jesus fuck i cannot wait for these old bags to fucking croak and take their outdated logic with them.
Hate to break it to you, but the old bags will be replaced by new younger douchebags.
It’s almost like business school teaches a few things random commenters on a website might not fully grasp.
It’s almost like business school is for those who couldn’t quite cut it as a doctor or lawyer or scientist or engineer…
As though it predominantly attracts a certain type of person who exhibits psychopathic tendencies in their obsessive pursuit of power.
It’s almost like there’s an entire management philosophy our economy pushes that’s categorically suboptimal for and often at odds with making a solid, sustainable, and engineering-first organization.
The only thing “classical” business experts are good at is trying to find the quickest route to monetization. This pretty much never yields a product that actual helps people in a meaningful and consistent fashion in the long term.
Make a thing, and make it well, and it will sell itself. Boeing did this until they acquihired McDonnell Douglass leadership and transitioned their entire business model towards being “investor-first”… and that gave us delights like the 737 MCAS debacle (exacerbated, of course, by deregulation and poor auditing). They used to be one of the true paragons of American engineering. Now they’re just another profit über alles corporation.
Engineering-centric organizations need to focus a whole hell of a lot more on engineering ethics. These days, it’s mostly an afterthought.
That philosophy might hold water if we weren’t living in a world where products have to be designed to a price point for consumers. The highest quality engineered lamp will be outsold by orders of magnitude by the okay lamp that costs less than half as much. Not everyone makes airplanes.
That’s not what I’m saying. I’m not universally anti-capitalist. Someone who makes a useful thing is absolutely justified in trying to make it efficiently as possible, both in terms of capital as well as environmental considerations (edit: addendum here), as well as some compensation for their expertise, time, and effort, according to which and/or how many customers use it.
What I object to is the constant drive towards short-term benefit over long-term investment, almost always at the cost of user experience - or these days, more broadly the constant march towards enshitification.
Our current system of unbounded amoral, and largely unregulated capitalism is very obviously harmful and parasitic to our society in a holistic sense. Milton Friedman’s “shareholder value first” philosophy (which has become standard practice for most of the western world’s corporate governance) has been a cancer on our societies since the moment those words left his mouth.
Also, fuck the entire concept of omnipresent advertisements with a rusty pipe.
He just pissed that business travel is still down. Sorry, it’s never going back to the way it was.
He’s also slightly mad because he now has to compete in a labor market where people can choose between:
A shitty waiting job that has you flying out of town daily, pay is about as much as a gas station clerk, has you dealing with some of the craziest ideologies on the planet because no one respects your authority. High Stress, low reward situation.
Then you have work from home: Right off the bat, you get 2 extra hours back from your daily commute. If you have kids, you are now saving hundreds of dollars monthly on child care. Car care costs go down. Gas costs go down. Less stressful situation, and more mentally stable.
The problem isn’t just that he is having to compete with work from home jobs, but he is now having to compete against the benefits of work from home. And there is only one way to do that: $$$.
Agree with everything except;
If you have kids, you are now saving hundreds of dollars monthly on child care.
Myself and most WFHers know still put our kids in care, you simply can’t work and look after young kids simultaneously unless you only work at night or during naps.
