Progress is moving forwards to the target destination. If you take a wrong turn in the fork you might still be moving forward but not progressing.

”To increase profit we need to make more money”

This was said by a C-level suite at my work. Yeah, no shit Sherlock.

I know Scott Adams is not someone to be promoted for his personal views, but Dilbert is so much a reflection of reality it's unreal.

One could argue that's regression and moving backwards.

Claude Lévi-Strauss theorised that human progress actually happens without a clear goal and doesn't follow a straight line, but rather goes in leaps, changing direction...

See Race and History chap. 5

Surely these alpha brains were discussing this!

Moves the cup of coffee forward, looks at you, expecting a response

Return to monkey is progress.

Same when they interview coaches after a game.

“What do you think went wrong, and what can you do to improve it”

“Well, I think mainly our problem was, we didn’t score more points than the opposing team. That was a major contributing factor to our loss. I think in the future, we need to focus more on scoring more points, and not allowing the opposing team to score more points than us.”

Reminds of doctors on about idiopathic ailments, like they've the answer. ... Also likely partly why so much ill-health everywhere.

.

I wasn't expecting that from Levi Strauss of all people.

Martin Luther King Jr's similar quote is that the moral arc may not be straight, but it bends towards justice. I'm far from being an optimist, but i think humanity generally progresses to better moral values. The hiccups and backlash we see are typically from people who are resistant to changes because they are more comfortable with what they grew up to be familiar in, even if it's wrong.

I mean, if "making money" = revenue, then increasing revenue, assuming you're making a profit, will increase profits..but you could also work on your costs and increase profits while keeping revenue constant

That is how you create an illusion of being important and busy. These gentlemen are really skilled.

“because of inflation, costs are rising”

Credit: Adult Children

humanity generally progresses to better moral values

Because those with bad morals just don't last as long. Rebellion and corruption bring them down sooner or later.

It's because Adams just drew the stories other people sent him.

The more common way these guys increase profit is by lowering costs, and the only way they've figure out how to do that is by laying off a bunch of people, so this is actually a step in the right direction at least.

Now I'm wondering whether their solution is to appeal to more customers or to raise prices. What am I saying. Of course it's the latter.

The Business Management Class is a bloated demographic sector that is 90% redundant, and nobody is more aware of it that they are. They know the fasted way to increased profits is to fire them, so they are desperate to justify their importance, and throw underlings under the bus instead of themselves.

Also, I'd argue, because reality isn't a zero-sum game. We simply earn more by working together and helping each other, and so more altruistic societies are more resilient. Over time this might average out into morally better societies winning out more than they lose out

That doesn't mean they can't lose out, though

C suites are now infested with a circle jerk of MBAs, business minded people who dont understand or care about the product or how its made. MBAs are a plague, let the engineers who know a damn thing sit at the table please...

I choose to believe this is some sort of shibboleth

like throwing the most inane business speak at each other somehow confirms that they are a real business person and not some guy in a suit that would never think to say something so vapid and devoid of actual meaning

Engineers: Hmm, maybe we should get someone with a bit of market knowledge to the table.

MBA: Shit, I have no clue what they're talking about. I need someone who speaks my language.

MBA 2: Man, these engineers really have no clue what we're talking about, huh.

Engineers: removed

It's so hard to refute this one. They're obviously closely linked, but that makes associations so much stronger in people's minds.

I remember physics class. Our teacher was desperately trying to explain that, in circular motion, the resulting force is THE RESULT of adding all others, and that resulting force results in circular motion, not some magical additional force because something is turning. Just like your quote, cause and effect were reversed. (Resp. rather, instead of cause, rising costs are inflation.)

A lot also depends on what the society does. If it's only resource extraction, you give people a pick axe and whip them until they start digging. If you want people to do science and engineering, you have to take care of people or you'll have subpar results.

Plenty of engineers struggle to care about the right things too though. You can witness this in Linux communities. The engineers will engage in passion-project rewrites of core systems any day of the week over fixing that one annoying UI bug that thousands of users complain endlessly about.

Seriously, sports interviews are the worst!

Reminds me of Peggy Hill:

The day before Thanksgiving is, in my opinion, one of the busiest travel days of the year.

Those are software people. I wouldn't really consider them engineers in the sense being discussed here. Lots of software people are ready to rewrite the entire code base in a refactor bcz they think they can decouple a few systems in a better way, all the while introducing bugs while they do it. I dont know a lot of engineers willing to do that. It's not zero, I do know a few, but it's a lot less.

There’s no professional organization that all software engineers belong to, the way we have with civil engineers. This leads to a ton of ambiguity about who is a true engineer and who are software people, as you call them. This is an issue even among people who know how to write their own software.

So then should we really be surprised that non-technical MBAs can’t tell the difference between true engineers and software people?

Jack Welch hollowed out and destroyed one of the largest conglomerates in the world, but he was able to hide the damage until after he retired and he made a ton of money doing it.

So obviously his methods became the standard for the business world, even after GE's collapse and the countless postmortems laying the blame on him.

But a society that does just resource extraction won't outperform a society that does research and engineering. It all kinda plays into everything else

This isn't a no true scottsman thing. An engineer is someone who also does engineering work in addition and not just software. It can be anything from structural stuff like FEA simulation, fluid dynamics, to manufacturing. That's the distinction, that's it.

It's as if being able to say dumb shit like this without feeling self-conscious demonstrates that your thinking has a sort of ethical ambiguity about it that means you'll go along with whatever to make the shareholders and your fellow c-suite drones more money. It also seems like it could be sort of a personal thought-terminating cliche, as in, "I'm not going to think too hard about the effects of the next round of layoffs, because a more efficient company will make more progress, and progress is moving forward."

How does that pertain to the above issue of businesses and MBAs and software which was nothing to do with physical engineering work? Like if you’re saying only people who understand fluid dynamics know how to build business software and the people who engage in passion project rewrites on Linux software don’t, then what? I have no idea what you’re really arguing here.

are those paid positions?

Well except in that case the coaches and players don't actually give a fuck. They are contractually obligated to be there and say something to morons trying to bait them into viral clips

They respond by spitting out canned responses

This is not a problem with sports, if sports was left alone I promise you the coach wouldn't be volunteering to go give a recap of a 3 nothing loss to a team outside the division in the middle of the season

Why does that matter? People always say that about open source! “If you don’t like it then fix it yourself!” And then they complain that no one wants to use it!

You can’t have it both ways. If you’re just building it for yourself then keep it to yourself. If you open it up to the public then people are going to complain if there’s issues (or just ignore it outright if it sucks).

Having said all that, I do have a lot of sympathy for volunteer devs who promise to fix issues after they complete some core rewrite or major refactor, as long as they’re open about it and make a good case for it being necessary. I have a lot less sympathy for developers who are forever bored of fixing issues and just want to endlessly break things by doing rewrites and other fun hobby stuff. If you’re going to do that then don’t present your project as if it were part of the open source community; it’s your hobby, not a community project.

Engineer here. No, we refuse. Yes we hate the decision making people too, but I also have no interest in doing accounting and project management and all that bullshit, how about they just pay us to engineer shit good and then listen

"Better moral values" is an interesting phrase, since moral values are the thing by which you'd judge if a thing is better or worse, which just means that better values are those that are closer to whatever one's own values are.

It seems to me that it should look like this is the case to a typical person regardless of where people's morals go, because the average person can be expected to have the average values of their time (otherwise how would those be the average values?), and as such, a typical person is going to see a world that mostly agrees with them on what is fundamentally right and wrong, but which historically did not and which eventually changes into values close to their own with time, without there needing to be any kind of arc or force of history that shape's people's values towards a given conclusion.

are they paid?

yes or no

Many of them often are, through donations / Patreon / etc.

Well, I'd argue they're focused on the right things from their perspective, which is usually trying to optimize a thing for a purpose. Engineers are pretty good at engineering and not so good necessarily at other stuff, like every other job.

But if you tell them what you want and why, and what limitations you have, clearly. They can typically engineer the thing you want. The complications are normally money, suppliers, manufacturing, etc

so no

there’s your answer and I suspect you understand this as we’ve struggled to arrive here

if you want people to do non passion projects you need to pay them for those parts specifically

as much as I love patreon as a concept (not the company it is shit) the work agreement I’ve always seen is rather open

So then should we really be surprised that non-technical MBAs can’t tell the difference between true engineers and software people?

You made a statement about engineers vs software people.

I remember borrowing a friend's MBA textbook just for laughs. I particularly remember the chapter on "Negotiating", which included a boxed section that said "Your skill at negotiating will affect the outcome of the negotiations."

Lol "now".

“How good you are at something will dictate how good you are at that thing.”

the only way they’ve figure out how to do that is by laying off a bunch of people

Weirdly enough, another way to lower costs would be to have everybody work from home so you don't have to pay for office space. Yet the overwhelming trend is away from WFH.