Best workplace culture books according to redditors

We found 598 Reddit comments discussing the best workplace culture books. We ranked the 162 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.

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Top Reddit comments about Workplace Culture:

u/rnaa49 · 423 pointsr/politics

Avoidance of responsibility is a primary characteristic of psychopathy. He ticks off all the other checkmarks, too. Only libel laws are protecting his ass from being called a psychopath openly. Educate yourselves about psychopaths -- I recommend these books I have read to understand my own lifelong contact with psychopaths, starting with my mother:
Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us
Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work
Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight
The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
The Inner World of the Psychopath: A definitive primer on the psychopathic personality

He is commonly called a narcissist, but here's a handy rule of thumb. Not all narcissists are psychopaths, but all psychopaths are narcissistic. It's easy to understand why -- they don't see humans as humans, only objects to be manipulated for fun and profit. They, themselves, are the only conscious being, so nothing else matters. Their brains aren't wired to understand we have minds and memories, which is why they lie constantly to achieve their immediate needs. Strangely, the inability to experience emotions (and that includes fear, which is why Trump seems to never give a fuck about consequences) comes with no sense of past or future. There is only the "now."

1% of the population are psychopaths. You know more than one. Some say it's an evolutionary adaptation that exploits humans with emotions and morals, and that they are "intraspecies predators." There are professions that rely on psychopathic behavior, and you can draw your own opinions on them:
The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success

It is also commonly said that psychopaths are experts are reading people. This is false (because, to them, there is nothing to read). They are simply experts, from lifelong experience and practice, at putting people into situations with predictable reactions. For example, Trump likes to insult people because he knows it distracts them and takes them off their game as they try to defend themselves. Psychopaths like to do their manipulating in the background and behind peoples' backs (and in Trump's case, behind NDAs and hush money), thus Trump's biggest problem -- he's the world's most watched person and nothing goes unnoticed, so his previous tactics aren't working. He is thrashing more and more as he gets more desperate to deceive. He is not losing his mind or getting senile. He's a psychopath who can't understand why his old tricks are no longer working.

His apparent "humanness" is a practiced façade, as is true for all psychopaths. They learn, starting in childhood, how to fit in. Some learn how better than others. Trump is good enough at it to fool a large number of voters.
BTW, there's nothing saying a psychopath can't also be dumb as a brick or illiterate.

u/wonder_er · 323 pointsr/personalfinance

100% agree with /u/Alligator777.

I work remotely for my company. They're based in Boston, pay Boston-based wages, and I live in the Denver area. I can finish work and be outside climbing in about ten minutes.

Bonus is remote-first companies tend to have better management structures anyway.

Check out:

  • Weworkremotely
  • RemoteOK
  • Remote: Office Not Required

    In the last two years, I've worked for my company from eight or nine countries, and dozens of states in the USA.

    Even when I'm not traveling, working remotely beats the snot out of not working remotely.

    Where in the stack do you work, and what's your specialty? I might be able to point you in some helpful directions.
u/Vadoff · 102 pointsr/cscareerquestions

https://www.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Growth/dp/1491973897

Haven't read it myself yet, but heard it recommended a lot.

u/Belle_2222 · 98 pointsr/AskWomen

Total comp (base plus bonus) is a little over 200k. I work in HR strategy and I love it. I am single with no kids and my boss lives across the country, so I don't really count my hours that much. Some days I work from 10-3 if I'm just not feeling it and have a bunch of personal errands to run. Other days I work from 6am to 10pm because I'm on a roll and in the groove with something I'm working on. There's no expectation that I work on the weekends or evenings, but I do sometimes anyways. I just generally make sure that I get a lot of quality work done and that my leader is happy. My own standards are super high, so I don't tend to have a problem with my leader thinking I'm slacking.

Also, the best thing about my work/life balance is getting to work from home when I don't have meetings that require me to be in the office. Today I worked from home in PJs. Sometimes I'll watch a movie while answering emails.

I worked my ass off for 15 years to reach this point and I feel like for the first time since high school I can take a breath and just enjoy my life. Gotta say I'm proud of myself. :)

Edit: For those who are curious about exploring what HR strategy is all about, I highly recommend reading Work Rules, which is about how HR works at Google.

u/LWRellim · 53 pointsr/aspergers

>This may be a stupid question but...is he fooled by feigned emotions, do you think?

Well, several things.

First you have to realize that there are a LOT of problems with SBC's so called "Empathy Quotient".

To begin with, constructing a VALID "instrument" is a VERY difficult thing. SBC has attempted to create something that appears to be similar to say Hare's PCL instrument. But, he has not done the kind of diligent work necessary to get anywhere close.

For starters, SBC's EQ instrument/test is a "self-report" -- such things are notoriously INaccurate because they can be (and are) subjectively manipulated (i.e. "gamed"). Second even a cursory look at it shows that the questions 'telegraph' what the expected "correct" answers should be.

So let's take 3 groups of people:

Group AA is introspective, brutally honest, non-conforming, and more than a bit self-effacing;

Group NT is a mixture of people of varying degrees of superficiality and with varying amounts of rather dubious scruples, but overall a penchant for "going along to get along"** (i.e. doing what they are told, what is expected, answering questions in a fashion that will be "conforming" to the group);

Group SP is the opposite of group AA, entirely superficial, manipulative and deceptive.


Guess which group is going to show up with the lowest scores?

Answer: Group AA (by a wide margin). Why? Simply because they ARE being honest, self-doubting, and self-effacing.

Group NT will (because of the mixed nature of the questions*) probably form a mixed range will creates a nice little normal distribution "bell curve" of scores.

And Group SP will show up as probably THE most empathetic. (Cf Hare's research {repeated & confirmed} showing that Sociopaths/Psychopaths are EXCELLENT at expressing sympathy/empathy -- and a self-report test is the ultimate in opportunities for them to "game" other people).

*Note that the array of questions will have been designed to produce EXACTLY this result. (In other words, there will be some questions that are designed to be "gimmes" obvious to everyone; some questions that are "borderline" {and so those with slightly more honesty, scruples, and self-effacement will occasionally answer in a NON-empathetic manner}; and the third category of questions will be designed to be slightly "tricky" in an attempt to confirm/verify previous answers, but with the side effect of causing some people {including those "gaming" the test} to mis-answer. End result a "nice distribution" of population answers (which is then claimed as a confirmation of the validity of the test, but in fact it proves nothing of the kind).

So the entire thing is (from a scientific standpoint) a farce. What is SAD is that this kind of crap is (still) deemed to have some validity.

**EDIT: As a side note, I think it is fairly obvious that in the Asch Conformitu Experiement that Aspies would be in the "non-conforming" group (they would KNOW which lines matched, and would NOT CARE how many of the others disagreed); and likewise in the Milgram Experiment the Aspies would probably nearly ALL be in the "non-obedient" faction (whereas the Sociopaths would obviously LOVE inflicting the pain, using "obedience" as a cover). Which is a REAL demonstration of both "empathy" and an awareness of other people, versus SBC's farcical analysis (which really only gains "pseudo-credibility" because someone gave him a bunch of time with a fMRI machine, and he diddled with it to produce cherry-pickable BS).

---

>Or is it more that feigning emotion is the "done thing" and so, he wants Aspies to do it too in order to fit in better, be less disturbing to the "normals". Heh.

I'm not certain that he WANTS Aspies to feign the emotion, indeed I'm also not certain that he wants Aspies to even display REAL empathic emotion. SBC seems (these days) to be mainly focused on his own needs/wants -- his "reputation" -- he (like his more notorious cousin) seems almost sociopathic at times, and certainly seems devoid of "empathy" for Autistics & Aspies, more than willing to scapegoat, sacrifice, and entirely mischaracterize them for his own aggrandizement.

Indeed the direction SBC seems to be going (see his latest book) is to attempt to replace Robert Hare -- but he really DOESN'T have the "chops".

AND, he has falled into the same "trap" that Hare did initially -- thinking that a "lack of empathy" was what leads to criminal behavior. Hare eventually found out his error, that it is NOT a lack of empathy, but rather a lack of CONSCIENCE (a profoundly different thing altogether).

One of the Amazon comments on his "Zero Empathy" book says it pretty succinctly:
>Simon-Cohen posits a very forced empathy-based construct, to explain Borderline and Antisocial Personality Disorders, for example.
Those of us who have decades of clinical experience working with these disorders can readily see Cohen's forumlations as far too simplistic, at best, and, at worst, ignorant!
For example, Cohen makes NO allowance for the fact that many (classical) sociopaths are exquisitely sensitive to every nuance of the feelings of others -- which they then EXPLOIT with great skill.
Back to the drawing board, Dr. Cohen.


And likewise, another commenter notes on his "Science of Evil: Empathy" book that:

>An amateurish attempt by a great researcher out of his depth
>His argument is that researchers have overlooked the importance of empathy in studying evil. Despite the fact that psychopathy researchers have noted, and studied that, for decades, he pretends (or really thinks?) that he's come up with something new here. [...] Baron-Cohen calls his new empathy link between two of these traits "blindingly-obvious". It should be, because it's been recognized for decades now! So Baron-Cohen is really reinventing the wheel here. Worse in fact, as he leaves out the troubling (for his theory) case of Machiavellians, who can flip back and forth between empathy as it suits their needs.
>[...]
>Baron-Cohen also conflates/confuses psychopathy with general antisocial behavior. One of the fascinating things about psychopathy is that it isn't strongly correlated to the parenting one received. In direct contrast to what Baron-Cohen reports, Lalumiere and colleagues have done excellent research showing that compared to general criminals, psychopaths are LESS likely to have suffered from pre- or post-natal trauma.



---

>But feigning emotions is sociopathic. Isn't it? Sinister, manipulative.

Yes, it is. There is plenty of evidence that it is (at least occasionally) symptomatic of most of the population (i.e. NT's) and it is one of the hallmarks of sociopaths (aka psychopaths), who are the masters of both READING and of feigning emotions (i.e. playing on/with empathy).

The mistake I see a lot of people (including SBC) making is saying that sociopaths lack empathy -- not true at all, sociopaths are EXPERTS at being charming, sympathetic, producing "crocodile tears", etc.; in short at both reading AND displaying whatever emotions will "get the job done" of manipulating people. (And quite frankly a lot of NT's are pretty darn good at this as well).

What sociopaths REALLY lack is not just "empathy" it is that they have ZERO "conscience" -- i.e. they do not (internally) feel "bad/guilty" about harming other people (or creatures) -- they are essentially "thrill/adrenalin/power" junkies.

I have seen several mentions in Aspie forums, and from my own experience I think it true: that Aspies (especially the really aware HF Aspies) are the "natural enemies" of sociopaths -- and if sociopaths are caricatured as "snakes" (i.e. Hare's "Snakes In Suits" book) then Aspergers are the "Riki Tiki Tavi mongooses" of the world.

I think the prevalence/problems that Asperger's and Autistic types are having in our modern world is in no small part DUE to it being the kind of world that it has become. I think Aspie & Autistic types has a MUCH easier time in a "small world" of agricultural communities (it is notably almost non-existent among the Amish), with lots of animals needing care, a tendency to small local schools (you are much less of an "oddball" in a school of 10 students of mixed ages, than you are in a mass-school of 1000+ all similarly aged), not to mention the old "orderly" courting & social practices (often explicitly TAUGHT to children as "set" rules), etc.

Where Asperger's and Autistic types "stand out" and run into problems is in the "chaos" of recent decades -- in our cliquish/materialistic, gossip-centered MASSIVE schools, urban environments, etc. The problems of Asperger's and Autistic types are exacerbated.

And equally of note: In the "older" world, it was much HARDER for sociopaths to pull off their tricks; our modern world (with it's superficiality, triviality, and disorderly chaotic social practices) seems to be "tailor made" for sociopaths (in everything from promiscuity, to the world of banking & bureaucracies).

u/wasabicupcakes · 53 pointsr/facepalm

> Now, robot slaves might be a good thing until they gain sentience. Then we might end up in a matrix type situation, if we're lucky, or a Terminator type situation if we aren't.

Read Martin Ford's Rise of the Robots. The real problem with robots is not that they will become self-aware but that they don't pay income taxes. It kind of leaves the public sector in the toilet unless we let AI become politicians.

u/availableName01 · 39 pointsr/cscareerquestions

read this: https://www.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Growth/dp/1491973897

Even if you only manage to pickup one thing, please let it be the importance of regular 1-on-1s. They make a huge difference and you should do everything in your power to not neglect these meetings.

u/kajsfjzkk · 37 pointsr/cscareerquestions

Managing people is hard. Managing engineers is harder. Have you paid for any management training for Randy? How about for you?

I'd feel a little concerned if I found out director-level management at my company was asking for advice on reddit about how to mediate routine interpersonal conflicts.

http://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-diving-save/

http://randsinrepose.com/archives/bored-people-quit/

https://www.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Growth/dp/1491973897

https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Humans-Humorous-Software-Engineering/dp/1484221575

u/Freak-Power · 33 pointsr/todayilearned

He (David Graeber) actually came out with a book that expounds on the essay. Link

u/ensui67 · 30 pointsr/Foodforthought

One word, technology. It is the realization of the capitalist system dynamic we have and the ever increasing automation through improving organizations/algorithms/robots. For more on this theory, check out Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford.

u/ergoproxyone · 29 pointsr/Steam

Look at some of the amazon reviews. His theory is that jobs that are beneficial to society are paid less while those that have no benefit are paid more. Also, there are entire industries that are bullshit jobs. He categories them into 5 different categories: Flunkies, Goons, Duct Tapers, Box Tickers, and Taskmasters.
Ultimately, he concludes that we have to shift society to a more free society when we incorporate something like UBI. People should be able to truly be free from wage labor. One shouldn't be tied to a job in order to survive in the world. Inequality is rampant. The average worker doesn't realize there is more to life than wasting your life at a job. A worker just busy toiling away their lives in a bullshit job means they are not going to rise up and do something about the rampant inequality we see today.

u/ianmccisme · 28 pointsr/UpliftingNews

Dr. Atul Gawande, who is a surgeon who also writes for the New Yorker, wrote a book called The Checklist Manifesto. It's about how the use of checklists, which are drawn from the aviation community, can do a lot to reduce complications in healthcare. It's an interesting read.

https://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/dp/0312430000/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

u/istartriots · 27 pointsr/cscareerquestions

have you by chance read Bullshit jobs? it talks about this exact idea.

u/demicolon · 22 pointsr/australia

That's a general rule of all work, including paid work. If you're paying someone by the hour then you're bloody well going to get your hour's worth, even if the value of that work is zero or negative. That's what leads to the phenomenon of upwards of 40% of all jobs, public and private, being bullshit jobs.

Housecleaning isn't a bullshit job, but once you're in the zone you tend to want to keep going. It's the same as women from 'traditional' backgrounds and cooking: they end up with orders of magnitude more cooking experience than any professional chef, because their entire working day is centred around the kitchen.

u/iamnothanging · 21 pointsr/AskEngineers

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows

u/dontal · 19 pointsr/AskReddit

True psychopathic disorder is not that common.

Not all asshole bosses are psychopaths--it's often confused with Narcissistic personality Disorder, Histrionic PD et al.

Some further reading if interested:

Snakes in Suits

No Asshole Rule

u/La_Sandernista · 16 pointsr/politics

Not a doctor either, but he ticks most of the boxes for antisocial personality disorder (also known in layman's terms as psychopathy).

  • Glib and superficial charm -
  • Grandiose sense of self-worth
  • Proneness to boredom
  • Pathological lying
  • Cunning and manipulativeness
  • Lack of remorse or guilt
  • Shallow affect
  • Callousness and lack of empathy
  • Parasitic lifestyle
  • Poor behavioral controls
  • Sexual promiscuity
  • Early behavioral problems
  • Lacks of realistic long-term goals
  • Impulsivity
  • Irresponsibility
  • Failure to accept responsibility for own actions
  • Many short-term marital relationships (Arguable. He married three times and has had multiple affairs, but his marriages lasted 14 years (Ivana), 8 years (Marla), and 12 years (Melania), so not that short.)
  • Juvenile delinquency
  • Revocation of conditional release
  • Criminal versatility (He has been accused of sex crimes, scamming people with Drumpf University, and wide array of financial crimes)

    Remember, most psychopaths are not violent! They all leave a smoldering path of destruction everywhere they go, but most are not violent. The 'respectable' psychopaths are more common, and many of them have jobs that are held in very high regard in our society (surgeons, police officers, CEOs, etc). Look at the ten professions with the highest rates of ASPD. Intelligent psychopaths can do very well in a business environment - so much so that 1/10 CEOs met the criteria for ASPD, as opposed to 1/25 in the general population. This is because certain psychopathic traits, such as manipulativeness, lack of remorse, being a good liar, and being willing to take risks can pay off handsomely in the business world. Of course, it's a double-edged sword because their other traits (such as impulsivity and grandiosity) often catch up to them and lead to their downfall.

    If you want to learn more about white-collar psychopaths, I highly recommend the book Snakes in Suits, written in part by Dr. Robert Hare, the "founding father" of psychopathy research and the creator of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist (the most-used diagnostic tool for ASPD). Donald Drumpf -- and a ton of other politicias, for that matter -- will become much easier to understand.
u/poopmagic · 16 pointsr/cscareerquestions

Here are a few that I've found useful relating to teamwork, management, and/or general career shit:

u/vstas · 14 pointsr/programming

I generally like Ted's posts and I really dislike adding process to software development. However, saying "no process" is overly simplistic.

Some of the things glossed over:

  • Sometimes you have to grow headcount, like it or not
  • Sometimes you don't get to chose all members of your team
  • Learning from your mistakes is fine when you can afford mistakes. Sometimes you cannot and the cost of downtime would be simply too great.
  • Development and operations work in different modes. In development we value speed (again, in most cases), in ops - reliability, stability and predictability. They need to be viewed separately.

    In short (and it's a huge topic), in most cases, IMHO, it comes down to a tradeoff: what's more important, not ever fucking up or maintaining speed and flexibility. Unfortunately, leads/stakeholders on most projects think that not ever fucking up is the absolute priority, while realistically it's not.

    Again, this is a broad topic, so I will just add a couple of things without going too deep:

  • I find that it's better to add rules instead of adding process. Kinda difference between structural and functional styles. Instead of saying how to get there, specify the end result. So instead of describing how exactly to do branching and merging, describe the desired outcome: "for maintenance release, verify that there are no changes committed that don't correspond to bugs scheduled to be fixed". This still allows flexibility while adding to quality.
  • Process should be replaced with tweaking the way you do work or automating whenever possible. In the preceding point, the check can be done automatically with a simple script. Or, classic example, instead of having a designated person do integration builds & run unit tests before a release, rely on continuous integration server to keep it up to date all the time.
  • Also, checklists. I used to be very checklist/process-averse until I read a book Checklist Manifesto: http://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/dp/0312430000/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325097505&sr=8-1
u/frenchst · 12 pointsr/cscareerquestions

Three CS fundamental books in the order I'd suggest someone read them if they don't have a background in CS.

u/Throwaway_castaway2 · 12 pointsr/canada

That’s just ignorant.

No we can’t function as a society without childcare, without nurses...

We can totally function without diamond miners... without marketing... without creative financial instruments...without gasp mid-level assistant managers...

Social workers do a helluva lot more for society than corporate HR or Assistant management does...

There’s far more male bullshit jobs than female and they are far more taxing on society as a whole

u/Serious_Feedback · 12 pointsr/FunnyandSad

Hey, you should read the book "Bullshit Jobs", which is about the exact phenomenon of people being paid for (and required to stick around for) non-work or fake work.

u/badsectoracula · 11 pointsr/Games

> Apple and Microsoft both ripped off Xerox's gui.

Actually that is wrong. The majority of the Mac OS X GUI was made by people who didn't saw the Xerox demonstration and did stuff based on what they assumed Xerox's system did from the descriptions of the people who saw it. An example would be the ability to draw the windows' contents when it isn't active - Bill Atkinson (the low level mind behind most of the GUI stuff) simply assumed that this was what Xerox did because to him made more sense. In reality the Xerox system only drew the window contents when you clicked/activated it. Also stuff like the Finder, menu bar, the distinction between windows and folders and a bunch of other things which today we take for granted were developed by these people.

This book does a great job describing the story of making the first Macintosh by one of the original developers.

Xerox obviously had a big influence (before that the Mac was more text oriented) but it was far from a rip off.

u/HiccupMaster · 11 pointsr/Automate

I had to take a supply chain management class for my degree. Along with the text book the teacher also had us read this: http://www.amazon.com/The-Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0884271951/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1397485408&sr=8-1&keywords=the+goal

It's an allegory so it's not technical by any means but gives you an idea on how to think about all this stuff.

It's a really easy read, should only take you a day or two.

u/raziphel · 9 pointsr/TrollXChromosomes

He probably sees something of himself in the other guy, which is why they bonded and he got the position. That's just kinda what predatory people do. Especially manipulative, selfish, abusive people. I know it's a little bit of a stretch of the term, but I say abusive here to refers to the "willing to put others down to lift themselves up" destructive personality trait. Though less extreme than the standard clinical definition, "sociopath" fits fairly well too.

An example of this is specifically what you said: the boss tried to guilt trip you for leaving, but didn't ask you to stay. The only reason I can see here is to hurt your feelings, and use that demonstration of power and control for his own emotional well-being. But then... I'm an outside observer here and not a psychologist. I'm sure you could look back and find better examples. Yeah- you absolutely made the right decision, and I'd wholly encourage any friends still there to look elsewhere too.

Books like Snakes in Suits explore this topic, but there are probably better books available (that's just the one I'm familiar with, and it's mostly anecdotal).

I've had to deal with one of these vindictive jackasses for a decade now, but thankfully he's gone as of tomorrow. The guy replacing Evil VP is significantly more reasonable.

u/---sniff--- · 9 pointsr/todayilearned

The Checklist Manifesto is a great book on the subject.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Checklist-Manifesto-Things-Right/dp/0312430000

u/healydorf · 9 pointsr/cscareerquestions

Do good work. Impress the right people. Be noisy, but above that know your shit.

Produce work that is:

  • Timely
  • Reliable
  • Easy for stakeholders to understand

    Read actual software development management books. Managing Humans and The Manager's Path are my top 2. An Elegant Puzzle is a good 50/50 blend of "managing ICs" and "managing managers" with sprinklings of TPM related topics.
u/HarinderG · 8 pointsr/google

Laszlo Bock explain in much more detail in his book Work Rules!. Also he talks about the other cool things at Google. :)

u/licyeus · 8 pointsr/startups

I don't think development methodology is what you should be focusing on at this scale. Your focus should be on growing and fixing the org (I agree with other comments that you're probably too large to split by function rather than feature). Hire smart people and let the teams determine how they work best; most will likely settle on something resembling agile. Your role now is to set larger goals and let the teams figure out how to achieve them. Pick up https://www.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Growth/dp/1491973897

And stop churning on tooling: Trello, Asana, Jira, Pivotal... it doesn't really matter. Pick one, stick with it. Sounds like you're doing that with Jira.

Sounds like you're in a strong business with a good market. Good luck. :)

u/Clauderoughly · 8 pointsr/KotakuInAction

I can recommend 2

u/The-Adjudicator · 8 pointsr/ShitAmericansSay

>Once routine settles in, people become lazy, and laziness leads to accidents…

Exactly. This happens pretty much everywhere. Hospitals, airplanes, etc etc.

There is an interesting book regarding this called "The checklist manifesto"

u/beowulfpt · 8 pointsr/Unexpected

I see your point. Little mistakes can happen to anyone and some small slips can have grave consequences, that's why sometimes simple actions require checklists, given the disastrous impact an error can have, no matter how improbable.

Still, in this case, I maintain you're totally inept. This cannot happen unless you're still unlicensed, a noob training and not legally able to drive [in which case it wouldn't be your fault, as someone is responsible for your training].
Or, you know... if you're an imbecile.

u/_augustus_ · 8 pointsr/productivity

Not sure if really relevant, but in other fields where attention to detail is vital they use checklists. For example, even pilots who have been flying for years use checklists.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0312430000?pc_redir=1396411218&robot_redir=1

u/Tangurena · 7 pointsr/AskReddit

There are a number of books that I think you ought to read to get a better understanding of office politics and how to cope/deal with them. All offices have politicking going on, and any company that claims otherwise is lying to you. Any time more than 2 people get together, there will be some sort of jostling for power and attention. When that happens at work, we call it "office politics".

Your library may have these, and if you get them, read them at home. Don't ever bring them into the office.

Corporate Confidential. HR is your enemy, not your friend. Gives a number of examples of what will destroy your career with companies, many of which you (and I) probably do without realizing the consequences.

The Passionate Programmer. The first edition of this book was called "my job went to India". While aimed at programmers, the points are to keep your mind and skills up to date as technology and business move too rapidly to let things get rusty.

To Be or Not to Be Intimidated.
Looking out for number one.
Million Dollar Habits. I feel that these 3 by Robert Ringer are very important. If you think his first book was about to intimidate others, you only read the press coverage. If you think his books are about real estate, then you only skimmed them. There are a lot of people in the world who will try to intimidate you into giving up what is yours, and he shows you what some of them are like, and what countermeasures you can use.

The Art of Deception. Bad title - it is about arguments, how to make them, win them and tell if you're hearing a bad one. Used to be called "rhetoric" when Plato and Aristotle taught the subject.

Snakes in Suits. There are some evil people out there. You'll work for some of them. You will be stabbed in the back by some of them.

Bullies, Tyrants, and Impossible People. One book on office politics and dealing with some of the worse sort.

The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense at Work. Some folks are very good with verbal manipulation, this book and the others in the series, cover how to deal with such people.

Winning with People. Most of the books this author writes are about managers and leadership. This book is more about people skills. It will be focused more at managers, but I think it is a good one.

The 48 Laws of Power. They have it. You want some. Light read with anecdotes. I like his other books as well.

Games At Work. Office politics.

It's All Politics. Yes it is.

Moral Politics. Liberals and conservatives, why do they think that way? You'll work with some of the opposite persuasion some day, so understanding where they come from is a reasonable idea. Most books on this subject are insulting and degrading, but I think this one is pretty much judgement-free.

> When I walk by him going to the bathroom, he will stop talking until I walk by.

Do the same. When they come to your desk, always brush them aside with "I'm sorry, I can't talk now, I'm busy working".

u/promet11 · 7 pointsr/Polska

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
by Martin Ford
https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Robots-Technology-Threat-Jobless/dp/0465097537

tldr: jeżeli twoja praca nie polega na pracowaniu twarzą w twarz z innymi ludźmi to masz przechlapane.

edit: postępu technologicznego nie zatrzymamy ale jest jeszcze szansa tak pokierować swoją karierą aby jakoś dociągnąć do emerytury.

u/Nashvillain2 · 7 pointsr/sanfrancisco

I loved living in SF but to be honest unless you are a startup founder, in Y Combinator, maybe, or VERY early startup hire with extreme equity I don't think living in SF is tenable. The city's dysfunctional housing and taxation politics are almost unbelievable. Jerry Brown has been trying to fix the problem but has not been successful.

The choices are exit, voice, or loyalty. I tried voice and failed. Exit was and is better for me as an individual.

u/LuaKT · 7 pointsr/elementary

Here is a better quality image http://i.imgur.com/o7as8IF.png

These is the book list I was able to read:
In Hand: Broken Windows (Can't find specific book)
Stack:
?
?
How to stay alive in the woods
The Lying Brain
The Psychology of Memory
False Confessions (Not sure specific book)
The U.S Army Survival Manual (Not sure specific book)
?
The Measure of Madness
The Book of Basic Machines: The U.S. Navy Training Manual
?
?
The R Document
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
Deception (Not sure of specific book)
?
?
Polyurethane Technology (Not sure of specific book)
?
Polyamide (Something)
Crime and Public Policy (Not sure of specific book)
?
?
Spectacle: An Optimist's Handbook

u/riffic · 7 pointsr/sysadmin

this might be a basic place to start.

Other than that, learn where your constraints are and exploit it. They'll keep moving around according to my recent read of The Goal, so keep trying new things to keep your throughput up. Be data driven.

Ignore at least half the advice tossed around in this sub as it might actually be harmful.

u/educatethis · 7 pointsr/The_Donald

Check out systems theory... best counter to critical theory. You will never regret reading this primer and if you are an extroverted thinker, you won't be the same. No ideology, pure scientific problem solving. Thinking in Systems: A Primer https://www.amazon.com/dp/1603580557/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_ulEozbF168304

u/Prince_Kropotkin · 6 pointsr/neoliberal

https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp/150114331X

Absolutely not true. But you don't need a book to know that; have you ever worked in any kind of large bureaucracy? Tons of people are in commissions to set the names of other commissions and so on. This is one of the centrist dogmas that is most unbelievable to regular people. Of course huge numbers of jobs are useless.

u/Azsu · 6 pointsr/philosophy
u/[deleted] · 6 pointsr/HumanPorn

You can also check out Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work by Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare.

u/TheSecretIsWeed · 6 pointsr/todayilearned

They're called sociopaths and corporate culture accelerates them to power quickly. There's several books on this topic like Snakes in Suits.

http://www.amazon.com/Snakes-Suits-When-Psychopaths-Work/dp/0061147893/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1397728316&sr=8-1&keywords=snakes+in+suits

u/DrPollak · 6 pointsr/Indiana

Good to hear from someone who was actually in the industry that I'm not too far off base! I think there is a widespread misunderstanding about the causes behind the collapse of U.S. manufacturing and the rise of the rust-belt cities. While cheap imports may have been what triggered the crisis, they were simply revealing inherent inefficiencies in our manufacturing industries that we ignored for too long. No matter how much we wish, we can never go back to way things were. Technology and economic development simply won't let us.

The real scary part is that if we fail to learn this lesson, we're going to be in for quite a few more rude awakenings in the future. A great book on the topic is Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford.

u/akurik · 5 pointsr/Entrepreneur

If you haven't read it yet, I definitely recommend The Checklist Manifesto.

u/Viper007Bond · 5 pointsr/MaliciousCompliance

You wear pants? Amateur. Someone actually wrote a book about the company I work for titled "The Year Without Pants": https://www.amazon.com/dp/1118660633/

u/LoadHigh · 5 pointsr/sysadmin

Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250103509/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_PQ4UDb5C6B0J2

u/ReinH · 5 pointsr/AskComputerScience

I would look at three things: what is the impact of my work, how connected am I to the impact of my work, and where else can I find meaning in my work.

Let's begin with an uncomfortable truth. Most jobs in our industry are just not very meaningful in terms of the impact of the work itself. Most of us are not working on something that might (say) cure cancer or reduce poverty. There just aren't enough meaningful jobs to go around, so some of us won't be able to find one for ourselves. (This isn't only true of software engineering, of course. Many of today's jobs are bullshit jobs.)

If we can't find meaning in the work itself, I think we have to look for meaning in other places. I look for meaning in contributing to the success and happiness of my coworkers, and I look for jobs where I can work with likeminded people. I've found that this more than anything else has had a big impact on my work satisfaction and has reduced my feelings of alienation.

Also, as you alluded to, regardless of how meaningful the work is per se, our connection to the work can be made more or less meaningful. Feedback of the sort you are asking about helps us understand the impact of our work. If you can't feel connected to the actual impact your work has, you might feel alienated even if you are in some way helping to cure cancer. You should absolutely look for and ask for this feedback, as it will improve both your work and your feelings about the work.

u/random-idiom · 5 pointsr/news

People who - when finding out they get paid way less than they are worth - want to make sure no other job gets a fair pay instead of blaming themselves or their employer for lowballing their wage.

It's amazing that humans are so petty they are willing to work for shit as long as they can point at someone else and say 'I'm better than that'.

Also - see this book on bullshit jobs
> The most socially useful profession is medical research, which produces $9 in benefit for every dollar that goes into it. Finance workers produce -$1.80 for every dollar they're paid.

Jealousy is a bitch and the free market exploits it - which is why 'rational actors' is a bullshit assumption to make

u/ramindk · 5 pointsr/sysadmin

Thinking in Systems

It's not about administration per se, but it is about systems by one of the top people in the field. I found it very useful in updating my thinking based on smaller systems that could be authoritatively managed to large distributed systems where you have less power to direct the system.

u/Kaer · 5 pointsr/london

You buy me whisky?

Where I work, Expedia, we do the occasional meetup, like speed dating, where we attempt to match mentors and mentees.

But, for homework, read these books.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01J53IE1O/
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B06XP3GJ7F/
https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Got-Here-Wont-There-ebook/dp/B0041G68WS/

In all seriousness, unlikely I can help out directly, I've got 4 peeps I'm mentoring at the moment, (2 internal to my company, 2 external)

u/shadestreet · 4 pointsr/AskEngineers

You have a golden opportunity in front of you. You can either seize the opportunity, work your ass off, and transform both yourself and the company. Or, you can sit on the sidelines.


The more problems a company has, the more opportunities there are. Do you aspire to top out as a rank-and-file employee, doing your prescribed work in your cubicle, working for a company where you are completely expendable, collecting your paycheck and never doing much more in life? Or do you want to be an agent of change, grow to become a leader, and the COO in 7-10 years?


If you don't have ambition, than call OSHA, sit on the sidelines, bide your time, and complain about the problems.


If you have ambition, then devote yourself to your work. Make that company your engineering playground. You are young, this is the perfect time to reinvent yourself.

If you have ambition, here is what I would do:

  1. Buy a copy of the The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. Order it today so you can read it over the weekend. You will probably want to refer to it, so buy it, don't bother with the Library.


  2. Get a spiral notebook and begin mapping out the company. Take a brainstorming session over the next few days. Articulate as best as possible the following:

  • What does the company provide? How do they get customers? What is their competitive advantage?
  • Org chart to the best of your ability - with quick summaries on perceived job duties
  • General process flows of the entire company. Start at a high level - Finance, Marketing, R&D, Manufacturing, Distribution, HR, etc - do this to the best of your ability. What are the inputs and outputs? This is just to give a basic idea of how the company operates. Regularly review and revise this as your understanding of the company grows.
  • Detailed process flow of the manufacturing plant. Group by department and note inputs & outputs. Capacities. Bottlenecks. Production sensitivity.

  1. Now the real work begins. Brainstorm every problem you can think of with the company. Take your lengthy list and then brainstorm all the root causes of those problems. And the root causes of those root causes. And so on.


  2. Take your expanded list of problems and jot down possible solutions to each problem. I hate using buzzwords, but make them S.M.A.R.T. . With your list of problems and solutions, apply a loose PFMEA scale to each to get a sense of how severe each problem is, how frequent it is.

  3. Considering your list of problems, your corresponding solutions, and the priority assigned, now you will go back through and assign costs. What is the cost of not correcting the problem? Lost throughput? Insurance claims? Turnover (costing money in training)? What is the cost of solving the problem with your solution? Estimate this all of this to the best of your ability. You will be coming back to this notebook daily in your career and revising as you grow in knowledge and experience.

  4. Now it is time to act. Take the low hanging fruit, the easy problems to fix with simple solutions, and implement them. If they need buy-in from management, get it. Learn how to sell your ideas. Make concise presentations and keep them accessible so you can at any moment be ready to give someone above you a quick improvement strategy.


    To be clear your management isn't interested in hearing problems. They want to hear solutions. They want to hear solutions with clear action plans, costs, and value.

    If you have the ambition and motivation to be the person to drive the change, follow the above outline. It will take a lot of work. You can't just clock out at the end of the day, get high and play video games. You can have some unwind time, but spend at least 2 hours constantly analyzing the company and finding ways to change it for the better.


    To close, let me be clear on one thing:

    >They have me doing a little bit of every job


    This is a good thing. I hope you realize that. Please don't have the "that's not my job" mentality. If you have that attitude, you have already limited the amount of success you can achieve in life.
u/obliviouspenguin · 4 pointsr/cscareerquestions

This one is pretty good: The Manager's Path.

u/EverForthright · 4 pointsr/antiwork

There a book by David Graeber (anthropologist and Occupy Wall Street organizer) called Bullshit Jobs that examines how productivity increases through automation have resulted in more pointless jobs, instead of a reduction in work. Definitely worth a read.

Don't glorify production/manufacturing jobs. I've worked in a handful of factories and the only reason half of these jobs exist is because it's still cheaper to pay a human to suffer than it is to buy expensive robots+engineers to oversee the robots. Mandatory overtime is common and the repetitive motion strain will ruin your body.

u/Ladarzak · 4 pointsr/reddit.com

"The PCL-R has slipped the confines of academe, and is being used and misused in ways that Hare never intended. In some of the places where it could do some good -- such as the prison in the TV documentary I was yelling at -- the idea of psychopathy goes unacknowledged, usually because it's politically incorrect to declare someone to be beyond rehabilitation. At the opposite extreme, there are cases in which Hare's work has been overloaded with political baggage of another sort, such as in the United States, where a high PCL-R score is used to support death-penalty arguments, and in England, where a debate is underway about whether some individuals with personality disorders (such as psychopaths) should be detained even if they haven't committed a crime."

I see it used well here in BC, in the courts. Interesting how it's misused elsewhere.

Edit: Uh-huh, and that's what I get for replying before I finish reading. So, anyway, the article's from 2001! The book with Babiak is this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Snakes-Suits-When-Psychopaths-Work/dp/0060837721

Still an interesting article, though.

u/manelsen · 4 pointsr/raisedbynarcissists

It's an empowering line of action, @mangababe, but that's when he could start gaslighting her badly to cover his deeds. Serpents don't like being exposed to the light.

@OP, I strongly suggest you read Snakes in Suits ( http://www.amazon.com/Snakes-Suits-When-Psychopaths-Work/dp/0061147893 ). The book talks about psychopaths in a work environment; surprisingly, though, you'll find that it applies in many ways to narcissists in at home. It's all about control.

Serious TW: maybe you'll want to see Myth #5: http://upsettingrapeculture.com/rape_myths.php

You should acquaint yourself with the concepts of gaslighting ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting ) and general Victim Blaming ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_blaming ) and learn how to defend yourself if it happens.

Let's hope he simply backs off. Otherwise, you must know that we'll always be here, reachable, ready and resourceful. You can PM me anytime if need rises.

u/--ninja · 4 pointsr/getdisciplined

There's influence from a lot of different techniques, but they key for me is having a checklist to follow so that when I start working, I don't have to think about it or make decisions. It's just mindlessly going down the list of steps I have to take and checking things off.

I picked this up from The checklist manifesto

u/GanymedeNative · 4 pointsr/CGPGrey2

One of them was The Checklist Manifesto. I read this one and really enjoyed it.

u/tenudgenet · 4 pointsr/BehavioralEconomics

When i first read your rant, I was a bit annoyed, but working through it, it became clear that you are pointing to some of the weak spots that a lot of other practitioners have also noticed. fx a lack of coherent definitions, people practising "nudging" without any idea of what it is, a systematic lack of knowledge of the psychology behind the interventions.

So please read everything below here with the kindest voice you can make in you mind. :) Text is a horrible medium for some things.

Realization #1
>He did a great job explaining that "Nudges" are subtle changes to the environment that do not require effort from the Nudger or the Nudgee. Indeed, they work implicitly by acknowledging underlying (system 1) psychological processes. Examples he gave were classics: painting a fly on a urinal, traffic stripes to slow drivers, defaults in organ donation.

I thoroughly agree that many people don't understand what nudges are. It's understandable that lay people don't know, as they have very little reason to care at all about it. However, I also see many practitioners and even academics that somehow comes to very different ideas about what nudging is, but seems to have no interest in forming or accepting a proper definition.

To this point I have to add that I have never seen anywhere, that a critical part of a nudge is that it is (1) subtle, (2) confined to being changes in the environment or (3) effortless for everyone involved.

At (1); there is several examples of nudges that work particularly because they are not subtle. Think of trucks backing up making beeps. A clear attention-grabbing nudge, using an audio version of the fly in the urinal. Not at all subtle though.

At (2); Changes in psychology, that does not stem from direct environmental change can also be regarded as nudges. People get a lot less critical of different ideas when they are horny. :)

At (3); There is a classic prompt for increased sales, where you are offered a complimentary good at checkout. "Do you want a lighter with those cigarettes?". everyone involved knows that lighters available, but still the sales increase when the prompt is in place. It does require continual effort from the sales person however. Better examples might come to mind later.


> Folks who worked in the NHS wanted to come up with structural challenges like figuring out ways to rearrange doctor's (GP's) check-up routine

This is a dream scenario for any choice architect to work with. If you ever read The Checklist Manifesto you will see that there is tremendous opportunity in structuring rutine tasks more.


Realization #2

To repackage and replicate preexisting nudges, is one of the most promising ways of figuring our what parts of the nudges actually works and in what way. As artifacts of the ways people process information and not the information itself, nudges are usually not sector specific, meaning, that the same ideas that works really well in tax collecting, might be worth a shot in healthcare as well.

Most people will learn some very valuable lessons about what kind of nudges that makes the most sense, when they have to test them. Having the experiment as an integral part of implementation of any behavioural intervention is whats going to change the world, by showing that you can do more than raise awareness or make laws, and that it will actually have an effect. The bad ideas will fade, and the good ideas will stand strong. :) (Hopefully)

Don't worry As a lot of people might be considering nudging a fad, it has been gaining considerable ground in the last 10 years, and behaviourally informed interventions is now fast becoming a part of the "standard" public policy toolkit. Because it has proven merits, it will remain in one way or another. However the name might change. :)


u/fuzzthegreat · 4 pointsr/oculus

I'd like to post just a bit of clarification on this expiration from a developer perspective - firstly with some addition details on the code-signing certificates specifically and secondly some speculation on how oculus got here.

Example

Think of this scenario - you have an application that you built and seldom release updates, maybe once per year. Additionally, you don't have an auto update mechanism in your application so your users have to seek out an update. This means some users may never update, some may update every 3 or 4 versions, or some may update every version.

Even if you are diligent on keeping your certificates up to date, you can't go back and put the new certs in old versions of your software as the public key is baked into the executable. What this means is inevitably your code signing certificate will be renewed and some users will have software with an old, expired certificate. This is why the certificate timestamp mechanism exists - the certificate says "this executable was produced by ABC Software on 1/1/2010" but the countersignature/timestamp says "this signature was valid on 1/1/2010 when it was signed and verified by Symantec on 1/1/2010".

Oculus Speculation

Now, with all that said above one of the things I left out was the amount of details that go into building and releasing software. Many times these details are figured out once and then put into an automated build system such as TeamCity, Jenkins, or TFS. Many times when a process like a build gets automated, it gets handed off at some point and all the details that led up to its creation are no longer in someone's head. This can lead to details getting dropped or missed even when they're extremely important. More than likely the certificate signing is deep in the build chain and the details are obscured.

One important thing to mention is Oculus DOES have an automatic update mechanism in their software so deploying updated executables with renewed certs is much easier for them. This doesn't mean that their renewed cert gets added to their build chain but that they at least have the ability to push updates more regularly than my example.

Does this excuse Oculus? Not at all, but I don't believe there should be calls for people to resign over something like this. While it's an unfortunate outage, this is a great opportunity to teach an individual engineer (or set of build engineers/managers) and learn as an organization. Rest assured mistakes like this happen all the time especially when automated processes and approvals are in the chain without a checklist at the end of the process. One of the books we recommend to our clients when we are going through process and quality improvement is The Checklist Manifesto. For some insight into what might be going on at Oculus right now this is a great youtube video about debugging in production by Bryan Cantrill, a former Sun engineer who is now CTO at Joyent

u/Level9TraumaCenter · 4 pointsr/labrats

Exactly what I was going to recommend. Fantastic book.

u/LocalAmazonBot · 4 pointsr/Automate

Here are some links for the product in the above comment for different countries:

Amazon Smile Link: http://smile.amazon.com/The-Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0884271951/ref=sr_1_1


|Country|Link|Charity Links|
|:-----------|:------------|:------------|
|USA|smile.amazon.com|EFF|
|UK|www.amazon.co.uk|Macmillan|
|Spain|www.amazon.es||
|France|www.amazon.fr||
|Germany|www.amazon.de||
|Japan|www.amazon.co.jp||
|Canada|www.amazon.ca||
|Italy|www.amazon.it||
|India|www.amazon.in||
|China|www.amazon.cn||




To help add charity links, please have a look at this thread.

This bot is currently in testing so let me know what you think by voting (or commenting). The thread for feature requests can be found here.

u/womo · 4 pointsr/coffee_roasters

Time to immerse yourself in the world of Lean manufacturing and production. Good reading includes The Goal, and Taiichi Ohno on how Toyota learned to really manufacture efficiently, and anything written by Shingeo Shingo. Don't think "manufacturing" reduces quality, in fact if anything modern manufacturing concepts increase quality while reducing waste, and are optimal for small scale production such as roasting.

u/Kwickgamer · 3 pointsr/iamverysmart

Of course! I study Criminology and Psychology in university, but obviously that's not a valid source.

Doctor Robert Hare is the leading expert on Psychopaths. His book: Snakes in Suits Is what my profs recommend for further psychopath reading.

Here's a great article on the topic by the Correctional Service of Canada.

As for use as a risk assessment scale this(doi: 10.1177/0011128705281756) article outlines the pros and cons nicely.
This(doi: 10.1016/j.ijlp.2004.08.008)article also points out a lot of the use of application of the PCL-R.

The second article in particular has some awesome sources that allow for further reading.

I also recommend this article from Doctor Hare's website. It's not peer-reviewed but it's a great article.

I hope this helps!

u/DataSicEvolved · 3 pointsr/videos

Last year I became obsessed with the concept of psychopathy.

I read Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of Psychopaths Among Us which is more of a general look at psychopaths. It talks about what makes them tick, how devastating an encounter with them can be and psychopathic children. It showed the more horror-film version of psychopathy.

Without Conscience was a scary book but the next book on psychopathy I read, Snakes in Suits, had more terrifying implications by far. Snakes in Suits suggests that the vast majority of psychopaths are not like Dahmer or Hannibal Lectar but are actually in major positions of power in large corporations at a greatly disproportional rate to psychopaths in the general population.

In short, SiS suggests that the most intelligent psychopaths are drawn to white collar jobs with extremely high stakes, earnings, power and prestige. They excel in these jobs because they're extremely intelligent, utterly unscrupulous, manipulative, able to read people's body language and they're smart enough to hide any tracks of ill deeds to avoid trouble with the law.

I couldn't help but think of that book when I saw this article. Sure, he might have just been having a bad day and taken it out on his dog but maybe it's something more sinister.

u/neffered · 3 pointsr/IAmA

'Snakes In Suits' is another interesting book along similar lines.

u/carlio · 3 pointsr/technology

Despite his silly name, Clay Shirky has written some fascinating articles about the Internet's effect on culture and content, probably the most insightful of anyone I've read. There's one about cognitive surplus, which unfortunately I can't find because he's since written a book called that and reviews of it are drowning out the rest of the results! Here is the TED talk he gave though. Here Comes Everybody is also a great read.

u/counttess · 3 pointsr/YoungProfessionals

I honestly think any kind of customer service. That is where I was able to develop a lot of soft skills. Volunteering for a nonprofit thrift shop or something like that would give you a good start and would be minimal hours.

In addition, taking on a leadership role in anything (a local chapter of rotary, etc.) can be very good experience.

That being said, a certain amount of soft skills will have to do with personality type and personal motivation. I was personally motivated to go out of my way to attain leadership positions throughout my high school and college years and have been overall successful with it.

One book I see recommended a lot is How to Win Friends and Influence People. Dale Carnegie has a lot of other books as well that pertain to your interests.

Also, my work has a special obsession with The Checklist Manifesto and The Advantage. The equity firm that owns my company requires all managers and higher ups to read those two books, so obviously they've got something going for them!

u/strange-humor · 3 pointsr/editors

Great book to read for this is the The Checklist Manifesto. Might also give you ideas of how to approach it. Details how this fixed errors in Aviation industry and Surgery. It is pretty short and full of good info on how to look at things.

u/woooofwoof · 3 pointsr/sysadmin

Checklists.

http://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/dp/0312430000/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1383063171&sr=1-1&keywords=checklist+manifesto

I've implemented them with my team, and we're starting to roll them out across IT. Each person figures out the best way that works for them, and then they've developed checklist for everything they do. One person on my team has a checklist for reading email, and one sending email, they are both posted next to his monitor. It's overkill for me, but for him it fixes one of his biggest gaps, e-mail communication. Previsouly he would upset almost everyone who recieved an e-mail from him, now nobody gets upset. His e-mail checklists address one of his gap areas, something that was becoming a career derailer.

u/kenjimike · 3 pointsr/adops

+1 for Checklist Manifesto (https://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/dp/0312430000)

Also Tim Wu's Attention Merchants (https://www.amazon.com/Attention-Merchants-Scramble-Inside-Heads/dp/0385352018)

and AGM's Chaos Monkeys (https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Monkeys-Obscene-Fortune-Failure-ebook/dp/B019MMUAAQ)

edited to add that I'm currently reading "Predictive Marketing: Easy Ways Every Marketer Can Use Customer Analytics and Big Data" (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01AOOH2MA/) to get down with CDP's...

u/innovativesalad · 3 pointsr/sex

Humans as a whole have a shit track record when it comes to performing small, routine tasks reliably. That has little to do with intelligence; it's true for doctors, pilots, and everyone else, too. If you're interested in some reading, check out The Checklist Manifesto for a writeup on the efforts that go into getting people to remember to perform small tasks that ensure they or their patients don't die.

From that perspective, a contraceptive method that requires the user to perform a 30-second task reliably every single day is a high-failure approach. Studies I've seen that track pill compliance typically find that a great majority of users regularly skips doses, and younger users (who are unfortunately more likely to conceive) miss the most doses--several a month on average in some data sets. Perfect use is not a relevant statistic for a sizable majority of users.

u/solidh2o · 3 pointsr/SelfDrivingCars

This is probably the closest I've seen:
https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Robots-Technology-Threat-Jobless/dp/0465097537


There's several articles on the topic though, from a few different angles ( with a few links to studies in most of them):

Consumer
http://time.com/money/4797898/self-driving-cars-could-soon-save-the-average-family-at-least-5600-a-year/

https://www.curbed.com/2017/7/7/15935126/google-uber-driverless-car-waymo-autonomous

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-26/self-driving-cars-could-change-your-life-within-six-years/8987628

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/demand-for-driverless-cars-could-boost-uber-to-2016-09-19

https://www.wired.com/2017/06/impact-of-autonomous-vehicles/

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/03/self-driving-cars-will-disrupt-10-industries-commentary.html

http://www.esa.doc.gov/reports/employment-impact-autonomous-vehicles


One thing to keep in mind - there's three transformations happening at the same time. The first is autonomous vehicles, the second is the conversion to electric vehicles, and the last is the "Transportation as a Service" (TaaS) movement. All of these are happening at different speeds in different ways from different companies, but they all add up to a huge difference in societal interaction. TaaS combined with autonomous vehicles will ( In my opinion) be the largest driver for the type of change you're talking about - from no longer needed parking lots to shutting down the network of gas stations, the world of 2050 likely looks nothing like the world of 2010 in this regard. Los Angleles has 30% of it's space devoted to parking lots. If no one owns a car, those spaces can be reclaimed for something more useful.



u/ThisShitAintMagic · 3 pointsr/Futurology

https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Robots-Technology-Threat-Jobless/dp/0465097537

Martin Ford. Even people who don't like his argument have praised the book for it's clarity.

u/finiteworld · 3 pointsr/collapse
u/rismatica · 3 pointsr/Advice

We joke in my company that we have 200 5-person teams... which sort of gets at your point. Each team understands what it does but we have varying degrees of understanding of the whole. (But that's okay, there's a 5-person team whose job is to understand the whole.)

Most corporations borrow heavily from standard corporate culture, and that's how you most easily make such a large mass of people useful; you use what has worked before. I can look up job descriptions of my job at other companies.

If you really want to know more I recommend the book The Goal. It's a business management book, but it's written as a story so it's an easy, enjoyable read.

u/thedesijoker · 3 pointsr/Systemizing

I will recommend the book The Goal

It is a good read too along with Built to Sell

u/100redsmarties · 3 pointsr/Accounting

I really enjoyed The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt which is tangentially related to the accounting field (deals more with operational improvements).

I agree with the other poster that self-improvement and leadership-oriented books are also helpful. One recent one is the Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene.

u/hopelessdrivel · 3 pointsr/sysadmin

Lately I've just started reading books to help get my mind back into a happy place. If I'm burned out or frustrated, taking a half hour to read through a few more chapters of The Goal or something similar helps get me motivated again.

u/TheIllustriousYou · 3 pointsr/programming

If you'd like a digestible entry point to systems thinking, I suggest starting with "The Goal". It's a (contrived) story about a person applying systems thinking in the manufacturing sector, circa 1985.

u/pilgrimscottpilgrim · 3 pointsr/cscareerquestions

There's also https://weworkremotely.com/ from the guys who make basecamp, dedicated to work from home jobs.

With regards to freelancing, don't worry about global competition so much. It's not a race to the bottom. If you can prove yourself to be better than the global guys, whether that be skill, timezone, communication etc. then you can charge higher. You don't want to do QA for the people who aren't willing to pay, but there's going to be people who will pay premium for a job done well. You just need to market yourself well.

If you're going to do it I highly recommend reading The Year Without Pants (http://www.amazon.com/The-Year-Without-Pants-WordPress-com/dp/1118660633), about an ex microsoftie who went to work for Wordpress which is fully remote. Brilliant read whether you want to work remote or not, but particularly relevant in this case.

u/RabTom · 3 pointsr/gamedev

A book I can't recommend more (for being in management) is Radical Candor

I just moved into a Lead position myself and it has helped.

u/kickstand · 3 pointsr/apple

I'd recommend "Revolution in the Valley" over the Isaacson Jobs biography. All the good stuff in the Jobs biography was taken from "Revolution in the Valley". If you don't believe me, check the end notes.

u/bd_sic · 3 pointsr/humanresources

Kudos to you for tackling the big issues! I would give "Work Rules" a read. I recommend it to all HR professionals. It'll get you even more motivated to make work better for the folks in your office!

​

As for HR management software, I'd give Workday a call. I know they've been working hard to tailor their stuff for small to medium sized businesses.

​

+1 to speaking with the owner and getting them aligned to your goals. The worst thing that could happen is you do all this work and the owner shoots it down. I would present a 1-3 year road map on what you plan to do, how you plan to do it, the cost of doing it, and the outcome of doing it. Get them excited about it, too!

​

Good luck to you and don't let the negative comments get in your head! You can do it!

u/tmorton · 3 pointsr/ExperiencedDevs

Is this your first role as a lead? You're adjusting to both a new company and a new job.

Some of these problems are just kind of "welcome to leadership" - for example, managing your meeting load is now a decent part of your job. You do need to be in a lot of meetings. You will also get invited to meetings that don't exactly need you. Figuring out what's important, and performing well in those meetings, is a big part of the lead's job.

I highly recommend the book The Manager's Path which has a section on the "tech lead" role. There is a sidebar that addresses almost your exact situation - a first-time lead that doesn't like the job. The author's answer was (very roughly) "yup, it sucks in some ways - that's the job." But the experience as a tech lead is necessary to get promoted beyond an individual contributor role.

Of course, there are also problems with the company. Every company is dysfunctional in some ways. You need to decide whether this company's problems are ones that you can fix and/or tolerate. It might be a good challenge if you want to level up your career.

u/Syndeton · 3 pointsr/cscareerquestions

I heard this book is decent: Manager's Path

Haven't read it yet but I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has read this book and used it for career progression.

u/kamihack · 3 pointsr/sysadmin
u/pcbo · 3 pointsr/portugal

Tens um livro muito bom para quem está a começar em IT e quer crescer na área, The Manager's Path. É uma boa literatura para quem procura crescer para Tech Lead, mas também para quem se quer posicionar como Specialist...

Idealmente tenta arranjar um mentor (ou mais). Alguém que te guie, que veja benefício em acompanhar-te e que te faça 1-on-1's com alguma regularidade!

Também depende muito do line manager que tiveres também e do momento da empresa / projecto em que fores inserido, às vezes os seniores estão de tal forma "atafulhados" em trabalho que não têm tempo para "mentorar" os juniores.

Curiosamente, vamos ter uma talk durante o Landing Festival sobre esse tema: "Upgrading for Junior Developers" (https://landingfestival.com/lisbon/talks/36), aconselho-te a estar presente – vais aprender imenso.

PS: Boa pergunta btw, não é nada comum este tipo de maturidade em malta recém-licenciada, se tiveres interesse envia-me o teu perfil via DM.

Disclaimer: sou co-fundador da Landing.jobs.

u/ukralibre · 3 pointsr/getdisciplined

Irvon plays on public fears, bulding career on the controversial topic. That's all. He did not do the double-blind placebo studies. What he does it bullshitting.

https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp/150114331X/

u/ChrisWiegman · 2 pointsr/simpleliving

Here's a non-affiliate link to a book on the topic which you might find interesting. It covers WordPress.com but much of what it talks about is applicable elsewhere.

As for myself, I've worked from home for about 4 years, currently as a web developer for a major university. There are lots of great jobs out there depending on your skill set.

https://www.amazon.com/Year-Without-Pants-WordPress-com-Future/dp/1118660633?SubscriptionId=AKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q&tag=duckduckgo-osx-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1118660633

u/krsjuan · 2 pointsr/todayilearned

Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made
Written by a member of the original Mac team
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1449316247/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?qid=1394998489&sr=8-3&pi=SY200_QL40

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
The only official biography, very in depth on the later years, but glosses over a lot of the early years when he was in my opinion a giant prick.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1451648537/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?qid=1394998612&sr=8-2&pi=SY200_QL40

What the dormouse said: How the sixties counterculture shaped the Internet

I don't have anything Atari specific to recommend but this book is excellent and covers a lot of the early people and companies that invented all of this

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0143036769/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1394998761&sr=8-1&pi=SY200_QL40

u/headzoo · 2 pointsr/psychology

He's been both. If you're really interested, I'd recommend reading Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made. It was written by one of the core engineers who built the first Mac. It's very entertaining, and does shed a lot of light on Steve's management style.

Steve Jobs wasn't a designer, but every design decision had to go through him. Everything from the monitor chassis to the operations manual had to get his approval, and he had no problems rejecting design after design, until he got what he wanted.

He wasn't an engineer either, but every engineering decision went through him. He decided what went into the hardware* and software. When his engineers said something was impossible, he made them work late, and work weekends until they made it possible.

Jobs perfected the art of micromanaging, and even though he didn't know a capacitor from a resistor, the final product was in every way his vision, and it's that vision that sold products. He was an extreme narcissist, and no one else's ideas would have even been any good.

* Interesting antidote: The Mac engineers built an expansion port into the motherboard so users could upgrade the memory, add another printer, etc. Jobs nixed the idea. He felt that people should have to buy a whole new computer if they wanted to upgrade. The engineers went behind his back, and added an expansion port anyway, but they told Jobs it was a "diagnostics port". That same philosophy exists today. You can't upgrade the hard drive in your iPod. You're forced to buy a whole new iPod if you want a bigger hard drive.

u/Black_Phreak · 2 pointsr/google

Read/Audiobook this before you go - [Work Rules] (https://www.amazon.ca/Work-Rules-Insights-Inside-Transform/dp/1455554790)

u/Jessa55JKL · 2 pointsr/humanresources

My boss had me read the book about google's HR policies when I first started. I really enjoyed it.

​

https://www.amazon.com/Work-Rules-Insights-Inside-Transform/dp/1455554790

u/thedougaboveall · 2 pointsr/webdev

Management is not your only option. You can continue to work as a developer. If you feel you've reached your maximum potential at your current company ( no new problems to solve or no incentive to learn ) you may need to find a new role with room to grow. I say this with the hopefully obvious caveat that there will be competition at every level and you don't just get to keep growing your salary without being valuable to an employer.

​

You might be right about being a Tech Lead. I can't speak to your higher ups motivations, but Tech Lead is not necessarily a management position. It can definitely be more responsibility without more compensation. Check out the chapter on being or managing a Tech Lead in Camille Fouriner's book The Manager's Path. It describes the exact thing you're bringing up, and I would recommend it whether or not you want to be a manager. https://www.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Growth/dp/1491973897

​

Moving into management should not reduce your capacity to keep up to date with tech. You should learn at an exponential rate because the people on your team are all striving to improve too. If you read about an upcoming browser feature that would be useful on future projects, you can assign someone on the team to learn it and teach it to everyone else.

u/jetpackswasyes · 2 pointsr/ITCareerQuestions

Only the sociopaths like it. It's more about seizing control of your own destiny. You've got the right attitude to succeed. Best advice is to treat your staff like you wish your own managers had treated you at their stage in their career. I know you've already got a ton of book recommendations but if I can make one more, I found it extremely helpful: https://www.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Growth/dp/1491973897

u/Sigma_Beta · 2 pointsr/datascience

I recommend this book, if you haven’t already read it.


https://www.amazon.ca/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Growth/dp/1491973897

u/krobinator41 · 2 pointsr/AskEngineers

Check out The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier. It's especially oriented at people in technical fields, and has a wide variety of advice for people in all stages of management, be it a mentor, tech lead, first-time manager, all the way up to CTO.

u/NUCLEAR_FIRST_STRIKE · 2 pointsr/ChapoTrapHouse

techbros can be radicalized, everyone can, it's just a matter of finding the right talking point for them. go out for drinks with em, shoot the shit, build up a rapport. talk about how pointless you think product management is (never met a dev with a positive view of their nontechnical managers) and bring up some of the points from Bullshit Jobs. talk about how github banned iranian devs and how economic sanctions only cause collateral damage to the working class and how forcing people to starve is violence. there's an episode of chapo where the guest (@pisspiggrandad) talks about how he did it and unionized his workplace.

staying connected with like-minded people helps fend off the alienation (plug for the sci4socialism slack). i hang with a couple coworkers who are left-leaning and a few who are apolitical but fun to be around. loneliness and hopelessness just make it that much harder to organize outside of work where real material gains can be accomplished.

oh and take really long shits on the clock and steal office supplies.

u/veringer · 2 pointsr/worldnews

Here's a fleshed out theory. The gist is that so many people have bullshit (ie soulless/useless) jobs that people with meaningful careers (like teachers) are viewed jealously by much of society. They are getting compensated both financially and with real actual satisfaction knowing they're making a positive impact on the world.

u/ohiodsaguy · 2 pointsr/jobs

In addition to others saying that downtime is normal, there is also the bullshit jobs theory - https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp/150114331X

​

Some jobs are simply unnecessary on the whole and filled with nothingness.

u/Steel_Wool_Sponge · 2 pointsr/BasicIncome

> I mean, if I hired someone to mow my lawn

If a feudal lord hired someone to mow a remote acre of his lawn and the mower, winking, reported to you that a wandering herd of goats had actually already got to it, who would you trust more to figure out whether the mower is worth what they're being paid - the mower, or the lord?

> I think the evidence is in their willingness to pay

Right, and that is the difference between our arguments and why it is wrong for you to try to analogize between them. I don't think the garbagemen know better than the mayor because they're being paid less: I think they know better because they collect the garbage. You however do think that a willingness to pay can be translated into knowledge about whether someone is worth paying.

> Maybe his book really does contain better evidence than he's alluded to in trying to promote it

https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp/150114331X

Read pgs 1-2 (not i-ii in the intro)

u/Hynjia · 2 pointsr/getdisciplined

How about read a book? See if the experience fits how you feel about your job.

u/ok_asclepius · 2 pointsr/BlackPeopleTwitter

I'm not sure I follow how the politics is affecting the education. You're saying we have a group that is revving up racist propaganda and manipulating the poor, but I think what's wrong with education is more some of the things you mentioned later: that funds are poorly distributed, that there are a lot of bullshit jobs (theres a book about this) that suck up money, and that the core education system has been chiseled in a fashion that kids aren't learning enough in high school so now college is much more important.

America has no reason to be so low in the world rankings for education, except that it's a huge country and it's hard to make one system to fit all - i.e. we should allow people to do different things and value trades where you don't need a masters degree so people don't fall to the debt trap.

u/qwejibo02 · 2 pointsr/Career_Advice

Read Bullsh!t Jobs: A Theory for an interesting take on this. Depending on where you live and work, and what you job is, it could be really short. ;)

u/left_flank · 2 pointsr/metacanada
u/HTownian25 · 2 pointsr/ChapoTrapHouse

Possibly relevant to your interests

> Graeber explores one of society’s most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation.

u/walker6168 · 2 pointsr/ludology

That was a funny solution a Cracked writer proposed to the whole debate, to free multiplayer games from singleplayer games so they can quit hassling each other. It solves some problems, creates others.

Technically my reading list moved away from game academia a while ago. I'm just a hobby writer, I don't worry about the same issues they do. I was a game critic for 3 years at Popmatters while I was in law school and I steadily got more interested in rule theory. That's most of what I do now in my writing.

I don't really know where someone could start with that...probably by studying systems. This is an outstanding intro book for it. Something bit more sophisticated on rule systems would be this one on how they are presented

I can start rattling off the legal philosophers but they are such boring old farts...Greg Lastowka wrote what is probably the best book on game design and law.

u/iugameprof · 2 pointsr/MMOVW

This is a good book, though a bit old now. If you're interested in agent-based simulations, a lot of great work has been done since then -- I'd suggest starting with something like Growing Artificial Societies, or reading up in general on Sugarscape and the models that have followed it.

Both these and The Limits to Growth lead to "systems thinking," which Meadows wrote about in Thinking in Systems. That book in turn (along with many others) was a big influence on my game designs, and on my book about game design and systems thinking. Understanding how systems and games work together is vital, IMO, for building virtual worlds.

u/calvinhockey · 2 pointsr/slatestarcodex

Maybe this post on different kinds of risk can be interesting? It points at this book "Thinking in Systems", does it seem to be the kind of thing you are looking for?

u/tellman1257 · 2 pointsr/soccer

Good, but THIS is the BEST book on the subject of cross-culturally communication:

http://www.amazon.com/When-Cultures-Collide-3rd-Edition/dp/1904838022

u/wazzzzah · 2 pointsr/politics

Those other countries have populations that view their relationship with politics very differently than how Americans do. Americans value taking a fundamentally irreverent and or even an automatically rebellious view toward authority to begin with; flouting, bending, or breaking rules in all sorts of settings and contexts is considered "cool": "I do things MY way. Fuck what they say. I don't care" <audience cheers and applauds>. (A specific variation of that sentiment would be: "Fuck voting.") I found throughout Western and Northern Europe that anti-authority, rule-breaking behavior over there, whether in words or actions, is seen as either immature, stupid, inappropriate, and often contemptible. So let's look the most voting countries as of this year:

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/08/02/u-s-voter-turnout-trails-most-developed-countries/

How about wearing translated version of this T-shirt in one of those top European countries? Think it would get the same looks and reactions as it would in the American version in America?

http://www.foulmouthshirts.com/Political-t-shirts/shirtpages/FUCK-VOTING.htm

Note that Australia was at the bottom of that list, 8 spots below the US. They have an irreverent attitude toward authority as well, even more so that the U.S.! They even have less regard for formality, too.

If you're interested in this kind of stuff, THIS is the book the best, an ultimate overview of cultural differences around the world:

https://www.amazon.com/When-Cultures-Collide-3rd-Leading/dp/1904838022

u/downrightacrobatics · 2 pointsr/softwaretesting

I've been in QA for about three years - started out in Support, kept getting stuck with the "weird" tickets, got better at troubleshooting and bug hunting, and eventually started doing testing with the dev team. Working at very small startups helped speed this process up tremendously. I'm now working at a ~500 person company (huuuuuge from my perspective, I'm used to a dozen coworkers, tops!) and learned Selenium/Capybara automated tests about a year ago.

I haven't found any quality-related books that have interested me, and most of the technical resources I've found have just been whatever pops up on Google/Stack Overflow. I am also subscribed to this subreddit, and /r/qualityassurance, but they're both pretty low-traffic, and I wish more articles were shared here. If there are any blog posts that have resonated with you, I'd love to take a look as well!

The best thing I've done for myself, technically, was re-writing our automated UI test suite in POM. This ended up saving me hours of work a few months later when we added a bunch of new features, and I just had to copy-paste a few things to test for them. This is a good overview:

https://www.guru99.com/page-object-model-pom-page-factory-in-selenium-ultimate-guide.html

Because of how much grief this saved me, I continue to evangelize for it!

I can, however, recommend some management/team/soft skills/business-y books! I'm not in love with my current company, so I end up reading a lot of these to keep myself sane and motivated. Here are some of the ones I've liked the best:

u/dcousineau · 2 pointsr/webdev

Start by asking yourself a few questions:

  • What do you like about $currentBoss. What do they do well that you'd love to keep seeing happen?
  • What do you not like about $currentBoss. What do you wish they would have fixed?
  • What are your current needs out of this job? Are you looking for growth, mentorship, or just a place to chill?

    Use these questions to decide what specific questions _you_ want to ask. Be a little selfish. If you will be directly reporting to this new Dir of Eng, you should make sure they're going to be who you need them to be.

    Personally I'd ask questions about:

  • What is your management style, do you do regular 1:1s?
  • What was your favorite career ladder you've worked with in the past?
  • How have you managed career advancement in the past for your reports?
  • Have you had to deal with interpersonal conflict between reports in the past? How did or would you handle this?
  • How do you delegate technical/architectural decisions? What processes have you found to work well for you?
  • On that topic, tell me about a time you had to make an executive decision about a technical matter. How did or would you handle this?
  • Based on what you've seen in the interview process what do you see yourself digging into first?
  • How do you typically handle prioritizing tech debt and product progress?


    Consider grabbing a copy of The Managers Path by Camille Fournier. The book provides really good descriptions of each typical level in an engineering organization, consider skipping ahead to the chapters on Engineering Manager, Director of Engineering, and VP of Engineering to get an idea of where, ideally, they're coming from, where they should be, and where they're likely trying to grow to.


    Also remember, other people at the company are interviewing this person for a variety of perspectives. Focus your questions on "how will this person help me/us do our jobs" because everyone else interviewing this person will be doing the same.
u/trekkie80 · 2 pointsr/cogsci
u/Zatzy · 2 pointsr/AskReddit

Absolutely. A previous post of mine:

There is a lot about corporate culture that attracts and rewards psychopathic behavior. In this situation, it sounds like the manager would be rewarded and protected for keeping costs down and improving profit. This is a very interesting book on the subject (I'm not sure how to embed hyperlinks)

http://www.amazon.ca/Snakes-Suits-When-Psychopaths-Work/dp/0060837721

u/Mailman7 · 2 pointsr/jobs
u/hepheuua · 2 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

The claim that psychopaths are over-represented in positions like CEO, etc, doesn't come from an external analysis (or outside looking in) of their decisions made in the pursuit of profits or maximising returns to shareholders, it comes from a clinical personality assessment conducted on them as individuals. The same kinds of tests that are used to determine how much of the prison population may have psychopathic traits, for instance. The tests have undergone all sorts of validation and refinement before being adopted, and are part of a rigorous field of research, not just someone looking on and thinking, "Oh, hey, they make decisions that seem like they don't care..they must be psychopaths!" That's not how psychology works. You don't diagnose someone at a distance.

The thing is, psychopaths aren't good for businesses in the long run. They can be incredibly damaging, in fact. But the kinds of conditions /u/Lord_dokodo is talking about are often conditions in which they thrive, at least for periods of time before they cause enough damage that the often have to move on to another company.

There's a great book on the topic called Snakes in Suits which is worth a read.

u/dissdigg · 2 pointsr/conspiracy

https://veilofreality.com/2011/04/18/organic-portals-soulless-humans/

I think it's similar to pre-Adamic vs Adamic man: http://theunityprocess.com/a-gnostic-perspective-adamic-vs-pre-adamic-man/

Edit: And if this information is too "out-there" for you, you can start with something less deep like: Snakes in Suits. There are a lot of people who are still trapped in thinking our material existence is all there is.

u/Tbbhxf · 2 pointsr/businessnews

Company management/mismanagement is one of my favorite topics to read about! Solid article. Thanks! Some solid books if you enjoy similar:

u/Capolan · 2 pointsr/IAmA

I know a lot about psychopathy and such, have taken the HARE assessment - and have my own mental issues.

I usually call bullshit almost immediately on these because generally they are bullshit. for some reason it is "in" to be a psychopath right now, which is sick as someone who has known true diagnosed people with psychopathy could tell you (me included in that)

I've read through the OP posts and I'm fairly convinced that there is definately some strong psychopathic elements here, shallow affect, manipulation and lies, an understanding of morality but a wanton disregard for its rules, culture and customs, violence of a directed nature, etc.

OP: here's the obvious ones -- 1. did he play with fire? 2. wet the bed 3. multilate or cause purposeful intentional undo harm to animals?

OP - you are going to have a problem getting a proper diagnosis as a fully functioning psychopath is clever enough to side-step most tests as they see fit. They "act" the part they need to at the time to best fit the situation, the ultimate cameleon you could say.

You would need to go to a therapist that is a specialist, that understands how to treat psychopathy and anti-social disorders.

Here's the interesting thing OP -- if untreated your brother sounds adjusted enough to understand how games are played and how to get what he wants and needs out of whatever "system" he is placed into. With this said - he probably could become a very successful "X" - i.e. whatever he wants to be. It is estimated that many high level executives particularly in the finance realm have risen to their ranks in part because of psychopathic tendencies.

Remember, sociopath and psychopath are thrown about loosely -- not all of them "murder" in actuality. Some make a killing in the stock market, some transfer the "kill" to closing the deal, etc.

Check out "Snakes in Suits - When psychopaths go to work"

Also - I Highly recommend Robert Hare's "Without Conscience"

u/Bhorzo · 2 pointsr/AskWomen

Many sociopaths aren't obviously parasitic nor arrogant. Many are VERY controlled and deliberate.

Most would say a sociopath is simply someone without the ability to feel empathy nor remorse, someone who has no innate desire for "socializing" - except when they can use it to gain something from others, and someone who doesn't value other people for any other reason than what resources they can provide for the individual. Yes, many sociopaths lie to gain what they want, and often if they are in trouble they will shift the blame to fall on other people - and they have no difficulty in doing so because they don't feel empathy nor remorse.

An interesting book on sociopaths in the workplace: http://www.amazon.com/Snakes-Suits-When-Psychopaths-Work/dp/0061147893

u/zhengyi13 · 2 pointsr/worldnews

Not sure how high quality the research is, but yes, there's at least some research as to the correlation between power and psychopathy.

http://www.amazon.com/Snakes-Suits-When-Psychopaths-Work/dp/0061147893

u/Bullsfan · 2 pointsr/politics

I agree. I am looking forward to the post Trump analysis/movies/documentaries. I will especially like the world leading researchers in psychopathy to comment on where this guy fits on the spectrum of psychopathy. I think his rise to power is a bad thing for psychopaths. I'm hoping deep learning and inference in the AI field will be able to recognize the predictable patterns of these mutants. This shit needs to be eliminated from the species. It costs many people needless pain, suffering and financial loss. They are criminals on the loose. Great read or skim on the subject

u/Aenemius · 2 pointsr/ffxiv

I can make a few general points, yes;

  • The people who do go guildless tend to do so for their own reasons - meaning having someone "above" them doing the organizing simply doesn't appeal. That makes any attempt to recruit moot, because they're unrecruitable.

  • That unrecruitability generally ends up in one of a few categories; inconsistent schedule, willfulness in terms of play objectives, a preference not to get invested in the community of a game, personal/social issues such as anxiety, or (very very rarely) not believing any group is good enough for them.

  • When you do come up with a value proposition for them, it needs to perform perfectly without exception. They won't develop loyalty to the model, so a single incorrect payment or bad raid will instantly prove your failure, not their own, and they'll go back to pug life instantly, likely blocking and never providing feedback on why or what happened.

  • The managers of this kind of group tend to be very well-meaning, but that actually makes it harder. A "why can't we all do it together?" attitude, especially about distributed play like mercing, becomes either hard to maintain or frustrating to people who just want to do their own thing.

    Granted, this experience comes from competitive gaming rather than PvE, and it's not specific to merc work, so perhaps your mileage will vary.

    But "organizing the unorganized" is not ever a thing one person can enforce or structure. There's actually a huge amount of sociological work in this area with social media being what it is. (EDIT: Book recommendation, "Here Comes Everybody" by Clay Shirky - it set the bar for this kind of thinking.)

    The outcome of this is that if you're going for this model, you need team players who haven't found a team and don't want one. That's a heavy, deep contradiction that I just can't see getting mass behind it.
u/NinjaLanternShark · 2 pointsr/CatastrophicFailure

The book The Checklist Manifesto talks about how the air travel industry overhauled itself after some high-profile, avoidable disasters. It's fascinating, as is the rest of the book.

On the whole the book basically asks "How do normal people, who make normal mistakes, manage to do incredibly complex things, nearly perfectly, nearly every time?"

u/SonOfWeb · 2 pointsr/ADHD

We all want to do well, but we also all want others to think we're doing well. That's why it seems like everyone else is doing better: they're trying to make it look like that. They're managing their image. It's like Facebook, when your friends are only posting the good things that happen to them, and it looks like you're the only one anything bad happens to.

Unless you're a celebrity, you are your own harshest critic.

> Medical school, for me, has been a never-ending cycle of wanting so badly to be better, trying, failing, and barely making it to the next course.

Why did you keep trying each time you failed or nearly failed? What made you think it would be any different the next time? Here's my theory: because you believe you have the potential to succeed. That's the paradox of ADHD, the blessing and the curse: it's not that you try, fail, and assume you're just not capable. You try, fail, and believe that you failed despite being capable. This is the dangerous part - if you didn't fail due to lack of skill or knowledge or innate intelligence, you and others assume it must be a character flaw. This is why people with ADHD are often labelled "lazy" instead of "stupid." People look at a person with dyslexia, and it looks like they're trying hard but still failing, so they assume that person is stupid. People look at a person with ADHD, and it looks like they're doing fine for a bit, but then they just get distracted and stop trying - if only they had a bit of self-discipline, they'd do fine. So they assume that person is lazy and weak-willed.

Hidden in all these negative perceptions is an important but easy to miss fact: if it's not clear that someone has the potential to succeed at something, then people don't blame them for failing or wanting to give up. It's clear that you have incredible potential. You're in med school at 24 despite having ADHD and depression. You've accomplished a lot, and you know you can succeed. That's why you're hard on yourself.

> I have to believe it will get better. I don't believe it right now but I have to eventually.

There's a huge difference between not believing you can, and not believing you will. If you don't believe you can do something, then it's very easy to say, "why bother trying?" It's logical, if a bit defeatist. It's how many people live their lives, content because they don't think they could do better. If you don't believe you will do something, that just means you could do it, but when you try to picture yourself doing it, you see it just not happening, for some reason or another, and you judge your hypothetical self. This is a symptom of depression. All you can think of are the times you failed in the past, not the times you succeeded - in getting through high school, in getting through college, in getting into med school, in meeting your SO and maintaining a relationship with them (That's hard for people with ADHD).

Because you know that you didn't fail because you just aren't smart enough or clever enough, that means there was just something wrong with your approach. Try looking at one of your recent mis-steps from a detached, analytical point of view. Instead of treating it like evidence of some weakness of character, treat it like a symptom, because that's what it is. Put on your medical professional hat and scientifically examine what went wrong, as if it's someone else's experience.

Imagine a person recently diagnosed with diabetes. Maybe a kid with type 1, or an adult with type 2. They try to keep in mind their disease, but sometimes they get caught up in the moment, maybe at a restaurant with their friends, or too absorbed in their work or school, and they crash or spike. It's not that they're stupid, and it's not that they lacked the willpower to constantly mind their levels. It just happens sometimes, because people tend to assume they're normal, and it's easy to forget when everyone else can do something "the normal way" that you can't. The wrong approach is to tell that diabetic person that they can never participate in "normal person" things, that they must always eat at home from carefully prepared special boring meals and must choose a job, a life that makes it easy to manage their diabetes. No. You work with that person to help them come up with strategies that let them live life by dealing with their illness as just another part of life. It's just a slightly different way of doing things. Maybe they carry a little finger-pricker thing and some emergency glucose in their purse or manly man bag when they're out with friends, and they set up subtle reminders on their phone to check themselves every so often at work or at school. With the right support system, they can get used to it and live life with relatively little overhead.

Like that diabetic person, you can't pretend you can approach life exactly the same way someone without ADHD can. Someone else can say, "Oh, I'll remember that," and have a chance of actually remembering. Us, not so much. But that doesn't mean you're doomed to a life of forgetting important things and your license expiring or your rent being late. It means every time you get a bill, you ALWAYS put 5 different reminders in your phone to beep at you before it's due. It means when you get some important paperwork, you leave it paperclipped to your keys, or taped to your bathroom mirror, somewhere you CANNOT miss it. It means when a patient mentions a symptom, you write it down, and when your boss verbally asks you to do something, you ask them to please send you an email and then you write that shit down in two different places right then and there because you carry at least 3 moleskines or folded-up pieces of loose leaf or just ANY paper you can write on, and at least 5 pens with ink on your person AT ALL TIMES, and then you put a reminder in your phone or your Outlook or both to remind yourself to do that thing. It means that you take the Checklist Manifesto to the n^th degree. It also means you plan every day, and schedule time to plan every day, and set multiple reminders that hey, it's planning time for the next 15 minutes and hey, that's enough planning for today, you're getting bogged down in details.

There are so many of these little coping mechanisms mentioned in various books and various threads in this subreddit that it seems overwhelming. But once you have one in place, it melts into the background, and it's just there helping you, and if it doesn't work, you're not a failure, it's just not for you, and you try another, because it's worth it to have a life that's not consumed by your ADHD. You can be in crisis mode, or you can be in management mode, and once you can get into management mode, it just gets easier and easier. You don't remove the structure you created for yourself any more than a diabetic person would stop checking themselves and assume they know what low or high feels like; you just optimize your systems for your life.

u/cogitoergosam · 2 pointsr/DepthHub

Here's a good book on the subject: "The Checklist Manifesto" by surgeon Atul Gawande (M.D., M.P.H., FACS). He's written a lot on the subject of process and environment and the role they play in medicine and elsewhere.

The long and short of it is that checklists and repetition have huge positive influences on outcomes.

u/johnnycrackhead · 2 pointsr/sysadmin

I'll only advise on the "how to write checklists" portion, by recommending this really excellent read: The Checklist Manifesto

Seriously. I thought I was good at writing procedures until I read this book. Now I'm good at writing procedures.

u/kaidomac · 2 pointsr/productivity

>After a few dates we realised that we still love eachother and that not maintaining our relationship was the biggest mistake we made.

On this point specifically - I ran into a similar problem many years ago. Like 6 months into my marriage, the honeymoon period was over, as they say. All relationships have their ups & downs & it's super easy to feel like quitting when you feel like there's nothing left. We talked it over & looked at the situation & realized that we weren't dating each other anymore. When you're married, you're just kind of there at home all the time, so why go out & why put any effort into anything? The chase was over, you got what you wanted, end of story, right?

As it turns out, actively doing things together is what helps you bond & grow (this is only obvious once the lightbulb goes off in your brain, haha!), whether it's dating or moving in or fixing up an old house or having kids or whatever. The core thing that we realized was that we weren't actively planning out any kind of one-on-one time, so - as dumb as this sounds - we setup a weekly appointment for a date. We were both very busy at the time with our respective jobs, but we made it a point to carve out a date night every week. We alternated who planned it, so it was my job to figure out dinner & an activity every other week. That way, the job load was split, we both had to put some effort into doing something fun together, and it was a surprise what we'd be doing together on the weeks when I didn't have to plan.

Sounds pretty lame, but it worked AWESOME! It also opened my eyes to the concept of "plot vs. story", especially regarding checklists - checklists were the plot, the required parts, the engine - to keep the story moving; checklists were NOT the purpose or meaning of the story! It's super easy to get those confused, because using things like a personal productivity system requires interaction with the system's controls on our part, and we get duped into feeling like the system is the point, not the output of the system, which is getting stuff done & enjoying stuff!

Being kind of a free-range artist growing up, things like checklists & schedules were mentally & emotionally extremely demotivating for me. Mainly, they felt super restrictive. I didn't like feeling tied down to a schedule or locking out my options. As it turns out, in practice, that is not the case at ALL! As it turns out, living by checklists & alarm reminders is like having a secret superpower! One of the books that really cemented this concept into my brain was The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gaw:

  1. In how I experienced doing things
  2. In what stuff I actually ended up doing
  3. In my results

    I lived an incredibly reactive life before adopting a checklist-based personal productivity system; using checklists allowed me to be proactive & actively decide not only what I wanted to invite into my life, but how I wanted to experience things & what kind of results I got. The system we implemented in our marriage was pretty simple & outwardly boring, but had profound impacts on our relationship, because we weren't just on reactive cruise-control anymore, we were proactive about taking adult control over our lives. I've since applied these basic concepts to pretty much every aspect of my life:

  • Why am I so tired & low-energy all the time? How can I feel better?
  • How do you eat for energy & good health, while still eating for happiness & enjoyment? (macros & meal-prep!)
  • How can you do a daily workout at home & get shredded, without having to go to the gym? (calisthenics!)
  • How can I improve my relationship with my wife? (alternating scheduled date nights every week!)
  • How can I manage my finances in a low-hassle way & get ahead of the curve? (personal financial system!)
  • How can I easily keep a clean & tidy house all the time & integrate deep cleaning into that system so that I could spread the work out over time?
  • How could I remember to maintain my car through its regular maintenance schedule for oil changes, tire rotations, fluids replacements, etc.?

    The list goes on & on & on. We have to be aware of what all of our personal situations are, and then we have to decide how we want to tackle each situation, and the way we implement that, after the decision-making is done, is via trigger-driven checklists (in my case, mostly via smartphone alarms). This creates a shift from "bah, I have to do this" to "what do I have the opportunity to do right now?". For example, when I was in school, having things broken down like that into step-by-step lists of next-action items mean that I suddenly had the opportunity to knock out my homework right away & get it done early, rather than procrastinating & putting it off day after day & letting it build up to horrific levels of work, lol.

    So I had a very distorted view of what checklists really were & what they really meant in my life. I thought they were restrictive, when in reality, it was my own poor, non-productive behavior that was trapping me in crappy situations, like having to stay up late to do homework because I goofed off first & being tired the next day, or having my relationship drift apart because I wasn't treating it like a living thing & feeding & caring for it on a regular basis. All of which simply boil down to checklists with alarms, haha!
u/FliesLikeABrick · 2 pointsr/therewasanattempt

there are 3-4 books that I keep at least 2 copies on-hand of, because they are informative and I like giving them to people with no expectation of giving them back.

Ok this sounds like I am talking about religious texts - they aren't. They are:

- Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies

- The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

- The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing

- The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns (Little Books. Big Profits)

​

The first two are must-reads for engineers working in any kind of system, be it computers, electronics, mechanical, or people systems (project management, etc)

​

The last 2 I tend to recommend to people who think that reasonable investment awareness and decisions requires a lot of specialized knowledge and attention

u/shri07vora · 2 pointsr/medicalschool

Atul Gawande - Better, Complications, and checklist manifesto.

Sandeep Jauhar - Intern

Jerome Groopman - How doctor's think

Michael Collins - Hot lights, cold steel and Blue collar, blue scrubs

Samuel Shem - House of God

Brian Eule - Match day

Paul Ruggieri - Confessions of a surgeon

Emily R. Transue - On call

Okay so I was in the same position you are in right now. I wanted to read as much as I could because I truly found it fascinating. I read these books and I'm glad I did. These books just give you an idea of how hard doctors work and what the life of a doctor is like. Another recommendation is Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential. It has nothing to do with medicine but I read it and I think you should too. He talks about the life of a chef and how perfection and long long hours are demanded of him. I feel like there are some overlaps between the different settings. Chef/doctor and Restaurant/hospital. Anyways, This list should last you a long time. Hope you enjoy.


Edit: Added links.

u/Hashi856 · 2 pointsr/gtd

Well, if you're actively working on Mr. Smith's case or file or whatever, I would do the two minute task. As I said, if it's important to log your progress for a project, I would definitely do it. If you have a template that you use for many customers, I would personally create a checklist and then attach a copy of that checklist to every person's file. That way you can see whether or not you've done X or Y for any given customer. I'm a huge proponent of checklists. If you're interested, I would seriously recommend The Checklist Manifesto.

u/eclectro · 2 pointsr/todayilearned

> but there is no standard thing for surgery.

It's "below" many doctors. But this is not a new concept. See the book "The Checklist Manifesto."

It is estimated that at around 44,000 to 98,000 people a year die from preventable medical errors. Imagine an airliner filled with people going down in the French Alps on a weekly basis. Don't you think that everyone would put their foot down and do something about it?

But for some reason doctors and the medical establishments they belong to are given a complete pass.

u/quadras_music · 2 pointsr/Cricket
u/Graped_in_the_mouth · 2 pointsr/politics

There are a lot of people who took (and misunderstood) Econ 101 classes and now think their Anarcho-Capitalist/Libertarianism is sound policy. It isn't. It's incredibly destructive in the real world, and I'll explain why. I'll even put a TL;DR summary at the end of each point, for the lazy, since this is a goddamn wall of text.

People talk a big game about how "labor should be a negotiation between employer and employee", and how if you don't like the wage offered, you can "just walk away". Or, worse, how unskilled laborers should just "go to school and get some skills so they can be skilled laborers". These talking points all belie a complete misunderstanding of the phenomenon of market failure, and the ways in which real life does not always conform perfectly to the theory you heard in class.

First, labor is, in most circumstances, not an equal negotiation between two parties with equal leverage. When you have rare or unique skills in high demand built up over a lifetime of work and education, sure, you can afford to negotiate over your salary until you get what you want. You probably have a decent savings, and time probably isn't a huge factor.

For the rest of the population, the "negotiations" are extremely one-sided. For so-called "low-skill" jobs (people always mention burger flipping, ditch digging, etc), the prospective employee has virtually no bargaining power whatsoever. If a company offers you a wage, and it's not enough for you to live on, you can either walk away from the job, or accept it. There is no negotiation to be had. The employer has four jobs to fill and 150 people who want to fill them. Good luck.

Summary: Employment is a buyers market, and employees (especially those to whom minimum wage applies) do not have sufficient leverage to negotiate for a living wage, even if the job they're applying for creates a significantly higher economic surplus for the producer.

Which brings me to our second issue: time sensitivity. A lot of people who are, you know, alive, have bills to pay. - health insurance, food, shelter - and those bills can rack up quickly. Without a good safety net, people who are faced with the choice between taking an exploitative wage and, essentially, risking starvation, homelessness or illness, will choose the exploitative wage. Desperation causes people to accept wages that are significantly below the value of their work; as long as there are poor people, there will be a steady supply of workers willing to trade their labor at unfair prices because the alternative is unacceptable. This is the real leverage a company has against prospective employees: McDonalds won't go out of business tomorrow if it doesn't find a burger flipper at it's desired price, so it can hold out at a low wage until someone is desperate enough to accept. Job-seekers rarely have that luxury.

We saw this in spades before the minimum wage existed; people had their children working because if they didn't, they couldn't afford to feed those children. Do you think those workers had the opportunity to negotiate for a fair wage? Of course not. The employers had near-absolute market power (as they still do, the only exception being a price-floor on labor that limits just how much exploitation can occur), and the workers had virtually none. In some industries, there are decent unions, where collective bargaining is a real possibility; this is not the case for most minimum-wage jobs. Most people simply can't afford either the lost wages.

Summary: workers (especially those without high-demand skills) cannot afford to spend time searching and bargaining for better salaries, and often have no choice but to accept unfair wages or suffer consequences.

So, we've explained the unequal market power that disrupts the so-called free sale of labor, and the desperation that causes people to accept a wage below the value of said labor - which brings us to the next problem: education.

A lot of people believe that a living-wage should be reserved for only skilled workers. This has always been somewhat elitist, but was somewhat viable as a model back when education costs were reasonable, but things have changed. The ratio of tuition-cost to minimum-wage (you know, the jobs you're supposed to have while you get educated?) has gone up over 5 times, adjusted for inflation. Someone working a minimum wage job in 1976 could work for about 10 weeks to cover tuition; now, it costs 50. One can only afford to be a full time student if one is also as full time worker...except, once this money goes to tuition, there's none left over for food, rent or anything else.

Now, it's virtually impossible to work a full-time entry-level job while also paying your tuition. As such, students who want to "become skilled workers" are forced to take enormous student loans, some of which are fair, and many of which are not. Many student loan companies are extremely predatory, and the interest rates students are charged are very high. This not only means that a student is less likely to be able to afford school, but that they will be able to save far less money after school, meaning time is a larger factor

Summary: Education costs have risen disproportionately to minimum wage, and as such, "becoming a skilled worker" is much more cost-prohibitive than it was 40 years ago.

Fourth, we reach the issue of "lost jobs" - i.e. that "a job below a living wage is better than no job at all, and forcing people to pay minimum wage means fewer people will work."

This is an outright lie, perpetrated by corporate apologists and Libertarians misusing theoretical microeconomics and trying to apply it on the macro level to justify exploitation. Jobs are not disappearing en-masse as a result of minimum wage increases.

The second thing that most people fail to realize is that people will, generally, try to cobble together a living wage by working more than one job. If jobs pay more, people can stop working two jobs, and instead work only one; this means that job, previously someone's second, can become a primary job for someone else. The end result is that, as the study linked above states, there is no correlation between minimum wage increases and job loss.

Summary: Minimum wage increases are not correlated with decreasing levels of employment.


Finally, we have to deal with the question that no one on the anti-minimum wage side wants to address: social good.

A higher minimum wage, assuming employment levels stay constant, mean that more money ends up in the hands of the working poor. The working poor have the highest marginal propensity to consume, and economic measure of how much of a person's income is actually spent, rather than saved. This means that a large portion of these higher wages will be spent and injected right back into the economy, increasing demand for goods and services. This will, in turn, mean more profits for the corporations that supply those goods and services, meaning they can afford to pay those higher wages more easily.

This results in decreased overall poverty, which means not only a healthier economy in general, but a healthier society; crimes of desperation go down with poverty rates, and formerly impoverished people with new, higher incomes tend to reinvest them into themselves and their communities (as demonstrated by the Basic Income experiments in India), thus making America a better place to live in general.

You may be asking "but won't this cause inflation?!" The answer is "only a little". High inflation is generally only a major problem in economies that are either 1)printing money at an absurd rate, as in Zimbabwe and the Weimar Republic, or 2) are rapidly developing, and supply is struggling to keep pace with demand.

The United States fits into neither of these categories, and as such, a relatively meager increase to the minimum wage is unlikely to cause significant inflation in a robust, highly developed economy with a more measured pace of growth. Remember, inflation is not just "more money" existing, it's the phenomenon of "too much money chasing too few goods". If supply is able to keep up with demand (as it has in the United States for decades), inflation is a relatively small problem.

The major exception to this is the "stagflation" of the 1980s, which caused almost entirely by OPEC, due to the fact that oil became extremely scarce and drove up costs all over the economy without driving up wages. This was a completely different phenomenon from regular, run-of-the mill inflation, and unrelated to questions of minimum wage.

Summary: Raising minimum wage means less poverty means less crime and other social net positives.

There are, of course, caveats; yes, raising minimum wage can incentivize some businesses to automate more quickly, meaning that jobs will be lost. However, this is only a change in time-frame, since those jobs were going to be replaced anyway as automation becomes cheaper, more efficient, and more capable of replacing higher-skilled humans.

For more information, I highly recommend Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford, on the coming problems associated with increased automation, and the options we have, as a society, to solve them.

u/key_lime_pie · 2 pointsr/nfl

You probably don't want to read books like The Second Machine Age or Rise of the Robots then. Self-driving cars are the least of our problems. Consider what we're going to be faced with when automation replaces roughly half of all jobs in the United States over the next 30 years. Truck driving is already headed that way.

Anyway, I work in automation, and unless there's a major (like life-altering) change in government policy, we are all going to be proper fucked in a short amount of time. But at least we'll get there faster in our self-driven cars.

u/Teantis · 2 pointsr/InternationalDev

Read criticisms on international aid and development now or in college. There have been very many good ones written in the past 15 years or so about aid effectiveness, programming, results monitoring, and philosophy. The industry for the past couple of years has been undergoing some soul-searching as it struggles to quantify its positive impact and worth, and those pressures will only increase with the prevailing atmosphere of world politics.

The approaches I'm familiar with are the "Politics Matters" crowd which is trying to approach development with a greater focus on the politics of the countries they are working in and how to deal with that. There's some background context here involving the Washington Consensus and its failure, and a long-running development industry focus on technical assistance, financial support, and conditional loans, which is shifting. Some good reading that may be a little early for you as a junior in high school but you could maybe glean some insights from it:

Adrian Leftwich on Thinking and Working Politically

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by AO Hirschmann

Overseas Development Institute's Thinking and Working Politically Reading Pack

Doing Development Differently community's book they're centered around Harvard I believe, it's free

As others have said a technical focus will help you get an initial job (and one that might even actually pay well), but you can enter as a generalist it's just harder. I kind of half-heartedly studied economics as an undergrad and that was my only higher education but I managed to find a niche in development for many years (and may return to it in a few years). Development agencies and international NGOs fetishize advanced degrees, almost everyone else I met in the industry who was at a program management level and above had at least a master's and many had a Ph.D, except for me. I never felt hamstrung in actual work terms by my lack of an advanced degree, but it is hard to get your foot in the door without one. I just luckily stumbled upon a boss and mentor who didn't really care about those unwritten rules who gave me my start and then helped me lift myself up continuously throughout my career.

I would also highly recommend learning a language, and like u/travelingag recommended study a lot of history, especially focusing on modern history of the last ~150 or so years. I can't say whether going deep is better than going broad, but definitely (obviously) focus on undeveloped areas of the world where int. development organizations work. It would be a big waste of time to study a bunch of European history if you want to work on development.

u/TheSpoom · 2 pointsr/ExperiencedDevs

The Clean Coder is pretty great as it talks about being a professional developer and all that that entails. Very opinionated though (as all of Uncle Bob's books are). "If you don't do TDD, fuck you" is a fairly accurate paraphrasing of one chapter. Still, I found a lot of value there.

I recently read Rework which is a very quick read, but very dense with information on how Basecamp runs their business and many ideas of things that you should or should not do. If you do any freelancing or are thinking of starting your own business at some point, I'd recommend it.

Probably going to read Remote next as I'm working with remote business partners myself.

u/bradestey · 2 pointsr/Atlanta

Remote: Office Not Required by Jason Fried will give you all the arguments and talking points you could ever need to sell remote working to your company. http://www.amazon.com/Remote-Office-Required-Jason-Fried/dp/0804137501/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&linkCode=sl1&tag=braest-20&linkId=12130157992a2fd47f4eb0ff14e95b73

u/reddsal · 2 pointsr/todayilearned

There is a wonderful book about process improvement from about 35 years ago called The Goal by Eli Goldwater that is written as a novel. Wonderful book - terrible novel: The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement https://www.amazon.com/dp/0884271951/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_AS.vDb6F2QH3T

And The Phoenix Project - on DevOps is an homage to The Goal and is also a novel: The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win https://www.amazon.com/dp/1942788290/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_9Y.vDb2981BYS

Also an amazing book and a terrible novel. Both of these are great examples of the power of different learning styles. The novel format accommodates Socratic Learning (questioning) and is just a terrific way to teach what would otherwise be very dry subjects. Humans are wired for storytelling and these books are exemplars of that.

u/DataIsMyDrug · 2 pointsr/politics

May I stand on a soapbox?

Automation isn't that simple. Automating processes that are already flawed to begin with is worse than no automation at all - as all automation does of a bad system is just compound the issue, and bring in new constraints.

Basically - automation is a solution, but it isn't the only solution - in fact, automation should be the last solution looked at it - and your solution should be the last step in the process improvement.

If you're serious about getting into management, and you work with processes that you feel could be made better or automated - I'd suggest the following reading:

The Goal

The Toyota Way

u/SQLSavant · 2 pointsr/learnprogramming

Some of these are directly related to programming and some are not but are additional reading that touch on skills that most every programmer should have some concept or idea of.

I've read all of these at some point throughout my career and can attest to their usefulness. Here's my personal list:

u/Ardentfrost · 2 pointsr/technology

THE book to read about changing how you view optimization problems in general is actually a novel called The Goal. I read it about every other year. It's really easy to look at a problem and point at a symptom as the cause, and that's what the book really talks about. Again, it's a novel, not a text book, but it's so good, and a really easy read. It focuses on optimization in manufacturing, but the lessons can be applied to any field.

The math of optimization is actually probability and statistics. The formula you're building for a system includes variables that align with some sort of probability curve, and so the "answer" is what results in the best result over time, not at any given moment. What really describes all of this is called Stochastic Processes. Unfortunately, I don't really have a good book for you to just buy and learn that, but there appear to be quite a few on Amazon that cover the subject.

So, the first will change your brain, the second will get you down the path of nitty gritty. In my opinion, everyone in the world should read The Goal, though.

u/space_noodel · 2 pointsr/gamedev

I think that The Goal is a great book on business and management.

u/D_Katana · 2 pointsr/EngineeringStudents

If that one's too dry for you, you might try [The Goal] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0884271951/ref=sr_1_1_ha?ie=UTF8&qid=1375240896&sr=8-1&keywords=the+goal) or Velocity- both focus on Lean and Six Sigma, but take the form of a novel instead of a textbook.

u/velatine · 1 pointr/IAmA

> the individuals had character flaws that combined with their position of authority and access to information, allowed them to do some pretty big WTFs.

I'm sorry you had to deal with all that damage.

I can't even imagine the levels of stress and frustration that you experienced.

"position of authority and access to information" that sounds like dismal system design.

I'm familiar with SoD (Segregation of Duties) which is intended in business to design a system with appropriate risk management and dispersion of authority to prevent theft and collusion. For example, different people in charge of custody of assets, authorization and recording.

The system structure changes results.

> Discussing an open investigation with everyone who will listen, that's not what is supposed to happen. Charging an individual with no evidence of a crime, and only pieced together "maybes" is not supposed to happen, not on the level of the charges they brought forth.

If there was no channel for recourse, then there was nothing to prevent abuse.

> A good person is not good 24/7, and a bad person is not bad 24/7.

I don't disagree with this. This has been demonstrated in psychology experiments, too.

But there is a qualitative difference in motivation between the 2 molds (neuro-typical and sociopath/antisocial personality disorder).

I am not a psychology professional. But a good book is by expert Robert Hare Snakes in Suits

I'm not against "low empathy" per se-- people can believe what they want to believe-- I'm into cruelty prevention.

edit: maybe it seems ironic that I said "cruelty prevention" in a hacker thread, but taken at face value krage28's story is more foolish than malicious.

u/randomnighmare · 1 pointr/marvelstudios

> here is no difference between a psychopath and a sociopath

Okay, thanks. For some reason, I always thought that a psychopath can't love because it is believed that there are a biological, psychological, social factors/history, and/or genetic differences.

And that sociopaths are made because of social issues and early environment. So, I always thought that sociopaths can at least have one or maybe two different people that the can feel something towards because they are at least (according to brain scans) like the rest of us.

Now, my understanding of this does come from this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Snakes-Suits-When-Psychopaths-Work/dp/0061147893/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1497405119&sr=8-1&keywords=Snakes+in+Suits

u/ludovician · 1 pointr/Advice

Don't cover your ass at all times. Instead, find a company to work for where you don't need to cover your ass at all times. They're out there.

Also, all Linked-In recommendations are moderated by the account owner, so you won't be able to post anything nasty about him - and I wouldn't try.

+1 for contacting the person above though, especially if you're letting him know that there is a problem without necessarily wanting your job back. You might also want to send them a gift wrapped copy of Snakes in Suits.

u/aasdfrw · 1 pointr/AskFeminists

psychopaths make up 1 percent of the population-yeah that's scary stuff. I speculate that the only reason why you don't hear more about them in the media is because they disapporinately makeup the top one percent of society. In fact the guy wrote the first psychopath test wrote a book on the topic. People should be far more concerned about the fact that the people running our have a mental illness,especially this one rather then the fact they have a penis like feminists do. Yeah there are more ceo's then there are psychopaths however just take a look at north korea to see what a society run by a mentally ill looks like. I'd rather have all our ceo's be women then have even 1% of our leaders be psychopaths.

u/KingBroseph · 1 pointr/worldnews

www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0061147893?pc_redir=1405314910&robot_redir=1

u/residents_parking · 1 pointr/ukpolitics

Let's look on the bright side: we don't have to live next to psychopaths anymore.

u/coconutcrab · 1 pointr/sociology

Hm. I hope this is in the arena, but Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody might be of interest to you!

u/jchiu003 · 1 pointr/OkCupid

Depends on how old you are.

  • Middle school: I really enjoyed this, this, and this, but I don't think I can read those books now (29) without cringing a little bit. Especially, Getting Things Done because I already know how to make to do list, but I still flip through all 3 books occastionally.

  • High school: I really enjoyed this, this, and this, but if you're a well adjusted human and responsible adult, then I don't think you'll find a lot of helpful advice from these 6 books so far because it'll be pretty basic information.

  • College: I really enjoyed this, this, and started doing Malcolm Gladwell books. The checklist book helped me get more organized and So Good They Can't Ignore You was helpful starting my career path.
  • Graduate School: I really enjoyed this, this, and this. I already stopped with most "self help" books and reading more about how to manage my money or books that looked interesting like Stiff.

  • Currently: I'm working on this, this, and this. Now I'm reading mostly for fun, but all three of these books are way out of my league and I have no idea what their talking about, but they're areas of my interest. History and AI.
u/Hedgehogz_Mom · 1 pointr/bodybuilding

Checklist Manifesto

interesting as hell read

u/FountainsOfFluids · 1 pointr/LifeProTips

I mostly do this in my head, but yeah sometimes I make real lists. It's a huge help. Real LPT material. Lists are incredibly useful both in professional life and personal life.

Also, be sure to adapt this idea for your personal style of thinking. You can see in these replies that people have different methods for breaking down large goals into simpler tasks. Figure out what works for you.

Further reading: The Checklist Manifesto

Or listening: NPR interview about The Checklist Manifesto

u/DortDrueben · 1 pointr/movies

I just finished reading The Checklist Manifesto (Fantastic, I highly recommend it.) One section details the Miracle on the Hudson and credits it to a synchronized effort of a Team sticking to their checklists. Apparently when Sully and the co-pilot deboarded they looked at each other and said, "Well, that wasn't that bad." The author makes the point that we tend to celebrate lone heroes. The myth of the "master builder." One man has all the information and experience in his head to accomplish a complicated task. When the truth (and more importantly, saving lives) is about teamwork, management, and following a checklist.

u/kepold · 1 pointr/relationship_advice

nothing you said seemed like a big deal.

i mean, maybe you're a flake, idk. you sound pretty normal to me.

if you want to change it, then start making a list. use a list app like "any do" or something. and just write down what you want to do so you don't forget. get in a habit of doing the list.

read "checklist manifesto" by Atul Gawande
https://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/dp/0312430000

u/practicingitpm · 1 pointr/projectmanagement

I just use Excel, the world's most flexible tiny database management system. Work item, due date, assigned to, done date. If the checklist needs other columns, like checked by, it's easy to add them.

Have you read The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande?

u/pgabrielfreak · 1 pointr/news

Here's an amazing read on checklists: "The Checklist Manifesto"
http://www.amazon.com/The-Checklist-Manifesto-Things-Right/dp/0312430000

u/JamminOnTheOne · 1 pointr/sysadmin

The surgical industry got the idea of using checklists from the construction industry, which actually has a really good track record historically (there have been a lot more botched surgeries than buildings that fall apart). Source

u/les_diabolique · 1 pointr/goodyearwelt

I probably have 50 or 60 books in the queue, i'm a bit behind!

I finally finished Zero to One by Peter Thiel. It's not a long read, but I've barely had time to read.

Here are some of the books:

u/gonetosea · 1 pointr/politics

Looking at the economy through some kind of *ism is worthless.

What has happened is the control of how resources are distributed in the United States has been consolidated into just a few people and groups. Too few people are now deciding how resources are distributed. It is not a free market anymore because the market is fixed. It's not that they might be stupid, I'm sure that they are very smart. It's that no human is smart enough to have a small group decide how so many resources get distributed. Call it what you will the problem with the Soviet Union is the same as the problem with Goldman Sachs -- a small group of people are deciding how a huge portion of resources are being used and nobody is smart enough to do it well.

For example, they made the mistake in providing too much resources for people to build houses during the last decade. They, the bankers, have a social responsibility to say we have enough houses lets put some of this money we decide who gets into something else. That is the same type of mistake that Gosplan and Gosbank made.

The invisible hand of the market is a much better tool for allocating resources than small groups of people just because of the lack of human ability to see such complex systems for example the complexity of making a pencil. I believe in the Wisdom of the Crowd, that it is truly remarkable how well working together the audience does at answering tough a question on WhoWants to Be a Millionaire.

Go right ahead and tell me that a small group of people should decide how most of the resources should be used. Lots of people in Russia would agree with you.

If the people who lead the banks don't see what they do as a huge responsibility the system will crumble. When it does we might try to do the same thing like people who keep losing in Vegas yet return with the hope that this one time they might break the bank or we might try something else.

Although it is completely true that people taking care or people is a thousand times better than governments taking care of people, it is also true that if people are not taken care of seriously fucked up things happen to a society which is why I am supporting Obama one hundred percent in his fight against the Republicans trying to get people the help they need.

The best way to prevent the government from taking care of people is to be a self starter and go out and take care of people as a person. The more people are cared for by their church, families and communities more the need of the government to take care of them is nullified thus nullifying the need of government.

Lately, Goldman Sachs has been all for self. You would be surprised how often it is in one's best interest the interest of the other guy and the selfish thing to do is paradoxically the selfless thing to do. Our economic system if it is going to survive will have to face this and it's not up to me to make the decision. I am like you at the mercy of the small group of people who make those decisions. We are at their mercy and can only hope for their wisdom.

It's possible that the small group might start to make good decisions as we have seen in the last few years the small group who controls the Chinese economy make some what currently looks like great decisions. Live and learn.

u/Sportsgrind · 1 pointr/explainlikeimfive

Really the jobs have been replaced with automation and technological advancement. Imagine you sell widgets. A robot comes out that cost a tenth of what you pay your employees but is 100 times more efficient. The benefits of switching to automation are staggering in this case.

This is explained in great detail in Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future.

u/findmeout888 · 1 pointr/portugal

Por enquanto a Inteligência Artifical é "estreita", ou seja, apesar de já poder aprender ainda não tem consciência de si mesma e é dirigida a funções específicas. Há todo um artigo deste livro sobre isso. Por enquanto estamos muito longe que tal aconteça. Quando isso acontecer, dar-se-á uma "singularidade" segundo Ray Kurzweil, com consequências debatíveis e imprevisíveis - imagine-se uma máquina capaz de condensar toda a inteligência e toda a informação existente que começa a auto-melhorar-se. Será bom ou mau para nós? Nem o Stephen Hawking é capaz de responder a essa pergunta.

u/entropywins9 · 1 pointr/nyc

>Except, empirically, it shows otherwise.

Actually, minimum wages have been shown to cause job losses: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/business/economy/seattle-minimum-wage.html

The Berkeley study covered restaurant workers only. A different University of Washington study compiled data from all sectors in Seattle, and showed far worse results:

The University of Washington researchers found that the minimum-wage increase resulted in higher wages, but also a significant reduction in the working hours of low-wage earners. This was especially true of the more recent minimum-wage increase, from as high as $11 an hour to up to $13 an hour in 2016. In that case, wages rose about 3 percent, but the number of hours worked by those in low-wage jobs dropped about 9 percent — a sizable amount that led to a net loss of earnings on average.

Yeah surely the rents don't help, but if you make the minimum wage $100/hour, you will have fewer jobs. This is econ 101 stuff.

As for the automation replacing jobs thing, the experts on AI/robotics are mostly in agreement on this. Check out:

The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business and one of the most cited scholars in information systems and economics, and Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at MIT,

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, by Martin Ford.

High-Skilled White Collar Work? Machines Can Do That Too NY Times article

It's not really a question of when, it's already happening.

Consider how:

Turbotax and automated payroll systems have replaced a significant % of accounting positions

Wall St firms need fewer employees because most trading is now automated

Highly automated Amazon warehouses means fewer employees are needed for retail and malls shut down

Law firms now need fewer new associates and paralegals due to legal software

Universities can hire fewer teaching assistants due to educational software

In the ports of NYC and worldwide a few engineers controlling robotic cranes have replaced tens of thousands of longshoreman unloading and loading ships

Many newer behemoth companies like Facebook and Google are worth far more than old guard firms like GM or Walmart but require only a few hundred to a few tens of thousands of human employees...

And technological progress isn't slowing down, it is speeding up. Think of the approximately 20 million drivers who will be almost surely out of a job within the next 2 decades as self driving cars and trucks hit the roads.

Yes there will still be jobs, but a surprising number of them are being and will continue to be automated, at an ever increasing rate. One cashier watching 10 self-checkout scanners replacing ten cashiers is a good example of the jobs that might still require humans... until you replace her too with a robot.

Neither tariffs nor high minimum wages will change this trend. UBI is really the only long term solution.

u/elbac14 · 1 pointr/Futurology

There is a terrific book on this exact topic that was also a NYT Bestseller: Rise of the Robots

u/omegasnk · 1 pointr/academiceconomics

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty is also a fun political game theory book.

u/ningrim · 1 pointr/politics

When there is disagreement/conflict within an organization, there can be several options for the minority (other than violence)

  • Voice - try to persuade the majority
  • Loyalty - accede to the majority
  • Exit - leave and form a different organization

    Secession has a negative connotation (for understandable reasons), but it shouldn't. The threat of Exit needs to be there, it's healthy for the entire organization if a minority isn't trapped and has the Exit card to play if needed.
u/bwaskiew · 1 pointr/starcraft

By what metric can you determine when bad press is warranted and not a temper-tantrum?

Are you telling me that no one is allowed to criticize anything a company does as long as they can choose not to buy that company's product? Do you know no economic theory?

I honestly can't tell if you are trolling or not.

In the case that you are not, here is a quick read on pertinent economic theory: http://www.amazon.com/Exit-Voice-Loyalty-Responses-Organizations/dp/0674276604

To put it one way: the primary two options customers have to give a company feedback is exit (not buying the product) and voice (bad press). Exit prevents them from receiving money they already would have received, and voice prevents them from getting new customers.

It is actually much more complicated (and more like a symbiosis) but it should be easy enough to see that voice is a perfectly valid form of expressing discontent with a company's product.

u/dutchLogic · 1 pointr/Entrepreneur

I just read the chapter Cabin fever in the book Remote: Office Not Required that give some great insights in how to deal with this issue. I made some photo's so you can read it: http://imgur.com/a/rh42L

u/rekiahh · 1 pointr/Entrepreneur

And also, you say that running any business remotely is highly unlikely. May I refer you to this wonderful book: https://www.amazon.com/Remote-Office-Required-Jason-Fried/dp/0804137501

And do you ever imagine that all your experience and degrees may actually work to stunt your thinking? That you've seen things done a certain way for so long, maybe you find it difficult to imagine that things could be done differently, for similar, if not better results?

u/Heyokalol · 1 pointr/webdev

You should read Remote, it has just the insights you're looking for.

u/napjerks · 1 pointr/ExistentialTherapy

Thanks for posting this lecture introducing his at the time new book When Nietzsche Wept (2011).

In the lecture the story he starts with - the tale of the two healers from Hermann Hesse’s Magister Ludi - who find each other is a great way to start a talk as it kept me listening.

I only have his Existential Psychotherapy and it reads more like a text book. Explaining through prose, or teaching by telling a story, like the book Fish or The Goal is a very entertaining way to learn something and that appears to be what he's doing with When Nietzsche Wept.

Apparently he brings up the tale of the two teachers again later in The Gift of Therapy in 2013.

u/Cola_Doc · 1 pointr/CFBOffTopic
  1. Read The Goal

  2. Look for Herbie

  3. ???

  4. Profit
u/sowbug · 1 pointr/teslamotors

If you find this process stuff interesting, read The Goal: http://www.amazon.com/The-Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0884271951

u/attractivetb · 1 pointr/CGPGrey

Oooh....read "The Goal" by Eli Goldratt - Very easy read, I loved it. There will be plenty to criticize too!

http://www.amazon.com/The-Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0884271951/

u/IwantaModel3 · 1 pointr/teslamotors

I don't know what the source you linked to is thinking, but reducing inventory does not decrease risk, it increases it. Just think, I keep 100 widgets of inventory, and use 20 every day. That means that if something happens in the supply chain, and I don't receive any shipments of that product, the production line can continue running for 5 days. On the other hand, if I keep 20 units in inventory, I am relying on a shipment every single day, or else my entire production shuts down. There are several videos on Youtube with Elon talking about the the production line shutting down because of random supply chain issues. Most of those happened a couple of years ago, but it is a concern when you run a very lean operation. That is extremely risky. Reducing inventory does reduce costs, which is probably why they do it.

Also, I wouldn't trust any source that tries to sell you a product at the end.

> TradeGecko makes world class inventory, order, and supply chain management software for SMEs to help them grow their business. In fact, we support multi warehouse and multi currency functions because we know that many SMEs run global businesses. Our software helps businesses manage their inventory in a way that best suits their practices and objectives - whether it’s Tesla’s lean inventory management model or otherwise.

If you haven't read The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt, I highly recommend it.

For more Tesla specific things to look into, Elon has mentioned bringing in the capability to produce the majority of the components in the car, even if they continue to typically buy the components from outside vendors, it will give them the capacity to get over a supply chain issue.

u/Gary32790 · 1 pointr/engineering

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement - Eliyahu M. Goldratt. A very interesting way of describing manufacturing and other processes to everyday things that most people can relate to. Definitely a must read for anyone who will be going into process engineering or will be an engineer for a manufacturing company.

u/svnft · 1 pointr/IAmA

Would you ever quit it all and go a year without pants?

u/dmurko · 1 pointr/smallbusiness

What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team, NY Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html

One-On-One Meetings - https://getlighthouse.com/blog/how-to-start-one-on-ones-your-teams/

Growing Great Employees, Erika Andersen - http://www.amazon.com/Growing-Great-Employees-Extraordinary-Performers/dp/1591841909 (though I hate the stupid comparisons with plants)

The Year Without Pants, Scott Berkun - http://www.amazon.com/The-Year-Without-Pants-WordPress-com/dp/1118660633

The E-Myth Revisited, Michael E. Gerber http://www.amazon.com/The-E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses/dp/0887307280

u/nofearinc · 1 pointr/IAmA

We love Asana as well, it's the tool we use the most on a daily basis.

So if you want to be fully distributed, there are various factors you need to comply with - time zone differences, different languages, cultures, religions, styles of work. While some of these could be unified, it's often hard to convince a European to work US business hours every single day. Different holidays also matter - you have to maintain a calendar of all national or religious holidays since location/religion could define these.

We do several things to keep a healthy remote work environment.

  1. Our communication happens in Asana - even if there are quick chats live, on Skype or Google Hangouts, the recap should be in Asana. This prevents any blockers or isolated team members and leads to a good level of transparency
  2. Our planning is built with remote in mind. We don't allow a client to call and ask for urgent changes today since it's often impossible. Our internal management, client communication and legal docs are shaped around that foundation.
  3. The easiest thing for us is working on weekly sprints - for example, the weekend in Saudi Arabia is Thu-Fri, so if we work with a Saudi contractor, we always deliver a feature (or report) on Monday and don't care what's the definition of "weekend".
  4. I always try to identify the three most important values for every employee or contractor. If I am able to satisfy these, then all of the daily minor misunderstandings or the emotional remote gap doesn't matter because the priorities are in place. It's hard to plan work- and time-wise for everyone, but that's what keeps the team together.
  5. I try to be online as much as possible even if I'm not working, just to be able to answer a blocker question or assign some tasks around.

    There's much more that I could share, but I'd like to refer to three books that you will probably enjoy:

u/ottoema · 1 pointr/agile

I can recommend Scott Berkuns book about his experience in a distributed team: https://www.amazon.com/Year-Without-Pants-WordPress-com-Future/dp/1118660633

u/GenericUnitedFan · 1 pointr/muppetiers

Radical Candor, great book!

u/stpn108 · 1 pointr/EngineeringManagers

"Radical Candor" by Kim Scott
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250103509

u/SirSassquanch · 1 pointr/sysadmin

Designer here. This book has been fantastic for me.
Radical Candor

u/he-said-youd-call · 1 pointr/todayilearned

Folklore.org is an amazing site that collects stories written by the original Macintosh team. Many, if not all, of the stories were also collected in a book titled Revolution in the Valley. A few of the best stories: I'll Be Your Best Friend, It's The Moustache That Matters, Reality Distortion Field, Calculator Construction Set

Here's the Wikipedia page about DONKEY.BAS, and down in the external links section of that article is a way to try the game for yourself.

u/0102030405 · 1 pointr/consulting

Becoming the Evidence Based Manager by Gary Latham

Leadership BS by Jeffrey Pfeffer

Dying for a Paycheck by Jeffrey Pfeffer

Evidence Based Management by Denise Rousseau and Eric Barends

The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle

Work Rules by Laszlo Bock (of course)

​

And more that are actually based on solid evidence, not stories (sorry, I mean case studies. Same thing).

u/PaperHammer · 1 pointr/cscareerquestions

The Managers Path might be worth a look.

u/sam__izdat · 1 pointr/Showerthoughts

2/3


  • "... a huge portion of silly bureaucratic, managerial, etc jobs would just vanish"
  • "There is no economic reason for them to exist and their existing is the opposite of what the textbooks say should happen in a capitalist economy"

    David Graeber put a lot of time and research into this and he can explain it better than me basically repeating all the same things. Here's the book. Here's the article that started it in strike mag. Very worthwhile reading.
    > You seem to like to argue against yourself.

    This is likely a comprehension problem, not a "nonsense" or "absurd assertion" problem. I'll try to use an example that might help you understand. The math is stupid to keep it simple.
u/Homunculus_I_am_ill · 1 pointr/Showerthoughts

Probably not just money, but a combination of low pay, how dead-end it is, and how useless it feels to do it.

u/SNAFUBAR- · 1 pointr/AskMen
u/Patman128 · 1 pointr/Economics

There are millions of people working jobs with literally no purpose. They provide no value at all. It's not surprising though when you force people to work just to survive.

Automation isn't going to reduce the number of people working, it's just going to push more and more people into jobs where they have to pretend to work. It's the appearance of a healthy economy when it's really just welfare with extra steps and lots of wasted time.

Highly recommend the David Graeber book by the way.

u/JuckFeebus · 1 pointr/politics

Profit is not a significant source of inefficiency. This is a basic misunderstanding, both by liberals and conservatives. The entire industry makes only about $50 billion in profit each year. That's why it helps to actually have an education that includes economics when trying to discuss the issue.

In laymen's terms, the inefficiency comes from unnecessary transactions - i.e. the processing of all of the claims, and everything needed to support that processing, from janitors and rent all the way up to the CEO of the firm (profit or nonprofit). The processing is grossly inefficient compared to universal healthcare because at every level from the patient up to the bank there are 10x more transactions than are actually necessary. This situation exists because incentives in the market are what economists call "perverse" - I.e. not to maximize value for consumers (patients), but precisely the opposite.

What universal healthcare does is not just wipe out private industry's profits, it wipes out private industry's revenues. And note that earlier I included not just private insurance companies but also hospitals and medical practices. Those enterprises (profit or nonprofit) waste a huge amount of resources on processing transactions as well.

Altogether, universal healthcare will save 40% of the value of the healthcare industry's revenues simply by wiping unnecessary transactions. And that is how you save not $50 billion per year, but $1 trillion per year.

What Sanders is really missing is the economic impact of wiping out $1 trillion worth of industry activity, because that represents a huge number of jobs. The vast majority of healthcare industry revenue doesn't go to filling billionaire's pockets, it goes to employing 17 million people - 11% of the US workforce.

At least 25% of people currently employed in healthcare will lose their jobs when we switch to universal healthcare, because that is where all the inefficiency ultimately lies. The high cost of healthcare in the US is, in the end, not really creating tons of millionaires and billionaires but rather is funding a bullshit jobs program for about 5 million people.

If you want to criticize universal healthcare, that's fine - just make sure you understand how it really works and where the real issues are. It's not that it won't save Americans $1 trillion medical care costs each year, it's that about 90% of those savings will come directly from putting people in the healthcare industry out of work. In the end it will be a good thing, since those people will be able to do something more productive for society than push useless pieces of paper around, but it's going to be a really rough road for a few years.

u/TheShawnP · 1 pointr/Showerthoughts

I think you'd enjoy Bullshit Jobs: A Theory It's a pretty much a bunch of anecdotes about those kinds of jobs and how damning they are to your health.

u/canaryhawk · 1 pointr/investing

I wonder if Kevin Johnson just read Bullshit Jobs and he's trying to fix the problem?

u/therealwoden · 1 pointr/glitch_art

There's an entire book about this.

Here's an interview talking with David Graeber, the author of the book, about the concept. A relevant excerpt:

Sean Illing

What are “bullshit jobs”?

David Graeber

Bullshit jobs are jobs which even the person doing the job can’t really justify the existence of, but they have to pretend that there’s some reason for it to exist. That’s the bullshit element. A lot of people confuse bullshit jobs and shit jobs, but they’re not the same thing.

Bad jobs are bad because they’re hard or they have terrible conditions or the pay sucks, but often these jobs are very useful. In fact, in our society, often the more useful the work is, the less they pay you. Whereas bullshit jobs are often highly respected and pay well but are completely pointless, and the people doing them know this.

Sean Illing

Give me some examples of bullshit jobs.

David Graeber

Corporate lawyers. Most corporate lawyers secretly believe that if there were no longer any corporate lawyers, the world would probably be a better place. The same is true of public relations consultants, telemarketers, brand managers, and countless administrative specialists who are paid to sit around, answer phones, and pretend to be useful.

A lot of bullshit jobs are just manufactured middle-management positions with no real utility in the world, but they exist anyway in order to justify the careers of the people performing them. But if they went away tomorrow, it would make no difference at all.

And that’s how you know a job is bullshit: If we suddenly eliminated teachers or garbage collectors or construction workers or law enforcement or whatever, it would really matter. We’d notice the absence. But if bullshit jobs go away, we’re no worse off.

And here's a podcast interview with the author where they go into great detail and give lots of examples.

u/Ferocious-Flamingo · 1 pointr/confession

Heard about this book and really want to read it. Seems like it fits nicely here

https://www.amazon.com/dp/150114331X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_DxGRCbWDC7T3Y

u/mandix · 1 pointr/cscareerquestions

I'm telling you... you do not have to wait to become a web designer especially if you have any CS chops. It sounds like you need some kind of validation lol? In design you have to be an entrepreneur, design your own experience, find out some people who are doing design x software email them... surprise them, designers love surprises and something different... make your own luck.

As far as Amazon good books, you really want to aim for a whole view of design at this point. Think of it like you wouldn't learn run before you can walk, there is A LOT out there.

u/crvyxn · 1 pointr/StardewValley

Games are a combination of systems, I recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/1603580557

u/selectrix · 1 pointr/politics

I'm glad you're calling it a system, even if your only reference to such is the typical cliche at this point. But it is a system, and as such its behavior can be understood and altered.

Some basic elements to the system:

  • Human/animal nature: it's in the very basic programming of every living organism to try to maximize the benefit extracted from one's environment. This is how living organisms are successful, from the day-to-day, individual scale to the species scale on up. Just about every civilization has followed the pattern of growing until the local resources are exhausted, and then collapsing (as you alluded). Therefore, when the carrying capacity for a given group is limited not just by the local resources, but the resources of the planet as a whole, some very effective measures are needed to combat that basic instinct and encourage longer-term thinking.

  • Cancerous growths: due to the condition above, certain institutions within society are essentially hijacked by individuals who shift the institution's priority from serving society (as nearly every societal institution is created to do) to serving the will of the individual in charge. Lately this has taken the form, by and large, of companies whose primary goal is pleasing the shareholders instead of the customers.

  • Unprecedented potential for aggregation of power: The internet is a fantastically powerful tool- it could conceivably be used as the infrastructure for a global democratic forum, empowering those who have never before had a voice in the political process; or it could conceivably be harnessed, censored, and monitored by an incredibly small group of people. It's the responsibility of every concerned citizen to work against the realization of the latter, because some very powerful people want that very much.

    There are a number of effective leverage points in the system, unfortunately many of them are being pushed in the wrong direction at the moment- education, for instance...

    In any case, there's a really great introductory book on systems theory- Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. That would probably give you the best perspective for understanding how each of these issues came to be the way they are.

    That and evolutionary psychology. Read lots of that.
u/esotericthered · 1 pointr/collapse
u/SeegurkeK · 1 pointr/germany

I feel like everyone who wants to work in a different country should read a bit about the differences in culture beforehand. A (imo) good source is Richard D. Lewis who describes a lot of different cultures in his book.

If you're going to lead a group there read about managing across cultures.

BUT: be aware that your company has it's own culture that, while often strongly influenced by the culture of the country, can have significant differences to what literature would suggest.

Possible Literature:

Richard D. Lewis - When Cultures Collide

Carte/Fox - Bridging the Culture Gap

u/explainlikeim50 · 1 pointr/Denmark

Nope, not bullshit. "Good education and a high rate of literacy lend people confidence in communi-cation. Vietnamese literary tradition is strong." - fra When cultures collide.

>Hvad er det med folk?

Din hasty generalization, ikke min. Jeg sagde ikke at "blot fordi man er født i Øst og Sydøstasien", at man så er god til matematik. Og kinesere != vietnamesere.

Efter 3 års studier omhandlende Asien er jeg udemærket klar over at man ikke skal generalisere. Vietnam klarer sig godt, fordi deres offentlige institutioner sætter undervisning højt på skemaet.

Og normalt skal man ikke gå ud fra at land- og byområder har samme velstand, men her er et lille citat fra Comparing Rural and Urban Primary Education in the Mekong Delta:

"Results indicate that there are far more similarities than originally suspected, particularly in material taught, teacher experience and education, gender balance and student attendance, and students’ plans for the future."

u/meesan · 1 pointr/india

Build a projects portfolio for the kind of projects you'd e apply for a job for.

Web app dev? Build and host a web app.
Android App dev? Build and publish a few apps.
DB Admin? Build and work with DBs.

If you can show a company you can do their work, by having already done it or done large components of it already, makes you a very attractive hire.

Read and follow this Bible's every word, mix and match as per your convenience though; Land the Tech Job You Love by Andy Lester. Look up the interweb and you might score a copy there or buy one if you want to have the hardcopy. You will keep returning to this book for the rest of your CS career, for the cool tips and ideas it provides. I highly recommend it.

u/xiongchiamiov · 1 pointr/cscareerquestions

If your university offers a technical writing class that covers resume writing, take it. Heck, take that class even if it doesn't cover resumes - you and your employers will appreciate it.

I own a copy of Land the Tech Job You Love (Amazon), and it covers how to make up a good resume, as well as other generally-good advice. Pretty cheap, and small. Recommended.

u/shipshipship · 1 pointr/cscareerquestions

Contribute to open source. Create something of your own, and contribute to other projects. Since you are basically self taught and you are going for your first gig, conveying to prospective employers that you care about design, testing, and that you are not a cowboy will help. Read and understand books like Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby. Also, don't be a one trick pony. Tackling JavaScript could be a next logical step. Needless to say, all your open source and projects you demonstrate should have good test suites.

Learn about the non-technical stuff as well. I think Land the Tech Job You Love is great, and you probably want to look into Cracking the Coding Interview as a starting point for learning more about algorithms and data structures. Upcase is another great resource for beginning/intermediate Ruby programmers who want to up their game. Start solving challenges on e.g. codewars.com.

u/daredevil82 · 1 pointr/webdev

Manager's Path is a really good book about different levels of management, and Debugging Teams is a series of examples from the author's histories that can easily apply to your new position.

u/random_dent · 1 pointr/Technocracy

Energy accounting.

It is not like any of them. It has some features of capitalism (markets dictating production response), socialism (energy distribution) and a lot of features none of them have.

If you learn capitalist economics in college, it's a multi-year program. You're not going to learn it from me in a reddit post, but here's about the best summary I can make.

It begins with energy accounting - the assigning to every resource an energy value based on physics (the basic matter/energy conversion) and multiplied by the extractable and known-usable mass of the resource within the area controlled by the technate, and added to value of available imports, minus the value of expected exports. This sets a base modifier for prices that causes prices to climb for limited resources to reduce consumption to sustainable levels.

For renewable and abundant resources (those for which demand is less than renewable supply) price is essentially negligible and for all purposes becomes free. Accounting for these is transparent for the population at large, and is handled electronically behind the scenes only for the purposes of adjusting production to demand.

In a socialist economy the preferred item or form might be mandated by law. This prevents the production of items consumers might otherwise want and while in theory it's to increase the efficiency of production by producing one item and controlling employment levels, in practice it results in massive shortages whenever production and imports from more economically stable countries can't be subsidized (see Venezuela). In capitalism, markets dictate price entirely. Supply and demand create a balance, but this is short-term supply and demand. It takes no accounting for non-renewable resources, socialized environmental impacts, and only some consideration for long term projected growth or decline in demand (largely the result of the invention of futures markets).
The first prevents massive abuse of limited resources, but can result in mass shortages of vital goods. The second ensures as long as goods are produceable they are available as long as there is demand, but makes no accounting for long term sustainability, so products can become unavailable in the long run if resources run low, and the consequences of production are often simply ignored until its bad enough for the government to get involved and impose regulation.

Technocracy seeks to take the best of both of these - those things with limited supply can still be available at ever higher prices, set to control demand to sustainable levels, while abundant and renewable resources can be made available as desired. In either case, production is not controlled by a central authority as in socialist centralized economies, but is dictated by consumer action as in capitalism. Further, costs of environmental protection are rolled into the process - in many ways the concept of a carbon tax is a limited ad-hoc version of this. The technocratic version would cover all waste products and the full cost of cleaning them up as part of the energy price calculations, and thus an otherwise sustainable resource can become priced like an unsustainable one if the environmental impact of production is unsustainable.

Couple all that with a distribution system that sees everyone paid the same for their time (very much a socialist concept) combined with the goal of making resources and production as abundant as possible while pursuing post-scarcity, moving most labor-jobs to robots and automation and most other jobs to AI as soon as possible with the long term purpose and intent of making human labor obsolete and freeing up human time to focus on arts, invention, study, and anything else people actually value doing with their time.

I'll end by touching on a common criticism, that due to pay being separated from work people won't be motivated to do anything. The truth is a lot of work is bullshit and not necessary anyway. There are plenty of people who would work just because it's worth it to them to do it. Especially when it comes to things like invention - the greatest inventors have never in history worked for the sake of money. They did it because they loved discovering new and better ways of doing things. Einstein wasn't a physicist because the pay was good. He was a physicist because he loved it. Imagine how many people would be freed up to pursue their interests in academics, engineering or the arts if they could try out their ideas without fear of losing their house or starving if it didn't work out? Many people aren't entrepeneurs only because they fear the risks that come from leaving the work force. Many of them won't ever produce anything new no matter how much they try, but if even a few pay off it can be huge. Then imagine just how many people, due to growing up in poverty, never have the opportunity at all. Imagine if suddenly they all had the chance, limited only by their own work ethic and imagination.

Authors don't write because they hope for a big payday. They do it because they can't stand to NOT write. Actors don't act for the pay. Most actors never make ends meet with it and they keep doing it anyway. The big stars earn enough to live on for the rest of their lives in one or two movies, yet they keep coming back and doing it again.

The truth is people do NOT need money to motivate them to do something with their lives. They need money to motivate them to do shit they hate. So why not work to automate all that stuff? Make work obsolete, and keep paying people so they can live lives of meaning instead of toiling 1/3 of their life away doing things they hate, or which serve no real purpose.

u/constant_flux · 1 pointr/confessions

There's a good book that goes into detail about your situation: Bullshit Jobs.

u/stjep · 1 pointr/enoughpetersonspam

> I just don't understand how someone could even think to analyze handshakes to this degree.
>
> How empty does your head have to be to think that a simple greeting gesture is so meaningful?

Same thing for those body language "experts" they wheel out on American TV. How bored do you have to be to care? How dull do you have to be to think there are people with expertise in this? How deluded do you need to be to think that you can do this with any level of accuracy, or that what you're doing actually matters?

Clearest example I have for this (outside of like all middle management positions): https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber-ebook/dp/B075RWG7YM/

u/TheNightHaunter · 0 pointsr/Anarchy101

We need to talk about what it did right vs what it did wrong.

We know a planned economy works, they went from a quasi feudal state to space in less than 50 years.

We know they fucked up by removing the soviet councils from the workplace effectively making it so workers did benefit from the fruits of there labors.

We know that quality of life was much better compared to other countries do to guaranteed jobs, this in contrast with Captialism shitting on bureaucracy jobs all the while making even more useless jobs themselves (https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp/150114331X)

Socialism in one country did not work, we know that Captialist will not ever let a socialist nation live while they are alive. Which brings me to another point regarding the state, we will need some form of state to support an military industrial complex, this was one of the key things that helped the soviet union from being destroyed.

u/stalematedizzy · 0 pointsr/norge

Janei, kanskje på tide å tenke litt mer på borgerlønn, som en del av løsningen.

Det vil hjelpe både mot arbeidsledighet og forbruk

Så kan mange få noe mer fornuftig å bruke tida si på enn å råtne på et kontor uten at de egentlig bidrar med noe som helst.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHx5rePmz2Y

http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp/150114331X

u/brasslizzard · 0 pointsr/collapse

Winning goes to the winners---in any system.

A great book that explains this by Donella Meadows: https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/1603580557

Winners use their winnings to consolidate and grow their wins. Ever play monopoly?

The only reason that nearly every matured market has exactly 2 dominate players is anti-monopoly laws.

Coke and Pepsi, McDonalds and Burger King, PC and Mac, Android and iPhone, Facebook and Twitter, Wal Mart and Target.

It's a meritocracy, yes--but winning goes to the winners. Meritocracy over time equals monopoly.

u/verticalnoise · 0 pointsr/Romania

Frankly, e prea multa discutie ipotetica aici pentru o fiinta care nu cred ca exista (iar tu nu ai avea cum sa stii cum gandeste, ce presupui, presupui din Noul Testament ignorand Vechiul Testament), iar in ultimul paragraf faci niste presupuneri si extrapolari exagerate (sau total false, cum e treaba cu sociopatii, vezi Snakes in Suits).

Ce vrei sa dezbati cu mine concret, vrei sa discutam motivele pentru care nu cred in Dumnezeu? Ca atunci ar trebui intai sa astepti sa spun de ce nu cred exact, nu sa presupui ca un citat este parerea mea si unicul motiv pentru care nu cred si apoi sa faci presupuneri referitor la ce as crede doar pentru ca ai vazut ca-s atee. Nu de alta, dar e obositor sa-ti combat presupunerile si ne invartim in cerc.

u/dudeweresmyvan · 0 pointsr/todayilearned

Read "The Checklist Manifesto" it briefly covers how feats like this are accomplished.

http://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/dp/0312430000

u/saargrin · 0 pointsr/gaybros

I always sucked at my job.I hate routine and get distracted easily!
Oh,squirrel!
Here i am replying to stuff on reddit and facebooking :(
So i very often make stupid mistakes because i dont prepare for tasks so my evaluation reports always suck
on the bright side im good with out-of-the box stuff and making stuff work so that sort of makes up for my failings in other departments up to a point i'm sort of the only person who can get stuff done quickly

anyway ive been using time management and task management tools on the web to keep tabs on what im supposed to do and its been helping quite a lot

also, checklists!
read this:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Checklist-Manifesto-Things-Right/dp/0312430000

check out trello.com

u/OX3 · 0 pointsr/ethereum

There's a huge amount of research on this stuff. Start here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Wisdom-Crowds-Many-Smarter/dp/0349116059
It's clear that throwing darts will perform worse than asking which way people would bet in almost any situation.

u/PLEASE_USE_LOGIC · -1 pointsr/AskMen

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I've read them all; they've helped a ton^1000

u/banished98ti · -1 pointsr/Buttcoin

Bingo.

Most human activity in the modern age is useless. Read the fantastic book that came out by David Graeber called Bullshit Jobs.

https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp/150114331X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1526815230&sr=8-1&keywords=bullshit+jobs

No you aren't understanding my argument. It has nothing to do with tangible or intangible.

Intrinsic value does not need to be marketed. If something requires advertising or marketing it most likely is illiquid(useless) and I need to convince you you need it.

Stuff with intrinsic value ie family, house, resources, land etc does not require marketing it has value in and of itself. People fight and die for those things. Nobody fights and dies for fiber optic cables.

u/neurorex · -2 pointsr/jobs

Oh yes, I know of your affinity for the Gospel of Nick Corcodilos - the professional recruiter who has a Master's in Cognitive Psychology, but no formal training in organizational development, and it shows in that article by misinterpreting empirical findings and counter with his own biased slant. He even went as far as considering academic research as something of a [bent and corruptable](http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/whoisnick.htm#about "The headhunter") way of thinking and investigation. Ironically, OP, an individual who believes that no one book should outline and define a practice or industry, is using this one book to vehemethly defend a narrow viewpoint of someone who is not intimately involved with HR on any level. I was surprised that OP did not cite a chapter from his own book as a plug, Land the Tech Job You Love (Now available on Amazon for the low, low price of 16.36. Get your copy today!)

In the actual article itself, Corcodilos addressed several domains to build the argument that exit interviews are simply antiquated and dehumanizing. He constructed the argument in a manner similar to a propaganda, using emotional appeal to critique findings that are not based on subjective observations from which to draw reaching conclusions.

u/modern_rabbit · -6 pointsr/fargo

Thank the lord for Meghan Battest and her job.