You didn't see it coming

https://aishwaryagoel.com/you-didnt-see-it-coming/

by agcat • 10 months ago

75 61 10 months ago

piva00• 10 months ago

What do we need? Real guidance. That comes from honesty about constraints, the times when your "strategy" was actually just making the best of what you had. It demands admitting that many successful decisions weren't visionary choices but creative responses to circumstances beyond your control.
But that kind of honesty doesn't get shared or saved on LinkedIn and X/Twitter.

Because honesty is not incentivised nor rewarded, the rewards come to the deceivers, the ones inflating and exaggerating claims to their customers and investors.

It's all smoke and mirrors, founders searching for funding won't get any money from being honest, the same for workers, honesty is not appreciated nor valued during the hiring/funding process, hell, it's not even appreciated in a lot of working environments where being honest would save a lot of headache and waste.

We all need more "real" but there's nothing incentivising for realness, even less within social media where it's all bluster chasing a dollar.

agcat18• 10 months ago

Yes that’s the point I was trying to make. These lies don’t just affect them but also the people reading it as they might never see what actually happens

bluetomcat• 10 months ago

These lies don’t just affect them but also the people reading it as they might never see what actually happens

This is what sustains this whole economic bubble built on debt and future promises. At all levels of society, you have these inflated unrealistic expectations and BS circulating in the media. Technically-incompetent but eloquent and charismatic CEOs predict that in 6 months, some major technological shift will happen. Managers preach about adjusting their organisations to these new realities. Workers have no choice but to play the game with all its dirty tricks, if they want to stay employed. Anyone who dares to say that the emperor has no clothes is isolated in a dark corner because they may suddenly deflate the value of the whole economy. This is corporate feudalism disguised as a competitive economy.

nenenejej2• 10 months ago

People bullshit on linkedin for sure. This is the mild end. Medium end is made up stories "a client told me...", and high end you have fat lies.

agcat18• 10 months ago

I learnt people even put wrong revenue numbers or what not

ramon156• 10 months ago

Weirdest thing is they're not even lying about the tight things. E.g. why would I care about turnover when I actually want to see revenue?

If you do b2b ofcourse there's going to be money flowing, that's not news.

ChrisMarshallNY• 10 months ago

A subreddit for the times: https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/

agcat18• 10 months ago

Haha this is hilarious

Zanfa2• 10 months ago

It’s safe to assume without extraordinary evidence that anything posted on LinkedIn is at best glorified reality, but most likely complete fabrication. There’s zero incentive for anybody to be truthful.

agcat18• 10 months ago

Have you found any social medium on internet that actually empowers honesty?

Zanfa2• 10 months ago

I’d say closest would maybe be early internet style niche forums or other closed (torrenting?) communities where your reputation is somewhat correlated with your contributions.

coldtea3• 10 months ago

the ones that are not focused on professional, commercial or business opportunities, like LinkedIn is, at least remove one of the motivations to lie. Those that offer full anonymity, remove another.

hk__2• 10 months ago

Reddit? HN?

markovs_gun2• 10 months ago

99% of my LinkedIn feed these days is AI slop from people and companies I have never heard of. IDK why anyone looks at the anything other than job listings on LinkedIn. Everything else is garbage.

agcat18• 10 months ago

Do we have an alternative?

joduplessis• 10 months ago

"he who talks loud, saying nothing"

agcat18• 10 months ago

I agree. But I have learnt that it's important to get your work recognized too. Unfortunately, the algorithms doesn't relate to that much rather than just clickbaits.

iamflimflam12• 10 months ago

Post rationalisation of decisions - everyone does it.

agcat18• 10 months ago

I learnt its called - cognitive dissonance

podgorniy2• 10 months ago

You learned wrong

Gepsens2• 10 months ago

Or rather, all the people who do it, like to pretend that everyone else does.

andrewstuart• 10 months ago

Everyone justifies their own existence.

agcat18• 10 months ago

And use social media to say it out loud

coldtea3• 10 months ago

Not everyone. There are also self-hating or self-criticizing people

Antibabelic5• 10 months ago

Note: Written from my own experience, with Claude helping me structure my rambling thoughts into something readable
#Personal Growth

Why not spend a bit of effort to rewrite the draft yourself? That's how you learn, and well, grow as a writer and a thinker.

agcat18• 10 months ago

I agree. I write 70% of it and then Claude helps me refine it by enhancing vocab, structure and grammar. Ideally I would like to just use it fix grammar but atleast this way I am writing more and my drafts just don’t sit in notes.

Antibabelic5• 10 months ago

The 30% you're outsourcing are where the growth happens. If you don't have any idea how to improve beyond a vague feeling that AI outputs look "better", I recommend checking out the book "What Is Good Writing?" by the linguist Geoffrey J. Huck. It should give you a clear understanding of your impressions and a clear direction.

OrderlyTiamat• 10 months ago

The claude-signs make me skip about 50-80% of text, unconsciously seeking for humanity. I'm not sure if I'm typical, but you might not be aware that you're losing more than you thought you bargained for.

podgorniy2• 10 months ago

Ego stuff

Havoc• 10 months ago

That’s a pretty strong take on someone labelled “friend”…

Some level of retrospective pat on back is necessary if all of the competition is doing it

I know people like prediction markets for this reason. There is no hiding. You’re either right or not

cjs_ac2• 10 months ago

It's ironic that there's a link to a YouTube video praising James Dyson at the bottom of this post, because Dyson is an example of someone whose narrative is bullshit. The clever physics and engineering in Dyson's products don't result in superior products. Have a look around the Dyson Institute after hours and you'll see the cleaners using Henry vacuum cleaners made by Numatic.

agcat18• 10 months ago

I was curious to learn about how they do what they do. Not promoting or demoting their products here. I generally mention things I read as part of footnote

cjs_ac2• 10 months ago

Yeah, that's the thing about these self-aggrandising narratives: you have to read/watch/consume the narrative, and then find information from other sources, before you can decide whether they're nonsense.

GJim• 10 months ago

Dyson is an example of someone whose narrative is bullshit

James Dyson, the salesman of (slightly crap) vacuum cleaners to the middle classes?

I believe he was called out by those middles classes for advocating Brexit to "boost British industry" and invest in Britain, then promptly shifting his operations to Singapore.

abanana• 10 months ago

James Dyson drives me nuts.

His modus operandi is to take something that has an inherent compromise, which exists for a specific reason, and to remove that compromise, thereby slightly improving one thing at the larger expense of something else.

The most obvious example is his vacuum cleaners - his big "innovation" was to remove the bag, which exists to make it easy to empty and to stop the dust from clogging up the workings of the machine, at the expense of a very small amount of suction power. Reviews everywhere say the same thing, always - they last no time at all before the suction power drops substantially because of the clogging-up. I've heard so many times about people making money by rescuing and reselling dumped Dyson vacuum cleaners that "just" needed dismantling and thoroughly cleaning.

Another example is hand dryers - basically just increase the power at the expense of (1) deafening noise and (2) blasting damp germ-filled air everywhere, for which they had to be banned from being installed at any NHS site in the UK, notwithstanding their marketing claims about somehow purifying the blasted air.

He's clearly a brilliant businessman - he's made a fortune from selling these items via top-notch marketing. But he's wrongly described as an "inventor", one of those words a certain class of people love to call themselves. At what point does the act of removing a carefully-designed compromise feature (a fix to one issue at the relatively small expense of something else - a net positive) from an existing piece of equipment, become inventing something new?

jackpepsi• 10 months ago

We expect comitted founders to make the best of their constraints.

This founder is doing that by putting a positive spin on their constraints in their social media posts.

Fallibility is important and I hope that founder is honest with their team, but at the same time keeping a positive public narrative about your company is also important. Not everyone has to perform their growing pains in public.

supriyo-biswas• 10 months ago

Additionally, founders/CxOs talking about or admitting to problems in public is rarely ever a good thing as it reduces confidence in the company - a prime example being the burning platforms memo[1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2011/feb/09/noki...

zetanor• 10 months ago

I don't understand how a clickbait title submitted as-is, a "Source:Internet" image or a shallow LinkedIn-type post (mostly written by a LLM?) can get any traction on here. Clearly a good Rorschach test, though.

jffry• 10 months ago

It's a $12 stock photo, making it even stranger to put any source label on it https://www.istockphoto.com/vector/gm2076276464-564919694

xnickb• 10 months ago

I do understand the core message but I don't get why the author seems upset about it. Sounds like people complaining that instagram models show fake "fake" life. LinkedIn is a social network. Professionals show off how successful and hirable they are, or companies show how nice it is to work there.

I personally can't take this self promotion that has become very necessary in many parts of our industry so I stay clear of places where it is exercised.

agcat18• 10 months ago

Self promotion is understandable. But the core message in this is that people calling their past choices as strategy on why they did what they did instead of accepting that it was because of constraints, luck or just the situation.

Often these things lead to wrong motivations for people who consider them as experts

Gepsens2• 10 months ago

What this boils down to, is that we live in the civilisation of the image, where image is the most important thing. So now, for authenticity, you constantly have to look past and ignore the bs.

You didn't see it coming

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