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[–] 47 points 4 months ago (8 children)

I once listened to a presentation by a guy who had this really elaborate plan, based on everyone doing their jobs absolutely perfectly, with nothing going wrong at all. If anything skipped a beat, anywhere along the way, the entire house of cards would come down.

I asked what would happen if someone didn't accomplish their objectives, and he said they would. But what if they didn't? They will. That's when I said, you aren't taking the human factor into account, and he said that the solution is to "fire the human, and get a new human."

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  • [–] 23 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    Okay, cool. What happens while you're training that new human? Trainees will operate at substantially less efficiency than expected while learning and may for a while afterwards too, depending on complexity of the work. What happens if one of those humans gets hurt or sick?

    Dude really was a moron, wasn't he?

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  • [–] 13 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Dude really was a moron, wasn’t he?

    A leading hypothesis is management are fucking stupid. Throw them back into the trenches. Let them do some actual work for a few years

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago

    It's easy to tell which managers were promoted from within and which were external hires with no hands on experience.

    I don't think hands on experience is necessary, but you need to have a comprehensive understanding of the work being done by people you oversee. That becomes increasingly difficult as your position moves you from the front line, which I think is one reason upper management and executives often seem like aliens compared to the rank and file and lower management.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago

    What happens while you’re training that new human?

    My managers always had a simple solution to this problem: pretend that new programmers fresh out of college require no on-the-job training at all. Or for bonus points, pretend that they're even better than the guys who have been doing this for decades and pay them more.

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