I don’t think it’s always that way. Most companies I’ve worked for have been straight shooters to be honest. Though I’ve seen what you’re talking about.
You need to be a researcher or something.
We won the KC regional quiz bowl one year and our teacher sponsors were all like - good luck getting to Ohio for nationals kids, you’re on your own. That sucked. We probably could have come up with the money. But we needed guidance and impetus.
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Yeah. We could have done it. The other kids on the team had the money. My dad would have shrugged sadly and felt bad about himself if I asked. My mom would have slapped me.
But we wouldn’t have, same reason as you.
I wonder how many teams actually show up? It’s probably heavily dominated by local Ohio teams.
My two favorite answers I’ll never forget:
(paraphrasing) What was the name for the traveling intellectual get-togethers in the early 1900s?
I knew the word chautauqua from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance - but had no idea how to pronounce it, so I spelled it. I distinctly remember some professor in the crowd (it was at a local college) wondering how in the hell I knew that.
If there’s a 40% chance it rains one day, and 60% the next day, what are the chances it rains either day?
I remembered (a+b - a*b) from my stats class at the last minute, and convinced the team to go with 76%.
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Another problem with the old-time work ethic is your boss realizes he can dump stuff on you and you end up working even more and it’s hard not to feel taken advantage of even if you do get a little bigger raise or whatever. Eventually you get burned out.
There’s a bunch of national tournaments. We were in Michigan so always played at Case Western and Ohio State.
Chip Beall ran a big one with awful questions. It moved around a bit. Houston, DC, Malibu. They were horrible.
The big one as far as we were concerned was the Panasonic Tournament in Orlando. Only one team per state, many states sent all-star teams. In Michigan it was the state champion.
Extremely weird format. 6 teams at once and you got points from where you finished. Our team was overmatched, but the thing is, we were elite in certain categories, so we actually had a chance in this thing if the other teams split points on stuff we sucked in.
There was another format quirk where they asked these matching questions, like match up four authors and titles. To be the first team in, you had to basically ring in as they spoke the first syllable of the 3rd author. But you had to go early to beat five other teams. In the finals, I rang in on three but timed it to early and had to pure guess. I missed all three coin tosses. Had I gotten 2 of 3, we would have gone to the finals.
The finals was just the saddest thing ever. They asked all these insanely hard questions that my team happened to know the answers to and the six other teams just bricked them. If we had made the finals, we 100% pull off an incredible upset.
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I’ve never done it unless I was getting something out of it too - either learning new tech in a real world scenario, or working with a team that felt like family, or both in the best cases.
In my mind Bill Russell’s dad was in some kind of similar spot where he didn’t hate the work and liked who he worked with.
The larger point though is I don’t think you ever lose if you work your ass off to get good at something. I never see it as my employer is exploiting me, even though I know I may be adding many multiples of my salary in value. Because I’m getting something out of it too. But when you aren’t learning any more or getting anything out of the job it’s maybe time to move on. Yes I know not everyone in history has had that option.
One of my old bosses had a quote: “You’re either learning, you’re teaching, or you’re leaving.” I believe in that one too.
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Re: working hard.
I don’t have a problem putting in real time and working hard. What pisses me off to end no end is that in most professional contexts that I’ve been, which may not be representative I admit (spots where people really don’t get fired unless everyone gets fired), the harder you work the more they expect.
I don’t think they do it on purpose, but the bosses ask so much more of people who don’t deadbeat. I’m sure it’s just because they get conditioned to do this, but it sucks. And it incentivizes not working hard.
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Yes, good point. I’ve done that too. And it was only when I got to diminishing returns that I knew it was time to move on.
One of my old bosses had a quote: “You’re either learning, you’re teaching, or you’re leaving.” I believe in that one too.
This is great.
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My experience with computer programming is you often work your ass off during crunch time, then you have in-between time where you barely do anything - and your bosses are cool with that. I actually prefer it to a steady stream of work, which I find boring as hell.
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I’d still put that in the STEM category. I don’t know how we say that’s non-Science.
We didn’t have quiz bowl in HS but I did join an ad hoc team for a college quiz bowl. I got a wtf for answering a question with the War of Jenkins Ear, which I had remembered from AP history because it struck me as odd.
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The easy way to think about problems like this is to figure out the probability that it doesn’t rain on either day. Which is of course 0.60*0.40 = 24%. Therefore it must be a 76% chance that it rains on at least one of the two days.
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Wait, there’s another way to think about it?
Chessmate!
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I think this one gets weird because 100-60=40 and vice versa.
If it’s 60% and 70%, you have to first subtract both from 100, then multiply them, then subtract that result from 100. Or you can do 130-42 = 88%.
I guess it’s whatever makes sense to you. For some reason a+b-a*b always stuck with me.
Once you get more than two days - yeah much easier to just subtract the odds it doesn’t rain on all days.
fitty fitty