It’s not about feeling better but likely that the company had a Rooney rule. Your friend was how they got around that while on paper complying to avoid internal political issues.
> Also in moderately big to big companies, is all about contacts and personal marketing, which could (and typically is) orthogonal to your actual work.
As you go up the levels that is exactly the job (for better or worse) so doing that is doing the work at the next level. You are organizational glue that connects people and ensures your team has proper visibility. If you didn't see it that way then that may explain your problems with promotions.
I think the important distinction is "doing the responsibilities of the level above yours" and "doing them well." These are actually very non trivial since many people don't actually know the former (what does your boss actually?), and then have no baseline so overestimate their actual competence if they do know. Simply doing more work of the same kind as before will not get you promoted.
As I've seen it younger engineers simply focus a lot more on money and their career growth versus the product or whatever their own sense of "the right thing is". That makes the stock go up and everyone is happy more or less. At the same time a lot of experienced engineers get very upset at the suggestion that they should do likewise.
In my lens the only true score is the collection perception of the score. Not a number, not a formula and not what you think the score is. There is no external absolute counter you can point to because the collective view is the truth.
It’s got nothing to do with values but value. Are you doing things that provide value. Once you realize the only measure of that is how other people perceive what you’ve done it’s a lot less frustrating. It makes thing more cooperative as you now need to work with others and communicate with others and you know that versus clinging to a siloed invalid notion of value.
There is no objective score and thus people are perfect at it since the score is by definition what other people think it is. Like the value of money or stocks. Once you realize that a lot of life is significantly less frustrating.
It’s not a scam. It’s a system that exists for people and made by people. Period. Money, outcomes and so on only have value because people assign them value. If you remove people then what you do has no value or concept of value. Life is not some video game with an omniscient score counter. Other people are the score counter.
Or that the vast majority of people don't actually value their own productivity and time that much. Which given the popularity of social media and people not paying a few dollars to avoid hours of streaming ads per month seems fairly clear to me.
And that's fine, this site has rules and the mods follow those rules. I am free to say things but I am not guaranteed a platform to say them on. My usage of the term is just as inaccurate as your usage of "freedom of association." The difference is that I am aware of that and was seeing if you'd bite which you did. Accuracy clearly only matters to you as a way to discredit others but not as a pillar of your own arguments.
The core of the argument is that they say the rules are X but the actually mean they are Y. That has nothing to do "freedom of association" but simply with being two faced liars. Which people often dislike. And the thing called "freedom of speech" lets me say those last bits. :)
We're discussing this in regards to an article where the obvious "solution" was found by the government to this very approach. You're free to build it that way and we're free to put you all in jail afterwards as a result. Rubber hose decryption at its finest.
> There were many decades where phones didn't have back doors.
Your cell phone provider almost certainly will respond to a valid warrant and wire tap your non e2e encrypted phone call.
I'd be very surprised if the most common mode of remote communication in any time period was not subject to government interception in some format within a short time of becoming such. That includes physical mail, telegrams, landlines, cell phone calls, txt messages, emails, etc.
Referring to "how things used to be" is not in fact helping the case for privacy.
I find it fascinating that saying "we're not yet an actual dictatorship" is seen as complacency.
> Of course, my family escaped a dictatorship and made our home in the US. So we have a better sense of these things.
Fascinating what people assume about others and then use that to discount the views of others if those views disagree with them.
Clearly you've got a lot of trauma but panic and excess anxiety are not healthy responses to that as they make your decisions irrationally biased. That's how you get lots of immigrants who escaped communist dictatorships voting for a right wing dictatorships in the US. Their trauma biases their world view so much that they panic and then cause an equally bad outcome.