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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   5649 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 13, 2022

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Anyone have any suggestions for books or the like that helped them navigate their career? Anything pertaining to organizational logic and work related interpersonal skills welcome, also.

I read a bunch of Ask A Manager when I first started getting "real" jobs which was really helpful for calibrating what's normal and how to behave in an office, that kind of thing.

In Balzac's La Comédie humaine, there's a section entitled the Government Clerks (also retitled Bureaucracy today) that described life in a bureacractic environment very well. I found it useful in navigating reform from within large organizations, also it's funny in a similar way to office space).

I know it’s shameful, but I just can’t get over the pronunciation of his name.

The crisis of the third century, featuring Pupienus, would like to have a word with you.

My introduction to him was at a Rodin museum, where there was a piece called collosal bust of Balzac, which I mentally assigned a very different meaning than the creator intended.

It's possible the translators are doing yeomen work, but the little I've read of his work, make it clear someone is a very keen observer of the world.

I actively recommend against it for most people. I think it’s infohazardous. It paints a pretty bleak picture of corporations, and some class of people will be demotivated on actually doing the work they’d need to do to get ahead.

It's a book for low-level and middle managers, the ones that are called the Clueless. "Do your job well, and you will be valued and rewarded" more or less works for ICs, but many people think it works for managers as well. This is a lie. The whole system of annual goals, KPIs and stuff like that exists to weed out crap managers, not to identify and promote good ones. Good managers have their own goals that have a double purpose: some executive at the top needs the result and this increases the manager's visibility overall

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