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When the only tool you have is an MBA, every customer looks like a nail.


If there was a screwdriver analogy, we could turn this in to: "If all you have is an MBA, every customer looks like it needs to be screwed".

All of this is of course fine banter, but there does seem to be a pattern where the end-of-the-chain responsible party just has some generic business related schooling that results in questionable practises in the name of profit, or in some cases just growth (or some derivative).

It's not the customer support agent that woke up one day and thought "how can I screw over the next customer I get on the line", it's probably not the engineer that made the software in such a way that it just screws over everyone who comes in contact with it. Middle management probably doesn't have much to do with it either; they are often just doing what their manager told them, and don't want to go against that and risk their position. They are often not responsible for the top-down policy either... so that leaves us with the people that feed a bad policy to the rest of the company.


More critically, it's people that claim positions of authority while not having any clue of how real work actually gets done, making protecting their own position their primary goal. These people excel at playing politics such that nobody is responsible for any given problem, so once you get a critical mass it becomes a stable situation where little can change.

If you created a new company with ten random people from this thread, it would not suffer this banning problem as everyone would be aware of this failure mode. But if you fed the same people one by one into Google, they would each either succumb to corporate politics or quit, and at the end nothing would change.

These kind of bullshit jobs are the best argument for basic income. Our society would be better off if they were paid to stay home and stay out of the way.




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