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Devils_Avocado | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

I have spent my entire career in your area and can say with 1000% confidence that "the value that I create will talk more than the nonsense of some people" is something that EVERYONE assumes to be true when they start but EVERYONE realises is 100% incorrect after a few years in the industry.

Devils_Avocado | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people

+10,000,000 the comment below.

If you feel you have not received recognition or reward in proportion to your efforts while in the employment of this company, its time to 1) start looking elsewhere for an environment more in sync with your own personal values and 2) accept that for >90% of all economic interactions, perception = reality and adjust your attitude accordingly.

"clavalle 1 hour ago | unvote [-]

I never heard anything about incompetence in your description. Technical debt can build up for myriad reasons not related much to competence.

What I would suggest is not to approach this situation as how you can wall off or otherwise attack this person but, instead as a life lesson on the importance of interpersonal relationships and politics.

Politics are a fact of life. Humans are social creatures. All things being equal, and some ways even when not equal, those that are proficient in interpersonal relations will come out ahead. Grok that fact. There is no escape from it.

Good. Now that unpleasantness is out of the way. On to how to cope. Scratch that, /thrive/, in an environment of people doing people things when you are a technical person.

First, information. That is the lifeblood of many systems and politics is no different. Simply make sure important information is conveyed to the right people at the right time.

You use the example that this fellow was able to take credit for your work. Had you passed the information of what you were doing and why it was important to the right people, he would have simply looked foolish to try to take credit.

It can be uncomfortable, to toot your own horn, but it is necessary. Additionally, it can be important to the organization. Assuming you are creating value, it is important that decision-makers know that so they can make the correct decisions. Don't feel bad. Toot away.

Building relationships is critically important in almost every human endeavor. Get good at it. It is a skill like any other.

The target of your annoyance became a manager because he built up those skills and made it known.

Build your skills and make it known. It is just that simple."

Devils_Avocado | 7 years ago | on: The EU's Link Tax Will Kill Open Access and Creative Commons News

> I just can’t believe that the EU ... actually ... tries to regulate something it does not really understand just because...

This is generally how government works! But it's even worse than usual in the EU, since it's an unaccountable transnational mega-bureaucracy; MEPs are not directly elected, they are appointed by their political party after proportional representation votes (which haven't had turnout higher than 50% since 1994).

You think Congress is beholden to lobbyists now? Imagine how bad it'd be if state representatives could get "re-elected" each term without ever having to put their record to a public vote!

Devils_Avocado | 7 years ago | on: Age of Invisible Disasters (2017)

From my own professional experience, I'd say it's got more to do with the artificial delivery constraints that come with the mandatory annual and quarterly financial reporting of publicly traded companies. They announce their yearly results to the market and next years IT budget is broadly defined as a portion of the previous year's profits.

Everything is planned & tracked as a portion of an arbitrary 12-month time frame & the internal politics means each department are competing for funds on a "use-it-or-lose-it" basis. If you've never sat in on department/geography/company-wide governance forums where they agree next year's "change management" budget, the basic format is you present a business case & cost forecast based on FTEs over the expected duration of the project, all the mandatory regulatory compliance projects get approved automatically and the remainder of the budget is set based on how well each middle-manager can defend the interest of their department. They have a final number for total approved spend & approve as many projects as they who's forecast cost fits into that, Tetris-style, with a flat 20% contingency spread across everything to account for the fact that historically, trying to plan in this way is so inaccurate that it's basically a series of pseudo-random guesses. It's worth noting that even stuff badged as "Agile" is funded & budgeted for in this way.

Every programme I've been involved with has had some variation on "we can't start work on X in that month, because it won't finish until February and will cannibalise part of my budget for next year".

Unfortunately, given the economic & political status quo this problem is impossible to solve (but for the libertarians reading this, an interesting example of the 'higher order' unintended consequences of sincerely designed industry regulation.

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