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this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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chapotraphouse
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Nobody fucking knows how anything works. Nobody knows who is supposed to know. Your boss pays $300/hr for a consulting firm to send another fresh-out-of-college-kid to tell you why the system you bought from a vendor who has produced exactly zero application guidance is malfunctioning, and that kid will spend the next two weeks learning how the damned thing works right alongside you.
This has been my life implementing the latest edition of RightAngle for the last two years. Just a stack of expensive third-party 20-somethings saying "Ah, fuck, never seen that before, let me get back with you in a week."
I feel like our society forgot that you're supposed to pass your knowledge down to the next generation, but boomers decided that it wasn't their job. Every man is an island instead of standing on the shoulders of giants like we are supposed to, and the result is everyone has to rediscover how to do anything themselves.
I don't think boomer workers had much of a say in the matter. The change in culture has come from the top. MBA-brains stripping all the copper out of the walls
Yes exactly this. Corporate downsizing consolidates 3 jobs into one and now that one person left never has any time for documentation or trainings/knowledge transfers. They get overworked and leave and suddenly there's no one left who knows what they did or how they did it.
The management understands that labor costs money but don't seem to understand why, so they just keep firing or not re-hiring until all the institutional knowledge is gone and the firm collapses.
To be fair, why should a long-term employee spend months of their productive time training a short-term contractor who may not last the year?
Ignore for a moment how few to no actual "employees" are being hired, and thus everyone is a short-term temp.
It's just a consequence of wanting maximum gains for little to nothing, i.e. corporate greed i.e. late-stage capitalism.
Bonus points if managers who do spend time training contractors get removed and replaced by those more willing to get in line with the company vision, being more "productive" in the ways that those in charge (Bezos, Musk, Huffman, etc.) can understand and agree with.
Literally why the US can't make certain missiles any more lol. So it's not all bad. Turns out none of the managers realised making weapons is skilled work until all the skilled workers retired.
Because they don't retire. They just fucking die at their desk and the knowledge goes with them.
The best part is that after all that expensive experience-gaining, when the project is over the consultants leave and the company is left with nothing. So they can just rinse/repeat in a year or three
One of the more common practices is to simply insource the consultants. There's a perverse incentive, wherein you're paying $300/hr for a guy getting paid $40/hr, so you eventually realize you can offer them a 50% raise and achieve 80% savings in a single stroke.
it makes perfect financial sense but I've never actually seen that happen haha
what I see is that once a project is finished it gets outsourced further to employees or contractors in south asia who know even less than the consultants did
I've gotten that kind of offer when working in one of these contractor jobs a couple of times. but it was always from the absolute worst places that I would not consider working for directly, for any amount of money. like think paranoid executives building toxic workplaces where people sometimes die of stress-induced heart attack type shit. having a layer between me and them was protective and I was willing to "pay" 50% of my salary as protection money.
imagine my shock getting burned out of grad school because the guy i worked for had absolutely zero technical skills in anything that interfaced with the research equipment. just a noggin full of papers and shit. even academia is this fucked up about a lot of stuff.
Was this a bigger or smaller university?
top 25 in the us for the field, big state school
Hm interesting, idk if the size or status has anything to do with the tendency to have people around like that. It's probably just the nature of how scummy academia can be I guess.
Wall. Unless you sabotage their business.
How can I compete with their own incompetency?