Nobody fucking knows how anything works. Nobody knows who is supposed to know. Your boss pays $300/hr for a consulting firm to send another fresh-out-of-college-kid to tell you why the system you bought from a vendor who has produced exactly zero application guidance is malfunctioning, and that kid will spend the next two weeks learning how the damned thing works right alongside you.
This has been my life implementing the latest edition of RightAngle for the last two years. Just a stack of expensive third-party 20-somethings saying “Ah, fuck, never seen that before, let me get back with you in a week.”
I feel like our society forgot that you’re supposed to pass your knowledge down to the next generation, but boomers decided that it wasn’t their job. Every man is an island instead of standing on the shoulders of giants like we are supposed to, and the result is everyone has to rediscover how to do anything themselves.
I don’t think boomer workers had much of a say in the matter. The change in culture has come from the top. MBA-brains stripping all the copper out of the walls
Yes exactly this. Corporate downsizing consolidates 3 jobs into one and now that one person left never has any time for documentation or trainings/knowledge transfers. They get overworked and leave and suddenly there’s no one left who knows what they did or how they did it.
The management understands that labor costs money but don’t seem to understand why, so they just keep firing or not re-hiring until all the institutional knowledge is gone and the firm collapses.
To be fair, why should a long-term employee spend months of their productive time training a short-term contractor who may not last the year?
Ignore for a moment how few to no actual “employees” are being hired, and thus everyone is a short-term temp.
It’s just a consequence of wanting maximum gains for little to nothing, i.e. corporate greed i.e. late-stage capitalism.
Bonus points if managers who do spend time training contractors get removed and replaced by those more willing to get in line with the company vision, being more “productive” in the ways that those in charge (Bezos, Musk, Huffman, etc.) can understand and agree with.
Literally why the US can’t make certain missiles any more lol. So it’s not all bad. Turns out none of the managers realised making weapons is skilled work until all the skilled workers retired.
Because they don’t retire. They just fucking die at their desk and the knowledge goes with them.
The best part is that after all that expensive experience-gaining, when the project is over the consultants leave and the company is left with nothing. So they can just rinse/repeat in a year or three
One of the more common practices is to simply insource the consultants. There’s a perverse incentive, wherein you’re paying $300/hr for a guy getting paid $40/hr, so you eventually realize you can offer them a 50% raise and achieve 80% savings in a single stroke.
it makes perfect financial sense but I’ve never actually seen that happen haha
what I see is that once a project is finished it gets outsourced further to employees or contractors in south asia who know even less than the consultants did
I’ve gotten that kind of offer when working in one of these contractor jobs a couple of times. but it was always from the absolute worst places that I would not consider working for directly, for any amount of money. like think paranoid executives building toxic workplaces where people sometimes die of stress-induced heart attack type shit. having a layer between me and them was protective and I was willing to “pay” 50% of my salary as protection money.
And then an MBA comes along and says we can save $2.4m over the next two years by laying off 10 of those employees. Then the MBA moves on to the next job by the time the company needs to go back and hire $400/hr consultants to fill in the cracks.
imagine my shock getting burned out of grad school because the guy i worked for had absolutely zero technical skills in anything that interfaced with the research equipment. just a noggin full of papers and shit. even academia is this fucked up about a lot of stuff.
Was this a bigger or smaller university?
top 25 in the us for the field, big state school
Hm interesting, idk if the size or status has anything to do with the tendency to have people around like that. It’s probably just the nature of how scummy academia can be I guess.
RightAngle is a commodities trading and risk management solution for liquid hydrocarbon companies, such as producers, crude marketers, refiners, fuel marketers, and fuel consumers
Wall. Unless you sabotage their business.
How can I compete with their own incompetency?
Starting new jobs is like the worst experience. Not a clue how anything works, no idea who to ask, everyones busy and you have no work to do, or the work you are given makes no sense.
Everyone is either pretending to be busy or legitimately busy carrying most of the workload
This. At my spouse’s job, they’re kept so absurdly busy that there isn’t a single day they don’t have tasks leftover in their queue when they close up and go home after a 10 hr shift. Meanwhile there were managers who just talk all day and shop online.
Well fuck, I could have told them that 10 years ago.
I remember when I was a teen looking for my first job. “Why don’t you try a coffee shop, easy first job” was what I was told by boomers.
Every single one did not want to hire anyone who didn’t already have years of experience.
I once asked one of the baristas “Well, how did you get experience then?” he sheepishly said, “Well… my parents owned a cafe business so…”
I am fast learning that most of what boomers say translates into “Sounds like a whole lot of not-my-problem”. They managed to get theirs by climbing the latter built by the previous generation or two, so now you are asked to do the same… and without the ladder.
The trick is that brainwashing techniques are strong, so they don’t see the hypocrisy inherent in those positions. Nor do they care. The TV man says jump, and they ask how high.
It’s funny when people give you general advice, but then you ask about their experiences and it doesn’t line up with their advice at all.
Everyone wants to be helpful but don’t realize that they’re not really helping
in every functioning organization there’s one person that knows how everything works, and they’re too busy being abused by management to teach anyone else.
Do too poorly and you get fired, do too well and you become too indispensable to ever receive a promotion or go on vacation.
Yeah if you want to be promoted you need to coast by doing the exact average amount of work and licking boots, causing no problems for your managers (keep head down, don’t bring up problems or ideas or improvements)
accurate. You either become a knowledgeable underpaid employee, or you get promoted despite not knowing basic shit about the company.
My workplace keeps firing the one person in charge of important tasks and then doesn’t replace that task because no one in management understood the task was necessary. They fired the person who counts inventory, now no one does inventory and we’re all expected to just live with it. I think the idea is someone is supposed to take initiative and do the inventory tasks on top of their normal job, but why would they?
Constant carousel of firing an important person, learning that person did an important task, management rearranges people to do extra tedious stuff, then management pats themselves on the back.
Less workers doing the same amount of work = more profit. That’s why they pat themselves on the back. They think they’re geniuses for making the company more profitable, failing to realize that little trick has its limits as everyone gets worn down, loses sleep, performs worse, etc.
deleted by creator
Places hate taking inventory because they realize they have less stock than the computer said, meaning they “lose” money when they correct it. They’d rather just keep pretending. Literally fictitious capital.
The inventory I mean are supplies we use for manufacturing the products. We have no central database for incoming raw materials, no inventory to know what we have, and no one in charge of tagging incoming supplies. It makes no sense and we realize we’re depleted on something important at least once per week.
holy shit lol
Sounds like you have some free stuff in your future
Maybe I’ll find it later but this reminds me of the reddit thread from last year where a GenZ kid made a post asking people how his desk phone worked, what all the buttons did, and so on.
No one told the poster how it worked at the time they were hired. They didn’t want to admit to coworkers that they had no idea how it worked.
I think this extends way beyond just work though. People just don’t know how anything works. They buy phones and have no idea how they work, cars, computers, everything is a black box to most people.
People just don’t know how anything works. They buy phones and have no idea how they work, cars, computers, everything is a black box to most people.
This isn’t entirely their fault; the makers of these products have deliberately made them harder and harder to tinker with and learn from over the years.
But even the people who are supposed to know how things work don’t know how they work - my experience hiring people is that basically anyone who grew up with home wifi, cell phones, online gaming instead of LAN parties, etc. doesn’t know anything about how networks or computers actually function, no matter what degrees or certifications they claim to have.
I’ve asked people applying for network engineer positions to explain how the Internet works, and they thought I was being philosophical. Like, woah, man, how does the Internet work? The conceptual map just isn’t there, even if I try to gently lead them through it.
how does the internet work tho?
It’s a series of tubes
Magic blue smoke
I’m always terrified I’m going to accidentally hang up on a caller when I attempt to transfer them. Chalk it up to “was never trained on it, just used intuition and hope”
I stopped asking how anything worked at my first job and just googled the model to find a manual. The best I could get from other people was the one function they used.
On the other hand it’s a skill that’s come in useful in general, because 9/10 problems with stuff can be fixed by just reading the manual, and now I’m a custodian/handyman nearly all of the problems I’m faced with can be solved by reading a manual or watching a YouTube how-to.People just don’t know how anything works. They buy phones and have no idea how they work, cars, computers, everything is a black box to most people.
This is why I say at minimum, learning how to solder and what basic electronic components are and do is an important skill in the times we live in. I’ve fixed so many things I would’ve otherwise thrown out and bought another, if I didn’t know the basic stuff. They should really teach it to the younger folk in school.
Any suggested learning materials? That does sound very handy.
Sure, for books I recommend the “for Dummies” series of books on anything electronic. Some hobbyist electronic stores have all sorts of books and magazines you can get too (idk the name of any stores outside my country though, you’ll have to look what stores in your country have that kind of thing. Those hobbyist magazines and books are what I learned from.
Online there’s all sorts of stuff, a quick google search for me found a lot of good stuff on soldering and electronic components . Those “for Dummies” books are really good for the theory and math behind all of it. Also your local electronic shop might even have “learn to solder” kits you can practice on, they usually explain what all the components do and why you’re making the thing. You can even find really cute custom ones on etsy if you want.
If you want to get started solderless, give arduino a go, they’re really cheap and there’s all sorts of projects that are fun, and/or useful, and you can even get your kids involved in many of their learning projects. Definitely pick up a kit (or a clone kit from AliExpress), it’s lots of fun, and you learn some programming too.
This is a REALLY good recommendation. If you’re interested in learning more about electronic bits, do this.
Thanks for the comprehensive answer. Time to hit the high seas and download a bunch of books for dummies lol.
YouTube is full of great hobbyist channels too, I can’t really give a good recommendation on tutorial channels though. I’m sure you’ll find something good if I you look around. I believe there’s lots of arduino channels, plus arduino itself posts video tutorials.
I literally found the instruction manual for the pile of phones at a store I worked at and figured out how to make it do things that were useful.
One of which, was changing the fucking time after Day-Savings-Time because the phones were fancy enough to have it hard coded into them, but not fancy enough to be updated after the date of Daylight Savings changed. So for YEARS the phones would spend like four months with the wrong time until the time changed happened again.
It’s not just corporate jobs either. I was “training” (in quotes because they taught me fuck-all) to be a server at a fancy restaurant and show venue, and they let me go after my second day. Mind you, they only “trained” me for 4 hours tops my first night, and then threw me in for a full regular shift on my second day. Fired me because I didn’t nail absolutely everything perfectly first try. Made me want to commit arson.
Probably a blessing in disguise, considering the owner was a massive creep, but holy shit.
For restaurant server jobs especially that’s a big reason they really only want to hire people that have tons of experience. That shit is really hard work, not intuitive at all, and especially for my introvert ass, very mentally exhausting, as well as physically draining. Most restaurants I worked at never had any sort of training plan, they just double up the new person with whoever has a slow section and wing it. It’s also not the type of job that incentivizes doubling people up on a shift, due to tips, which I think negatively affects any training program. Pairing someone up with a senior employee has been the fastest onboarding in my experience.
Even at my current job I only get a month, maybe 6 weeks if I’m lucky, to have someone shadow me on the job and get direct training before they’re expected to be pulling shifts alone. And my phone is blowing up for months with questions when they first start solo, so I know that time should be extended.
It’s extremely rough. I had 4 years of serving experience at the time, had served in a variety of settings from nice sushi restaurants to dive bars. They fired me because of specific niche little things that their establishment specifically does a certain way, which makes it all the more frustrating.
I work logistics now, this reminds me of a while back, around late 2020 when a truck driver showed up to pick up a load. He had never been trained to back into a loading dock so he asked to be loaded by forklift, easy request to oblige. He was also never trained on how to roll back his curtainside trailer so we looked up a youtube video and got it done together. He apparently was also never trained on securing loads because I got a call from the destination with pictures where he must have had to hit the breaks hard and one pallet shifted and squished so many cans of paint. That poor dude must have been having a terrible fucking time at that outfit, and they definitely did him dirty. The first email I get after my manager files an insurance claim is from that trucking outfit saying they fired the guy and that mistake won’t happen again. So quick to cut him loose to save their contract.
Dude needed some fucking training and some shadow shifts or something, not getting thrown to the wolves and hung out to dry.
Wait, a truck driver was never trained to back into a loading dock? That’s like…truck driving 101.
: "Do everything yourselves, peasants.So, why are you taking so much profits again? You do literally nothing and miraculously still end up doing less and less. You said it yourself, we don’t need you. Even by your own capitalist standards, the fact that you get all the money and do zero labor means it piles up to never be spent. Having idle billionaires is just leaving money on the table.
no expenses, only profits
It’s so fucked to start a job. Before training even comes into it, you start with a broken setup that no one knows how to get working.
Then you just sit in limbo with no help wondering if things will get fixed before you get fired, and wondering if there will ever be any help or training coming.
I worked at a place that would hire random people for 13 dollars an hour and sell their labor to small businesses for 120 an hour and say they were marketing/SEO experts. The job posting was basically “copywriter” and the training there consisted of “figure it out”
One client saw how bad his site was written, and yelled at the director and accused him of hiring busboys, rhetorically really, as he didn’t know any of it
The director incredulously retold this story to us, as if it was the most absurd accusation. Like dude, he didn’t mean you handed your laptop to your waiter at Applebee’s. He means you hired busboys and didn’t train them in the skills you’re selling. That’s… That’s half the team. The client couldn’t have been more right
The more companies I have to talk to for my job, the more I realise that 80% of being a business is trying to pretend that you have a good product and good internal processes, and the other 20% is putting out some crap from not having a good product or good internal processes.
“On the job” training these days is like a fuckin’ poorly designed game. It’s mostly fail at something they don’t explain to you properly and assuming you don’t die you kind of extrapolate from there. Yes, trial and error is a way to learn, but with any sort of technical skill or task (or even social behavior), it’s a lot easier and better when you are instructed or better yet paired with a teacher of some kind.
In my experience, having an experienced colleague is often the fast way a new hire can get up to speed, but that requires a job to prioritize workers in some meaningful way.
They are treat us all as individual node utterly unconnected to other nodes. they want you to learn on your time not theirs. Also I hate “upskill-ing” being totally outsourced but also is kinda mandatory these days. They all wonder why we all hate work, and never take a second to look at how work is done and more importantly HOW THEY made it worse
Explained what I was thinking perfectly.
When I did my work placement in college at a long term care home, I had basically 1 day of orientation and that was it. I was expected to do 1-1 counselling sessions with residents immediately, it was absolutely terrifying.
I was once the 6th person in a row to be hired and fired within a few days in an accounting role for a Chinese home appliance manufacturer. My onboarding consisted of a brief introduction, getting sat down with a fat stack of Amazon invoices, and given a shitty laptop with a shitty trackpad and no mouse. Nobody bothered to set up my account, so I didn’t have any emails. Nobody explained how to use SAP, which I still hate for being the shittest bit of accounting / enterprise resource management software I have used, and nobody explained how the fuck to interpret the mish mash of disorganised Amazon delivery notes. I waved my predecessor goodbye as she was fired the day I started (she had been there for 2 days herself), and 2 days later I was fired myself. I am pretty sure the reason I got fired is that I left work on time, while my manager was in a meeting going on god knows how long. I had spent the whole afternoon twiddling my fingers with nothing to do, no resources, and no way to get started by myself. Good riddance. Hopefully my former manager is still hopelessly overwhelmed working 16 hour shifts to this day.
I’ve felt like this basically my entire life. Half the time I got in trouble at my previous job it was because of something that wasn’t explained and that I didn’t know I should ask about. My current job literally put my in charge of a project doing something I had never done before on my first real work day - at least they also gave me a pretty detailed instruction manual for the project, so I was able to figure it out, but it was still pretty weird.
