I think the statement “people will put up with many things if you are excellent at math” is incredibly revealing
Also, no they won’t. Every physics department, every national lab, every tech company has that guy. You know who I mean. If your lab does not have that guy, odds are, you are that guy.
That’s does kind of prove her point. That guy still has a job and likely would not have that job if he were just ok at math. She’s not wrong, but hopefully society moves away from that culture and then that guy will have to either adjust or be left behind.
Does it?
He has a job - for now. That guy is famously hard to work with, and colleagues are always trying to shuffle him off to another department and managers get exasperated trying to mediate all the conflicts he’s involved with and when the RIFs hit, guess who’s on the chopping block?
Everyone in those places is good enough at math. But only one is a fucking asshole.
My perception might be tainted by personal experience. If you’re good at math and easy to work with, you’re golden, but between ok at math/easy to work with and great at math/terrible to work with, in my experience the former is let go before the latter. To a certain extent it makes sense, wether it’s publish or perish in academia or maximizing profit in the corporate world, you end up prioritizing the “best” and brightest.
Are you in academia? This has not remotely been my experience in private industry.
Social skills pretty much trump all in engineering. If you write the most hyper efficient machine code, it will be a bitch to maintain and costs the team 10x as much going forward, but if you write code empathetically so that a normal human can pick it up, understand it, and fix it easily, then everyone will love you.
Same thing back when I was in physical engineering, you could have a brilliant idea for a design, but if you can’t communicate why it’s brilliant and why it’s worth getting everyone else to change to accomodate it, then it will get shot down.
Glad to hear that hasn’t been your experience. I’ve been in both now, but I’ve seen people I wouldn’t spit at if on fire get funding or positions because of the work they produce. A guy known for making grad students cry has a line out the door because people want to be associated with him. He’s got the funding and pull to make things happen because he’s good at what he does, despite being an impossible prick. I think part of it is that there are very few people of the caliber that people will excuse that behavior from. Not every smart person with a bad attitude gets a pass, but in my experience, there’s a threshold past which people will excuse a lot. I think there’s a similar thing with money. Not every millionaire can get what they want, but at a certain point of wealth they just can. I totally understand if that’s not a universal experience. I was just offering my perspective.
Yes this is something I drill into more junior engineers as much as possible - Simplicity is a design consideration. Your designs need to convey what they are doing as clearly, intuitively, and simply as possible. You invented some new thing that automated everything? Congrats, the next person that needs to do a modification or read the drawing to react to an emergency is definitely going to break it, possibly even hurt themselves. Whenever I look at a drawing I can very quickly tell the quality of an engineer by how intuitive the drawing is - and for the quality of the notes they left when they had to do something complex
We have had very different experiences. Social trumps all in RIF discussions. Your boss’s boss ('s boss’s boss) is the one that made the decision and all he knows is that you organized the potluck last year and are always in-office. He doesn’t even know the math guy’s name.
Yea, that’s completely valid. I imagine personal experience affects this a lot, but I’m glad to see people’s experiences have been contrary to what I imagine this woman has likely encountered. Not that anything excuses letting your child’s emotional and interpersonal development languish. She’s a terrible influence, regardless of if she was correct.
It’s also notable that the math guy has extra power in highly technical startups. This has resulted in Silicon Valley placing very high value on him compared to more mature businesses and industries. The brilliant asshole is more of a liability than an asset at GE, they’ll be fine without him (ok they won’t, but the MBAs made it so they wouldn’t be fine with him). The size of the venture heavily limits how much benefit a single engineer can provide, and a culture of putting up with it can result in hefty lawsuits.
But he does know that guy because he’s the one that sends him emails about how rule 46 of the employee manual is not being applied in regards to the Christmas present that Doris got for the cleaning lady, or the endless bickering when he gets passed up for promotion.
That guy stands out. And not in a good way.
then your boss’s boss renames it copilot app
Problem is, he ends up on a bunch of the things that are necessary but boring/unpleasant. So he ends up being the basement troll you can’t fire or else the whole company will collapse
We have that guy at my work. Even his teammates actively avoid tasks that involve having to deal with him, so he largely works alone as a result. The worst part is that his boss for whatever reason refuses to do anything about it even when he can see the grief the guy causes to mutiple teams in our org. I bet if his boss was someone else, dude would’ve already been RIF’d.
The problem is all of those things are generally not enough for management to do the very basic documentation required to fire a person.
People like that often end up getting promoted to a position that doesn’t interfere with the team.
That guy at my university never developed the skills to work in a corporate environment. Last I heard he is unemployed most of the time
Having jever developed the ability to fail at things, he was also unable to continue academics. He made it through an undergrad on pure intellect. That didn’t work so well for grad school
Also undergrad researchers were only making $15/hour, so not like staying in that role indefinitely is a great career
That guy would have been director of my department, and I’ve seen it at two different jobs. Problem is, they are that guy so the bosses keep them around but no one would ever dare promote them to a position of power. It would have been unbearable and everyone would bail quickly.
lol thinking making less and managing reports is what that guy wants
TBH if I was bad at dealing with people but good at the technical aspects of my job, that would be exactly what I want. But IDK, some of these assholes probably think it’s fun to be an asshole.
You know you’re describing, like, 2/3 of lemmy rn?
I imagine that’s a joke, but that’s being overly gracious to lemmys collective intellect and insulting to lemmys collective interpersonal skills. Most people I interact with on Lemmy are nice, if not at least cordial, and I don’t think being tech savvy equates to the kind of skill I’m attributing to that guy. Unfortunately, knowing what Linux is doesn’t actually make you intelligent, despite what even I sometimes like to believe.
We aren’t talking about being nice. We’re talking about lacking social skills. And I would argue that “autistic nerd who has pegged their social worth to being good at something” is a good proxy for the average lemmy user. And linux user.
We’re talking about something deeper than lacking social skills, “That guy” isn’t the autistic coworker who blanks out when you attempt small talk. They’re the coworker who toes the line of sexual harassment, or who calls their coworkers idiots. It’s the person who hears someone brought doughnuts and rushes to eat twice their fair share. A common variant is the person who needs to constantly assert that they’re the smartest person in the room, not just by hyping themselves up, but by putting others down. Maybe they eat incredibly pungent food at their desk while others are working. They may repeatedly bring up divisive politics in front of coworkers they know disagree with them.
Yeah I had a job with two of them for a while. Meanwhile my boss was probably autistic and possibly my personally favorite boss I’ve ever had. Didn’t know much about him, but he was always happy to help whoever needed it and treated his subordinates with respect and kindness.
And yeah lemmy has a fair handful of them, but also the internet encourages bad behavior
I don’t know the person you were picturing, but me and at least a handful of other people were not talking about autistic people who happen to be nerdy. In my opinion, regularly making people cry in a workplace setting is lacking social skills. Based on just the OP, I imagine that teacher is not sending this home because the son is exhibiting signs of autism, he’s probably being a prick, which I’d say most kids are by default, but it’s a parents job to help them mature out of that phase. I generally have not experienced any issues working with people on the spectrum, certainly none that would elicit tears, which I think is an ok proxy for some social skills. Obviously, we can have just been thinking of different people, but I have not had many issues on Lemmy and I didn’t want people to come away with the impression that Lemmy is 2/3rds hostile or has issues communicating. Most people are pretty nice. Someone even gave me a soup recipe!
I think you and most other people in this thread are making an unfounded leap about what was written in that report card, based on the politics of OOP. But OOP says it was a report card - which is a normal, regular thing to send home with a child. There is no indication the child was sent home early, or that what was written was any kind of repremand. No where does it say that OOP’s child made anyone cry.
Presumably, this is an expensive preschool for the children of silicon valley elites, who want their children to recieve an education that will prepare them to be extremely high earners and leaders in industry. These sorts of people typically do acknowledge the large component that being socially aware plays in one’s success, and the preschool is likely offering updates and help on social/emotional development as part of their service, since it is something that the parents want. If OOP’s child was making other children cry, this info would probably be brought to the parents immediately, since regardless of how wealthy and high status they are, all the other parents are also wealthy and high status and would raise a stink about their kids getting bullied. Otoh, “your kid avoids eye contact and never plays with other kids, just does math and plays with legos alone” would be a fairly normal thing to discuss in the social-emotional development section of a report card.
Similarly, I never said lemmings arent nice. But I would bet that if you gathered a bunch of them together, they would stand around nervously for 45 minutes and just listen to 3 people talk who happened to stumble upon a shared special interest.
I don’t presume to know what was on the card, but the cry comment was in reference to an anecdote shared elsewhere in the comments that I thought was in the thread with you. My apologies for that confusion. Overall, I am pretty sure if the kid was exhibiting signs of autism that’s probably something you call the parents about and not just note on the report card, whereas just being a prick, which plenty of kids are, is not really parent teacher conference worthy, but still worth mentioning somewhere. Either way, I hope the kid gets assistance if he needs it.
Consider this: Many lemmy users who act like assholes get banned. But face-to-face interactions don’t have a paper trail.
That is really fucking cruel.
Just kill the maladapted people?
Yeah, up to a point. I interviewed a guy once who seemed super smart, but was a total asshole. He easily breezed through all the technical rounds, but ultimately we didn’t hire him because none of us wanted to work with the jerk.
I’d rather have a colleague I have to sit down with and work on a problem for a few hours than one who is like the one you described. In the end it will still be net positive because we work as a team, we both know and understand the solution, if anyone of us was hit by a bus the product would still be maintained. Given we both know our shit and are at least good at what we are doing. There are very special cases where a prodigy, regardless of character, might be needed but most of the time, hire the people who are good, cooperative and have the social capability to bring up problems in a meaningful way.
Also just like, Turing. Sure that guy can get away with shit as long as it flows in the right direction, but when they don’t need you anymore or your weird is outside what they’ll put up with, suddenly you’re on your own with your lack of social skills to defend yourself.
And then there’s the Jack Parsons of it all. A brilliant, wild, and weird person may be able to thrive in a startup that depends on them, but once the institution becomes successful enough to not need them they can go from an asset to a liability instantly.
Jack Parsons
man that is a wild fuck wiki to read. someone needs to make his story a movie.
That’s full psychopathic behaviour
And unfortunately also not incorrect. At least in the US, pretty much all of the most wealthy and successful people are psychopaths. :(
It is incorrect. No one is so good at math that they can design and build a full useful system on their own. That means they have to work with other people as part of a team. That means that their lack of social skills will doom or limit them.
It is also a mistake to equate psychopaths with having no social skills. They don’t have empathy, but they often have excellent social skills.
Yeah, it’s also survivorship bias. All the successful psychopaths would make you think that a) you need to be a psychopath to succeed, and b) all psychopaths will succeed. It’s wrong on both counts, but we can conclude that c) being a psychopath does not preclude success. It might even be easier to succeed, since capitalism abhors a principle, but I don’t have the statistics to support that.
the billionaires and hundred millionaires are, they are also kinda stupid, because they have yesman to tell them nothing is wrong.
Thee day result of “STEM is all that matters” is a bunch of miserable, emotionally damaged kids who can do quadratic equations but can’t understand consent
Such bad parenting. Basing his self-worth around being good at math is just setting him up for failure
When you’re told you’re really smart, or good at math, you avoid ever failing - you’re the smart kid, it shold come easy to you. If you’re struggling, it’s the fault of the subject or problem, not you - because you’re the smart kid
Alternatively, you feel like a complete failure when you inevitably hit a wall.
I feel real lucky my parents divorced early, and my mom immediately put me into a ton of therapy and counseling. The shit at the school was kinda counterproductive, maybe at best taught me to hide it better. But the professionals were probably responsible for me coming somewhat normalish.
Or when you get past where you can coast (calc 2 for me) you realize you don’t really know how to learn and study. It didn’t ruin my self image but I did change majors.
Please please please be satire
Please please please be satire
Well, it’s not
When I saw the words “Andreessen Horowitz” I about wanted to puke. Those people are truly evil. They helped Trump get elected.
And will help JD Vance get the job too, maybe even elected
thank you for highlighting
Nope. Shes works at a VC in silicon valley and is close friends with JD vance.
The day before, at the Pre-K:
Teacher sipping tequila: “Sooo, what should I give this little privledged shitbucket? ‘Excels at math’ or ‘Reads above grade level’? I think I already did 6 or 7 ‘Excels at math’ in a row and this kid is just…a regular-ass little kid that eats glue and stares at the ceiling.”
Asst Principal shooting tequila: “Math! That little shitbucket is Valley money. They don’t care about reading.”
Just a reminder that Theodore Kaczynski was a mathematical prodigy.
Ya but he was experimented on by a Harvard psych professor, so that’s not a fair comparison.
edit: found it sorry
Kaczynski’s lawyers later attributed his hostility towards mind control techniques to his participation in Murray’s study.[25] Kaczynski stated he resented Murray and his co-workers, primarily because of the invasion of his privacy he perceived as a result of their experiments. Nevertheless, he said he was “quite confident that [his] experiences with Professor Murray had no significant effect on the course of [his] life”.[28]
I dunno, I’m inclined to believe someone with that kind of intelligence to be able to evaluate his own motivations. YMMV
I 100% thought that was satire until I saw who wrote it
So she’s going to raise a brilliant mind that ends up having zero empathy or emotional intelligence? That’s going to be a miserable life for everyone involved.
“I got fired for no reason! I was a top performer!”
It’s because you’re an asshole that got along with no one at work. My dad was also a top performer but had empathy and compassion. He left a high-paying field because of miserable assholes with no emotional intelligence.
I worked somewhere that had a principal engineer that stuck around for years at a job. Everyone I talked to disliked them. Every single person. They were abrasive, argumentative, and not receptive to anyone’s ideas. There were even examples where they took credit for the work of others. The only reason they were kept around was because they had the ear of the CTO. When they finally left, everyone was publicly happy about their departure and we got to start undoing their shitty decisions.
Often times it’s simply who you know, not what you know.
People will put up with anything if you hold a gun to their heads (the USA method!) or if you pay their expenses, mostly, but people will avoid you if not if you’re just a difficult and annoying human being. I feel bad for the kid. 😕
Honestly, this sounds about right from someone who works at Andreesen Horowitz. She is friends with JD Vance.
In my experience they have been an out of touch tech investment firm for at least twenty years now. I’m pretty sure their entire culture is to be a delusional competitive rich kid echo chamber.
3 of the most elitists producing schools: yale, harvard and stanford, it make sense. if you had a professor from one of these schools you will know how snobby and arrogant they are when teaching the class.
So, another brand new account with no comment history posting about how Katherine Boyle is shitty.
Granted, she is but can lemmy.world not do something about these hit an run accounts?
I’m actually the same person.
Have you considered a fully monogamous Boyle hate account. That can be your thing. “I think Mickey 17 is a great movie; also, Katherine Boyle likes to eat dog poop.”
I think Mickey 17 is a great movie…
They’re only on their second incarnation. They’ve got at least 15 more to go.
Math in pre-K is knowing numbers?
May also be addition and subtraction. I was taught them by my parents at that age, because I was going to be an engineer whether I liked it or not
And that, boys and girls, is the story of how narcissistic sociopaths are born.
…and that’s how you end up slaughtered in a mock-up classroom for not solving an equation in the time set by your psycho captor.
Be good at math, and no one will care. It’s definitley math, and not having all that money from your parents that make people not care. That’s why his math needs to be “good”, not “great” because skills aren’t something people with money actually need to survive.
That’s just everyone else.
In this case, their “be good at math” is actually good advice, in that it will likely be the only skill and therefore excuse their kid has to remain employed in their 6 figure salaried position where they do nothing but participate in meetings all day.
Great parents.
Theodore Kazinskey was great at math. Once in a generation brilliant. Somehow he’s remembered better for his other works…
