Tell a fish success is measured by climbing a tree, and he will spend his whole life thinking he’s a failure.
What skills, attitudes, personality traits have you seen mismatched to a certain job that later made the individual an awesome worker in another job?
Cruelty is not so good in nursing but is a desirable trait in a CEO.
Soft hands.
Great for massage therapists, surgeons, etc.
Terrible for any physical work such as construction, wood working, etc
Don’t you get rougher hands from those things though? So it would only be disadvantageous for a while, not forever necessarily.
A very large penis is an asset in porn but frowned upon for mall Santas.
that’s very chaste of you
“You’ve been very naughty”
I almost cried with joy when my boss at my new job as a massage therapist thanked me for being so quiet. I was turned down for jobs and nearly fired from one for being “too quiet.”
That sounds amazing!
“Thinking outside the box” is rewarded in software development but terrifying when applied to assembling an airplane.
Boeing would like to know your location.
Ha! Boeing couldn’t find me when I worked there.
If you become a whistleblower, they’ll find you for sure.
Sadly, the kind of info I have is just embarrassing, not criminal nor safety related.
Thinking outside of the box too much is scary in manufacturing and engineering. Mistakes are expensive to fix.
Also doesn’t work for submarines
Questioning Aurhority.
Probably the most important ability to internalize, yet rarely told by anyone. Turns out most authorities dont like being questioned in terms of legitimacy, yet its important to not blindly follow someone just because of a title. Especially if the title is worthless and does not reflect relevant skills. Everyone can act as CEO, but not everyone can be a medical doctor.
Usually disliked by those who shouldn’t be in a position of authority. Good leaders will be able to really handle and be welcoming of constructive criticism.
I maintain that lazy programmers are the best programmers because they put all their energy towards having to do as little work as possible. Everything goes to efficiency. Everything that can be automated will be. The code will be structured and documented to avoid future work.
Did that over and over job before last.
CFO was complaining about how much time “her girls” spent daily on a task.
“You’re scanning CSVs with you eyeballs?! I can make that go away.”
She didn’t understand what I was saying, so I went behind her back to her second in command.
“Send me a couple of example files.”
Within 2-hours we were ready to test. Perfect. My god accounting loved me.
Yes! There are so many times where a focus on efficiency is mislabeled “laziness”. As long as the job gets done the same or faster, it’s just efficient to put less work into it.
Absolutely. Let me spend five hours to automate this ten minute task.
If you do that task 6 times a day after a week you’re in a net positive of time. And a lazy programmer would not automate something he will do just once, because of laziness it’s easier to just do the 10 min task once.
xkcd has the chart for this: https://xkcd.com/1205/
I did that once and cost someone their job.
Back in the bad old days of 2009, the company I apprenticed at furloughed the secretary and made me enter in job tickets. We had a special relationship with one client and they used us like one would use a drop shipping company – they sent us their customer orders and we fulfilled them. It was low volume (per job), high frequency work. About 80% of our tickets originated from PDFs that always followed the same pattern. As my first serious foray into programming, I automated the ticket intake for just their tickets so I didn’t have to type them up manually. At the time, I did not realize reducing a 10 minute task to 10 seconds (repeated about 15 times a day) would mean they never brought her back to work full time.
I don’t feel that bad about it: In the 5 years there she’d never been given a raise, the healthcare plan was atrocious, and she found out she was pregnant during the furlough. However, she decided to look for another job, and found one as a secretary at a school just down the street from her house. It was a dramatic pay increase, much better benefits, and better job security.
I left a few months later, and a year or so after, the business folded.You’re talking about a recurring task that takes ten minutes every time. I’m talking about a one-off that would take ten minutes to do and never come up again. We are not the same.
You never specified it was a one-off. And lazy workers won’t automate a one-off, because they are lazy.
Ha! I’ve definitely done that, too.
It’s just the above story makes for more interesting reading.
“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
~ Bill Gates
YUP can I automate this? is the output as good as my manual work? did I just save my client 8 billable hours? can I go home now
Logical reasoning is good for programming but won’t get you anywhere in management.
Logical reasoning is good for programming
For a given type of logical reasoning.
(Everquest once introduced the command “/stand” in a patch, replacing the existing command “/sit off”)
For me personally adhd makes factory work torture but kitchen work a breeze.
Having a brain is wanted in most professions, however the military would preffer brainless suicidal muscle sacks.
brainlesspoor suicidal muscle sacksActually ideally both
Same with policing. Most police departments (in the US at least) basically don’t want folks above C-student level. There are tests required to be a cop and it’s possible to be rejected for doing too well on them.
Only for infantry, and only at the lowest levels. They want people to obey, but not be duller than a sack of hammers.
There are so many jobs where looking at only the details in front of you at a given time is absolutely crucial, and yet being called myopic is still an insult.
stereoblindness is bad when you’re an athlete in a ball game, good when you’re a photographer
This is interesting, how does stereo blindness help with photography?
Stereoblind people already see the world the way a camera does.
I am not sure how non-stereoblind people see in 3D because I’ve been stereoblind my whole life, but I do think it helps me when taking photos.
Stereo vision isn’t very different. Human pupils are only 5-6cm apart, so the effect is only useful for objects less than 20-30 meters away, maybe 50 tops. It only works in the center of our visual field, not in the periphery (that only one eye can see). And then, only on the horizontal, left-right axis. Beyond that, we do depth perception the same way: mostly through experience, parallax, context clues, motion prediction, atmospheric distortion, and the like. It doesn’t change the imagery at all, it’s the same scene if I close one eye. I’m guessing that most people who woke up in a familiar environment (e.g. their bedroom) without stereo vision would take a while to notice.
Empathy and compassion are all but useless in business, but are key tools in psychiatry/therapy.
In most other jobs you need to have some level of critical thinking and some ethics. The police profession is therefore ruled out.
I wasn’t outside of getting upset at my mom growing up, and when that would happen, she used to joke “if I was your dad, I’d be a success.”
In all seriousness, one good example I know of is game testers make bad game designers. Back when Nintendo was making Mario Kart 8, they discovered some of the people actually overseeing production actually had bad vertigo (purportedly including Iwata and/or Miyamoto), so they’d invite them in to see the games being tested so they could see if it triggered their vertigo which they would attempt to fix, then repeat cycle. Now had those people with vertigo been making the games, we probably would’ve gotten simple Diddy Kong style race tracks.
