Indeed, the worst introverts are usually considered misanthropes. The worst extroverts are usually considered sociopaths.
1 Like
It is a strange trade off; people in power donāt want blame, so during the normal working hours, all the pronouns should be āweā or āthemā or āthisā, to avoid anyone feeling blame. But when it comes to interviews, resumes, and the like, everyone wants to assume everything presented is āIā.
I much prefer the consistency of using we, as we all discover that any project of measurable importance has multiple components. But thatās not how managers tend to see it, merely because they can almost rightly claim the āIā title for all the work thatās done under them.
The only thing I can think of to align the two is add qualifiers to all the āIā statements.
2 Likes
You must have missed the second half of the quote:
āitās like the essay question on an English test. Bullshit away!ā
Thatās pure prejudice there.
I somewhat agree with you on managers, in that many people in the position of hiring donāt know what skill set is necessary for a good one, but disagree that itās not possible to quantify and recognize the appropriate skills for management positions just like for any other job.
1 Like
Oh, and donāt worry if you arenāt a narcissist, just learn the system and act expediently in the interview without regard to whether you are being genuine (machiavellianism). While you are at it, be sure not to show that you are uncomfortable doing this but instead cover your real feelings with a veneer of confidence and glib charm (trait of psychopathy). Itās the dark triad of getting hired.
3 Likes
Points for citing Dunning-Kruger.
2 Likes
Itās not entirely impossible to quantity the things that go into management, but beyond the math of the bean-counting aspect, thereās an awful lot of things that are certainly hard to measure - and thatās assuming that companies are even going to care about measuring, which countless numbers do not.
Being āgood with peopleā is a strange, complicated thing that is difficult even for trained psychologists to parse quantitatively, much less corporate bigwigs. Itās not about having a checklist of behaviors and personal qualities that you run down to ensure an applicant has. Itās much more about the person doing the hiring being made to believe that the applicant is āgood with peopleā.
Hence why it can be bullshitted. Unlike something like engineering or whatever, you donāt actually have to demonstrate anything substantial - you just have to gain the hirerās confidence. That act in itself gets treated as proof of competance.
In short? Bullshit the person hiring you well enough and they end up convinced you know your stuff - something that is essentially impossible in most other fields.
1 Like
Well, now that Iāve seen it in a comic, it must be true for all organizations everywhere.
Again, Iām not saying it isnāt true quite often, but itās not fair to suggest that managers are ipso facto bullshitters or they wouldnāt have their jobs, unlike other professionals. Thereās a lot of bullshitting that can happen in an engineering job interview, for example. Just because they got a certain GPA in school and know the right terminology doesnāt mean they can turn their projects in on time and within budget, handle change requests well, work with other people on the āteamā, etc.
1 Like
Stealing that āfirst dateā line. As for your last paragraph, Iāve never found those things out till well after the interview, so maybe Iām doing it wrongā¦
If the management world has a bad reputation for being full of bullshit and incompetance, itās not because I somehow built it for them.
Engineering has a reputation for being highly quantifiable, and for requiring you to show your work. You have to actually show your stuff the vast, vast majority of the time. Managing is not the same. Sometimes you have to prove your worth, but the vast, vast majority of managers (read lower and middle management) do not.
1 Like
Related: narcissim more frequently found in men than women: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder#Epidemiology
Related: men are more likely to be overly confident : http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/04/the-confidence-gap/359815/
D-K effect focuses on the incompetent blowhards and the understating achievers, but of course there a couple of other far less populated categories; the folks who know they have it and the folks who know they donātā¦
I guess Iām one the worst introverts there; the misanthrope tag mostly fitsā¦ the way I see it, weāre basically overgrown chimps with a (potentially) far more advanced culture. And thereās less difference between the average dude and a chimp than there is between the average dude and a guy like say, Da Vinci (in case youāre wondering, Iād rate myself about halfway along the scale to DaVinci; 98th percentile or so). So humanity shits me to the extent that we fail to live up to our potential, let alone our responsibilities, and also because it feels like Iāve spent a lifetime being held back by fuckwitsā¦
And because Iāve minimised my own overheads and responsibilities, I can walk into a job interview and look the folks in the eye without switching from my default persona - if they canāt take me as I am, I donāt want to work for em. Of course, living in Australia helps, if you want to avoid kissing arse (we still have some remnant of a social safety net for the time being).
Anyway, I can toot my horn without bullshitting, or feeling like I should be more modest, or (hopefully) bragging. Iām just used to being better than average at most things I try. Although IME apparently it can be tough job telling a guy like me from an incompetent blowhard at first blush, at least for the average Joeā¦ Iām sure the muscles that roll my eyes are overdeveloped.
I think the whole point of the effect is that you should realize that you donāt know if you have it for any skill where the ability to evaluate performance and the ability to perform are difficult to distinguish. If two chess masters played 10 turns each I would have no idea who was winning but I might think I do based on my lesser experience. Fortunately, I can tell that they are better at chess than I am because there are international rankings (and if I actually played them they would trounce me).
In order to āknow you have itā, you have to be able to reality test that knowledge against some kind of criterion you can rely on. Thatās not being an outlier to the D-K effect, itās just understanding it well enough not to trust your own self-evaluation. This kind of understanding is what seems to be missing from job interviews.
So you donāt have to be a narcissist to be confident in your abilities, but it feels like you usually do in order to explain why you are confident in a way that the interviewer will understand. There are a lot of skills that I canāt calculate my ELO for and so I know that I donāt know how good I am. But I have to not let on the fact that I know that.
Thereās an xkcd IT Crowd for that
I think you missed the important bit:
It doesnāt matter whether the hiring manager believes youāre a good manager or not, nor whether he believes your bullshit or not; if youāre this good at spewing your bullshit to him, then youāve covered the bullshit bar and can bullshit others into doing whatever it is you want them to do
A hiring manager, hiring another manager, is going to hire the manager whose bullshit they can detect, so that they arnāt a threat. But the paradox comes from whether oneās properly deduced whether or not the act being performed is or is not infact bullshit.
Thus, bullshit is merely a metaphor for ice cream.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
