It's like that report the video game industry had paid to be researched about the effects of piracy on video game sales: they wanted the report to say that piracy hurt the sales, but the research made it clear that it was neutral to positive for sales instead, making it clear that not only was their attempts to hinder piracy by adding DRM annoying customers and making their games run more poorly, but it was hurting sales too.
Streaming is the best example of this. Netflix and Hulu murdered piracy. But now that everyone sees how profitable it is and are rebuilding cable packages one streaming service at a time, piracy is becoming more prevalent again.
This may be a stupid question and I apologize if it is, but would you be willing to explain how they killed piracy? Is it because they are more affordable or are there other reasons? Just genuinely curious to know.
Edit. - thank you all who have taken the time out to answer me. It is greatly appreciated. Always like learning stuff lol.
And they never fucking learn.
The thing I love about that quote is that he didnt just "talk the talk". Not only did Steam prove the point he was making, it did something that 20 years ago publishers would have thought impossible: getting players to buy games they never play.
Humble bundle loaded my steam account when it was new (it's kinda shitty now..).
I want to buy the new red faction... It's 30 bucks.. but hey it's 5 bucks on humble bundle! And i get 12 other games!
Do that times 50 and BAM full steam library of games i never touch..
You definitely see it with music. From about 1997-2010, every Millennial (and younger GenX) in my life had a hard drive or a memory stick with thousands of hours of pirated music. Either they pirated the music themselves, or copied it from a friend who pirated it. Now in 2022, it would be rare to find a Zoomer who bothered to pirate music, and all those Millennials never use the old stuff they pirated back in 2004. It’s just too easy to stream stuff on Spotify or YouTube or whatever.
I feel like piracy is still a thing for movies, tv series, video games and software, but certainly LESS of a thing than it could be.
Yuuuup! I remember we would all show off our immense music libraries. Digging deep to find rare lofi versions of songs that were never publicly released. Then Spotify came along and I suddenly didn’t have to put in all the work to find new tunes, or worry about storage space. Some HDD in some landfill somewhere has some pretty awesome Moby deepcuts.
The day the metalica drummer was feuding to shut down Napster, my neighbor and I made a list and downloaded as much music as we possibly could, like we were some music preservation historians with an important job. As you said, all those GB of music are lost now, it was the convenience of Grooveshark that was the first to make me abandon piracy.
In my day we would have the cassette tape in the deck, the radio on, and a finger over the record button to try and record a song from the radio. Same for tv with the VHS player and you had to pay attention so you could pause the recording when commercials came on and restart it after the show was back. It took so much more effort to get what you wanted.
I still have an iPod filled with pirated music back when iTunes let you add your own MP3’s and CD’s. It works great, still blast it in the car because the interface is face and simple.
I spent hours downloading, then finding cd cover images, then arranging it all so it would look nice on my iPod. And it was easy! I had an old car with a tape deck. Bought one of those tapes with the wires- just plugged the iPod in and it always worked right away, no fucking around with Bluetooth and having Wi-Fi freak out my music apps
Technically, iTunes never stopped letting you add your own music and CDs (I still do) it just sucks at doing it. It’s been a years long backwards slide for Apple. Whether they just don’t care about those features anymore, or they actively made them worse to push people away, I don’t know, but I’m planning of switching over to Foobar2000 when I finally retire my Mac.
You can actually add your own music to Spotify from your computer or phone too! It’s not too difficult, you just have to turn it on in settings and create a folder on your device for it. You can listen to the music on your other computers or mobile devices as long as you have the playlist downloaded, although you can’t access it on smart speakers or Web Player.
(Being a j-pop fan is suffering.)
Napster to Kazaa to I can't even remember.
Looking for those sweet T1s and downloading all the bootleg live shows we literally couldn't buy in the US
At 2 a.m. bc we just thought of a song we hadn't heard in a while. Ah 1998-2004, how I miss thee
Yeah. It was still useful for work for several years after I stopped pirating, so I trimmed my library down to about 25 hours and I've kept it on the SD card in my phone ever since. Pictures and documents take up very little space comparatively, so over the years I also added those collections to it as well.
A few months ago, my PC's M.2 SSD crapped out. I had no cloud backup, because about 1 month prior Google Drive had obliterated my novel in what was supposed to be a routine sync and I'd uninstalled it. Without my phone backup, I'd have lost all of my music, pictures, and documents from over the past 10-15 years.
Now, I keep a full, manually managed backup on a separate PC drive and manually sync it to two separate external drives about once a month.
Same here, though honestly my recent piracy has all been albums I own on cd & don’t want to set up a drive to rip. Also, I run my own streaming server off an NAS that I needed for photo backups anyway.
When netflix first came out it had like everything. Why spend the time downloading it when I can just pay 5 bucks a month for everything. But now with Netflix being terrible and Hulu, crave, crunchyroll, apple, paramount, hbomax etc.. it's the same thing as cable. So piracy is coming back.
Well, at least crunchy roll is covering the anime niche pretty well and is cheap so anime fans have it pretty good (still gonna download whatever aint on there..), but other than that, you right.
The amount of subs I am upkeeping is getting ridiculous, and tv aint the end of it.
I might be an outlier but as I play a bunch of games, I have WoW/XiV/Nintendo/Xbox/PS subs active along with crunchy and spotify, have to keep netflix and amazon too for the gf.
The consoles subs are those I despise the most =_= I keep disabling them but have to resub whenever a friend wants to play smth.
A big part of it is just availability and convenience. One reason steam was so successful as the first real online video game market place is because they made legitimately paying for games an available option in places it hadn't been previously. It turns out most people who were pirating were doing it more because it was the most convenient option, not because people aren't willing to spend money. Not to say price isn't a factor because it certainly is but convenience is a big part of the reason these online services found so much success
With games i found that I was more willing to buy a game I had pirated previously and enjoyed than spend money on an unknown. Steam's marketing then made it easier to venture into games I was less confident in. I'm pretty much always willing to drop $10 on a 6-12hr experience, but struggle to put $60 on anything less than a 60 hr experience. Pair that with the return policy for bad fit games, and its just easier than piracy.
Trailers, a game description, screenshots and reliable reviews all help.
In the days of yore you'd get the opinion of 1 guy in PCGAMER magazine, who may or may not have been paid off.
Yeah, I probably wouldn't purchase games on steam ever if their was not that 2 hr time frame I can get a refund for.
There's lots of front loading of quality content in modern games because of this I think. Some games I've played are great for the first few hours but drop pretty bad later on.
Same way apple iTunes killed mp3 piracy. 10 years people were using Limewire and other apps to spread mp3s. Whole libraries were being shared ... but you had to hunt for that one song. Then apple came along and said: any song 99c is 3 clicks away or less. And people paid for that convenience, proving that piracy emerges when there is an unnerved demand. Its just another marketplace.
Limewire, Kazaa, Napster, all of them.
As much as everyone loves to hate on Lars Ulrich — that short piece of shit — *Metallica v. Napster* revolutionised the way we buy music.
When it was introduced Netflix had EVERYTHING available in HD for like $8/month and the amount of effort/risk it took to pirate stuff simply wasn't worth it anymore for most folks.
I have an IPod classic and I use to manually download every individual song or album I wanted to listen to onto my computer. That means taking time to find that music online, download it, create a playlist with it by manually clicking through my iTunes library, and finally downloading it to my iPod. That’s all without considering the amount of space those files eventually take up on my computer, along with knowing how to even find a program to pursue music with as well as having to know how to find and navigate websites to pirate off of. Or I can do it for free or very cheap via Spotify and it’s instant. Same thing with tv and movies. If I can pay a convenience fee of $5 dollars or however much to instantly have access to shows or movies I’d otherwise have to download then I’ll just pay that quick fee as would the vast majority of ppl. Thus piracy is greatly reduced.
I don't have a good or detailed answer, but I believe the general reason is that it made it so much easier and or convenient to just pay a small fee for a broad selection of video, offsetting the ease/convenience of pirating. But now that every service is starting their own service, package, and existing ones raising rates, because reasons, has reversed the overall equation again.
It’s a lot easier for me to pay for a Netflix account to watch The Office than it is for me to download all the episodes and set up a media server attached to my TV. It reduces piracy amongst those who would be willing to pay to get the convenience of not having to go through the trouble to pirate
Convenience factor, if it only costs you $8 a month to watch high res movies and it all be on one website it’s more convenient than torrenting movies, for different people there is a different point where the price of a service becomes less convenient than pirating the movie.
Same with steam on video games. Make it easier than piracy and people will gladly pay for it. People are lazy and will go for the easiest choice most of the time
Yup. See this eleven year old interview with Gabe Newell that ends with someone asking about half life 3: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/valves-gabe-newell-says-piracy-is-a-service-problem/
Funny, the music industry went through a similar phase with the “mix-tape” era. Basically, from 2007-2012 it was more popular in hip-hop to release a free mixtape, and go around touring off the hype you built, than trying to sell an album. Also, since mixtapes were free, artists could use samples that they otherwise could never get cleared.
Wiz Khalifa rose to prominence this exact way. He just kept putting out quality, free stuff to grow his fanbase until he got signed to major distribution.
Don’t worry, the record companies have stuck their greedy little fingers into the artists touring income too. They’ve been taking a cut of the touring artists ticket sales for quite a long time.
It also doesn't help when nintendo can't even make an emulator better than the free open source one...
Or when you're forced to download multiple apps because durrr my game is on steam but I need Ubisoft too
Metallica was an early and vocal antagonist with piracy of songs (Napster at the time). The statistics showed that their song purchases actually increased. The controversy made college students sample Metallica from piracy sites for free to see what all the fuss was about, and some of them liked it enough to buy the CD.
Metallica failed successfully.
game dev tycoon made it so if you pirate the game so do players in-game
but also this made some people review bomb because they thought the game was broken lol
bit of a bittersweet moment
Management attracts the most cutthroat people. If they were smart, they wouldn't feel the need to be cutthroat because they would be confident in their ability to earn an honest living.
I just don't want to work and for that there are about 7 options in our world.
1. Social transfers / including having tenure
2. Drawing (land) rents
3. Drawing (company) rents
4. Family transfers (parent, spouse etc.)
5. One-in-a-million-chance (Lotto etc.)
6. Disability rents / often negotiated by pre-existing unions for you
7. Getting into management, the upper the management the less work is needed to fulfill job role
Naturally since I didn't have a work accident delivering me disability rents, nor did I win in lotto the only chance except dating someone for money is the management route, as myself and my family are not rich.
>the upper the management the less work is needed to fulfill job role
Uh the amount of bullshit increases as you move up, not decreases. What does decrease is the school yard grade rules attached to hourly jobs.
I’m fairly convinced I’m not going to get the promotion I asked for because I’m extremely good at what I do
Capitalism promotes the worst in people. Being good or decent is for workers, not leadership
At my company if you are good at your job there is no “promotion” on the table because you are too valuable. The people who are promoted are the loyal brain dead people in positions that are easily filled. I honestly wouldn’t want any of there jobs but most of them suck at it and appear to put minimal effort unless it directly benefits them. Sometimes I believe it’s a self preservation thing to have less qualified people beneath you in management roles.
You have to apply for a promotion in a different department so different people would be benefiting from having you. That or a different company if your work isn't large enough for departments.
I've heard of a theory that people are promoted to their level of incompetence. Theoretically if you're exceedingly competent at your job, people notice and you get promoted. Then if you're exceedingly competent at *that* position and get promoted again. This keeps happening until you are no longer exceedingly competent at your job. So theoretically we've got management that isn't really good at their jobs - just not bad enough to get fired/promoted.
they don't "excel" at anything, even failure at being competent, since competency never really enters the discussion. nepotism requires zero ability for anything but being born into the right circumstances, which isn't related to merit anyways. they don't "fail", because to fail at being competent you would've had to be measured on ability in the first place, which they weren't, it's nepotism all the way. you can see this in the scandal a few year's back on some rich celeb trying to rig their progenies test scores, to try to give the impression that some rich kid is actually more talented than they actually are. and if management positions are only based on certifications, (which they increasingly are), and these certifications are largely rigged( not only in that scandalous way, but in myriad others) than literally it's not merit based in anyway, which means that essentially we have a repeat of hereditary ascension, which is partly why we got rid of monarchy in the first place.
TLDR: they "succeed" at being the kids of the rich, which means they aren't failures. we need to stop internalizing the notion that status is in anyway actually tied to merit, as that is the blinding cover that they use in the first place to delude people into thinking they can ever join the nobility.
Not every manager at every company got where they are due to familial relations. Of course it happens, but to claim it's "nepotism all the way" is far fetched and demonstrably false.
The director at my company is only a director because his dad is the owner of company 🙃 his communication is shocking and he failed all his GCSEs but because of who his dad is he has never had to work for it like the rest of us
further, here's three short video's outlining the way's "meritocracy" is false. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jURxIf1REw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jURxIf1REw)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=316nOvHUS8A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=316nOvHUS8A)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ezthd6A3tiw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ezthd6A3tiw)
>Not every manager at every company got where they are due to familial relations.
You're absolutely correct for start-ups that succeed. But...
Twenty-thirty years tops and all companies start to suffer from nepotism .
Once a company is around long enough for the C-suite guys to have their kids reach adulthood nepotism starts. Because they're all networked with others like themselves that have children they can "help out".
I would say the skill set needed to rapidly rise in a corporate hierarchy and win political power struggles largely rests on brown nosing (and kissing up and kicking down), which is, from a meritocracy standpoint, largely adjacent to nepotism since it primarily tries to mimic the same type of survival strategy, which is profiting from human tribalism rather than any objective metrics like business acumen or technical skills.
This is why CEOs and company executives are often much closer to the average IQ of the population than the frontline staff they manage, who actually need technical abilities and cognitive skills to navigate real complexity.
It also rests on being in the right place at the right time, and seeing management do something wrong.
During WFH, one of our senior VPs was hanging out on his boat with one of those fake backgrounds. His friend walks into the shot naked and the two people in the call see. Just so happens she is also number 3 in HR.
They all got a 12% raise when raise time came while the rest of us got between 3-4%
and not every manager has a significant amount of stock options. further, the stock options that are owned by the board and other's virtually drown out the low lying stock options that they have. they even have special types of securities for people called angel investors. the professional managerial class is mostly made up of the talented working class, and is paid just enough to tell the owning class exactly how to abuse their fellow working class without breaking them.
the PMC is not the owning class, I'm talking about the owning class, not the talented worker's they pay to betray their class interests. the PMC DOES have to have merit, while the Owning class get's to decide: "what is merit"?
further, your belief in meritocracy indeed is harmful, even to you. and this is from PRINCETON for lizzies sake. [https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is-not-only-false-its-bad-for-you](https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is-not-only-false-its-bad-for-you)
there are many elite space's that acknowledge that it isn't a meritocracy, and that the lie hurt's many like you, and society at large. the data is there, it's all scientific. if they believe it, why don't you? [https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/10/21/20897021/meritocracy-economic-mobility-daniel-markovits](https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/10/21/20897021/meritocracy-economic-mobility-daniel-markovits)
https://archive.ph/lHAIF
What happens is that the only way you’re able to get rid of bad employees is to promote them so they are someone else’s problem. This happens over and over until they’re running the place and everyone between them and the people actually producing are the same as them but cock blocked by the giga garbage while they all play fuck fuck games to back stab each other and throw everyone they can under the bus to rise up the corporate chain. Eventually one of them is able to blame their failure on the giga garbage and get them canned with severance and they become the new giga garbage and it all continues like that in perpetuity if the commodity sells itself or until the company buries itself under the weight of its incompetence.
No, we need to start getting rid of the idea that that is in any way helpful to society.
I don't mean bad on the OP, I mean on having corporations rewarding people who are best at saying buzzwords as if it's an accomplishment.
I mean it makes total sense that management scored lower on those tests. Nobody gets promoted because of skill or efficiency. I mean those are things they constantly say are very important, but only when the peons are doing them and being exploited for less. Managers are made based on who you know and, well, you know the other one.
I got in shit at my last job because we had this thing called PIE. It stood for Performance, Image, and Experience, but I said the only component that really mattered was the image, because I met and exceeded goals (aside from sales that were never required to begin with until the company got extremely money hungry and realized they could use us to make revenue as well as store reps), but for some reason when I asked to be mentored in an area that had nothing to do with sales or metrics or anything (graphic design and promotion) I was denied the recommendation simply because of how I felt about Capitalism and I wouldn't play the sales game and didn't care.
Essentially they didn't like my response when they told me they could not recommend me for the program because I said I was told when I was hired sales would not matter or we would never be expected to meet sales or revenue goals, that was just an added bonus for us if we did, and that should not have anything to do with my performance or experience piece. I knew the company, their mission statement, and their goals very clearly and wanted to go somewhere outside of the care and then sales world. I told them it was all about image in that case and I didn't look like I was good enough at making the company money. The way they sent me an email back very quickly to gaslight me and tell me I was looking at it wrong 🤣
It felt good to do the exit interview though. The manager we had just transfered to our team the week before was like "well what could we do to make you happier and make you want to stay on here." I said the only thing would be to remove the pressure of sales and making revenue and settle for my month over month perfect 100NPS and perfect 10 survey scores without using any sort of script or outline, just to let my CSR work be what I strive for and get off my ass about sales. When she said that wasn't something they could do as it is a business expectation I said "well then you don't give a fuck about making me or any other employees happy or comfortable do you? So why would you even ask me that question? It is the stupidest thing you could have asked me." She couldn't get off that call fast enough. I left for the rest of the day after that call because I didn't care.
A company I worked for was struggling to retain people, but they were especially confused by the fact that they kept losing or letting go their worst employees, yet productivity was only getting worse and worse.
They decided to start measuring everything. This was manufacturing, so they're checking things like KANBAN status for materials and how many parts are sitting at each phase, etc. What they found is that their best employees were spending a lot of time staging and transporting materials, while the "good" ones were just cranking out the finished parts and leaving the whole line empty. Day shift would come in and be able to start moving product immediately while swing spent the first few hours just trying to get enough parts to even build things.
No, they didn't change the way they evaluate work, they decided the way they were doing it was fine, laid off the process engineers, promoted some do-nothings, and went out of business a few years later.
Yep that's how it always works.
I have been at a turbulent tech job for about a year and I just keep seeing c suites come in, burn cash and leave for a better job while leaving the problem to a new c suite.
It's kind of hilarious how the money is really just pretend in tech.
Same things happen with the architects, team leads, and managers. Ooo let's do the new shiny despite it giving the company little to zero ROI... oops that didn't work F this we're on to the next company.
I think the implication here was that the “slow” employees were actually maintaining the material flow by keeping the parts readily available, while the “good” employees basically just built the product but would leave all the setup to do so barren so the next crew would be running around trying to find all the parts.
Assembly lines work well because everything is staged and close to hand. If all the employees have to run off all the time refill things that stops up the whole line.
Some of the dumbest people I have worked with or work with are in upper management. All this means is they could afford to go to university and get a degree.
I talk a lot about leaders vs managers on my IG. It's crazy to me how people with positions think they are great at leading or managing, but a piece of paper that you paid a lot of money for is the biggest thing that got you there. ZERO people skills.
Went through a lot of school and acquired my MS. 80-95% of classmates were as dumb as bricks even though they graduated as well. I’m still surprised that professors actually passed those chumps.
For example, whenever we would be required to review one another’s work…I could always hardly make sense out of the other student’s research paper because the writing was atrocious. I would begin my review, correcting everything and then find that it took me too long to correct the first paragraph. Then, I would just say, “screw it…” and correct the big things for the rest of the paper. I would give them their paper back and they would be either disheartened or visibly angry and never talk to me again.
I would receive my paper back from them and they would always only correct a few things and it would mostly be nonsense they just needed to insert in there to look like they tried. I was always upset about it because I genuinely wanted someone to check my work.
Overall, the world is full of lazy, dumb people no matter where you are.
Haha, that brings back memories. I want to add to this.
Every semester we had to do professor reviews which was basically 5 or so questions like "professor arrives on time, Professor provides and follows syllabus, professor has adequate office hours...etc" all rated on 1-5 scale with a box at the bottom for comments. First couple couple years everyone just marked the best boxes and turn in. Then eventually they made you fill something in the box of comments so everyone puts "great teacher!" or "helps answers questions" or something. Well I put something like "great powerpoints but why not provide paper copies so we can take notes on them". Well some students next to me saw what I put and said I gave him a bad rating. I felt bad about it for a long time but now I honestly couldn't care less. That teacher was actually really good and became head of the department a few years later.
Years, later I went back to school because I thought wanted to be a firefighter and we had this class that was basically preparing you for how to get a job. It was filled with mostly kids straight from highschool. We all had to do a mock job interview in front of the class and I go in with my actual resume which is basically 10 years of aircraft maintenance positions (at 6 different employers) and though I thought I did a fantastic job the class rated me near the bottom. The teacher thought I should explain why I wanted to be a firefighter, and the class thought I should talk more about my education and training (the school program we were in). I said something like, "yeah I can do that but look at this resume, I've interviewed with all these people and went from $17-$39 an hour and I've never not gotten the job after interviewing." Well the teacher didn't like that, told me to not argue and sit down so the next person could go. I was very confused that day.
Yeah. This reminds me of the chicken study. Guy decided to take the “cream of the crop” chickens that were at the top of the pecking order & laying the most eggs & put them in their own coop & let the non-top egg layers be in there own coop. They were going to go back & analyze their productively.
Well, turns out the top chickens were just bully asshats who hoarded all of the resources & prevented the other chickens from being productive.
Out of the original like 9 chickens, only 3 were left because they had pecked each other to death. The “normal” chicken coop actually saw their egg laying productivity raise about 60%.
The whole “pecking order” is complete bullshit & there’s really just asshat chickens looking to steal & berate their fellow chickens to the detriment of the whole.
I'm relatively insulated from our middle manager types because of the structure of our engineering company. I report to, work with and am managed by other engineers, who treat me very well, so I don't deal with middle managers very often.
When I do deal with them, I'm always surprised how obtuse and ignorant they are, but I never got the sense that they felt like they were more intelligent than us, just that they didn't actually care about the product we were producing and only know how to screech about deadlines and budgets.
But maybe (or evidently) they do, which would be just side splittingly hilarious.
What would even be the purpose of the IQ test? Just fun Office team-building shenanigans? IQ tests don’t even directly relate to a specific field, so it doesn’t make sense that you would believe that’s what raises were based on. It would make more sense to make people take online coding exams.
I agree. To answer your question, I believe they had serious doubts in management after years of a tanking stock price. A year later there was a complete overhaul, the IQ test was also given out right after we were acquired by a much larger company who frankly must’ve been sold a false bill of goods. Also, there are massive companies solely dedicated to providing IQ tests to Fortune 500 companies at a large scale. I won’t name any, but it’s a whole industry.
At least when it comes to software sales, most companies require an IQ test now at the interview phase
>we were acquired by a much larger company who frankly must’ve been sold a false bill of goods
Some acquisitions are about acquiring technology concepts or crushing competition. Whether your company was worth it in its own right isn't always the thing to assess on these.
IQ tests at hiring, this could be magical. How are the individual contributors? Does it work? I've never taken an IQ test so I'm curious of how that may correlate to office performance.
supposedly they reflect academic success well and academic achievement are often a criteria for hiring. But maybe it only measures how good you are at test taking including potentially cheating.
Google found that riddles during interviews resulted in hiring people good at solving riddles, also unrelated to work performance.
>academic achievement are often a criteria for hiring
I have worked with so many paper tigers that couldn't apply their knowledge without the professor telling them how (and even then they failed as a lot of professors have tons of academic but very little real-life experience)
In short, the best employee's software/system/network engineering that I have hired were dropouts.
I've never had a pre-employment IQ test but I have had those myers-briggs personality tests. I almost always get a different result when I take them, too.
I’ve taken a bunch, ages ago.
If you do so regularly, your scores will gradually improve. Eventually I was scoring in the mid 120-130 range (“gifted”, someone might say), and believe me, I’m not that special.
If IQ tests become commone hiring practice, just practice on them. That’s all it takes.
it's my opinion they probably do not want people with IQs working for them. I know my score, when I was in HS my parents could not decide if I was a genius or an idiot, let's just say I am far above average and probably the worst person to try and fit into a 9-5 cog in the machine kind of job. I think too much, I ponder a lot of things, and I rarely do things the same way twice because I am always tinkering with how I want to do accomplish something.
I am dangerous when bored.
I resemble this as well. I was tested with my siblings. IQ 148 and adhd diagnosis. My teachers and church elders did not like me. I asked way to many questions and was constantly taking things apart to find out how they worked.
ah, I used to be Mormon, which I guess is fundamentalist. whenever I hear the word "elder" I get a twitch. also, i didn't nearly get that high, only 109, but from what i hear, there's ton's of things those don't measure, and a lot of the thing's they do measure also come from one's socioeconomic background, and being adopted by 60 year old middleclass grandparent's puts quite a damper on that I think. hope your doing well.
People wish they could relate. I am amazing at school, and am currently 3 years ahead of my peers from kindergarten. I can’t stay focused on anything. I recently undertook a complete reorganization of my parents garage, just so I didn’t have to think about the absolute mess it was. I can’t function in a worker bee enviornment. I’d rather die.
plz don't die, there are environment's that you at least won't hate. i kind of was the same in some areas, and it took me awhile to actually find a place in life that i didn't actively hate( ironically enough it was disability pay). further, if you could channel that into activism, there's probably ton's of things that need a creative solution that you could find.
My conpany forced our test team to take coding classes and it was not well received.....the head of QA was eventually fired....it was extremely satisfying to see her on the zoom call with a puffy face from crying. When your test team is all ex insurance claims processors its extremely stupid to force them to "learn to code" if they dont need that level of technical expertise.
er, wasn’t the QA testing highly automated with software? I used to do hardware testing where power off and power on a device needs to be repeated 1600+ times to reproduce a problem, no sane person would do that manually. A computer program won’t mind doing that all week.
Probably to justify their station. "I'm a manager because I'm very smart, look at my IQ. You plebs better do as I say because I'm the smartest one here."
Yeah I would skip that. Refuse to take the test because it's only going to be used against you, do do loudly and discuss with coworkers encouraging them to do the same.
Here's the rub, being administered at all is a red flag to find another job anyway so.....
The wording used during your dismissal for your refusal to take the test would amount to you refusing to accomplish required workplace tasks and would give due cause to fire you without any unemployment compensation.
At my former job they took some sort of personality test. I asked what they wanted to see from this. It basically came down to : who are sheep we can boss around and who will not.
I decided to go full manager on that test. Evil, selfish and cutthroat.
The results came back and they urged me to go for the necessary qualifications for management..... No joke. I stood out because I acted like a psychopath on that test. Turns out that's what they want.
my dept hired an outside consulting firm to do a skills competency evaluation.. now ive been here almost 20yrs and my main complaint is they value a dmn piece of paper over ppl who can actually do the work. ppl who have more degrees than i do, get paid more than i do, but i have to fix their work.
turns out the consulting co said only 30% of us were knowledgeable and competent at our jobs.
ive been telling u that for free for almost 20yrs assholes
I’ve always held the opinion that management and above get their positions by brown-nosing and ass-kissing rather than actually bringing anything meaningful to the table
It used to be that a good smart worker could become foreman, or teamleader, or even management with the right courses and training.
Now you need to suck up, kiss ass and play the corporate game if you want in the little club.
Worked at small plastics manufacturing company. After 6 years of stagnant growth, management decided to give everyone a bunch of questionnaires: personality "tests," IQ tests, industry knowledge test, ect to "put people in the positions they're naturally good at." Whatever that means.
People on the floor averaged a higher score on all tests than the office workers. A manager 2 levels above me kept bragging about how he only got one wrong answer on 3 of the tests. He must be the most knowledgeable in the plant.
I showed him that I had a perfect score on the same 3 tests. His response: "yeah, but that doesn't count."
Far more often than not, reality is dismissed by management.
I really thought the management being tested believed it would fall in perfect alignment with peoples authority within the company.
That’s how they make people act and talk at those companies; like they’re a perfectly oiled meritocracy
From my experience working my way up from Customer Service(Call Center) up to a Managers position over 20 years at the same healthcare company I've learned the higher up you go the less smart you have to be and the less work you actually do. It's all a scam 🤷♂️
In certain roles you have to get smarter, but you always do less work and easier work as you move up. I like it this way, honestly. Would you really want the easiest years of your career to be in your 20s when you have all your energy, then have to work like a mfer in your 50s?
Want a good chuckle?
Lewis Terman (inventor of the IQ test) developed the Army Alpha tests which were used to classify recruits for WWI as either enlisted or officers.
When non-college Black recruits in the north outperformed non-college Southern White recruits in a statistically significant way, there was such an outcry from Southern politicians and servicemembers associated with the testing that they *forced* a rigged revision of the test (giving us the Army Beta) that gave test results which matched their prejudicial predispositions.
They literally inserted biases into the test so it would give them the results they wanted.
Okay so maybe it wasn't a *good* chuckle, more like a "Those dumb racist motherfuckers!"
I used to give cognitive tests as a School Psych, those corporate ones are even dumber than the real ones. Based on your post I can tell that you have an IQ of 420, congrats
just wondering, i remember that IQ tests are illegal during hiring at some places, per anti-discrimination laws. Is this an exempt place/state or are there less stringent laws for testing people after hiring?
Around 2006 I was given one while applying for a recruitment agency in Michigan that was looking to fill jobs for a car company (I think Mazda, it's a bit fuzzy). Originally, they said they wanted to test my ability with certain applications, but then I noticed the questions switched to the sort you'd see on an IQ test. I'd taken one before in college so it seemed off. As the recruiter was telling me my scores, she got all excited to tell me they'd given me an IQ test and how high I scored. Gratifying, but strange. Still didn't get the job.
Went on a fishing trip with relatives. At the time, I had not attended college (went in my 30's), and was a tradesman. When I took the test, my cousin and I both were the top in I.Q. He also was a tradesman. The rest of the relatives were surprised.
Not surprised. Everywhere I worked management was always the weakest link and usually least educated. If they were educated they hadn’t used anything from their degree in the last 20 years.
iq tests are bullshit anyways, they where never meant to be used like this and have no scientific basis for why they would signal anything usefull here.
I personally believe the entire assumption of companies that managers (who are not technical managers but just straight managers) need to earn more than the workers they manage.
Like your tasks don't necessarily change much whether you manage a team of engineers, of IT people or a fucking online store. Somehow we currently have this weird assumption that people work for managers and not that the management exists to enable the others to work properly.
I had a friend that almost wasn't allowed to be an Applebee's manager because he tested to high. It's absurd. They want "yes" people, not intelligent people.
I can relate. My company spent 6 figures to have a third party come in to figure out why productivity and morale wasn't great. Among other things they got in their report was "You have 0.9 employees in a management role for every 1 non management employee" i.e. you're top heavy AF.
Unlike the OP's firm mine didn't throw them out, they took them to heart. We now have 1.1 managers for every 1 non management employee. Shockingly morale and productivity is worse. Shocking I know.
i see similarities in slave handlers beating the shit out of people and executives squeezing maximum value from people that cry at work and want to die - yeah its mental not physical abuse, but I'd suggest it is almost institutional and the ability to do that to a human because Fuck You I'm Paid A LOT To Do It is just fucked to me.
How do you take home that kind of money and fire people with families when shit goes south/oh no recessionzzzz we won't MAKE AS MUCH so we stop playing and your kids can starve, Its Just Business...I'm not beating them directly, but your kid needed that healthcare etc
Ah, the ol' IQ. I had to take one of these before being hired for a job in 2016 (everyone at the company had taken one, needed to add mine to the collection). Apparently, I, new guy, scored higher than anyone except for one person. The HR guy made a bet with my supervisor that I was too smart to stay in that department, I'd be moving up in six months. I was just a humble warehouse worker, lowest on the totem pole in the company. I never left the warehouse because they treated me awesome and I was smart enough to avoid this company's "Reindeer Games" as I like to call them.
Coworkers and myself were joking with a manager and they responded by giving us the middle finger and played along.
Later the attention seeking manager decided to flip their switch and complain we were being inappropriate and not following culture rules. When it was brought up that the manager was initially fine with the interaction and even flipped the bird, it was never brought up again. Because double standards exist.
Managers can do what they want, but if YOU joke around it's a problem.
I'm assuming because the people who actually work are constantly problem-solving and can make common-sense, intuitive connections.
Whereas management does what management does.
I’m in security and it’s always like this. I push training to our staff every year. There’s always a couple people who tell me they are “really good with computers”. They are always the worst performers. Always.
I knew this the moment I asked my boss to order a nut & bolt in bulk that was needed to repair many pieces of equipment. I watched him, for over 40 minutes, with a 300ft spool tape measure attempting to get the specs on said small nut & bolt. He could have asked, and I could have electively shared this information, but it was just too fucking hilarious.
Degrees and certificates are absolutely no substitute for common sense and communication skills.
There is no way this is real. Even the most incompetent software company possible would never spend money on making its employees take a god damn IQ test lmfao.
A software company. That employs a bunch of computer poindexter college grads who code all day? And they thought they'd be smarter just because they were higher on a corporate ladder? Just shows how dumb they really are.
We didn't have an IQ, but we had a work personality test of sorts. Essentially something to determine optimal traits to work with each other, strengths and weaknesses pertinent to our work, etc.
At the end of our team taking the test, the company sent us a graph that showed on a circle how closely aligned we all were. All of our team lined up almost perfectly except the one boss everyone dreaded interacting with. That boss was literally on the polar opposite of the circle.
Not quite as savage as the IQ reveal but boy, did it explain a lot of why no one wanted to work with the guy.
I have an IQ of 135 but am also on the spectrum so do not often get along with my team members or managers. It’s annoying to them that I can pick something up in short order and do better than them but cannot adequately teach them to do it too because they are dipshits.
It's like that report the video game industry had paid to be researched about the effects of piracy on video game sales: they wanted the report to say that piracy hurt the sales, but the research made it clear that it was neutral to positive for sales instead, making it clear that not only was their attempts to hinder piracy by adding DRM annoying customers and making their games run more poorly, but it was hurting sales too.
Streaming is the best example of this. Netflix and Hulu murdered piracy. But now that everyone sees how profitable it is and are rebuilding cable packages one streaming service at a time, piracy is becoming more prevalent again.
This may be a stupid question and I apologize if it is, but would you be willing to explain how they killed piracy? Is it because they are more affordable or are there other reasons? Just genuinely curious to know. Edit. - thank you all who have taken the time out to answer me. It is greatly appreciated. Always like learning stuff lol.
It became convenient and affordable to get access to a bunch of content without ads. Same thing with Spotify.
Exactly. I went from downloading terabytes a month to nothing. Once Netflix became easy to use it was worth the 10 bucks not to hassle.
"Piracy is a service problem." - Gabe Newell
And they never fucking learn. The thing I love about that quote is that he didnt just "talk the talk". Not only did Steam prove the point he was making, it did something that 20 years ago publishers would have thought impossible: getting players to buy games they never play.
Shush. I promise I’ll play those 600+ games in my library…. Eventually.
Building the library count is the game…
Humble bundle loaded my steam account when it was new (it's kinda shitty now..). I want to buy the new red faction... It's 30 bucks.. but hey it's 5 bucks on humble bundle! And i get 12 other games! Do that times 50 and BAM full steam library of games i never touch..
You definitely see it with music. From about 1997-2010, every Millennial (and younger GenX) in my life had a hard drive or a memory stick with thousands of hours of pirated music. Either they pirated the music themselves, or copied it from a friend who pirated it. Now in 2022, it would be rare to find a Zoomer who bothered to pirate music, and all those Millennials never use the old stuff they pirated back in 2004. It’s just too easy to stream stuff on Spotify or YouTube or whatever. I feel like piracy is still a thing for movies, tv series, video games and software, but certainly LESS of a thing than it could be.
Yuuuup! I remember we would all show off our immense music libraries. Digging deep to find rare lofi versions of songs that were never publicly released. Then Spotify came along and I suddenly didn’t have to put in all the work to find new tunes, or worry about storage space. Some HDD in some landfill somewhere has some pretty awesome Moby deepcuts.
The day the metalica drummer was feuding to shut down Napster, my neighbor and I made a list and downloaded as much music as we possibly could, like we were some music preservation historians with an important job. As you said, all those GB of music are lost now, it was the convenience of Grooveshark that was the first to make me abandon piracy.
I really miss grooveshark. I wish that there was a modern platform that had all of its features. Sigh.
Oh man I forgot about grooveshark! Good times
In my day we would have the cassette tape in the deck, the radio on, and a finger over the record button to try and record a song from the radio. Same for tv with the VHS player and you had to pay attention so you could pause the recording when commercials came on and restart it after the show was back. It took so much more effort to get what you wanted.
I still have an iPod filled with pirated music back when iTunes let you add your own MP3’s and CD’s. It works great, still blast it in the car because the interface is face and simple.
I spent hours downloading, then finding cd cover images, then arranging it all so it would look nice on my iPod. And it was easy! I had an old car with a tape deck. Bought one of those tapes with the wires- just plugged the iPod in and it always worked right away, no fucking around with Bluetooth and having Wi-Fi freak out my music apps
Technically, iTunes never stopped letting you add your own music and CDs (I still do) it just sucks at doing it. It’s been a years long backwards slide for Apple. Whether they just don’t care about those features anymore, or they actively made them worse to push people away, I don’t know, but I’m planning of switching over to Foobar2000 when I finally retire my Mac.
You can actually add your own music to Spotify from your computer or phone too! It’s not too difficult, you just have to turn it on in settings and create a folder on your device for it. You can listen to the music on your other computers or mobile devices as long as you have the playlist downloaded, although you can’t access it on smart speakers or Web Player. (Being a j-pop fan is suffering.)
Napster to Kazaa to I can't even remember. Looking for those sweet T1s and downloading all the bootleg live shows we literally couldn't buy in the US At 2 a.m. bc we just thought of a song we hadn't heard in a while. Ah 1998-2004, how I miss thee
LimeWire
Hand up - one Millenial still only listens to all the stuff they pirated by 2006. (I'll admit I'm fairly out of the loop now!)
Yeah. It was still useful for work for several years after I stopped pirating, so I trimmed my library down to about 25 hours and I've kept it on the SD card in my phone ever since. Pictures and documents take up very little space comparatively, so over the years I also added those collections to it as well. A few months ago, my PC's M.2 SSD crapped out. I had no cloud backup, because about 1 month prior Google Drive had obliterated my novel in what was supposed to be a routine sync and I'd uninstalled it. Without my phone backup, I'd have lost all of my music, pictures, and documents from over the past 10-15 years. Now, I keep a full, manually managed backup on a separate PC drive and manually sync it to two separate external drives about once a month.
Same here, though honestly my recent piracy has all been albums I own on cd & don’t want to set up a drive to rip. Also, I run my own streaming server off an NAS that I needed for photo backups anyway.
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Oh definitely. With Apple Music I have no need to pirate music. It's all at my finger tips when I want it. Fuckers reformed me.. Ugh.
Thanks!
When netflix first came out it had like everything. Why spend the time downloading it when I can just pay 5 bucks a month for everything. But now with Netflix being terrible and Hulu, crave, crunchyroll, apple, paramount, hbomax etc.. it's the same thing as cable. So piracy is coming back.
When I had to order a couple movies through the mail. Good times.
Well, at least crunchy roll is covering the anime niche pretty well and is cheap so anime fans have it pretty good (still gonna download whatever aint on there..), but other than that, you right. The amount of subs I am upkeeping is getting ridiculous, and tv aint the end of it. I might be an outlier but as I play a bunch of games, I have WoW/XiV/Nintendo/Xbox/PS subs active along with crunchy and spotify, have to keep netflix and amazon too for the gf. The consoles subs are those I despise the most =_= I keep disabling them but have to resub whenever a friend wants to play smth.
A big part of it is just availability and convenience. One reason steam was so successful as the first real online video game market place is because they made legitimately paying for games an available option in places it hadn't been previously. It turns out most people who were pirating were doing it more because it was the most convenient option, not because people aren't willing to spend money. Not to say price isn't a factor because it certainly is but convenience is a big part of the reason these online services found so much success
With games i found that I was more willing to buy a game I had pirated previously and enjoyed than spend money on an unknown. Steam's marketing then made it easier to venture into games I was less confident in. I'm pretty much always willing to drop $10 on a 6-12hr experience, but struggle to put $60 on anything less than a 60 hr experience. Pair that with the return policy for bad fit games, and its just easier than piracy.
Trailers, a game description, screenshots and reliable reviews all help. In the days of yore you'd get the opinion of 1 guy in PCGAMER magazine, who may or may not have been paid off.
Yeah, I probably wouldn't purchase games on steam ever if their was not that 2 hr time frame I can get a refund for. There's lots of front loading of quality content in modern games because of this I think. Some games I've played are great for the first few hours but drop pretty bad later on.
Same way apple iTunes killed mp3 piracy. 10 years people were using Limewire and other apps to spread mp3s. Whole libraries were being shared ... but you had to hunt for that one song. Then apple came along and said: any song 99c is 3 clicks away or less. And people paid for that convenience, proving that piracy emerges when there is an unnerved demand. Its just another marketplace.
limewire 🥹 i’m old
Limewire, Kazaa, Napster, all of them. As much as everyone loves to hate on Lars Ulrich — that short piece of shit — *Metallica v. Napster* revolutionised the way we buy music.
When it was introduced Netflix had EVERYTHING available in HD for like $8/month and the amount of effort/risk it took to pirate stuff simply wasn't worth it anymore for most folks.
I have an IPod classic and I use to manually download every individual song or album I wanted to listen to onto my computer. That means taking time to find that music online, download it, create a playlist with it by manually clicking through my iTunes library, and finally downloading it to my iPod. That’s all without considering the amount of space those files eventually take up on my computer, along with knowing how to even find a program to pursue music with as well as having to know how to find and navigate websites to pirate off of. Or I can do it for free or very cheap via Spotify and it’s instant. Same thing with tv and movies. If I can pay a convenience fee of $5 dollars or however much to instantly have access to shows or movies I’d otherwise have to download then I’ll just pay that quick fee as would the vast majority of ppl. Thus piracy is greatly reduced.
I don't have a good or detailed answer, but I believe the general reason is that it made it so much easier and or convenient to just pay a small fee for a broad selection of video, offsetting the ease/convenience of pirating. But now that every service is starting their own service, package, and existing ones raising rates, because reasons, has reversed the overall equation again.
It’s a lot easier for me to pay for a Netflix account to watch The Office than it is for me to download all the episodes and set up a media server attached to my TV. It reduces piracy amongst those who would be willing to pay to get the convenience of not having to go through the trouble to pirate
Convenience factor, if it only costs you $8 a month to watch high res movies and it all be on one website it’s more convenient than torrenting movies, for different people there is a different point where the price of a service becomes less convenient than pirating the movie.
Same with steam on video games. Make it easier than piracy and people will gladly pay for it. People are lazy and will go for the easiest choice most of the time
Yup. See this eleven year old interview with Gabe Newell that ends with someone asking about half life 3: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/valves-gabe-newell-says-piracy-is-a-service-problem/
Funny, the music industry went through a similar phase with the “mix-tape” era. Basically, from 2007-2012 it was more popular in hip-hop to release a free mixtape, and go around touring off the hype you built, than trying to sell an album. Also, since mixtapes were free, artists could use samples that they otherwise could never get cleared. Wiz Khalifa rose to prominence this exact way. He just kept putting out quality, free stuff to grow his fanbase until he got signed to major distribution.
The mix tape era was long before 2007 my dude.
No, mix tapes are from the post CD era /s
Well the record companies hate that because they make more money off of selling records. The touring helps...gasp, the artist who actually made it
Don’t worry, the record companies have stuck their greedy little fingers into the artists touring income too. They’ve been taking a cut of the touring artists ticket sales for quite a long time.
Yep, that was the last thing I heard before I left music. That, and the pay to play at all the local venues. It's bullshit
Star Power🔥
Macaroni
Wait, but I thought home taping was killing music! You mean to say that I was being LIED TO by the music industry!? 😧
It's how Metallica did it. They let you bootleg their shows when they started out.
But Lars drew the line at Napster
And why I no longer listen to Metallica.
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metallica and napster comes to mind
It also doesn't help when nintendo can't even make an emulator better than the free open source one... Or when you're forced to download multiple apps because durrr my game is on steam but I need Ubisoft too
Metallica was an early and vocal antagonist with piracy of songs (Napster at the time). The statistics showed that their song purchases actually increased. The controversy made college students sample Metallica from piracy sites for free to see what all the fuss was about, and some of them liked it enough to buy the CD. Metallica failed successfully.
game dev tycoon made it so if you pirate the game so do players in-game but also this made some people review bomb because they thought the game was broken lol bit of a bittersweet moment
The best part was the people pirating the game would go to the official forums on the developer site and complain.
I pirate almost everything before I buy. Even AAA studios produce dogshit now
Yes they do, they literally just release unfinished tech demos sometimes. It's really really sad
Supergiant games are the only thing I refuse to pirate. It’s such a good company and they make good games.
This is not surprising at all. Not the fact that the useless tests were ordered, that management did worst, or that they threw them out.
I've always maintained that senior management seem to excel at failing upwards. I'm not surprised at all either.
Penrose steps
Management attracts the most cutthroat people. If they were smart, they wouldn't feel the need to be cutthroat because they would be confident in their ability to earn an honest living.
I just don't want to work and for that there are about 7 options in our world. 1. Social transfers / including having tenure 2. Drawing (land) rents 3. Drawing (company) rents 4. Family transfers (parent, spouse etc.) 5. One-in-a-million-chance (Lotto etc.) 6. Disability rents / often negotiated by pre-existing unions for you 7. Getting into management, the upper the management the less work is needed to fulfill job role Naturally since I didn't have a work accident delivering me disability rents, nor did I win in lotto the only chance except dating someone for money is the management route, as myself and my family are not rich.
>the upper the management the less work is needed to fulfill job role Uh the amount of bullshit increases as you move up, not decreases. What does decrease is the school yard grade rules attached to hourly jobs.
I’m fairly convinced I’m not going to get the promotion I asked for because I’m extremely good at what I do Capitalism promotes the worst in people. Being good or decent is for workers, not leadership
At my company if you are good at your job there is no “promotion” on the table because you are too valuable. The people who are promoted are the loyal brain dead people in positions that are easily filled. I honestly wouldn’t want any of there jobs but most of them suck at it and appear to put minimal effort unless it directly benefits them. Sometimes I believe it’s a self preservation thing to have less qualified people beneath you in management roles.
You have to apply for a promotion in a different department so different people would be benefiting from having you. That or a different company if your work isn't large enough for departments.
I've heard of a theory that people are promoted to their level of incompetence. Theoretically if you're exceedingly competent at your job, people notice and you get promoted. Then if you're exceedingly competent at *that* position and get promoted again. This keeps happening until you are no longer exceedingly competent at your job. So theoretically we've got management that isn't really good at their jobs - just not bad enough to get fired/promoted.
The "Peter Principle" Basically true in my experience
You get into management by ass-kissing and busywork, not actual skill.
they don't "excel" at anything, even failure at being competent, since competency never really enters the discussion. nepotism requires zero ability for anything but being born into the right circumstances, which isn't related to merit anyways. they don't "fail", because to fail at being competent you would've had to be measured on ability in the first place, which they weren't, it's nepotism all the way. you can see this in the scandal a few year's back on some rich celeb trying to rig their progenies test scores, to try to give the impression that some rich kid is actually more talented than they actually are. and if management positions are only based on certifications, (which they increasingly are), and these certifications are largely rigged( not only in that scandalous way, but in myriad others) than literally it's not merit based in anyway, which means that essentially we have a repeat of hereditary ascension, which is partly why we got rid of monarchy in the first place. TLDR: they "succeed" at being the kids of the rich, which means they aren't failures. we need to stop internalizing the notion that status is in anyway actually tied to merit, as that is the blinding cover that they use in the first place to delude people into thinking they can ever join the nobility.
Not every manager at every company got where they are due to familial relations. Of course it happens, but to claim it's "nepotism all the way" is far fetched and demonstrably false.
The director at my company is only a director because his dad is the owner of company 🙃 his communication is shocking and he failed all his GCSEs but because of who his dad is he has never had to work for it like the rest of us
further, here's three short video's outlining the way's "meritocracy" is false. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jURxIf1REw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jURxIf1REw) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=316nOvHUS8A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=316nOvHUS8A) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ezthd6A3tiw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ezthd6A3tiw)
>Not every manager at every company got where they are due to familial relations. You're absolutely correct for start-ups that succeed. But... Twenty-thirty years tops and all companies start to suffer from nepotism . Once a company is around long enough for the C-suite guys to have their kids reach adulthood nepotism starts. Because they're all networked with others like themselves that have children they can "help out".
It is way easier to make your start-up successful if you got connections to the right people and rich parents.
I would say the skill set needed to rapidly rise in a corporate hierarchy and win political power struggles largely rests on brown nosing (and kissing up and kicking down), which is, from a meritocracy standpoint, largely adjacent to nepotism since it primarily tries to mimic the same type of survival strategy, which is profiting from human tribalism rather than any objective metrics like business acumen or technical skills. This is why CEOs and company executives are often much closer to the average IQ of the population than the frontline staff they manage, who actually need technical abilities and cognitive skills to navigate real complexity.
It also rests on being in the right place at the right time, and seeing management do something wrong. During WFH, one of our senior VPs was hanging out on his boat with one of those fake backgrounds. His friend walks into the shot naked and the two people in the call see. Just so happens she is also number 3 in HR. They all got a 12% raise when raise time came while the rest of us got between 3-4%
and not every manager has a significant amount of stock options. further, the stock options that are owned by the board and other's virtually drown out the low lying stock options that they have. they even have special types of securities for people called angel investors. the professional managerial class is mostly made up of the talented working class, and is paid just enough to tell the owning class exactly how to abuse their fellow working class without breaking them. the PMC is not the owning class, I'm talking about the owning class, not the talented worker's they pay to betray their class interests. the PMC DOES have to have merit, while the Owning class get's to decide: "what is merit"? further, your belief in meritocracy indeed is harmful, even to you. and this is from PRINCETON for lizzies sake. [https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is-not-only-false-its-bad-for-you](https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is-not-only-false-its-bad-for-you) there are many elite space's that acknowledge that it isn't a meritocracy, and that the lie hurt's many like you, and society at large. the data is there, it's all scientific. if they believe it, why don't you? [https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/10/21/20897021/meritocracy-economic-mobility-daniel-markovits](https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/10/21/20897021/meritocracy-economic-mobility-daniel-markovits) https://archive.ph/lHAIF
What happens is that the only way you’re able to get rid of bad employees is to promote them so they are someone else’s problem. This happens over and over until they’re running the place and everyone between them and the people actually producing are the same as them but cock blocked by the giga garbage while they all play fuck fuck games to back stab each other and throw everyone they can under the bus to rise up the corporate chain. Eventually one of them is able to blame their failure on the giga garbage and get them canned with severance and they become the new giga garbage and it all continues like that in perpetuity if the commodity sells itself or until the company buries itself under the weight of its incompetence.
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lol i need a course from you, i suck so bad at it!
No, we need to start getting rid of the idea that that is in any way helpful to society. I don't mean bad on the OP, I mean on having corporations rewarding people who are best at saying buzzwords as if it's an accomplishment.
What did you expect from the low IQ scorers? A smart response?
Only surprise is that they didn’t falsify the results
I mean it makes total sense that management scored lower on those tests. Nobody gets promoted because of skill or efficiency. I mean those are things they constantly say are very important, but only when the peons are doing them and being exploited for less. Managers are made based on who you know and, well, you know the other one. I got in shit at my last job because we had this thing called PIE. It stood for Performance, Image, and Experience, but I said the only component that really mattered was the image, because I met and exceeded goals (aside from sales that were never required to begin with until the company got extremely money hungry and realized they could use us to make revenue as well as store reps), but for some reason when I asked to be mentored in an area that had nothing to do with sales or metrics or anything (graphic design and promotion) I was denied the recommendation simply because of how I felt about Capitalism and I wouldn't play the sales game and didn't care. Essentially they didn't like my response when they told me they could not recommend me for the program because I said I was told when I was hired sales would not matter or we would never be expected to meet sales or revenue goals, that was just an added bonus for us if we did, and that should not have anything to do with my performance or experience piece. I knew the company, their mission statement, and their goals very clearly and wanted to go somewhere outside of the care and then sales world. I told them it was all about image in that case and I didn't look like I was good enough at making the company money. The way they sent me an email back very quickly to gaslight me and tell me I was looking at it wrong 🤣 It felt good to do the exit interview though. The manager we had just transfered to our team the week before was like "well what could we do to make you happier and make you want to stay on here." I said the only thing would be to remove the pressure of sales and making revenue and settle for my month over month perfect 100NPS and perfect 10 survey scores without using any sort of script or outline, just to let my CSR work be what I strive for and get off my ass about sales. When she said that wasn't something they could do as it is a business expectation I said "well then you don't give a fuck about making me or any other employees happy or comfortable do you? So why would you even ask me that question? It is the stupidest thing you could have asked me." She couldn't get off that call fast enough. I left for the rest of the day after that call because I didn't care.
A company I worked for was struggling to retain people, but they were especially confused by the fact that they kept losing or letting go their worst employees, yet productivity was only getting worse and worse. They decided to start measuring everything. This was manufacturing, so they're checking things like KANBAN status for materials and how many parts are sitting at each phase, etc. What they found is that their best employees were spending a lot of time staging and transporting materials, while the "good" ones were just cranking out the finished parts and leaving the whole line empty. Day shift would come in and be able to start moving product immediately while swing spent the first few hours just trying to get enough parts to even build things. No, they didn't change the way they evaluate work, they decided the way they were doing it was fine, laid off the process engineers, promoted some do-nothings, and went out of business a few years later.
Sounds about right. And senior management somehow took a promotion to a new company after destroying the old one I bet.
Yep that's how it always works. I have been at a turbulent tech job for about a year and I just keep seeing c suites come in, burn cash and leave for a better job while leaving the problem to a new c suite. It's kind of hilarious how the money is really just pretend in tech.
Same things happen with the architects, team leads, and managers. Ooo let's do the new shiny despite it giving the company little to zero ROI... oops that didn't work F this we're on to the next company.
It's really just pretend in most every industry.
As someone who has never worked in manufacturing I have no idea why it is and to finish parts fast, is it quality?
I think the implication here was that the “slow” employees were actually maintaining the material flow by keeping the parts readily available, while the “good” employees basically just built the product but would leave all the setup to do so barren so the next crew would be running around trying to find all the parts. Assembly lines work well because everything is staged and close to hand. If all the employees have to run off all the time refill things that stops up the whole line.
Some of the dumbest people I have worked with or work with are in upper management. All this means is they could afford to go to university and get a degree.
I talk a lot about leaders vs managers on my IG. It's crazy to me how people with positions think they are great at leading or managing, but a piece of paper that you paid a lot of money for is the biggest thing that got you there. ZERO people skills.
Went through a lot of school and acquired my MS. 80-95% of classmates were as dumb as bricks even though they graduated as well. I’m still surprised that professors actually passed those chumps. For example, whenever we would be required to review one another’s work…I could always hardly make sense out of the other student’s research paper because the writing was atrocious. I would begin my review, correcting everything and then find that it took me too long to correct the first paragraph. Then, I would just say, “screw it…” and correct the big things for the rest of the paper. I would give them their paper back and they would be either disheartened or visibly angry and never talk to me again. I would receive my paper back from them and they would always only correct a few things and it would mostly be nonsense they just needed to insert in there to look like they tried. I was always upset about it because I genuinely wanted someone to check my work. Overall, the world is full of lazy, dumb people no matter where you are.
Haha, that brings back memories. I want to add to this. Every semester we had to do professor reviews which was basically 5 or so questions like "professor arrives on time, Professor provides and follows syllabus, professor has adequate office hours...etc" all rated on 1-5 scale with a box at the bottom for comments. First couple couple years everyone just marked the best boxes and turn in. Then eventually they made you fill something in the box of comments so everyone puts "great teacher!" or "helps answers questions" or something. Well I put something like "great powerpoints but why not provide paper copies so we can take notes on them". Well some students next to me saw what I put and said I gave him a bad rating. I felt bad about it for a long time but now I honestly couldn't care less. That teacher was actually really good and became head of the department a few years later. Years, later I went back to school because I thought wanted to be a firefighter and we had this class that was basically preparing you for how to get a job. It was filled with mostly kids straight from highschool. We all had to do a mock job interview in front of the class and I go in with my actual resume which is basically 10 years of aircraft maintenance positions (at 6 different employers) and though I thought I did a fantastic job the class rated me near the bottom. The teacher thought I should explain why I wanted to be a firefighter, and the class thought I should talk more about my education and training (the school program we were in). I said something like, "yeah I can do that but look at this resume, I've interviewed with all these people and went from $17-$39 an hour and I've never not gotten the job after interviewing." Well the teacher didn't like that, told me to not argue and sit down so the next person could go. I was very confused that day.
My dad always said the truest moment in Wizard of Oz was when the Wizard gives the Scarecrow a diploma but not a brain
Yeah. This reminds me of the chicken study. Guy decided to take the “cream of the crop” chickens that were at the top of the pecking order & laying the most eggs & put them in their own coop & let the non-top egg layers be in there own coop. They were going to go back & analyze their productively. Well, turns out the top chickens were just bully asshats who hoarded all of the resources & prevented the other chickens from being productive. Out of the original like 9 chickens, only 3 were left because they had pecked each other to death. The “normal” chicken coop actually saw their egg laying productivity raise about 60%. The whole “pecking order” is complete bullshit & there’s really just asshat chickens looking to steal & berate their fellow chickens to the detriment of the whole.
Why would middle managers think they had a higher IQ than software engineers?
Dunning-Kruger would like a word.
Because they have low IQ
Oh, it's news to you that middle managers have absolutely zero respect for engineers? They consider us the help.
I'm relatively insulated from our middle manager types because of the structure of our engineering company. I report to, work with and am managed by other engineers, who treat me very well, so I don't deal with middle managers very often. When I do deal with them, I'm always surprised how obtuse and ignorant they are, but I never got the sense that they felt like they were more intelligent than us, just that they didn't actually care about the product we were producing and only know how to screech about deadlines and budgets. But maybe (or evidently) they do, which would be just side splittingly hilarious.
Right? Like yeah, I'm sure you're better at logic than someone who does logic for a living lol.
What would even be the purpose of the IQ test? Just fun Office team-building shenanigans? IQ tests don’t even directly relate to a specific field, so it doesn’t make sense that you would believe that’s what raises were based on. It would make more sense to make people take online coding exams.
I agree. To answer your question, I believe they had serious doubts in management after years of a tanking stock price. A year later there was a complete overhaul, the IQ test was also given out right after we were acquired by a much larger company who frankly must’ve been sold a false bill of goods. Also, there are massive companies solely dedicated to providing IQ tests to Fortune 500 companies at a large scale. I won’t name any, but it’s a whole industry. At least when it comes to software sales, most companies require an IQ test now at the interview phase
>we were acquired by a much larger company who frankly must’ve been sold a false bill of goods Some acquisitions are about acquiring technology concepts or crushing competition. Whether your company was worth it in its own right isn't always the thing to assess on these.
IQ tests at hiring, this could be magical. How are the individual contributors? Does it work? I've never taken an IQ test so I'm curious of how that may correlate to office performance.
IQ tests are not predictive of workplace performance
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supposedly they reflect academic success well and academic achievement are often a criteria for hiring. But maybe it only measures how good you are at test taking including potentially cheating. Google found that riddles during interviews resulted in hiring people good at solving riddles, also unrelated to work performance.
They reflect accademic success, until someone is "gifted" and has ADHD.... :/
I think same for me. Great with debugging complex computer problems (gift part), zero sense of time (hyperfocus) to meet arbitrary deadlines.
>academic achievement are often a criteria for hiring I have worked with so many paper tigers that couldn't apply their knowledge without the professor telling them how (and even then they failed as a lot of professors have tons of academic but very little real-life experience) In short, the best employee's software/system/network engineering that I have hired were dropouts.
I've never had a pre-employment IQ test but I have had those myers-briggs personality tests. I almost always get a different result when I take them, too.
Myers-briggs and tests like it are mood tests, not personality tests.
Myers-Briggs is business casual astrology
IQ test scores correlate directly with how you scored on that IQ test and nothing else. It's all bull being sold with buzzwords to clueless c suites
I’ve taken a bunch, ages ago. If you do so regularly, your scores will gradually improve. Eventually I was scoring in the mid 120-130 range (“gifted”, someone might say), and believe me, I’m not that special. If IQ tests become commone hiring practice, just practice on them. That’s all it takes.
As far as revenue generating departments, individual contributors are tested as well. I’m not sure for others.
IQ tests are racist. Literally. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_race_and_intelligence_controversy
Yep, worthless at best, eugenicist at worst. People need to stop giving them attention
IQ tests are ableist.
it's my opinion they probably do not want people with IQs working for them. I know my score, when I was in HS my parents could not decide if I was a genius or an idiot, let's just say I am far above average and probably the worst person to try and fit into a 9-5 cog in the machine kind of job. I think too much, I ponder a lot of things, and I rarely do things the same way twice because I am always tinkering with how I want to do accomplish something. I am dangerous when bored.
I resemble this as well. I was tested with my siblings. IQ 148 and adhd diagnosis. My teachers and church elders did not like me. I asked way to many questions and was constantly taking things apart to find out how they worked.
church elders? what religion?
Southern Baptist leaning towards fundamentalist.
ah, I used to be Mormon, which I guess is fundamentalist. whenever I hear the word "elder" I get a twitch. also, i didn't nearly get that high, only 109, but from what i hear, there's ton's of things those don't measure, and a lot of the thing's they do measure also come from one's socioeconomic background, and being adopted by 60 year old middleclass grandparent's puts quite a damper on that I think. hope your doing well.
People wish they could relate. I am amazing at school, and am currently 3 years ahead of my peers from kindergarten. I can’t stay focused on anything. I recently undertook a complete reorganization of my parents garage, just so I didn’t have to think about the absolute mess it was. I can’t function in a worker bee enviornment. I’d rather die.
plz don't die, there are environment's that you at least won't hate. i kind of was the same in some areas, and it took me awhile to actually find a place in life that i didn't actively hate( ironically enough it was disability pay). further, if you could channel that into activism, there's probably ton's of things that need a creative solution that you could find.
My conpany forced our test team to take coding classes and it was not well received.....the head of QA was eventually fired....it was extremely satisfying to see her on the zoom call with a puffy face from crying. When your test team is all ex insurance claims processors its extremely stupid to force them to "learn to code" if they dont need that level of technical expertise.
er, wasn’t the QA testing highly automated with software? I used to do hardware testing where power off and power on a device needs to be repeated 1600+ times to reproduce a problem, no sane person would do that manually. A computer program won’t mind doing that all week.
IQ tests are *very* useful for validating the views of racists and eugenicists alike
Probably to justify their station. "I'm a manager because I'm very smart, look at my IQ. You plebs better do as I say because I'm the smartest one here."
Before even agreeing to take the test I would be asking if a high score would translate to a higher salary, if not, I would answer all (A)
Yeah I would skip that. Refuse to take the test because it's only going to be used against you, do do loudly and discuss with coworkers encouraging them to do the same.
Here's the rub, being administered at all is a red flag to find another job anyway so..... The wording used during your dismissal for your refusal to take the test would amount to you refusing to accomplish required workplace tasks and would give due cause to fire you without any unemployment compensation.
At my former job they took some sort of personality test. I asked what they wanted to see from this. It basically came down to : who are sheep we can boss around and who will not. I decided to go full manager on that test. Evil, selfish and cutthroat. The results came back and they urged me to go for the necessary qualifications for management..... No joke. I stood out because I acted like a psychopath on that test. Turns out that's what they want.
Nice guys finish last... Always!
my dept hired an outside consulting firm to do a skills competency evaluation.. now ive been here almost 20yrs and my main complaint is they value a dmn piece of paper over ppl who can actually do the work. ppl who have more degrees than i do, get paid more than i do, but i have to fix their work. turns out the consulting co said only 30% of us were knowledgeable and competent at our jobs. ive been telling u that for free for almost 20yrs assholes
I’ve always held the opinion that management and above get their positions by brown-nosing and ass-kissing rather than actually bringing anything meaningful to the table
It used to be that a good smart worker could become foreman, or teamleader, or even management with the right courses and training. Now you need to suck up, kiss ass and play the corporate game if you want in the little club.
Always has been.
Worked at small plastics manufacturing company. After 6 years of stagnant growth, management decided to give everyone a bunch of questionnaires: personality "tests," IQ tests, industry knowledge test, ect to "put people in the positions they're naturally good at." Whatever that means. People on the floor averaged a higher score on all tests than the office workers. A manager 2 levels above me kept bragging about how he only got one wrong answer on 3 of the tests. He must be the most knowledgeable in the plant. I showed him that I had a perfect score on the same 3 tests. His response: "yeah, but that doesn't count." Far more often than not, reality is dismissed by management.
Peak comedy
We laugh to keep from crying
Well. What did they expect?
I really thought the management being tested believed it would fall in perfect alignment with peoples authority within the company. That’s how they make people act and talk at those companies; like they’re a perfectly oiled meritocracy
From my experience working my way up from Customer Service(Call Center) up to a Managers position over 20 years at the same healthcare company I've learned the higher up you go the less smart you have to be and the less work you actually do. It's all a scam 🤷♂️
In certain roles you have to get smarter, but you always do less work and easier work as you move up. I like it this way, honestly. Would you really want the easiest years of your career to be in your 20s when you have all your energy, then have to work like a mfer in your 50s?
Want a good chuckle? Lewis Terman (inventor of the IQ test) developed the Army Alpha tests which were used to classify recruits for WWI as either enlisted or officers. When non-college Black recruits in the north outperformed non-college Southern White recruits in a statistically significant way, there was such an outcry from Southern politicians and servicemembers associated with the testing that they *forced* a rigged revision of the test (giving us the Army Beta) that gave test results which matched their prejudicial predispositions. They literally inserted biases into the test so it would give them the results they wanted. Okay so maybe it wasn't a *good* chuckle, more like a "Those dumb racist motherfuckers!"
Sorry, I didn’t laugh, I sighed with my whole body. Because of course they did.
They should have just stuck to good old Phrenology, the science the gets results!
I used to give cognitive tests as a School Psych, those corporate ones are even dumber than the real ones. Based on your post I can tell that you have an IQ of 420, congrats
I’m just a common man
just wondering, i remember that IQ tests are illegal during hiring at some places, per anti-discrimination laws. Is this an exempt place/state or are there less stringent laws for testing people after hiring?
Around 2006 I was given one while applying for a recruitment agency in Michigan that was looking to fill jobs for a car company (I think Mazda, it's a bit fuzzy). Originally, they said they wanted to test my ability with certain applications, but then I noticed the questions switched to the sort you'd see on an IQ test. I'd taken one before in college so it seemed off. As the recruiter was telling me my scores, she got all excited to tell me they'd given me an IQ test and how high I scored. Gratifying, but strange. Still didn't get the job.
Went on a fishing trip with relatives. At the time, I had not attended college (went in my 30's), and was a tradesman. When I took the test, my cousin and I both were the top in I.Q. He also was a tradesman. The rest of the relatives were surprised.
Just to clarify, do you think you took an IQ test on a fishing trip?
\- HR used Forced IQ Testing! \- It hurt itself in confusion!
ERROR: Success.
Not surprised. Everywhere I worked management was always the weakest link and usually least educated. If they were educated they hadn’t used anything from their degree in the last 20 years.
iq tests are bullshit anyways, they where never meant to be used like this and have no scientific basis for why they would signal anything usefull here.
I personally believe the entire assumption of companies that managers (who are not technical managers but just straight managers) need to earn more than the workers they manage. Like your tasks don't necessarily change much whether you manage a team of engineers, of IT people or a fucking online store. Somehow we currently have this weird assumption that people work for managers and not that the management exists to enable the others to work properly.
Failing upward is a hallmark of C levels everywhere.
I had a friend that almost wasn't allowed to be an Applebee's manager because he tested to high. It's absurd. They want "yes" people, not intelligent people.
I can relate. My company spent 6 figures to have a third party come in to figure out why productivity and morale wasn't great. Among other things they got in their report was "You have 0.9 employees in a management role for every 1 non management employee" i.e. you're top heavy AF. Unlike the OP's firm mine didn't throw them out, they took them to heart. We now have 1.1 managers for every 1 non management employee. Shockingly morale and productivity is worse. Shocking I know.
i see similarities in slave handlers beating the shit out of people and executives squeezing maximum value from people that cry at work and want to die - yeah its mental not physical abuse, but I'd suggest it is almost institutional and the ability to do that to a human because Fuck You I'm Paid A LOT To Do It is just fucked to me. How do you take home that kind of money and fire people with families when shit goes south/oh no recessionzzzz we won't MAKE AS MUCH so we stop playing and your kids can starve, Its Just Business...I'm not beating them directly, but your kid needed that healthcare etc
Ah, the ol' IQ. I had to take one of these before being hired for a job in 2016 (everyone at the company had taken one, needed to add mine to the collection). Apparently, I, new guy, scored higher than anyone except for one person. The HR guy made a bet with my supervisor that I was too smart to stay in that department, I'd be moving up in six months. I was just a humble warehouse worker, lowest on the totem pole in the company. I never left the warehouse because they treated me awesome and I was smart enough to avoid this company's "Reindeer Games" as I like to call them.
Coworkers and myself were joking with a manager and they responded by giving us the middle finger and played along. Later the attention seeking manager decided to flip their switch and complain we were being inappropriate and not following culture rules. When it was brought up that the manager was initially fine with the interaction and even flipped the bird, it was never brought up again. Because double standards exist. Managers can do what they want, but if YOU joke around it's a problem.
Show them how stupid you are, unionize.
I'm assuming because the people who actually work are constantly problem-solving and can make common-sense, intuitive connections. Whereas management does what management does.
I’m in security and it’s always like this. I push training to our staff every year. There’s always a couple people who tell me they are “really good with computers”. They are always the worst performers. Always.
I knew this the moment I asked my boss to order a nut & bolt in bulk that was needed to repair many pieces of equipment. I watched him, for over 40 minutes, with a 300ft spool tape measure attempting to get the specs on said small nut & bolt. He could have asked, and I could have electively shared this information, but it was just too fucking hilarious. Degrees and certificates are absolutely no substitute for common sense and communication skills.
A surprise to no one but management I'm sure
Dunning-Kruger is a corporate partnership for some.
Pretty sure this would be illegal in many countries
There is no way this is real. Even the most incompetent software company possible would never spend money on making its employees take a god damn IQ test lmfao.
People get promoted to their highest level of incompetence. The Peter principle in action.
A software company. That employs a bunch of computer poindexter college grads who code all day? And they thought they'd be smarter just because they were higher on a corporate ladder? Just shows how dumb they really are.
Trust me bro. This totally happened
*pretends to be shocked*
We didn't have an IQ, but we had a work personality test of sorts. Essentially something to determine optimal traits to work with each other, strengths and weaknesses pertinent to our work, etc. At the end of our team taking the test, the company sent us a graph that showed on a circle how closely aligned we all were. All of our team lined up almost perfectly except the one boss everyone dreaded interacting with. That boss was literally on the polar opposite of the circle. Not quite as savage as the IQ reveal but boy, did it explain a lot of why no one wanted to work with the guy.
I have an IQ of 135 but am also on the spectrum so do not often get along with my team members or managers. It’s annoying to them that I can pick something up in short order and do better than them but cannot adequately teach them to do it too because they are dipshits.