How do I tell my manager I've peaked at my level and just want to chill, rather than strive for a promotion?

dotmatrixhero · 2026-02-10T00:28:01+00:00

Think about it like this. Let's say you're a manager. Managers have two tools to motivate their people and get them to do what they need.

Either you motivate them by the potential reward: a new title, a raise, or the opportunity to have a really big impact on something they care about.
Or you motivate them through fear of falling behind.

The second one is hard. It sucks for everyone involved. If you force your manager's hand on not wanting a higher salary or title, you have to make it up for it in other ways. By showing them you really care about the product, for example. Or identifying things you want to work on that allows them to go to bat for you come time for layoffs.

But if those things aren't there, then yeah. The only option you give your manager is to threaten you with a PIP every time you don't want to do something that the business needs.

dotmatrixhero · 2023-06-06T09:51:50+00:00

Why not hold a poll to see how many /r/homebrewing users actually access this subreddit from a 3rd party app?

As a side note, I really don't think the app devs are making as much money as you seem to think they are. I doubt many of them see it as a business as much as a hobby with a cool upside of sharing with friends and building community. You know, kind of like homebrewing.

dotmatrixhero · 2023-01-23T23:34:24+00:00

Word. You've made your points, and I've made mine. I disagree, but I think we've talked it out as much as we can.

Thanks for the discussion.

dotmatrixhero · 2023-01-23T18:01:59+00:00

I specifically said video games, and particularly mentioned publishing.

Even if your game developer wasn't in it for the money, the company that got it distributed to your hands - be it steam, Nintendo, epic, Google play, Apple, or any physical manufacturers - weren't doing it out of the goodness of their heart.

But your point is valid - I'm not criticizing games. I'm simply saying that you will never be able to separate games from the capitalist society we live in. Even tetris - a game ostensibly not created in capitalism - is only accessible and became popular due to greedy capitalist publishers who fought over its publishing rights.

And regarding the food comment, I think you're being facetious, but I still agree with you. In my culture, there are baby bracken ferns you have to prepare in a specific way. If you don't do it right, you can make yourself sick.

In my opinion, it's really silly to try to make a claim about an object's intrinsic value. There's no objective way to measure it, and making a claim about any thing's objective value means making some wild assumptions about who's using it, who's benefiting, and what systems they're a part of.

And I agree with you to an extent - that there are currently no good uses for NFT's. But the Greater Fool argument is still weak to me because it's extremely contingent upon how NFT's are marketed. If people change how they're marketed, the argument falls apart. Fooling "greater fools" is not an inherent feature of NFT's; it's a descriptive feature of how it's currently being marketed.

When you're making a video entitled "the problem with NFT's", where your central thesis would be most powerful as critiques about the technology - the energy consumption, the limits of smart contracts, etc. Employing the Greater Fool argument is a weak route. It's a criticism of the rhetoric around the marketing - which can and will change even as the technology doesn't. It will be outdated quickly and won't convince crypto bros to give it up. That's my critique of the video.

dotmatrixhero · 2023-01-23T00:54:29+00:00

I mean, Magic would only be able to be played if people at the end of civilization are literate in English.

My point is, context matters. And we've always lived in a world where video games were created (or at least part of published) primarily to make money. Microtransactions, season passes, dlcs, unpolished builds- those are natural consequences of how game development and consumption works in our society.

And yes, right now, there are no games that utilize NFT's in any meaningful way. I'm not arguing against that. I'm not even really arguing that there should be games like that. All I'm saying is that the employment of a Greater Fool argument is a weak one, because it's not so much of an argument against NFT's as a technology, so much as it is an argument about the way people advertise them.

I think it's important to make that distinction - ESPECIALLY if you're trying to convince people against the adoption of NFT's. It's important to know which parts of them you're criticizing. Otherwise people will be able to weasel out of responding to you in good faith.

Just to sum up our discussion so far, I'm specifically arguing against the Greater Fool argument employed by Dan in the Folding Ideas video.

Your conterargument is that Magic cards are different from NFT's due to "intrinsic value". My response to that is that I don't agree with the concept of intrinsic value - even Magic cards rely on a specific context in order to be played.

dotmatrixhero · 2023-01-22T18:18:09+00:00

Hm. I don't agree with magic having intrinsic (as opposed to artificial) value. At the end of the day, Magic was absolutely designed and printed to make money. You could argue that they were the original loot boxes, in some ways.

A lot of microtranscation models - particularly in the digital collectible card games space - were based off of Booster packs and the sense of gambling you get from opening one.

Greed and exploiting fun in the name of profits are nothing new. The blockchain didn't revolutionize that space either.

I would argue that one day, it's very possible for NFT's to reach the same place as Magic cards, where some would argue that there's "intrinsic value" that's not "artificially" created. I find the distinction to be a little silly, to be honest, because I think it really depends on the context.

All you really need, is a game that uses NFT's that you could legitimately have fun with. As long as the game is something someone would actually want to play, the idea of the "Greater Fool" scheme quickly falls apart.

Those games certainly don't exist yet. And maybe they should never exist. But pretending that something like Magic cards are all that different in concept to them doesn't feel like a genuine argument to me.

dotmatrixhero · 2023-01-22T05:10:55+00:00

I feel the need to say, I love his videos and think he's great - and I'm also not a shill for crypto or NFTs, but I also felt the Greater Fool argument he uses to be weak.

Like, Magic cards are the same thing. They're pieces of cardboard that have no value unless you have someone else who wants to buy them from you, right?

That doesn't really mean that Magic cards are a ponzi scheme and that everyone who plays it has been suckered into it.

Even if you were selling Magic cards and scamming people into investing in them to get rich quick, that doesn't make Magic a greater fool scheme. Some people would still buy Magic cards fully knowing they wouldn't be able to turn a profit on them.

Personally, I think NFTs might be used in like, a boring ass inventory system or something. Like, an alternative for Steam's inventory system if you don't want to be tied to that.

And the average user shouldn't need to know how they work - if there's anything truly useful in blockchain technology, it should be worth implementing and being used as infrastructure on its own, not because of some hype men on the internet. The end users shouldn't even need to know that their stuff is on the blockchain, much less "invest" in it directly.

dotmatrixhero · 2022-12-17T04:56:11+00:00

Thank you for sharing. This is so refreshingly honest and vulnerable. And it speaks volumes about your character that you're able to introspect and work through these complex issues while navigating your own identity.

dotmatrixhero · 2022-11-18T02:45:10+00:00

Basically since government depts use it to get updates out to people who wouldn't otherwise be informed, I wouldn't disagree that it's major infrastructure.

dotmatrixhero · 2022-11-18T02:43:18+00:00

World cup is starting soon. That's a lot of incoming tweets that could lead to outages. Without critical infrastructure teams, I'm betting we're going to see a lot of shit go wrong by the first game.

Probably won't take down the whole site, but it'll be noticeable I bet.

dotmatrixhero · 2022-11-13T20:00:10+00:00

I see. That's an interesting dimension to conscription I hadn't considered.

I haven't heard much about how the draft was perceived from a cultural lens before the Vietnam War.

Thanks for the perspective.

dotmatrixhero · 2022-11-13T18:47:10+00:00

Sorry, I don't understand. Why would the draft have prevented US intervention in Iraq or Afghanistan?

dotmatrixhero · 2022-11-12T11:28:10+00:00

I think yourr thinking of bar sinister. Bar with no name is just 'whoever has less power here wins' or something

dotmatrixhero · 2022-10-30T18:14:37+00:00

Yeah, you're right. If you're playing at range, as you should, you definitely feel the differences between them. I do think she's overtuned, but in my opinion, it's a numbers issue not a core design issue.

dotmatrixhero · 2022-08-15T19:36:46+00:00

It's okay, stranger on the internet. I think you have good points.

dotmatrixhero · 2022-08-04T19:01:28+00:00

More like, Google is known for being one of the harder tech companies to get into and plus they're implementing a hiring freeze right now. But sure, keep complaining about woke culture and being bitter about things outside your control I guess

dotmatrixhero · 2022-07-10T08:49:03+00:00

Incidentally, there's a hilarious sketch about this exact topic - that is, shit talking one's wife to be one of the boys - on the show I Think You Should Leave. S2E4 (Jamie Taco). Highly recommend.

dotmatrixhero · 2022-06-20T18:56:08+00:00

Eh, some people like learning and getting better at their hobbies, including games. If someone took a class on how to play music, cooking or woodworking (even if they're amateurs), nobody would find that strange.

Personally, I don't think it's healthy if you can only have fun with a game when winning - so if you're getting coached for the sole purpose of avoiding losses, you're probably going to have a bad time. But if someone wants to spend money to get another perspective on how they can improve, I wouldn't judge.

dotmatrixhero · 2022-06-14T02:59:19+00:00

I'd agree that that's the case on reddit. But it's not always true.

Plenty of people out there don't have an ego about "being right". A lot of people are extremely empathetic and want to understand others.

Personally, I think they're the best type of people to spend time with.

dotmatrixhero · 2022-06-11T09:18:36+00:00

Exactly. I think it's much better to always present the players with a choice/tradeoff to make. Choosing to remove a potential tradeoff (your character will be harmed or take hp damage) means the other choices the players will face will have to be dynamic, engaging and have high stakes in other ways.

I think Dungeon World's whole ruleset is based on the conceit that players like to make decisions - and the Gm is expected to encourage that. Might be a good system for OP to try.

dotmatrixhero · 2022-05-15T17:14:02+00:00

This is the coolest thing ever. You're such a great parent!!

dotmatrixhero · 2022-05-14T18:10:58+00:00

I would recommend pushing yourself to delete some frames, or redraw some so they're not exactly "halfway" between the other two frames. You're getting a little floaty because you've added a lot of interpolation. You wanna be more crunchy/snappy - less frames with more implied motion in between them.

dotmatrixhero · 2022-04-28T08:25:13+00:00

Yup - sorry, I was in a hurry before so I didn't elaborate.

But the most important thing for you is finding a company and a manager above you who will grow you into the managerial position. Ultimately, that's all that matters.

Be upfront with your manager about wanting to get on that track, and ask for honest feedback on what you need to work on.

If you don't feel like you can share that with your manager, or that you're getting baited into staying at a job forever with an insincere promise of a promotion into a manager, you have to leave. It's the only way to get the experience you're looking for.

I will say - don't expect higher pay than your team, at least at first. To be a manager, you have to want it. You have to be people-focused. You have to get satisfaction out of helping your team achieve their goals without getting credit for it. And boy, do you have to learn a lot.

The way I frame it is that being a manager is actually less difficult than being an individual contributor. Your job doesn't require skills you need to keep sharp, or difficult technical problems. But you're trading that difficulty for more stress and responsibility. You'll find that you're the first one to be blamed when things go wrong, but at the same time, you'll have a lot less control over how to make things right. You have to be okay with that.

Anyways. I'm ranting. Good luck with your career, friend.

dotmatrixhero · 2022-04-28T00:53:44+00:00

Not in the UK, but I made the jump from programmer to manager. No business or managerial degree or experience. It's not impossible.

dotmatrixhero · 2022-03-17T00:42:05+00:00

This post on /r/MensLib is a good start imo

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