Unendowed with wealth or pity
January 18, 2019 11:14 AM   Subscribe

@girlziplocked asks, "What's a dirty secret that everybody in your industry knows about but anyone outside of your line of work would be scandalized to hear?" Twitter responds with dozens of reports of systemic fraud, abuse, prejudice, corruption, incompetence, and precarity from restaurants, heavy industry, non-profits, technology, theatre, shipping, customer service, flower arranging, medicine, law, art, education, government, senior care, agriculture, telecommunications, and virtually every other sphere of modern economic activity.

Apt commentary from @trash_fire:
if you read that "secrets of industry" thread you'll learn that class advancement is the biggest scam going

people are brought up to believe that they can do a variety of interesting things, but the reality is that those positions are already captured by a very small aristocratic class

then these people are forced into peonage by the same class, because they attempted to get close to them/ their traditional careers

this isn't to say it's impossible to make at, just that it's impossible to be an Artist unless you have wealth

the same thing goes for other careers that would traditionally lead to an upper middle class lifestyle, actually-- lawyer, doctor, etc

The salaries are lower than they used to be or the credentialing process is so long and expensive that it hollows out the career path
@girlziplocked's current pinned tweet is a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater:
Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.
posted by Iridic (185 comments total) 129 users marked this as a favorite
 
I wanted to see how many of them were variants of "lots of [highly specialized, highly trained field] is just googling the question" and was not disappointed.

I guess before smartphones people probably had to stall for time more, so they could go look it up in a book. Now you just need 30 seconds to pretend you're checking your messages or something, when really you're looking up what the side effects of that cancer drug are.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:27 AM on January 18, 2019 [12 favorites]


Having had only the most dilletante relationship with gyms for just a few years, the soulcycle/crossfit information surprises me not a joy, sadly.
posted by ominous_paws at 11:33 AM on January 18, 2019 [1 favorite]


[For many industries]:

Job descriptions are written specifically with one person in mind, often by that person themself, to ensure that they will be the best fit and are guaranteed to get the job. Of course, this completely undermines the purpose of searching for external candidates, and also wastes the time of anyone who goes through the application process, writes a cover letter, etc, not knowing that they literally have a 0% chance of getting the position.

It's an open secret that this happens within the UN system. Here's a nice, recent example of it happening within academia, too:
Notre Dame posted a couple of jobs and accidentally listed the men they’ve already decided to hire in the title. LOLOLOLOLOL. Congratulations Gergo and Eric!
My advice for anyone job hunting in industries that are prone to this: Simply don't bother applying to overly specific job descriptions, especially when some of the specification seems only marginally relevant to the position. That job isn't intended for you, sorry!
posted by chappell, ambrose at 11:34 AM on January 18, 2019 [41 favorites]


This is where we're all going to share dirt on our own industries, right? I'll go first.

If you need someone to come take the solar panels off of your asphalt composition shingle roof so that your roofer can replace the shingles, and then put them back on again afterward, you're very likely looking at a bill of around $10,000.

This is why I frequently recommend that people re-roof before solar even if they don't technically have to. Your solar array is warrantied for 25 years, and may last for up to 40. 25 years is the same as the warranty on standard-grade asphalt composition architectural shingles. Think about that. If you get a technical site visit and your site visit tech (e.g. yours truly) says, "We can definitely install on this, but your roof is showing some age-related wear & tear and if it were my house I'd consider re-roofing first," you should listen because I'm trying to save you ten Gs.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 11:36 AM on January 18, 2019 [66 favorites]


Also if you have an older roof and your response is, "Well, I'm planning to move out of here in five years anyway [and therefore this financial time bomb will be somebody else's problem]," I will secretly judge you.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 11:39 AM on January 18, 2019 [41 favorites]


Not only do account executives in media sales know how to use their tools, or how to deliver on a buy, half of them don't even really know what they're selling, how it's measured, or how it's costed. Most of their deals are made on the basis of personal relationships with other senior executives on client both the client and broadcaster/publisher side.

A lot of the money agencies make comes from billing clients, and then stiffing vendors for several months while they sit on the interest.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 11:41 AM on January 18, 2019 [18 favorites]


Fundraisers don't care if they annoy you. Response rates for direct mail are low, in the single digits. Response rates for e-mail are even lower than that. In the aggregate it all works out.
posted by Automocar at 11:42 AM on January 18, 2019 [11 favorites]


Sidenote: not sure what the hate is for googling. Of course we're going to google. The skills are for picking the right search terms and choosing which of the 100,000+ results is the best one. The days of having the entire corpus of (whatever your professional field is) memorized are long gone.
posted by Mogur at 11:44 AM on January 18, 2019 [111 favorites]


I ain't like twitter much, but I do love this kinda thing it does so well.
We need some harder shit now/truth's getting round/each public school is a halfway house

posted by es_de_bah at 11:48 AM on January 18, 2019 [1 favorite]


Yeah, I've worked with people who don't google, and that's often way more unprofessional.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 11:48 AM on January 18, 2019 [48 favorites]


Nobody knows how to write software.

Really, it's not like building a house where the methods have been around for hundreds of years and just iterate as better materials become available. Every few years the entire practice of writing software is recreated from the ground up because no one knows how to fix the fundamental flaws in the development process.

In fifty years there may be actual science involved in creating software, but right now it's everyone just doing their best and hoping it works out.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:48 AM on January 18, 2019 [71 favorites]


Really, it's not like building a house where the methods have been around for hundreds of years and just iterate as better materials become available.

Did you read the tweets from homebuilders in that thread?
posted by notyou at 11:51 AM on January 18, 2019 [35 favorites]


I work in software. If a person I'm interviewing responds to a question with an answer that shows they understand the problem domain, and ends with "and of course I'd then google [relevant bit]", that's a major plus. Knowing how to find answers is important. Knowing offhand every esoteric detail of e.g. a rarely used library or function call is about as useful to me (as the hiring person) as being able to recite the state capitols.
posted by tocts at 11:52 AM on January 18, 2019 [53 favorites]


(To not abuse the edit window: knowing the questions to ask is perhaps the most important thing; everything else flows from that)
posted by tocts at 11:53 AM on January 18, 2019 [23 favorites]


Also, most senior executives at ad agencies are in terrible shape, physically and mentally. This is because the way to succeed in advertising is to turn your self inside-out for ten years, and then demand that your subordinates turn themselves inside-out for the next ten on your behalf. Most clients don't understand ad buying or how to cost media either, so the way to demonstrate value to them is to provide "outstanding" client service. That is, take client requests at 4am, or 8pm on a Friday, turn requests around in 24 hours, write marketing presentations that they can put their names on and take directly to their superiors, etc.

Most really innovative ad campaigns are advertising the creative agency that produced them, not the client themselves. Usually, the concept will be pitched to several clients, and made to fit the one that buys in. This is also the reason for the Cannes Lions (along with an excuse to send clients on an agency-funded junket).
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 11:54 AM on January 18, 2019 [18 favorites]


it's not like building a house where the methods have been around for hundreds of years and just iterate as better materials become available.

hahahahahaaaaaaa… sure.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 11:58 AM on January 18, 2019 [8 favorites]


>>Really, it's not like building a house where the methods have been around
>>for hundreds of years and just iterate as better materials become available.
>
>Did you read the tweets from homebuilders in that thread?

>

Yes? Maybe I didn't read down far enough but it seemed like a few comments on how to handle it when things don't go to plan. What to do when things go wrong is as much a method as anything else...
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:58 AM on January 18, 2019 [4 favorites]


Additionally, in responses to advertising RFPs that are procurement-driven (that is costs and efficiencies have to be demonstrated up front, usually in some sort of dummy media buy), the numbers are usually completely made up, and there is no possible way the responding agency could ever deliver on them.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 11:59 AM on January 18, 2019 [2 favorites]


>> it's not like building a house where the methods have been around for hundreds of years and >> just iterate as better materials become available.
>
> hahahahahaaaaaaa… sure.

There are several hundred million houses that appear to contradict your cynicism.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 12:00 PM on January 18, 2019 [3 favorites]


Yes, and almost all of them have something crazy going on with their construction that can be discovered within fifteen minutes of walking into them.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 12:02 PM on January 18, 2019 [7 favorites]


Like, nobody knows how to build software but it still mostly works, right? Just because a house isn't falling over, catching fire, or (obviously) leaking does not mean that everybody involved in building it knew or even cared what they were doing.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 12:03 PM on January 18, 2019 [9 favorites]


In fifty years there may be actual science involved in creating software, but right now it's everyone just doing their best and hoping it works out.

To extend the homebuilding analogy: not only are we just sort of piling things on top of each other and gluing them together with Elmer's, but there are no clear conventions on, e.g. do you stack the biggest blocks on the top or on the bottom? Also our hammers are occasionally infested with termites, the 2x4s that frame the building are definitely infested with termites, the people in charge of the construction crews are all meth addicts who don't know which end of the nail to hit, and the people who get promoted to Head Homebuilder are the ones who are most adept at using marshmallows and tinfoil as structural elements and then moving on to the next house just before the whole thing collapses under its own weight.
posted by Mayor West at 12:03 PM on January 18, 2019 [38 favorites]


Job descriptions are written specifically with one person in mind, often by that person themself, to ensure that they will be the best fit and are guaranteed to get the job. Of course, this completely undermines the purpose of searching for external candidates, and also wastes the time of anyone who goes through the application process, writes a cover letter, etc, not knowing that they literally have a 0% chance of getting the position.

In many public employers (and presumably other organizations like NGOs), it is not possible to promote an employee. That is, one cannot walk into a performance review, state one's case and walk out with a new job. Nor can a supervisor move a deserving employee into another position to improve chances of keeping employees they value.

The only way to change jobs in these environments is through a public process, as if that job were being staffed from scratch. In many cases, a boss wants to promote an existing employee; thus these kind of competitions happen, where the fix is often in. There is no other way to retain an employee who wants to move up.

This is done for transparency and fairness. Everyone has to compete for every move up the corporate ladder, incumbent the same as any external applicant, at least theoretically. Yes, many of these are rigged. However, these are very nerve wracking for employees. Indeed, I've known of cases where the incumbent, even after having working in a job on a temporary basis for months or even years has been rebuffed and not hired. So even those that look like they're rigged may not be.
posted by bonehead at 12:05 PM on January 18, 2019 [44 favorites]


Like, nobody knows how to build software but it still mostly works, right?
Oh you sweet summer child. Come work QA for a few weeks, so that we can cure you of your naïveté and forever haunt your dreams.
posted by Mayor West at 12:05 PM on January 18, 2019 [57 favorites]


Look, that is not all that different from how homebuilding actually works.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 12:05 PM on January 18, 2019 [6 favorites]


Non-profit boards and executives are almost to a person only obsessed with their image in my decade of experience. The way they will spend to excess on themselves is only bounded by how poorly they'll advocate to treat their social workers and other staff.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 12:08 PM on January 18, 2019 [17 favorites]


Like, how do you insulate a house? How do you keep water out? How do you stop water from getting trapped inside it? Can we count on the 2x4s to be straight? Can we count on them to be dry? Who cares, it's a spec job anyway—let's get paid and then it's on to the next new subdivision.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 12:08 PM on January 18, 2019 [9 favorites]


Also, many people who build houses are not figuratively meth addicts, they are literally meth addicts.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 12:10 PM on January 18, 2019 [36 favorites]


Having had only the most dilletante relationship with gyms for just a few years, the soulcycle/crossfit information surprises me not a joy, sadly.

I take it you mean it did not surprise you?

I have reloaded that thread like 7 times and ctrl+f for gym or crossfit still brings up nothing. What did they say?
posted by thelonius at 12:11 PM on January 18, 2019 [10 favorites]


In many cases, a boss wants to promote an existing employee; thus these kind of competitions happen, where the fix is often in. There is no other way to retain an employee who wants to move up.

This is done for transparency and fairness.


Here’s a post by Dan Davies from 2015 in the wake of the LIBOR scandal (itself an open secret in the finance industry) speculating about when various scandals in academia would get their day in the sun. He coins an irregular verb that seems applicable to this situation:
I am the victim of a perversely designed set of incentives
You game the system
He is a crook.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 12:12 PM on January 18, 2019 [19 favorites]


I need to keep my day job, so pass on that, but the original thread touched on a couple of relevant things.

My side hustle, on the other hand, is covered by this old Salon article that I keep bookmarked. Lots of arts/creative types are bankrolled by rich families or spouses. I don't fault them for that -- nice work if you can get it -- but everyone pretends that the playing field is even when it is not.

More broadly, the cynicism I feel from the structural-inequity comments is mitigated a tiny bit by the we're-all-kinda-muddling-through comments.
posted by cage and aquarium at 12:15 PM on January 18, 2019 [13 favorites]


My advice for anyone job hunting in industries that are prone to this: Simply don't bother applying to overly specific job descriptions, especially when some of the specification seems only marginally relevant to the position. That job isn't intended for you, sorry!

This isn't great advice for academic positions. First my wife had a job tailor made for her last year and didn't get it so there is that. (Embarrassing!! It turned out that there were internal departmental politics and the faction that wanted her lost. So there is always that possibility.)

Plus candidates can interview badly, somebody unexpectedly good can apply (You'd probably not be surprised at the number of over-qualified American candidates applying for Canadian academic jobs right now) and finally department hiring decisions usually have to be approved by deans or colleges who are outside of the process until the last moment and they can disagree with the department for strategic or sometimes complete bullshit old fart reasons.

Your odds of getting any tenured academic job are so low regardless of the conditions you might was well buy every possible lottery ticket.
posted by srboisvert at 12:18 PM on January 18, 2019 [18 favorites]


There's like a hundred Cracked articles about this.

Previously on Metafilter about how no, software does not work ("The Edge Case Saloon").
posted by Melismata at 12:19 PM on January 18, 2019 [4 favorites]


Non-profit boards and executives are almost to a person only obsessed with their image in my decade of experience. The way they will spend to excess on themselves is only bounded by how poorly they'll advocate to treat their social workers and other staff.

Ain't that the truth. In a previous life I was a grants administrator trying to get money to mid-sized non-profits, and that involved a lot of interviews and auditing. Way too many at the director level and up knew next to nothing about their own organizations and used their involvement as peacocking in the socialite world. The yearly fundraiser gala and half-participating in staff searches was the extent of their involvement. Also, their compensation package would usually represent the single biggest cost their organization would incur in a given year.

Not sure how true it is, but I was told that these sort of people tend to be over-represented in those positions because the truly effective and dedicated ones end up getting high paying jobs in the private sector or larger nonprofits. The ones that stay are the ones that want a cushy gig that puts them in a room with people they are trying to impress.
posted by FakeFreyja at 12:19 PM on January 18, 2019 [5 favorites]


What did they say?

That at soulcycle (and crossfit?) people are hired for their looks, charisma and literal acting ability rather than their cycling ability or knowledge of actual training, physio, technique and etc; and as a result these programs are much less efficient and much more prone to causing injury than they would otherwise be.

(this was like the second reply when I looked, twitter's tl is so weird now)
posted by ominous_paws at 12:19 PM on January 18, 2019 [27 favorites]


I'm an executive assistant to the CEO of a large public company, and the secret I've learned in a career of holding this job for various people is that the only thing that sets apart C-level executives from the rest of us is their willingness to subsume their entire lives into making money for the company (and themselves) at the expense of everything else in their lives. There are so many people lower on the totem pole who are smarter, kinder, savvier, more knowledgeable, more well-rounded. I've seen appalling idiocy from people making close to a million bucks a year. It's bananas. The people running the world don't have any extra skills. They're there because they want to have power, the end.
posted by something something at 12:21 PM on January 18, 2019 [138 favorites]


Librarians, who are usually dependable to protest censorship of books or other materials, practice censorship themselves, all the time: it's called "collection development", i.e. deciding what to buy. FELLOW LIBRARIANS, PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE THE SCREAMING COMMENCES: That is not to say that professional librarians don't very carefully consider What The People Want, closely peruse book reviews and recommendations, solicit input from the community, and, if they're really at the top of their game, do at least a bit of careful self-analysis regarding their own biases, blind spots, deficiencies, etc. and ask themselves if they're rejecting possibilities out of hand simply because they make them uncomfortable. But, in the end, you can only afford so much, and wow is it tempting to reach for that as an excuse. You have to admit that that's probably the case with those other librarians, anyway.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:21 PM on January 18, 2019 [30 favorites]


(I should say: My boss is lovely. In case you're reading this, boss!)
posted by something something at 12:21 PM on January 18, 2019 [5 favorites]


A huge number of the people you see on television and film are barely getting paid for it. Acting is an extremely low-paying profession. Non-union extras make about minimum wage, and often go weeks or months between jobs, and pay a chunk of money to barely-legal "call centers" that have pre-existing relationships with casting agencies (and I suspect back room bribing relationships) and so get first dibs on jobs.

Union background talent get paid more but often work much less. Then there is an entire stratosphere of people who get knocked around from show to show, getting a handful of lines. They make a few thousand per show but sometimes will go six months without work, and, even if you are very cast-able, you can burn through every show in just a few years, and many shows are cautious about using the same talent too often, so you suddenly face a huge gulf where there just aren't any jobs anymore.

I'm friends with a number of actors, some of whom have lucked into very good jobs for a short while, but all have a side gig. And one of the most common side-gigs is having a spouse who makes a decent living who underwrites your acting. Without that, a lot of actors couldn't do it.

Oh, and if you see a lot of old people in the background of a show, they are largely retirees who don't need the money but work as extras because they like it.
posted by maxsparber at 12:22 PM on January 18, 2019 [44 favorites]


P.S. This is probably applicable to any number of professions, as well: is this really the hill that I want to die on?
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:23 PM on January 18, 2019 [3 favorites]


When I worked in dry cleaning, every so often we would screw up and ruin an article of clothing. Rather than inform the customer of the mistake, and risk losing their business, we would look for the exact same article, buy it, and swap it with the ruined item.

Unless it had some sentimental value or had been specially tailored, this was really a bonus for the customer ("Wow, they got this shirt looking brand new!"), but I would certainly be weirded out if I knew that the clothes I got back from the cleaners weren't the clothes I originally bought.
posted by Enemy of Joy at 12:24 PM on January 18, 2019 [72 favorites]


tocts, how do I get YOU to interview me? *Sigh*
posted by symbioid at 12:24 PM on January 18, 2019 [1 favorite]


That at soulcycle (and crossfit?) people are hired for their looks, charisma and literal acting ability...

Thank you! I did find someone saying that the reason yoga and fitness instructors are young and hot is that the only people in the business are those still too green to figure out that they will never make a good living at it, unless they work 12 hours a day, and they still won't have benefits. The exceptions, again, are people who have family money or spouses with high-paying jobs.
posted by thelonius at 12:30 PM on January 18, 2019 [13 favorites]


Publishing: I'm not placed close to the departments that might turn up the really good shit here, but:

Nobody has a frikkin clue what books will be successful at all

As commissioning editors are all essentially in competition with each other, it only takes so many drinks before one of them will admit that everyone in their department hates each other

As an industry of well-intentioned amateurs, we often assume that things outside our daily wheelhouse that are OBVIOUSLY VERY HARD will be a breeze; examples range from sourcing quality non-book items to package with books - who knew making toys was its own industry and might present a challenge or two? - to corruption (the price-fixing scandal where meetings were held in *literal* smoky back rooms; shouldn't we of all people have know this was meant to be a metaphor?)
posted by ominous_paws at 12:34 PM on January 18, 2019 [15 favorites]


Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The: "Also, many people who build houses are not figuratively meth addicts, they are literally meth addicts."

I've been out of that industry for a while. In my day they were were crack addicts. I ran a painting crew for a few years and guys not showing up because they were in the county jail was a fairly common day on the job.
posted by octothorpe at 12:39 PM on January 18, 2019 [3 favorites]


The people who spend the most money at record stores these days are flippers who resell stuff at a steep markup. It's hard to assess the value of a record unless you work in buying and selling them, and sellers often take advantage of that. A lot of what you're spending $5-10 on is actually worth more like $1, or even less.

Aside from that, a lot of labels are cashing in on the record boom by reissuing popular albums at a steep markup. A lot of them cost upwards of $30, but the source material is often the exact same digital source files used for streaming, and often the records themselves are manufactured very poorly.

Also, "180 gram audiophile vinyl" is complete and total bullshit. Any potential benefits are usually outweighed by the shitty manufacturing standards that can leave divots and other imperfections that affect sound quality. For a lot of people, the added thickness will just make the needle sit at a weird angle, which defeats the purpose completely. It's just a marketing gimmick to convince people to pay more.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 12:40 PM on January 18, 2019 [23 favorites]


After reading a bunch of the industry secrets, I guess the tl;dr version is:

In my line of work people will cut whatever corners they can, screw over whoever they need, and favor those who they like in order to gain money, appease or maintain power, and be able to do less work. (The methods for this vary, but the values are the same.)
posted by gusottertrout at 12:41 PM on January 18, 2019 [27 favorites]


Non-profit boards and executives are almost to a person only obsessed with their image in my decade of experience.

I've been lucky to mostly work for orgs where this isn't the case. My biggest complaint about the nonprofit world is the way foundation funding is often structured. Just applying for money can involve massive amounts of hoop-jumping and wasted time, and if you're lucky enough to get a grant, you are nickle-and-dimed and micromanaged and asked for fiddly reporting metrics which prove nothing about your effectiveness as an org. And then in a year or two, you do all that stuff again, because That's The Procedure.

This culture is changing slowly, and my current org is able to be more selective about our funders because of our great individual giving program. But way too many foundations make unreasonable demands of their grantees which actively hinder their ability to carry out their missions and necessitate the existence of an entire professional class (hi!) whose only role is to ask them for money in the proper manner.
posted by showbiz_liz at 12:44 PM on January 18, 2019 [16 favorites]


Like, nobody knows how to build software but it still mostly works, right?

Yeah, the dirty secret about every job (especially software and construction guys) is that the experts seriously overdramaticize the day-to-day minor stuff. Software and houses both work. Sure, there are people are working behind the scenes to maintain them, but think how much worse the world would be if that was unnecessary (and our current economic structure was still in place)?
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:49 PM on January 18, 2019 [2 favorites]


Job descriptions are written specifically with one person in mind, often by that person themself, to ensure that they will be the best fit and are guaranteed to get the job. Of course, this completely undermines the purpose of searching for external candidates, and also wastes the time of anyone who goes through the application process, writes a cover letter, etc, not knowing that they literally have a 0% chance of getting the position.

So the reason they have to do this is to be public and transparent about what's happening. It's a dumb way to do it, but it makes it clear they at least tried to keep it on the DL.

And it's more than academia or NGOs. A few years ago I got an offer from a big company and I told them it was too low (badly so). Their answer was to slide me into a higher level position, but... they needed to re-list the job for a week in the interest of transparency and legal butt covering.

The alternative, mind you, is NEVER listing the position at all. And if you do that, you are at risk of a suit for discrimination.

I think it's the dumbest thing in all of hiring, and one you have to educate people on ("It has a one week submission period? They know who they want already. Two weeks and they might be, or they are in a hurry. 4 weeks or more it's a serious need but they have no one internal. Until filled means they really don't know what they want but will know it when they see it.") The alternative, though, blocks opportunities for external candidates even more.
posted by dw at 12:51 PM on January 18, 2019 [12 favorites]


I have friends who support biologists purposed with the goals of protecting wildlife species in national parks and the number of stories I've heard where they've done more harm than good are very discomforting. Some examples:
  • trying to protect a downstream fish population from whirling disease by using nets, resulting in a large population of migrating ducks dying from getting caught in the nets.
  • doing an amphibian census by digging buckets into the waterline as a trap to temporarily catch amphibians, creating a frog leg buffet for bears and decimating the already limited amphibian population.
  • Doing a cull of what is supposed to be 10% of the fish population in a remote lake, next year's census indicates only 1% of the fish population remains, and they are all old fish (all nine of them).
posted by furtive at 12:52 PM on January 18, 2019 [18 favorites]


Your group project in college was probably first conceived of as a way to save time grading, and then retroactively reasoned to be 'collaborative project based learning' later.
posted by codacorolla at 12:54 PM on January 18, 2019 [41 favorites]


Reality TV is fake and it isn't. Competition shows are usually above board. Tightly formatted shows like property stuff is very planned and a little misleading. Slice of life shows often just shoot whatever so while what you are seeing really happened, it's usually combined with stuff that has no relation and made to look like it does. It's better to shoot something tightly structured and/or loosely scripted than just shooting lots of reality and trying to find a story later.

Also the industry is really really really white.
posted by yellowbinder at 12:54 PM on January 18, 2019 [13 favorites]



Also the industry is really really really white.


saaaaaaaaaaaaame
posted by ominous_paws at 12:57 PM on January 18, 2019 [4 favorites]


My advice for anyone job hunting in industries that are prone to this: Simply don't bother applying to overly specific job descriptions, especially when some of the specification seems only marginally relevant to the position. That job isn't intended for you, sorry!

On the other hand, a lot of those overly specific job descriptions are:
  1. Aspirational: The manager tells HR "We'd like to have someone with 10 years of experience; we'll settle for 5", and the HR person writes "Required: 10 years of experience".
  2. Cumulative: Four different managers gave their list of requirements for the position, and the HR person just cut-and-pasted them all together without asking, "Wait, is it even possible for someone to satisfy all of these requirements?" (I personally spent most of the week between Christmas and New Year's sorting out job descriptions for my company's HR department, and WOW did they ever do this. I deleted "Strong communication skills", "Excellent communication skills" and "High-level communication skills" from the same job description more than once.)
  3. Negging: The company wants you to think that it's doing you a favor by deigning to accept your measly 5 years of experience when it "requires" 10 years, so you'll take less salary.
So do apply to at least some of those overly specific job descriptions, but with the clear-eyed understanding that 3/4 of them were, in fact, already "filled" before you even saw the listing.
posted by Etrigan at 12:58 PM on January 18, 2019 [48 favorites]


Non-profit boards and executives are almost to a person only obsessed with their image in my decade of experience. The way they will spend to excess on themselves is only bounded by how poorly they'll advocate to treat their social workers and other staff.

Good for you. It took me almost two decades to realize this. (In my first decade, our executives were really good at lip service.) It is especially true that they will take everything for themselves from literally right up to the point when staff are driven to leave and then they’ll soften slightly to keep things going. This situation is particularly pernicious because in non-profits the worker bees are generally in it for the mission and are all too eager to work for low pay and poor working conditions, not realizing that laid back director in the corner office who drives a Prius and never wears a tie with his suit is a multimillionaire.

I’ll just add that medicine is full of dirty secrets that would shock people outside of the industry (I think we already covered the not-so-dirty secret of googling):

1. Health care organizations and insurance companies are in an all out escalating war of billing. Charges keep going up to compensate for denials of payment, so denials of payment go up, and charges go up. This is why every once in a while a bill slips through to you in the mail where you got charged $400 for a bandaid. The system takes armies of people on both sides who fight it out. A side effect of all this is that prices are meaningless and therefore the market rules of supply and demand do not apply and every transaction is made by secret agreement.

2. Leaders in health care organizations literally have no idea what the practice of medicine is like nor what the experience of being sick is like, and more importantly, they are absolutely incurious about this because they are too busy doing their jobs to be concerned about something as irrelevant as the product their company delivers. Every once in a while, one of these people has an epiphany after a cancer diagnosis and decides “we’re going to do things different from now on” and within 18 months tops they are out of a job or their organization is in such crisis they have to go back to playing the game the way everyone else plays it.

3. All that stuff about the US paying the most for health care and still having the highest 1st world infant mortality and falling life expectancy? I.e. we “pay the most and get the least”? Health care has almost zero effect on measures of population health. Google “social determinants of health.” At best, we are alleviated the suffering of sick people and every once in a while a life is saved (or death in that one particular case is delayed).

4. The only thing that results in anyone getting paid in health care, outside of hospital care, is the doctor being face to face with a patient. Therefore, the push from admin is to make “full time” doctors spend as close to 40 hours a week face to face with patients. But face to face time with patients is less than 50% of the time doctors spend working. The rest is charting, deciding what to do with test results, responding to patients who call or email, refilling medications, getting insurance authorization or filling out durable medical equipment forms, maybe once in a while reading a journal article or going to a conference. That medication you needed refilled early urgently because you were going out of town? Chances are that took a doctor about 3-5 minutes in the evening on unpaid time going through the mechanisms to make that happen while their family was eating dinner. Check the time stamp on the chart note. No one got paid to make that happen, so no one paid the doctor to do it. But your doctor likes you and didn’t want you to be off your meds when you’re on vacation so he or she sacrificed family time. Multiply that times 2000 patients (for a primary care doctor).

5. A minority of doctors work “full time” and those that do are depressed, abusive, chemically dependent, and die young .

6. Doctors are practiced at selectively hearing and deflecting things you say, having to make instantaneous judgement calls about whether something is important enough, or if something can even be done about the concern, in order to allocate minutes of their scheduled time with you to address the concern. The really skilled doctors can do this all while making you feel listened to. If your doctor is running late for your appointment, chances are good that someone before you brought in a written list of concerns which makes it much harder to ignore and prioritize the visit.

7. Black humor is essential to get you through the day and I will not repeat here any of the wildly inappropriate things doctors say. Paradoxically, most doctors are also profoundly moved by the things their patients say and do, and black humor is just a mechanism they use to survive.

8. There is universal agreement that the system is deeply deeply flawed and grinds people up.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 1:04 PM on January 18, 2019 [92 favorites]


My advice for anyone job hunting in industries that are prone to this: Simply don't bother applying to overly specific job descriptions, especially when some of the specification seems only marginally relevant to the position. That job isn't intended for you, sorry!

In nonprofits this is more likely to be "oops, this one staff person is leaving, and over the past five years they have become the editor, social media manager, graphic designer, and program evaluation officer, despite the fact that they were originally hired as an event planner. We can definitely find an exact replacement for that person with all the same skills, right?"
posted by showbiz_liz at 1:04 PM on January 18, 2019 [71 favorites]


Yeah I'm not sure that meth specifically is actually very popular in this part of the country right now. Other things are though, everyone has worked with someone at some point who's had a problem.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 1:05 PM on January 18, 2019


This job-hunting info is both reassuring and completely soul-crushing.

Job requires minimum 5 years industry experience? Hired.

Job requires qualifications I meet perfectly? Not even contacted for an interview.

I wonder if this is why no one ever contacted me when I applied to work at the same library I worked at before -- I wonder if they just had people lined up for all those positions already. I mean, either that, or one of my old bosses hated me and trash-talked me to everyone. I just could not understand why I wasn't even interviewed for positions I fit perfectly.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:07 PM on January 18, 2019 [12 favorites]


Here's a ThreadReader version with all the Twitter posts on one page. Well, I assume all the posts - it's a very long page.
posted by exogenous at 1:08 PM on January 18, 2019 [15 favorites]


I have friends who support biologists purposed with the goals of protecting wildlife species in national parks and the number of stories I've heard where they've done more harm than good are very discomforting.
My high school biology teacher reminisced about the days when he conducted fish surveys by detonating a stick of dynamite in the lake and then counting the number of fish that floated to the surface.

I ran a painting crew for a few years and guys not showing up because they were in the county jail was a fairly common day on the job.
The painting crew I worked on was relatively tame... at worst they had some ill-advised sexual relations with each other. However, an earlier iteration of that company was famous for their all-night partying and psychedelic drug use. One guy would run up the ladder, paint whatever he could reach for a minute, run back down the ladder, and then hide in the bushes until he was convinced that no one was watching him.
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 1:11 PM on January 18, 2019 [6 favorites]


Am I the only one who found that thread really, really depressing?
posted by tangosnail at 1:14 PM on January 18, 2019 [28 favorites]


Their answer was to slide me into a higher level position, but... they needed to re-list the job for a week in the interest of transparency and legal butt covering.

A reason for job postings that seem hyper specific and time-limited like this are often specifically covering the legal case where there is a visa sponsorship in play where the powers-that-be require the job to be posted and available to a non visa sponsorship applicant in case one is to materialize.

It's gross, but that's status quo in the wage slavery that is the work visa system.
posted by abulafa at 1:16 PM on January 18, 2019 [5 favorites]


I have friends who support biologists purposed with the goals of protecting wildlife species in national parks and the number of stories I've heard where they've done more harm than good are very discomforting.

In Florida, at least, the sole purpose of state biologists seems to be just rubber-stamping whatever cockamamie bullshit developers want to do to destroy Okeechobee or the Everglades. I'm sure people don't apply to the job expecting to do that, but willingness to go along with those schemes does appear to be the state's main hiring rubric.
posted by tobascodagama at 1:19 PM on January 18, 2019 [10 favorites]


Dirty secret of people conducting (public research) surveys: never worry about giving us a more socially desirable answer, since we really don't care what you say -- and will forget you on purpose right after we've double checked the coding on the questionnaire because what you said was private and we don't want to accidentally let anything slip. Also, we really, really don't care about how much money you do or do not make.

And putting my research-assistant hat on: OMG! many of those quotes need some serious redaction because they are way too identifiable. Someone says they work on a specific project and they are the only one with a twitter account? Identified, even if their twitter handle isn't included. You have to remove specific details if they are uncommon.
posted by jb at 1:22 PM on January 18, 2019 [16 favorites]


Am I the only one who found that thread really, really depressing?

Not at all, although there is also a certain perverse elevating effect to finding out things are actually as bad as you thought they were.
posted by thelonius at 1:22 PM on January 18, 2019 [22 favorites]


If you ask a lawyer declaiming authoritatively on some complex subject that is the topic of litigation he's working on a question about one inch to the left or right intellectually, he won't be able to say a damn thing. Even the best lawyers tend to know only exactly what they need to know to litigate the case.
posted by praemunire at 1:26 PM on January 18, 2019 [8 favorites]


If you are going to give another company a lot of money for something (e.g. an ad buy) then the way to get kickbacks like hockey tickets, perks or benefits is to ask the sales person if there are any "incentives" that might go with the contract.
posted by furtive at 1:26 PM on January 18, 2019 [5 favorites]


As a programmer, I think that 99% of what I do is looking shit up and trying things until it stops breaking, and this doesn't seem at all impressive to me. Until I try to do it with someone who has access to that same process, but doesn't have my knowledge and temperament. What I have is a genuinely valuable and useful skill set that doesn't seem that big a deal to me because I acquired it in very small quantities over a very long period of time. "Programmers are all looking stuff up on Stack Overflow" is totally true, but on the other hand, try working with a full-stack developer who doesn't know how HTML tables work and doesn't even know what to look up. Those people are much rarer. The stuff I'm looking up on SO is only building on top of the stuff I spent a decade learning that now seems so routine as to be something everybody can do.

I'm happy to help literally anybody learn this if they're interested, but it is actually really hard to get people over the hurdle of the background information they need to start.
posted by Sequence at 1:27 PM on January 18, 2019 [42 favorites]


99.9% of web-based software these days isn't architecture, it's interior design. Almost no one builds anything new, it's just connecting pre-made building blocks to make something the customer will sign off on. Here's the rub: no one who does this has any idea how the building blocks work. And those building blocks are subject to revision at any moment by their (typically) unpaid creators.

The only thing holding the web together is a tiny text-based manifest file that is essentially a prayer to the Packaging God that those building blocks won't change too much.
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:32 PM on January 18, 2019 [38 favorites]


Am I the only one who found that thread really, really depressing?

Not at all, although there is also a certain perverse elevating effect to finding out things are actually as bad as you thought they were.


I think I'd be more OK with finding this out if I could do it from the comfort of an office at a job that pays me a remotely livable wage. "Man, no wonder it's so hard to get a decent job!" carries a really different connotation depending on whether or not you currently have a decent job.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:34 PM on January 18, 2019 [21 favorites]


Success in the art world has nothing to do with talent, and everything to do with a combination of luck, networking, and fashion. Yes, your kid could paint that, and probably do a better job, too. But your kid didn't happen to schmooze the right gallery owner at the right show opening in a momentarily chic part of town when the crest of interest in that particular style of thing was about to hit the beach.
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:37 PM on January 18, 2019 [15 favorites]


The sooner robots take over the better, is what I'm hearing. Provided we get the luxury gay communist utopian kind, not the KILL ALL HU-MANS kind.
posted by emjaybee at 1:43 PM on January 18, 2019 [6 favorites]


In nonprofits this is more likely to be "oops, this one staff person is leaving, and over the past five years they have become the editor, social media manager, graphic designer, and program evaluation officer, despite the fact that they were originally hired as an event planner. We can definitely find an exact replacement for that person with all the same skills, right?"

showbiz_liz, I do not have enough favorites in all the world. Is it normal for nobody to know what-all you even do? I write it all down for the sake of the Bus / Lottery Factor, and six months later it's obsolete.

OTOH there are aspects of that approach that I like. Variety is nice up to a point.
posted by cage and aquarium at 1:43 PM on January 18, 2019 [8 favorites]


Oh man. From the thread:

A playwright whose work gave a lot of people Reasons to be Pretty suspicious that he's a misogynist was quickly dropped from a very long residency just a few months before his new play was going to premiere.

I am shocked - SHOCKED! - to find that the author of Fat Pig and In The Company of Men is a misogynist.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 1:45 PM on January 18, 2019 [15 favorites]


School principals are chiefly interested in the performance indexes of their schools, rather than in teaching or in the welfare of their students. They will actively abandon children that do not contribute to their bottom line, even though these students are most in need of intervention.
posted by SPrintF at 1:46 PM on January 18, 2019 [11 favorites]


I have become so cynical that almost none of the terrible stories of corruption and greed and prejudice in all of those fields surprised me at all, yet my jaw DROPPED when I saw that the Domino's pizza tracker isn't real.
posted by thebots at 1:52 PM on January 18, 2019 [58 favorites]


They will actively abandon children that do not contribute to their bottom line, even though these students are most in need of intervention.

Not to comment too much, but wait, is this really very common? Because I've always suspected that's what happened to me in high school, but no one could ever confirm it. It was weird, because I had a friend who got all these extra concessions so he wouldn't fail (not that I would have wanted to be in the remedial program). Whereas I failed all my classes for two years straight before dropping out. I would imagine dropping out must have hurt the school's evaluations, right? How does the abandonment you describe usually manifest? Is it the remedial program, or is it just letting a kid fail all his classes and leave?
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:55 PM on January 18, 2019 [7 favorites]


Reading that twitter thread was oddly refreshing. It confirmed my belief that nothing is getting fixed, anywhere, until there's a huge war, or a plague on the scale of the Black Death.
posted by KHAAAN! at 1:59 PM on January 18, 2019 [8 favorites]


Yeah, there's a certain comfort... Slight tangent: Watching the nfl documentary serieses Hard Knocks and All Or Nothing, it's reassuring to see that even these teams that represent 1/32 of a thirteen billion dollar industry are as raffled with infighting, incompetence and bullshit management jargon as any other outfit on the planet.
posted by ominous_paws at 2:04 PM on January 18, 2019 [3 favorites]


Re: schools abandoning students, in the UK in my day this looked like pushing certain kinds of kids into taking easier qualifications (BTECs instead of GCSEs) in easier/more vocational subjects (childcare and beauty for the female students, for e.g.) that would inflate the schools pass grade but which were virtually useless for the student.

If these kids then went on to FE or university it would be to low tier institutions issuing virtually useless degrees. But higher education in the UK is just another racket anyway (in recent years institutions have been permitted to not cap their student intake meaning that virtually any student with any grade will be offered a place on a course... inflating the numbers, burning out the educators, eroding teaching standards, and further devaluing degrees. Most universities seem to be hanging on and attracting students just by dint of their names and former reputation. The bubble's going to have to burst soon...)
posted by mymbleth at 2:06 PM on January 18, 2019 [4 favorites]


Not to comment too much, but wait, is this really very common?

Yes.
posted by prize bull octorok at 2:07 PM on January 18, 2019 [1 favorite]


I work in software. If a person I'm interviewing responds to a question with an answer that shows they understand the problem domain, and ends with "and of course I'd then google [relevant bit]", that's a major plus. Knowing how to find answers is important. Knowing offhand every esoteric detail of e.g. a rarely used library or function call is about as useful to me (as the hiring person) as being able to recite the state capitols.

And of course, before Google, one would probably consult the [FORTRAN, C, C++, Java, etc. ...etc] manual, starting in the back of the book with the index.
posted by JoeXIII007 at 2:11 PM on January 18, 2019 [12 favorites]


One time I saw an ad for an academic librarian position, and was very interested in applying, until I got to the very bottom of the ad and saw: "Please be advised there is a very strong internal candidate for this position."

Which is disappointing, but at least they tactfully warned everyone up front not to bother applying. I guess, thanks, in a way?
posted by orrnyereg at 2:18 PM on January 18, 2019 [28 favorites]


"The dominos pizza tracker is fake." noooooo how can this be
posted by asperity at 2:22 PM on January 18, 2019 [10 favorites]


All those job postings that are tailored to a specific candidate? Well, if you can get an interview and they like you, the next posting may be tailored to you. So while it's bad to get your hopes up or invest resources you cannot afford into trying to get the jobs, simply applying, and attending interviews, may not be as worthless as it seems.
posted by elizilla at 2:27 PM on January 18, 2019 [9 favorites]


I'm beginning to think people are the problem.
posted by schadenfrau at 2:28 PM on January 18, 2019 [21 favorites]


Nobody has a frikkin clue what books will be successful at all

Wait. Even Amazon? They've got all that data...
posted by schadenfrau at 2:28 PM on January 18, 2019 [1 favorite]


A buried lede in this thread is that most personal assistants (and any product or services that can record voice) is probably recording your voice when you don't expect it to. Hmm, that's funny, I remember all of the tech boosters here saying how impossible that was...
posted by codacorolla at 2:32 PM on January 18, 2019 [7 favorites]


I found this list somehow really reassuring, in the same way that learning that the wealthy and powerful are generally just as dumb and insecure as the rest of us is somehow reassuring.

Everything I'm close enough to know the details about is kinda fucked up. So it's good to know that the stuff I don't know the details about is fucked up too, and we've all just been mostly-successfully pretending to each other that we're all doing fine.
posted by ook at 2:49 PM on January 18, 2019 [8 favorites]


lol my work situation is sort of orthogonal to this right now. I have been in webdev for 18 years and I know what I know, but the people I work for never take my input into account, so who cares if its good or just good enough??

that said: 1) yeah, the rich and powerful mostly just got lucky, or they are good schmoozers or whatever but, 2) omg these morans are running the show we are fucked who is even steering this handbasket???
posted by supermedusa at 2:56 PM on January 18, 2019 [5 favorites]


People say software doesn't work, yet here I am
commenting on MetaFilter on my pocket supercomputer while simultaneously listening to a podcast and it's all working just swimmingly.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 3:02 PM on January 18, 2019 [21 favorites]


Lmao, this is a great thread to read right before sending off an application to an off-cycle TT academic posting.

The ones about schools and elder care are the most heartbreaking by far.
posted by en forme de poire at 3:08 PM on January 18, 2019 [4 favorites]


There is a large industry of “online learning” services (e.g., Odysseyware) that are miserable garbage, but cheaper than teachers. Problematic students are increasingly being pushed through these services, because the schools get per-student compensation from the state, but don’t have to pay a teacher.
posted by argybarg at 3:13 PM on January 18, 2019 [11 favorites]


Often when dumb stories like 'JESUS CHRISTS FACE FOUND IN CRISP' come out, it's actually product promotion. Walkers (or whoever) will pay an artist to etch a notable person onto one of their products and get the story in the paper.

... How does one get this job? Because that sounds like the best artist job ever.
posted by asperity at 3:31 PM on January 18, 2019 [14 favorites]


The jankiness of software is a well-trodden notion, but here's one from the tech industry that I think is more insidious: a company that stores sensitive personal data about you gathered from how you use their service might not even have a single dedicated security specialist, even at the point where they have millions of daily active users. It usually takes a large breach or a blatant instance of employee malfeasance that gets called out in the media to drive such an institution to implement even basic internal security audits.
posted by invitapriore at 3:32 PM on January 18, 2019 [20 favorites]


If you do e-discovery as a lawyer even a little bit, you will quickly learn that an appalling number of people carry out extramarital affairs over their work e-mail. If you happen to have to speak with them in the course of defending them, they'll usually tell you that they didn't want to risk their spouse finding out by using their "home" e-mail address, and you're like, Jackass, you're an executive at a major hospital, you get sued 230 times a year, and you know everything you do at work is discoverable. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU. Get a hotmail account like "sweetcheeks69" or some shit like that. GOD.

(I'm not appalled by the extramarital affairs (I don't know these people or their relationships, what do I care), I'm appalled by the dumbness in carrying them out over work e-mail.)

"Even Amazon? They've got all that data..."

Amazon has the lion's share of my book purchasing data dating back to 1998 and they STILL after 21 years can't recommend me a novel I'm interested in reading. At all. Ever.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 3:37 PM on January 18, 2019 [87 favorites]


Oh, and I don't know that this is a secret per se, but elected officials haaaaaaaaaate it when people call/e-mail/public meeting them and open with, "As a taxpayer ..." JACKASS EVERYONE PAYS TAXES. As a middle-class homeowner getting a mortgage interest tax deduction, you're frankly probably paying a lot less than an undocumented immigrant in the same community is paying. Sales taxes, income taxes, SSDI taxes, property taxes (rolled into your rent if you don't own, and higher than owner-occupied properties). It's like walking into a meeting and announcing, "I AM AN ENORMOUS, ENTITLED FUCKHEAD WITH NO UNDERSTANDING OF PUBLIC FINANCE OR POLICY, LET ALONE REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY."

(When it comes to local government, you'll get better results with "As a homeowner ..." because local government is typically scared shitless of its homeowners getting tetchy.)

Also if a local teacher/principal has been let go suddenly and without explanation, FOIAing e-mails will get you a little -- not much -- because HR info will be redacted. But you can FOIA website use of school district computers by employees, and sometimes you can figure it out that way. (There will be porn involved.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 3:47 PM on January 18, 2019 [45 favorites]


Amazon has the lion's share of my book purchasing data dating back to 1998 and they STILL after 21 years can't recommend me a novel I'm interested in reading. At all. Ever.

“Machine learning” seems to be the answer to the opposite question, “what is obvious to everyone outside your industry but would come as a huge shock to those within it?”

It’s obvious to those outside the tech bubble (the actual users) that algorithmic approaches are a total failure so far. The naive fools who believe that it works are all inside the industry, happily finding more use cases in which the technology can run over pedestrians, amplify extremist messages and target wildly inappropriate adverts at people.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 3:50 PM on January 18, 2019 [26 favorites]


JACKASS EVERYONE PAYS TAXES

And actually, now that you mention it, it seems like those with the most political influence are those who pay the least in taxes, so perhaps making the opposite claim would be more persuasive.
posted by tobascodagama at 3:54 PM on January 18, 2019 [15 favorites]


How does the abandonment you describe usually manifest?

Students with poor performance, who might benefit from intervention by a teacher or the school administration (to improve grades, English language development, attendance, discipline) are simply ignored because any reasonable improvement by the student isn't enough to lift the school. Helping a D student get to C is not as "useful" as getting a C student to a B, because of the way the metrics are calculated. So, the D student is abandoned while the C students get the help they need. It basically "teaching to the test," but at the school level. Subject and students that don't help the "bottom line" obtain no resources.
posted by SPrintF at 3:57 PM on January 18, 2019 [5 favorites]


so perhaps making the opposite claim would be more persuasive.

“As a platinum-tier citizen...”
posted by acb at 3:58 PM on January 18, 2019 [12 favorites]


Like, how do you insulate a house? How do you keep water out? How do you stop water from getting trapped inside it? Can we count on the 2x4s to be straight? Can we count on them to be dry? Who cares, it's a spec job anyway—let's get paid and then it's on to the next new subdivision.

I am typing this not six feet from a wall in my house so obviously curved (without intending to be) that we like to show it off to the many tradesmen we've had coming through the house for various projects, just so they know what they're getting in for. The people who built this place seem to have thought that cheap paint, in sufficient quantities, was a suitable building material: they used paint to bind pieces of drywall together, "seal" moisture coming in under laminate floorboards, and for particularly mysterious reasons used it to attempt to unmake an electrical outlet.

Also, the people who decided to flip the place last time decided it would be good to re-floor almost the entire house in cheap 12-inch square tiles, just so that we can be really, really aware of all the places where the original builders didn't bother to square the walls.

I am not particularly sanguine about the presumed expertise of builders, let's just say that.
posted by sciatrix at 3:58 PM on January 18, 2019 [12 favorites]


Wait. Even Amazon? They've got all that data...

At the point a publishing house gives an author a contract - no. At the point Amazon would order stock - I think for now also no, I don't think they get it right any more often than we do; the number of times we're either suddenly rushed to supply urgent orders or have to take massive returns suggests not.

In the future, especially (shudder) working directly with orders, will Amazon use a Netflix style algorithm to commission books they have calculated that there is demand for? Wouldn't be surprised at all.

(really it's not that bad of a situation; we just do our best to put out a bunch of things we believe are good or better than good, and hope one blows up big. heard an interview with an HBO exec a while back saying that this is also their MO; they had no idea Game of Thrones was going to be as big as it has been, it was just one of many shows, all of which they believed in)
posted by ominous_paws at 4:02 PM on January 18, 2019 [3 favorites]


In the future, especially (shudder) working directly with orders, will Amazon use a Netflix style algorithm to commission books they have calculated that there is demand for? Wouldn't be surprised at all.

This is more what I’m talking about. Amazon’s recommendations to me as a reader seem to be more accurate the more specific the interest or genre (so for nonfic especially, for me).

But they track everything. I know they’ve been using reader data (like, how many readers actually finish a book, where most people give on a book, etc etc) to decide which books to buy for their own imprints for a WHILE. And they’ve been using same to recruit authors for those same imprints.
posted by schadenfrau at 4:08 PM on January 18, 2019


pocket supercomputer

technically I don't think that smartphones have enough I/O to be classed as "supercomputers"
I mean your point is probably that it is a "doubleplusgoodcomputer" and that is true but this isn't some kind of farce here
posted by thelonius at 4:08 PM on January 18, 2019 [2 favorites]


Oh gosh. Mine:

1. There is nothing impressive about being pre-med. Any college student can declare pre-med and then they're a pre-med. When you brag that your grandchild is pre-med, all I hear is "my grandchild is probably right now coasting to a C- in Chemistry." Also, making a big deal out of it is making it harder for your grandchild to quit being a pre-med and figure out what she really wants to study, so cut it out.

2. Universities have a lot of rules and policies. Most of them are negotiable, even the really non-negotiable ones. Privileged students (and their parents) know this. Not-so-privileged students (and their parents) typically don't. If you're a privileged parent, you probably shouldn't take it up with the dean: your kid is already getting the message that rules don't apply to her, and probably she would benefit from some accountability more than she would benefit from getting the policy waived. But if you are not privileged, and your kid is really getting screwed over by a policy, tell your kid to ask someone with some power if there's anything they can do about it. (Note: that is not me. I don't have any power. But I can help you figure out who does.)
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 4:11 PM on January 18, 2019 [43 favorites]


Ugh, I meant to say "directly with authors", as you may well have figured out.

I certainly think it's possible they'll use all this data to increase their success over time when commissioning books. It's possible, although their current recommendation system has been absolutely horrible for me personally. (in general I find amazon web hideous for browsing, fine if I already know what I want). I don't know if they'll get any closer to predicting which books suddenly go beserk for sales, though. It may well be an impossible task.
posted by ominous_paws at 4:15 PM on January 18, 2019


I keep trying to think of things to say about my industry, but honestly, I think y'all have heard most of them. Researchers are not subtle about our lingering fear that we actually know nothing about nothing really.
posted by sciatrix at 4:31 PM on January 18, 2019 [4 favorites]


> ...technically I don't think that smartphones have enough I/O to be classed as "supercomputers"

Depends on which supercomputer you're talking about.
posted by CheapB at 4:35 PM on January 18, 2019 [2 favorites]


yet my jaw DROPPED when I saw that the Domino's pizza tracker isn't real.

Faith in humanity destroyed.
posted by jeoc at 4:48 PM on January 18, 2019 [2 favorites]


I thought I would just comment quickly on the google thing. There's nothing wrong with google per se, but your doctor will be lucky if he can spend two or three minutes on your case. Most doctors leave their patient, quickly google the symptoms on their phone, and then make their diagnosis in about ten seconds flat. I don't care how good a doctor is at googling, if they have just seconds to do it, they're probably not doing as good a job as the patient themselves can with a couple hours at their disposal. This doesn't apply to common cases, but any complex case I would be suspicious of what your doctor tells you. Definitely go for a second opinion, because often those second opinions are entirely different.
posted by xammerboy at 4:48 PM on January 18, 2019 [7 favorites]


Am I the only one who found that thread really, really depressing?

I don't know, I saw it a couple of days ago and felt the dirty little secret was there wasn't really anything that shocking or interesting there. A lot of people who had personal grudges though, and several people I don't believe.
posted by bongo_x at 4:53 PM on January 18, 2019 [10 favorites]


Dirty Secret: at least 45% of the anecdotes in that Twitter thread are greatly exaggerated or completely made up.
posted by straight at 4:56 PM on January 18, 2019 [20 favorites]


Filthy Secret: they do this thread literally every week on /r/AskReddit
posted by prize bull octorok at 4:57 PM on January 18, 2019 [35 favorites]


I'm glad some skepticism has finally crept into this thread. I read the whole Twitter monstrosity and found it 70% "That's not really a secret, articles have been written about it" and 25% "Wow, someone is really bitter about their ex-boss."

I'll make an exception for the descriptions of sexual harassment, elder abuse, and so on -- a lot of those really are secret, or at least not nearly as exposed as they should be. But the rest is fluff.


and I want proof that the Pizza Tracker is fake.
posted by mmoncur at 5:05 PM on January 18, 2019 [13 favorites]


Movie theatres sometimes save their popcorn overnight on weekdays.
posted by mmmbacon at 5:09 PM on January 18, 2019 [6 favorites]


Filthy Secret: they do this thread literally every week on /r/AskReddit

They

certainly

do.

Constantly.
posted by mmoncur at 5:10 PM on January 18, 2019 [5 favorites]


> Nobody has a frikkin clue what books will be successful at all
> Wait. Even Amazon? They've got all that data...

As the fine print says in those investment management ads: "Past performance should not be considered indicative of future growth."

In any event, Amazon is not as interested in delivering to you the most optimal next book for you to read, it's only interested in retaining you on their site for long enough that you'll buy something. As long as you keep poking around while Amazon is flinging at you an endless torrent of options based on what you've looked at before (and what other people who'd bought what you'd previously bought), they're going to reach their goal whether or not you reach your goal.
posted by ardgedee at 5:23 PM on January 18, 2019 [3 favorites]


ya know, I used to build houses, working with my father, who was a general contractor. I kinda take offense to these people saying that house builders are shit, or we were drug addicts. I’m just saying. you are wrong. there are I am sure less than good contractors. but there are craftsmen as well. so, you know. ease up.
posted by valkane at 5:24 PM on January 18, 2019 [27 favorites]


I knew the Dominos Pizza tracker was a farce from Reddit. I don't care. I'm just amazed I can get pizza in 15 minutes. When I was a kid, Dominos took 30 minutes and tasted like a shoe. Now I can get Dominos in half the time and it tastes pretty darn good. It's the biggest reason I am hopeful about the future and the progress we have made as a society.

Also, gays can get married, which I guess is important to some people.
posted by riruro at 5:31 PM on January 18, 2019 [12 favorites]


I just assumed Amazon recommended things they wanted you to buy, not what they think you wanted to read.
The same way YouTube keeps recommending me Jordan Peterson videos where he's not on fire.
posted by fullerine at 5:34 PM on January 18, 2019 [27 favorites]


Hey, I work in construction too. I've worked in renovation, now I work in solar. My uncle and cousin are GCs. I'm just describing what I've personally seen, as I think were the other folks who described similar things. I never said all or most contractors are drug addicts. For that matter, some of the people who are true craftsmen also struggle with substance abuse. They're not mutually exclusive. And obviously, substance abuse is common in all walks of life.

I was being kinda glib above, and for that I apologize. Be proud of your work and your trade. I know I am.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:46 PM on January 18, 2019 [13 favorites]


On the Dominos pizza tracker:

I've never used it, but I used to work at Dominos during the pizza tracker era, and will say that any time where a computerized system for running a restaurant is in place where outside interests can also interrogate it in some fashion (like, public-facing trackers, corporate-facing stats systems, management-facing employee performance checking), people will happily abuse it in any way possible to make the numbers look better. I've seen it done.

Also, such a system, if adjusted at any point along its track to make one person look better, is bound to make another person look worse. If the time-to-oven is reduced to cause the make line appear more efficient, then the cut table's time will seem longer. If the cut table time is reduced, then it'll make the delivery time seem longer.

Concerning software, an amazing object lesson on how one broad category of software is riddled with bugs just ended: AGDQ.
posted by JHarris at 5:50 PM on January 18, 2019 [4 favorites]


I have seen, and worked with, some damn fine builders. Of course some are shit. But to say that the whole building trade is a heap of improvisation and incompetence is just wrong.
posted by argybarg at 6:19 PM on January 18, 2019 [3 favorites]


I've never used it, but I used to work at Dominos during the pizza tracker era, and will say that any time where a computerized system for running a restaurant is in place where outside interests can also interrogate it in some fashion (like, public-facing trackers, corporate-facing stats systems, management-facing employee performance checking), people will happily abuse it in any way possible to make the numbers look better.

I've never worked at Dominos, but this just seems instantly obvious. Like, if I had the idea for such a system, my immediate thought would be, "Nah, people would just game it. Garbage in, garbage out. Why bother?" It's baffling that people actually spend money on that kind of bullshit, let alone make decisions based on the metrics it generates.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:21 PM on January 18, 2019 [2 favorites]


In entertainment, you can fuck your way almost to the top.
posted by Ideefixe at 6:27 PM on January 18, 2019 [3 favorites]


So do apply to at least some of those overly specific job descriptions, but with the clear-eyed understanding that 3/4 of them were, in fact, already "filled" before you even saw the listing.

I think there are, broadly, two different kinds of "overly specific job description." The original comment was talking about the academic kind, which is meant for one person. Then the other kind, which I know for sure one encounters in the software industry, is the kind that was made by a person who likes listing things, knows they aren't going to be able to afford the exact imaginary person they really want, and assumes applicants don't really believe in the concept of "required" anyway.
posted by atoxyl at 6:31 PM on January 18, 2019 [3 favorites]


In entertainment, you can fuck your way almost to the top.

or as Barbara Walters said: “I had to kiss a lot of ass to get where I am, some of it on the mouth.”
posted by valkane at 6:39 PM on January 18, 2019 [6 favorites]


Here’s a post by Dan Davies from 2015 in the wake of the LIBOR scandal

Instant favorite for any dsquared reference and he is especially good on this sort of thing. I liked his "discount rates are bullshit but what are you going to do, actually give people money when they pretend to predict returns 20 years in the future?" post too (though not enough to dig up a link.)
posted by mark k at 7:22 PM on January 18, 2019


Most doctors leave their patient, quickly google the symptoms on their phone, and then make their diagnosis in about ten seconds flat.

Doctors actually have special reference databases that are much more detailed and comprehensive than what laypeople generally have access to. They are also very jargony and would be pretty opaque to anyone who didn't already have a lot of familiarity with medical practice.

Uptodate is one. It even has an app.

These are the modern equivalent of a shelf full of reference books, except much faster to access and continuously updated.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 7:47 PM on January 18, 2019 [23 favorites]


Although more experienced docs will frequently make diagnoses on the basis that they've seen this shit countless times before and they know what it looks like. It's only when something seems a bit unusual that they need to hit the books to make sure they're following the right track.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 7:49 PM on January 18, 2019 [9 favorites]


I have seen, and worked with, some damn fine builders. Of course some are shit. But to say that the whole building trade is a heap of improvisation and incompetence is just wrong.

I don't know how many construction projects I've worked on, as everything from construction manager to designer to technician. The whole industry is not improvisation and incompetence, but there isn't a single project I've worked on that didn't have some of the latter. Good projects have less incompetence, none have none. All of them require some improvisation, I don't see that as a problem, done well you end up with improvements, not problems.
posted by deadwax at 7:50 PM on January 18, 2019 [4 favorites]


It's really no better or worse than any other profession, I was just having a bit of fun with it.
I'm sorry if I got out of hand. As I said, I work in construction and I like it a lot. I'm proud of my work,
as is everyone I work with and as were most of the people I've ever worked with. There are fools and assholes, like in any other industry. There are things that are frequently done wrong, or which there is no clear consensus about the right way to do, just like in any other industry. People make mistakes, people have bad days, people have bad years, people encounter problems they don't know how to solve and do their best to muddle through anyway. Sometimes people just don't care, because their working conditions suck or the boss is an asshole or the client is an asshole or they're just not a very conscientious person—just like any other industry. People are people, work is work, we build shit and generally speaking it doesn't fall down or catch fire.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 8:19 PM on January 18, 2019 [5 favorites]


knowing the questions to ask is perhaps the most important thing; everything else flows from that

For hitting machine with hammer: $0.05
For knowing where and how hard to hit machine with hammer: $4999.95

Also: many, many locks are keyed alike.
posted by flabdablet at 8:51 PM on January 18, 2019 [12 favorites]


and generally speaking it doesn't fall down or catch fire.

... and then fall into the swamp.
posted by oheso at 8:54 PM on January 18, 2019 [5 favorites]


You would be daft to build a castle in the swamp.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 9:01 PM on January 18, 2019 [10 favorites]


"Universities have a lot of rules and policies. Most of them are negotiable, even the really non-negotiable ones"

Otherwise known as "If I contact the chancellor, I get whatever I want." About 95% of anything you want, you can get if you complain up the food chain hard enough and there's no hard rule banning it. I don't know why they bother to set rules, honestly.

As for me: my job involves a lot of international mailing, except we are unable to provide tracking numbers (vendor doesn't provide) unless they pay $75-125 or so for them under one permitted special circumstance that most people are not allowed to have unless they didn't receive it the first time. I hear from at least 5-10 people a day saying they did not receive their package. It is extremely on fire dire EMERGENCY that they get these things ASAP, which is why I make a lot of very expensive reorders, which comes with its own drama when it comes to getting the payment for them.

There is one international population in particular that always has it the worst. Nothing ever arrives there. But even worse, when I tell them to mail their stuff to someone in the US? It still doesn't arrive there at least half the time if not more. They sometimes get returned in the mail marked "person doesn't live there." How the hell are they refusing to deliver that package when I get other people's mail all the time, including one name that someone obviously made up for bill collectors? It's uh...obvious that one particular population keeps having this happen to them because the "return, no such person" thing has happened about one other time to someone not from that country as far as I've seen. Now I tell people to put the friend's name on the envelope just in case. I have international phone numbers put on. Nothing bloody works. I had one client send 5 documents for her 4 friends to her house and only one showed up--not hers.

I spend a lot of time trying to discourage mailing if at all possible and I just wish I could outright say that there is no way in hell you will receive it if you have it mailed home instead of "a lot are lost in the mail." I am not a betting woman but if I was, I could bet all the money I have in the world that you will not receive it there. Will this ever get fixed? Hell if I know. I know of a vendor that could solve this problem but the more assistance and help/approval we need from higher-ups, the more likely things won't happen. This whole thing makes me want to cry a lot and it is so exhausting.

Also, there is one group I have to deal with that always holds up EVERYTHING and hates us and as far as I can tell, really slapped down the boss when she tried to fix the issue they are always holding us up about. I have been told that we literally have to fix every single other thing wrong with the system before we can ask them to do anything. This is like putting together a 1000 piece puzzle and leaving the easiest piece to put in until dead last. It would alleviate so much pain and drama if we could just convince them to do something to make this all less painful for the clients, but nooooooooooo that would take away their power.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:10 PM on January 18, 2019 [5 favorites]


Retail:

We collect tons of data on the customer that would be incredibly useful for personalization, recommendations and targeted offers, but the calendar moves so quickly that we don’t have time to analyze it and use it more than nominally. (This is why I personally don’t care what my Echo Dot hears. There’s so much raw data by now that it would take Skynet a century to dig through it.)

All the major websites are copying each other in terms of design and innovation. BUT this is actually sort of good, because it creates a fast-evolving real-world lab for UX. Like software, we’re making it up as we go and seeing what works.

Despite all the user testing and customer data and best-in-class industry practices available, an incredible number of decisions still get made overruling all of that, because some director or VP has a “gut feeling” or just wants it their own way.

Apple has extremely exacting requirements for reselling their products with other retailers. They decide the price, the promotional copy, the images, even the white space down to the pixel. They’re a legendary PITA to work with. But that might change since their sales were in the toilet last quarter.

The Target data breach occurred because a third-party vendor was using the free version of Malwarebytes because they didn’t want to pay for the commercial version. They clicked on an infected email and installed a back door on Target’s vendor system. Target’s FireEye system caught the breach as soon as it occurred, and repeatedly alerted the security team with automated emails warning them that a malicious user had entered the server, but they thought it was an error and turned off the alerts without reading them.

Everyone knew Wal-mart was going to crash on Black Friday (2018) because Wal-mart was stupid enough to publish the time when the doorbuster sales would go live. They basically DDOSed themselves because millions of customers went to the website at the same moment.

Planning for Black Friday generally starts in April.
posted by Autumnheart at 9:36 PM on January 18, 2019 [13 favorites]


I figured the Dominos pizza tracker was fake news, but it was still fun to watch.
posted by Autumnheart at 9:47 PM on January 18, 2019 [1 favorite]


At least where I live, rates paid to self-employed translators have been slowly diminishing for twenty years, while inflation has always been positive during the same period... In the meantime, agencies bid on large public sector and even private sector jobs (even those where the quality of the translation actually matters) with no idea about who is actually going to do the work, then force their freelancers to use translation assistance systems, which allows them to pay less (the software counts repetitions and even partial repetitions, and lower rates are paid for those bits), but they usually do not invest at all or sufficiently in managing their translation memories, which ends up making the job actually more difficult than it would be without using the software at all. Even halfway successful freelance translators are ruthless self-exploiters with no concept working versus non-working hours, riding the edge of ominously approaching carpal tunnel syndrome most of the time.
posted by holist at 9:48 PM on January 18, 2019 [5 favorites]


> Universities have a lot of rules and policies. Most of them are negotiable, even the really non-negotiable ones.

Don't come to your university bureaucracy with your problems. Come with your proposed solutions. The same is true with airlines.
posted by smelendez at 11:00 PM on January 18, 2019 [5 favorites]


your local hospital is leaking radioactive material into (choose two: the ground water, the sterile air circulation system, the outside air, the sewer system, ocassionally the lawn irrigation system). Yes, they know, and there will be money to fix it next quarter, which is never.

At two east coast school districts, wealthy parents bought grades in advance from high school admin, some of their kids definately knew. Pricing was in the new car per year range. "Irregularities" in standardized test administration were ignored or aided.

One of those schools paid a PI to research each student who wasn't white or east asian to attempt to dispute residency. this was for at least a decade and after the cold war.
posted by Anchorite_of_Palgrave at 11:19 PM on January 18, 2019 [6 favorites]


One of those schools paid a PI to research each student who wasn't white or east asian to attempt to dispute residency.

What the absolute fuck. This was a public school?
posted by en forme de poire at 11:55 PM on January 18, 2019 [2 favorites]


If you ask a lawyer declaiming authoritatively on some complex subject that is the topic of litigation he's working on a question about one inch to the left or right intellectually, he won't be able to say a damn thing. Even the best lawyers tend to know only exactly what they need to know to litigate the case.

i'd respond to this indignantly, but you said "a" when i expected a "the," so your inch-long rhetorical judo has rendered me speechless.
posted by wibari at 12:12 AM on January 19, 2019 [3 favorites]


Most doctors leave their patient, quickly google the symptoms on their phone, and then make their diagnosis in about ten seconds flat.


Last time I went to the doctor's, they googled on the computer right in front of me and we looked through the results together. But at least they admitted they had absolutely no clue what my pus-filled thing was, which I appreciated.
posted by Vesihiisi at 12:35 AM on January 19, 2019 [5 favorites]


In entertainment, you can fuck your way almost to the top.
posted by Ideefixe at 7:27 PM on January 18


In the music business in the 80’s in NYC, it was common knowledge that this was what Madonna did.

It would be interesting to calculate what she has ultimately ended up getting paid per “incident”.
posted by MexicanYenta at 5:23 AM on January 19, 2019


Gonna need some citations for those explosive allegations, Anchorite_of_Palgrave. I've lived in this part of the country pretty much all my life and not heard of those scandals. I would hope they'd be national news if they'd come to light, rather than just a MetaFilter comment. I'm not saying they're not true, but I'm gonna need some evidence for those extraordinary claims.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:59 AM on January 19, 2019 [2 favorites]


Any service provider you allow into your home (cleaning/maid service, childcare, babysitters, anything, really) will at some point in time do one or more of the following at your residence:

1) Search your upholstery for loose change/bills
2) Search your coats and jackets for loose change/bills
3) Eat your food
4) Drink your liquor
5) Steal something
6) Have sex
7) Nap
8) Use your bathroom facilities, toiletries, makeup, etc.
9) Go through pretty much all your stuff
10) Try to get onto your personal electronics
11) Read any mail, letters, files etc. they can find (if they are into snooping)
12) Watch TV / read/ be online when they are supposed to be working
13) Allow friends/family in while they are working (who will also do one or more of these things)

tl;dr: Have cameras up and tell people you have cameras up. Then, have other cameras up that are the real cameras because people will learn how to avoid the cameras you show them.
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 6:21 AM on January 19, 2019 [3 favorites]


That is simply untrue, I_Love_Bananas. I am such a service provider myself (I perform technical site visits in people's homes) and have never done any of those things, nor would I. I even take photos of the insides of people's homes in the course of my work, and am careful not to include things like the papers on people's desks in my photography. I am scrupulous about keeping my attention focused only on the things that are relevant to my job, because that is what I would want if the tables were turned.

Certainly the things you describe do happen, but it is unfair to say that any person you let in your home will definitely do those things. How do you come by this knowledge, may I ask?

Your suggestion that everyone should simply install an extensive camera system in their homes, including dummy cameras, is also remarkably unrealistic for anyone who earns a normal amount of money. I have visited hundreds and hundreds of homes and security cameras are almost exclusively found on upper-class and occasionally upper-middle-class houses.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 7:06 AM on January 19, 2019 [22 favorites]


The Software Industry (career track) :

Management is a scam. Don't fall for it. Become a developer and stay a developer. Managers spend the vast majority of their day in meetings, and these meetings happen at random times. As a result, managers almost never get the kind of long, uninterrupted blocks of time which are necessary for doing development work. This would be fine, except managers are still expected to "be technical," and can be faulted (or let go) for "not being technical enough." I personally haven't found a solution to this situation that didn't involve working a bunch of extra hours. On top of that, many engineers don't really respect managers, since if a manager is doing their job correctly, their work is mostly hidden. Furthermore, the kind of work you're required to do as a manager requires a lot of emotional labor and dealing with emotionally taxing situations. Sure, managers are paid more than developers, but not as much as you would think. Unless you're at the director level, you're maybe making $30K a year more than the highest-paid developer on their team. Maybe. Whether or not that is worth the stress and insecurity is for you to decide.

The one upshot : in the interview process, there isn't typically a lot of emphasis on solving difficult discrete math/algorithms problems on a whiteboard. So if you're terrible at that sort of thing (like me), perhaps consider a career in management. Of course, the converse is that sometimes you'll get turned down for a job for completely mysterious reasons, leading you to wonder what the "real" reason was you didn't get the job.
posted by panama joe at 8:02 AM on January 19, 2019 [11 favorites]


Docs and records management: Nobody knows what info we have. Nobody knows who knows what info we have. Nobody knows which hard-copy records are in storage, which have been scanned and should be shredded, which have been converted to actually-usable database data.

This would be a minor thing, suitable for library-minded geeks to fret over, except that "the info we have" includes things like "every bit of customer records for the last 10-100 years." The stuff that's currently active is in the hands of sales agents, field workers (or rather, managers of field workers), development departments, and so on; the stuff that's 5+ years old goes into a virtual black hole, and every two years, someone hires an archivist (that's me) to wade through the digital and paper sludge and attempt to bring order to one corner of the Old Misc Records sector of the business.

Invoices sent to clients are named "Account 2345213.pdf" and if you're lucky, there's a date in the filename. If you're not, they're stored in a folder called "January 2015 Invoices" and you can't put all the invoices for the same account together 'cos they'll overwrite each other. Invoices received-and-payable are named "Invoice.pdf" (when they're not named "5698413120181021.pdf" because that's what the software that generated them named them) and are stored on the desktop of the person responsible for seeing them paid; the "record" of payment is in their inbox; that's my cracked laughter you're hearing across the internet.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 8:56 AM on January 19, 2019 [12 favorites]


On the houses vs software issue.

We know how to build houses. We know how to build livable houses that work and last for generations. We can start with soil analysis, structural engineering, design patterns that are proven, ergonomics, etc...

It is hard work and expensive, but if one assembles a well educated and ethical team, a large enough bank account, and enough time one could get a pretty good house built on solid principles. The problem is that most of the time people are cutting corners.


On the software side we don't know how to build stuff. Most stuff is built by underprepared people under too much pressure with too little resources. But if you got the best developers with a large budget, enough time, and the best intentions in the world we would still not know how to build software.
posted by Dr. Curare at 9:02 AM on January 19, 2019 [4 favorites]


"One of those schools paid a PI to research each student who wasn't white or east asian to attempt to dispute residency."
"What the absolute fuck. This was a public school?"


That's nothing, I saw a football coach get arrested for stalking when he staked out a player's aunt's house to try to prove the player didn't actually live with his aunt -- which would make him eligible to play for their top opponent -- but lived with his mom, which would make him eligible for the coach's team. (Even crazier, both schools were in the same district.)

Everyone who's been in school administration for five years has at least one story of an insane coach disputing residency.

Probably most public schools have at some point paid an investigator (sometimes a lawyer just to take depositions) to examine a disputed residency. Out-of-district students have to pay tuition at public schools, and lying to attend an out-of-district school can be a felony in some cases. Cash-strapped schools get intense about it b/c if they've got extra students they're not getting state dollars for, it can legitimately be difficult to maintain appropriate staffing.

But by far the schools the most wound up about it are wealthy suburban schools where they are going to protect their schools from impoverished interlopers. All the time they "require" documentation far above state requirements to enroll your child when you live in-district (they literally demand more documentation than a passport does), and if you push back they'll have to go up the chain to the district office and eventually you'll get to talk to their lawyer who will admit that, no, they can't actually REQUIRE all that documentation, but very few people know that to dispute it. And if a rumor goes through a wealthy suburban school that some kid is attending who doesn't belong there, you can bet they'll investigate.

Systematic, racially-based investigations are outside my experience, but I would not be surprised at all. There are some really shitty school administrators out there. And I did see a principal call the state inspectors to try to have his own school closed as unsafe so that black kids who school-choiced into it couldn't attend. The idea being that the "school choice" kids would start the year at other schools and then when the school reopened two weeks later, they couldn't transfer back in once the school year was underway, but the white kids who lived in the neighborhood could return as it was their "home" school.

(He got fired. This was the tip of the racist asshole iceberg.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:08 AM on January 19, 2019 [21 favorites]


Regarding housing - I thought I'd gotten this from a metafilter post, but apparently not? Before the International Style (modernism) in architecture, our ancestors knew how to adapt the room heights according to the climate, achieving maximum effect (comfort) for the least effort (energy). Today we trust in the grid and so build 8-9 ft rooms from Bermuda to Reykjavik. (And if I'm misremembering, that should probably be a FPP; it's fascinating. But I thought I got it from here.)

Doesn't say anything about incompetence in actual construction, but cookie-cutter plans lead directly into "eh, anyone who can swing a hammer can build a house."
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 9:13 AM on January 19, 2019 [7 favorites]


you definitely did (i still have that tab open)
posted by itesser at 9:18 AM on January 19, 2019 [3 favorites]


Everything and everyone is a fraud
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 9:45 AM on January 19, 2019 [5 favorites]


Stalking and investigating students in an effort to get them kicked out of one's school seems like a pretty shocking betrayal of the fundamental duty of care that educators have to their pupils. How could anyone who knows about this practice ever have faith that their children's school isn't literally plotting against their child? How could a parent ever trust that their child's teachers and principals have their kid's best interests at heart? How can they feel safe sending their kid off to a place that would countenance such actions?
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 9:46 AM on January 19, 2019 [1 favorite]


Stalking and investigating students in an effort to get them kicked out of one's school seems like a pretty shocking betrayal of the fundamental duty of care that educators have to their pupils.

It's done under the claim of keeping non-local kids out of the "good schools." ...If we actually funded all schools the same way, and provided them the same level of support, this wouldn't happen. (Keeping out non-local-area kids isn't intended to keep out latinx and black kids, but it means the mechanisms are all there for any official to use against any kid they don't like.)
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 10:41 AM on January 19, 2019 [4 favorites]


That is simply untrue, I_Love_Bananas. I am such a service provider myself (I perform technical site visits in people's homes) and have never done any of those things, nor would I.


yeah, I cleaned someone's house for money when I was a teen and the only thing I ever did was look (just look) at their bookshelves to feel superior. I saw the things I was asked to dust when I was dusting them; that isn't intruding. having opinions about what you're looking at can't actually be captured on a security cam.

people who like to steal can steal from home-based clients. they can also work in an office and steal from other people's desks and coat pockets and the supply cabinet and the office kitchen.

the idea that reading/internet/tv is a special vice of domestic workers or visiting repair people is hilarious and the idea that employers should feel entitled to -- or be told that they actively should -- monitor for it is creepy and ridiculous. every office worker does that. every hourly worker of any kind has the same natural desire to take a few minutes out of every hour to think or read something. most of them do it, and none of them are doing anything wrong. suggesting we need to monitor for this is like saying we should all put up home cameras to find out if our cleaners are sneaking off to use our bathrooms on the clock. (they are. it's not sneaking. it's not wrong.)
posted by queenofbithynia at 11:25 AM on January 19, 2019 [36 favorites]


Honestly, I wouldn't have bothered going through the stuff belonging to the people I babysat for, because they were really boring. I can't imagine I would have found anything notable. Sex toys or porn, maybe, but who really cares? People overestimate how interesting they are.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 11:48 AM on January 19, 2019 [6 favorites]


So the housekeepers are good enough to clean the toilet but not good enough to use it? Words fail.
posted by jesourie at 12:12 PM on January 19, 2019 [23 favorites]


Oh yeah, I've totally used the toilet in customers' houses. That didn't even register as something that a person might find problematic. I'll ask if the customer happens to be there to ask, but if not then not.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:59 PM on January 19, 2019 [6 favorites]


"Stalking and investigating students in an effort to get them kicked out of one's school seems like a pretty shocking betrayal of the fundamental duty of care that educators have to their pupils."

I mean, welcome to white supremacy in action (and/or literally insane sports programs in action). Polite, suburban white supremacy where people only moved "for the schools" and say they had no racial motive, but nonetheless, it's a grievous injustice, and a racist and classist one, being done in the names of the polite citizens of the town. You should probably find out how much of it the school district you pay taxes to is doing, because it's quite possible they're engaging in this kind of white supremacist school enrollment policing in your name.

(Investigating a credible allegation of enrollment fraud is a different thing, that's legit and doesn't take very long or involve a lot of secret snooping, it's not generally very dramatic and revolves around awkwardly-timed moves or tricky custody situations and people who didn't know the rules very well. Rarely, you have someone who's actually deliberately committing tax/enrollment fraud and there's a legit criminal issue to address. Or, in Chicago, rich people like to "clout" their way into better schools -- like our former governor -- which is often combined with address cheating, and that also deserves investigation and punishment.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 3:36 PM on January 19, 2019 [3 favorites]


One of those schools paid a PI to research each student who wasn't white or east asian to attempt to dispute residency.

I've never seen a school that was quite so directly racist, but having truant officers and sometimes consultants (which could include PIs) to research residency is actually pretty common, especially in districts with public competitive-entry magnets. It's usually because the school only recently updated their regulations to state that those out of district are not allowed, or are located extremely near to mid to median performing districts.

The software ones are still silly. Software is built, so what does 'we don't know how to build software' even mean?
Also, the management track is not a 'scam', managers manage -which includes everything from dealing with low-performing employees, and hiring to making (very high) level architecture decisions and selling them to their managers and managing the budget. It's not development it's a totally different job, and if you would rather code, that's fine but that doesn't mean management is a scam.

a company that stores sensitive personal data about you gathered from how you use their service might not even have a single dedicated security specialist, even at the point where they have millions of daily active users.

This one is not totally true either, because for companies above a certain size, Sarbanes-Oxley requires security analysis and financial reporting metrics (which managers also must manage), but below that size (ie: company may have millions of active users, but be small enough employee and income-wise to be below the threshold) it could very well be true. Also 'sensitive personal data' is basically a legally defined term, and is probably not as broad as one might think. Auditing this stuff is actually a huge percentage of the big accounting firms' work.

Dirty secret of people conducting (public research) surveys: never worry about giving us a more socially desirable answer, since we really don't care what you say --
I'd say that the dirty secret of this (from personal experience) is that a good percentage of public surveying is totally made up. I used to do this and everyone else at the company too - get some elderly on the call and as they rambled on click buttons on the screen. Not that they were all made up, but a good 25% were. And I didn't care about your income because half the time the surveys were so long they were totally rambling and indignant by that point, even if they were answering the questions at first. The other dirty secret is home-bound shutins answer like 75% of survey calls, or at least they used to.
posted by The_Vegetables at 4:04 PM on January 19, 2019


I work in software. If a person I'm interviewing responds to a question with an answer that shows they understand the problem domain, and ends with "and of course I'd then google [relevant bit]", that's a major plus. Knowing how to find answers is important. Knowing offhand every esoteric detail of e.g. a rarely used library or function call is about as useful to me (as the hiring person) as being able to recite the state capitols.


I worked with and took a class with several guys who also took the classes on how to interview like this and how to rate the response as an acceptable answer. I interviewed with one (and a friend with the other) and we both got not hired.

And I know it’s because my answer was, “I don’t know that particular use case of one over the other, so I’d look it up in $AcceptableReference and make my decision from there.” The question was one that honestly never came up in 20+ years, and it wasn’t necessarily informatively useful. It sounded like something pulled from a list of questions he googled to ask me because he doesn’t wuite understand what a tech writer DOES. Which is fine because I was also supposed to run tech support on the side for customers.

As for my writer buddy? No idea. But she (like I for a DIFFERENT job) was pulled in last minute so they could make sure the guy they wanted to hire wasn’t terrible compared to her.
posted by tilde at 5:01 PM on January 19, 2019 [1 favorite]


The other not really dirty little secret I know of in tech writing is that generally speaking there are not tech writing emergencies. So we will decline all of the 10pm emergency roll out meetings. And most developers are shocked to know we make about 35% less than them ... and most hiring managers do everything to keep that low.
posted by tilde at 5:23 PM on January 19, 2019 [4 favorites]


Don't come to your university bureaucracy with your problems. Come with your proposed solutions.

I have tried this. Nobody wants to do the proposed solutions, or they say they have to discuss this with higher-ups first, which will approximately be on the twelfth of never somehow.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:55 PM on January 19, 2019 [3 favorites]


Nobody has a frikkin clue what books will be successful at all
schadenfrau: Wait. Even Amazon? They've got all that data...

Nope. When they did try to publish, the results were abysmal.

One dirty secret of book publishing is that the only way to be hired as an acquisitions editor is through connections and race and class privilege. For the most part acquisitions editors don't edit at all, and everyone in managing ed/production editorial/design/production has to clean up their messes.
posted by libraryhead at 12:37 PM on January 20, 2019 [4 favorites]


On the residency stuff:

I've written before about how my parents got us into an affluent suburban school district. That district at some point sent my sister home with a letter saying that her residency was in question and that she could not return to school until she had shown them her papers.

Luckily, our house guest at the time was a first-year associate with a corporate WestLaw subscription. My sister went back to school the next day with just one or two sentences to the effect of, "This is illegal [cite][cite][cite]. Please send her back to class." Where the citations were all about districts getting fined astonishing amounts per student per day.

(I was actually kind of surprised: I guess the courts do care about keeping kids in school. Or these particular districts had just had the misfortune of accidentally including a few wealthy litigious families in their dragnets.)

Anyway, the next day the school started calling people to tell them to send their kids back. We also never got asked for anything to prove residency, either. I think they just decided to drop the whole thing.

tl;dr residency investigations happened to me too, but not very competently.
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 5:07 PM on January 20, 2019 [4 favorites]


Huh, our state has gone to the extent to make it a second degree misdemeanor to fabricate where you live to get into an otherwise ineligible school.
posted by tilde at 10:24 PM on January 20, 2019 [1 favorite]


"Huh, our state has gone to the extent to make it a second degree misdemeanor to fabricate where you live to get into an otherwise ineligible school."

Yeah and I have mixed feelings about that. The rationale is that you have to lie to state officials to do it, and it costs districts a LOT of money when you do. But most of the time it's not really worth making it a criminal situation. Among the forms it occurs in:

1) By far the most common: Divorce, parents maybe doing shiftwork, child spends more nights at dad's than at mom's because of shiftwork schedules (but more days at mom's), parents ask for bus schedule adjustment as a result, and schools involved say, "Hey, so if he's spending 5 nights a week at dad's he's actually resident there and will have to transfer." (Solutions include student transferring, or dad going to mom's 3 nights a week and dozing on the couch until mom gets home so kid can be resident at mom's. Even in pretty shitty divorce situations families often find ways to put a responsible adult at mom's house so the kid can "be resident" there.)

1a) Parents move mid-semester and don't properly notify the school, so are unaware of what their (many) legal options are. It comes up b/c of changes to school bus situations or b/c they have a neighbor who's an asshole. Generally rapidly solved. (Sometimes people call and say "I'm totally moving into your district in October!" but in that case you are out of luck and have to just transfer in October instead of enrolling in August, you can imagine the associated scams.)

2) Student is extremely talented athlete of limited financial means. One school in the area has a notable team that can help student get recruited by a big NCAA team; the school he's supposed to attend cannot. Student will "live" with an aunt or a grandmother to get into the preferred attendance area. Hard to fault the student. (Often everyone will pretend not to know about this, unless the coach of what ought to be his "home" team is a lunatic who cares more about winning than the student's academic/job prospects.)

3) Parent deliberately buys literally the furthermost house in the low-tax shitty school district, right next to the dividing line for the high-tax good school district. Parent then lists their address as "1002 High Street" rather than the real "1000 High Street" because 1002 (which is imaginary) shows up as being in the attendance area for the good district. If you're sneaky about it you can change your electric/gas bill to 1002 High Street and your mailman will assume it's a typo and still deliver it, and then you can use that bill to register in the expensive district. Or you could even put "1004 High Street" -- your neighbor's house that's definitely in the good district -- and get those utility bills for an actual address (rather than relying on fairly dumb database hacks) and register for the good district. (These people also constantly try to cheat on local taxes in a huge variety of other ways up to and including attempting to secede from the town, I am not even kidding, and you have to spend $50,000 convening a hearing board to hear the town secession demand, it's in the state statutes.) These people suck and should be fined heavily, although jail is probably excessive. They will inform you that taxes are theft but demand that their child go to the best school district and protest vigorously against any reductions in fire protection. Sometimes they deny that schools and firefighters are paid for via taxes, because those are good things and taxes are theft. This attitude is not criminal, I just want to punch them about it.

4) Wealthy fuckers from suburbia who want their kid to attend a magnet school in a large urban district. So they buy a second house in the city, don't bother to live in it, have their kid apply to the magnet, and then (ARGH) have their kid clouted into the school (principals often get to waiver in a few students) so they don't actually have to compete on scores. These people know what the fuck they're doing and know it's wrong and should definitely go to jail over it, ex governor of Illinois whose daughter commuted from Wilmette to Chicago rather than just fucking going to New Trier because "Chicago" would look better on her college applications like she was FROM THE CITY rather than like she was yet another of the five hundred New Trier students applying to Yale this year. And, like, if it mattered that much? They could AFFORD to pay the out-of-district tuition and they could afford to live in the target district. They're just assholes soaking up resources intended for needy students. This is white collar crime and they are probably committing other white collar crimes and should be investigated by the AG to find all the other crimes they're doing, and also should serve jail time because jail time totally deters white collar criminals (although nobody else).

5) (Very rare:) Parent wants student to go to better district for pretty good reasons of grades, services, or similar, but can't afford to live in that district. Parent lies, crosses their fingers, and hopes for the best. This literally almost never happens.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:01 PM on January 20, 2019 [9 favorites]


My sympathies go out to anyone reading this or the Twitter thread *before* they've entered the work force. Good luck, kids!
posted by The Card Cheat at 5:50 AM on January 21, 2019 [3 favorites]


> ...we don’t have time to analyze it and use it more than nominally. (This is why I personally don’t care what my Echo Dot hears. There’s so much raw data by now that it would take Skynet a century to dig through it.)

FYI: Security through Obscurity ended years ago with the combination of decent speech to text tools and machine learning. Storing text is easy/cheap and digging through it is instant.
posted by CheapB at 8:13 AM on January 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


> In entertainment, you can fuck your way almost to the top.
I'd heard it as:
"You can fuck your way solidly to the middle"
posted by CheapB at 8:16 AM on January 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


> Don't come to your university bureaucracy with your problems. Come with your proposed solutions.
>> I have tried this. Nobody wants to do the proposed solutions, or they say they have to discuss this with higher-ups first, which will approximately be on the twelfth of never somehow.


While it is not a guarantee, my experience is that presenting a set of solutions tends to have a higher rate of success when attempting to resolve issues (business and personal) than simply highlighting a problem.
posted by CheapB at 8:58 AM on January 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


Ooh, ooh, tech writers! That me. The number of hours I spend waiting for engineers to decide what exactly should go in my manual is quite disturbing.
posted by Melismata at 1:10 PM on January 21, 2019 [3 favorites]


Melismata: that’s because we’re still writing the code and haven’t actually decided what that feature is actually going to do yet.
posted by pharm at 7:41 AM on January 22, 2019 [2 favorites]


I wish we had tech writers. They just make developers write their own documentation here and the result is as expected.
posted by octothorpe at 7:51 AM on January 22, 2019 [4 favorites]


Oh yes pharm, I didn't mean to imply that you guys weren't doing good work. I just feel guilty over the amount of time I spend not doing any actual work myself.

(This downtime doesn't include the amount of time I spend being a referee and/or a therapist. "John says that the specs are X, is that right?" "No, John doesn't know what he's talking about, they're supposed to be Y, why doesn't John talk to me about these things??" "Well, John said that Z was a factor, so ..." Luckily, I'm a good listener, we all get along well, and it's a good job. But I still feel guilty...)
posted by Melismata at 12:54 PM on January 22, 2019 [2 favorites]


No offence taken Melismata! That was as much a criticism of programmers as anything. We often don’t have any idea how something is going to end up working until we’ve bashed out some code, which isn’t exactly ideal. Half the time the reason a feature works in a specific fashion is purely because it was easier to program that way - putting the user first doesn’t always come naturally sadly.
posted by pharm at 1:34 AM on January 23, 2019 [2 favorites]


My sympathies go out to anyone reading this or the Twitter thread *before* they've entered the work force. Good luck, kids!

Yeah, that’s me.

😞
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:50 PM on January 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


Don't be sad, shapes! You hear a lot around here about the bullshit that goes down at people's jobs, but you rarely hear about the positive stuff. Work can be OK, honestly. It's actually really important to know that so that you don't just settle for some toxic bullshit thinking that that's as good as it gets. There's a lot of toxic bullshit out there, but honestly I actually like the job I have right now and so do lots of other people. It's not all garbage.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:26 PM on January 23, 2019 [2 favorites]


You know you are loved as a tech writer when you send an SME a meeting request and they dance over to your office to start pouring things into your brain almost immediately...

(Right after the former non writer lead turned the project over to you, lamenting, “I have the idea of what I want to do but had no idea how complex actually making it usable is...”)
posted by tilde at 4:40 PM on January 30, 2019 [2 favorites]


Here's a ThreadReader version with all the Twitter posts on one page. Well, I assume all the posts - it's a very long page. posted by exogenous

Indeed. @girlziplocked has the last say in the Thread Reader version.
I hope people can understand the very sane reason I turned off my DMs for a minute. I spent hours yesterday going through these.
posted by ZeusHumms at 12:35 PM on February 15, 2019


« Older Do unto otters...   |   “She decides to leave for Europe, with hopes of a... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments