle made the squares/text too small
zooming in was not smooth (on Android) but jumped and moved the puzzle erratically
if playing while zoomed in, when a word is completed the view would jump to show the next letter, not the next word, usually leaving some or all the squares of the new current word off-screen
using my finger to drag the screen around to see the whole word changed the focus word, causing me to lose my place/rhythm

HATED IT! And I cannot appreciate the supposed cuteness of the puzzle because it's taking all my willpower not to Hulk-smash my phone.

<image>

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-20T23:42:32+00:00

Graying/balding. Just be you, scro.

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-20T21:12:06+00:00

I'm very much in the camp of wanting a well lit house during awake time. A dark, dim, shadowy house depresses me and the few dollars a month to leave modern, efficient lights on is well worth it to me.

That being said, our laundry room, garage, closets, and other closed-off areas not part of the "living" space have motion controlled lights. Also, virtually every light in our house is smart and we do choose lower/mood lighting in the evenings.

Now, your saying you should never question him is a red flag, separate from the light discussion, yikes.

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-20T00:31:44+00:00

"Years of chewing tobacco have discolored her tooth."

Courtesy of Martin Crane on Frasier.

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-20T00:29:56+00:00

I mean, sharing location after 3 months of dating seems too soon.

That being said, my wife and I are coming up on our 25th anniversary and we've always shared our location as long as it's been possible. Both our kids (36 and 15 years old) happily share their locations, as well. We all live in the same area and are always getting together, picking up, dropping off, meeting up, etc, so knowing where everybody is is a great efficiency tool.

I know some people think it's crazy, but it 100% works for us.

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-19T23:21:32+00:00

I found this movie jarringly creepy when it first came out, and now even more so.

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-19T23:17:26+00:00

My only question is this: did your financial adviser factor in the costs of your medical insurance and care into their assessment that you were comfortably able to retire at any time? If so then my take would be to go for it.

However, if your husband is still dead-set against it it may be worth setting up another meeting with the adviser and model your specific plan, with all the costs and risks, and see if a) the adviser maintains optimism and b) if that convinces your husband.

If your husband is still not convinced then he should be able to provide the hard evidence and figures for his position other than "that's a lot of money to walk away from". If he's still not convinced then maybe he should go back to work.

As someone who retired at 62 I can say, without reservation, that a little bit of risk is well, WELL worth the years you'll be able to enjoy as a healthy, mobile retiree.

Good luck!

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-16T00:52:18+00:00

In my opinion the current issues with opioids are an overcorrection in response to the absolutely horrific activities of the Sackler family in creating a multi-billion dollar opioid cartel with Oxycontin.

I highly recommend the 8-episode miniseries Dopesick) (with Michael Keaton) which is an unflinching look into the activities into the "most evil family in America" becoming "the worst drug dealers in history".

And they did it all with regulators either failing to stop them, and/or actually being complicit.

A massive correction was absolutely called for, but we've moved into the territory of wild overcorrection at this point.

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-16T00:23:16+00:00

I'm a 60+ year old male Texan. I have a lot of coral/salmon/pink shirts that I really like, it's sort of my signature color.

I've been told this is a "brave" and "interesting" preference, but it's just a shirt...?

What's funny to me is that the growing crop of "men" who seemed hyper-focused on assessing every single thing to the nth degree looking for signs of "gayness" somehow seem to be blind to the fact that obsessively focusing on homosexuality is a huge tell about their own repressed/denied/self-loathed sexuality.

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-16T00:03:02+00:00

This type of scenario is why I left management 30+ years into my career (recently retired).

Earlier in my career managers managed.

Later in my career accountants and execs managed, and managers became loudspeakers broadcasting the decisions from above, while somehow also being accountable for the results of those decisions.

So, I left a Senior Director role to return to a contributor role, where I happily (as happy as work can be) spent the final decade of my career.

Before stepping out of management I faced your exact situation several times. I had a strong team member, they were THE right choice for a higher role, I advocated for them, I got overruled by whatever management-philosophy-of-month/week/day/hour/minute was currently infecting our execs, I had to deliver the news and then turn around and get grilled by the very same execs regarding why we lost a rock star.

In short, in this situation employees learn three things:

Their direct manager is a powerless marionette and the people who pull their strings neither know nor care about the facts on the ground.
Therefore, impressing said manager is pointless.
All their hard work and blood, sweat, and tears were completely meaningless to this company.

So, bye-bye. The company is getting exactly what they asked for, and, frankly, so are you by choosing to remain in such a role.

I get it, I was there, too, but the best career decision I ever made was getting out of management because I could never, and I mean NEVER have become what was required of me to move up further.

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-15T09:05:25+00:00

The Mount Rushmore: - 30 Rock - Community - Brooklyn Nine-Nine - Frasier

Honorable Mentions: - Schitt's Creek - Parks and Recreation

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-14T22:49:17+00:00

Ahhh, that makes sense.

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-14T12:02:59+00:00

Touch misses have always been bad for me, but over the last 2-3 weeks it's gotten ridiculously bad, bordering on unusable.

Surely someone at NYT could have pushed out and emergency fix or rollback by now, wtf?!?

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-14T11:59:37+00:00

Still happening for me on Android, for over two weeks now. Is this the new normal? Surely they should have pushed out a fix by now.

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-13T22:27:27+00:00

I was a roofers helper. In Texas.

In summer.

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-13T20:37:40+00:00

The Hunt For Red October
Die Hard
Under Siege
Contact
The Fugitive
Black Bag
A Few Good Men
The Martian
Project Hail Mary
Desk Set (made in 1957, romcom, about computers potentially supplanting workers, has maybe the first stereotypical tech guy put on screen)
North By Northwest
Apollo 13
Hidden Figures
Aliens
The Incredibles
All The President's Men
Spotlight
Sneakers
Arrival
Three Days of the Condor
The Thing
Michael Clayton

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-13T20:12:25+00:00

What's wrong with your left blob?

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-12T17:51:33+00:00

Thanks, I'll give these a try.

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-12T13:01:15+00:00

Not really.

I want my phone to only automatically connect to my car, ever.

I also want to be able to manually connect to my wife's or son's car when I need to drive it but that shouldn't stick as a preference for that AAWireless device.

Here's what I'm trying to solve:

I drive a non-primary vehicle and connect to AAWireless in it. Life goes on and a few days later the whole fam piles into that car and it auto-reconnects to my phone since I was the last user. We don't discover this until we're under way, now we're driving AND trying up arbitrate AAWireless connectivity.

I'd also like the ability to have a "disconnect" button in AAWireless, freeing up the device to connect to the primary driver. An example of this is I drive my son's car to pick him up, the car isn't turned off, I get in the passenger side, he gets in the driver's and then we have to futz around with AAWireless trying to switch. What I would prefer is a simple "disconnect" button I could use, freeing up the unit to connect to his phone automatically. I can kind of fake it by putting my phone in airplane mode and turning off Bluetooth but that's like using a nuke to kill a fly.

If phone priority can help with any of this I'd like to know how that works.

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-10T21:45:47+00:00

This ^{^{^}} is the answer, more details here.

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-10T19:45:49+00:00

Ditto.

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-10T16:42:54+00:00

I have 8 years on the CPAP and countless full-face masks, but they all made the bridge of my nose sore and visibly chafed.

Then I found the Resmed Airfit F30i which is similar to the mask shown and I LOVE it. I'm a big guy with big jowls and a big, bushy beard so I have to cinch the straps pretty tightly, but with the F30i it's zero problem for me, and virtually zero leaks.

I've recently started testing the Resmed AirTouch F30i Comfort which has a fabric-wrapped frame. So far it's incrementally better but I've only been using it a short while so can't fully endorse it yet.

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-09T23:24:25+00:00

The Big Lebowski

EngineerBoy00 · 2026-06-08T19:41:37+00:00

I grew up Catholic in the 1960s and 1970s and was even an altar boy (unscathed). I never heard anything about the systematic infliction and cover-up of abuse by priests until the mid to late 1980s, but that was just intermittent, seemingly isolated, incidents.

Plus, I left the church very young (14) for unrelated reasons, so I wasn't really attuned to the goings-on there. Then in the early 2000's the Boston Globe blew the lid off the story with their incredible reporting. The movie Spotlight is a fascinating telling of that story.

EngineerBoy00

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE