Bill Gates, Billionaire Philanthropy, and the Vaccine Patents

This seems at odds with the assertion that middle managers are powerful enough to unlock the productivity of millions of poor performers.

Keep in mind that deplorables don’t exist just in Facebook. Reasoning with emotionally dysfunctional employees about their performance goes just as well as arguing with Trumpers about policy.

Fair. It’s likely my perspective is colored by my current work situation. I’m in a matrixed, project-oriented organization so it’s likely easier to move folks around here than it is in other organizations, and therefore easier to find something that someone can do well. That being said, I’ve seen plenty of managers who still struggle with personnel management and plenty of staff who struggle as a result.

Some of this rings true to me, but there are also a bunch of people that will never be good at any median office job without serious therapy. There’s a high correlation between poor performers and people with toxic interpersonal behavior patterns. Its almost impossible for them to find any job.

It was a soft dig at myself since I’m a manager too and feel like I rarely do “real work” haha (and wouldn’t be half as good at it as the members of my team anyways). I think the primary function of managers should be personnel or team management, which is often perceived as not that valuable. I’m arguing that it is actually valuable and many managers struggle with it.

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This is definitely very common. Lots of people get to be low level managers because they are good at the “doing” but that doesn’t mean they’re good at managing. I think the most common version of this is that a person that avoids conflict can be an excellent producer but will be a disaster at management.

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And of course even when the person being promoted to middle management knows they won’t be a good manager (like me) they also know that taking on the management role is the only way to slightly increase their salary so they opt for the job they’re worse at.

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Then they should get therapy. Or they should just do the rest of us a favor and not work at all. I’m serious, I would rather they lived entirely off of public assistance than continued to fuck shit up at work. They actually produce negative net productivity while being absolutely miserable themselves.

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Not very easy to get quality therapy in this country, plus you need to be willing and acknowledge change needs to be made.

That’s the mental health care system’s problem not a workplace problem IMO. Expecting jobs to carry broken people who can’t complete the basic requirements of their role in a satisfactory way is totally unfair to everyone involved, especially that persons coworkers who usually end up picking up the slack for zero extra money.

There is a lot more management than necessary in most big organizations. A lot more. The mid tier and above corporate HQ types are still staffed like it’s the 80’s in many cases. A lot of these people’s jobs have been duplicative since the arrival of the spreadsheet lol.

Banks literally have entire rows on the org chart that are completely useless. Sometimes I think this persists so that the ambitious worker bees have something to aspire to, but more often I think it’s just because everyone in charge is old AF and relieved to be in the club. You start pointing at people, they might point back.

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Yeah this.

Every month at my last place they had a day-long managers’ meeting. We got so much more done on that day than normal.

Seems like he started a new affair for each new release of windows.

Patriotic Millionaires, whose members earn incomes of more than $1m or have assets worth more than $5m, campaigned in front of Bezos’s homes with billboards reading “Cut the bullshit. Tax the rich.”

“We’re ending up with a few rich people and a lot of poor people and that doesn’t work,” Morris Pearl, chairman of the Patriotic Millionaires board and a former BlackRock executive, told the Guardian.

“That’s not a way you can run a sustainable society.”

Also big companies are basically like the Republican Party, absolutely nobody in senior management wants to hear anything remotely negative, ever.

If you are a garden variety EVP at MegaCorp making like $400k plus stock options, the odds you actually stick your neck out to try to improve something are exactly zero. Your boss is making millions and all he wants to hear is that the trains are running on time. Everyone in charge has the same incentive: just don’t get fired. And when its time to decide who the next guy to make 7 figures will be, you sure as shit don’t want to be on the “not a team player” list.

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Sometimes you dont need to stick your neck out to improve something. Just outsource some division to India or something.

Seems nice.

He openly judged female employees on their attractiveness, showed colleagues nude photos of women on the internet and on several occasions made sexually inappropriate comments. He made a racist remark to a Black employee. He bullied others. When an employee said she was leaving Cascade, Mr. Larson retaliated by trying to hurt the stock price of the company she planned to join.

Saw this name and thought “The Press Your Luck guy?”