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?
Most neurodivergences
ADHD is hell in a corporate setting but fantastic in a creative profession (I do both)
Improvisation is a brilliant skill in something where you can just keep going if something goes wrong. Attention to detail is a brilliant skill in something where something going wrong will get someone killed. The example that comes to mind is a stage hand vs a stage hand where pyrotechnics are involved.
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.
Brutally beating up and killing people is seen as insanity in education but effective in law enforcement
Logical reasoning is good for programming but won’t get you anywhere in management.
Having a brain is wanted in most professions, however the military would preffer brainless suicidal muscle sacks.
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.
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.
Absolutely. Let me spend five hours to automate this ten minute task.
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.
“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
~ Bill Gates
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.
Questioning your superior’s orders in the military is probably gonna get you yelled at, probably dishonorably discharged, and if at war, could cause your country to lose a battle, or possibly a war.
Questioning your captain’s orders on an airplane is a good part of Crew Resource Managenment (CRM) and sometimes can let the captain realize his/her mistake and avoid a catastrophe. And sometimes it even goes as far as just telling your captain to fuck off and you take over the controls, if the captain’s capacity to fly is demininished for some reason (aka: subtle incapcitation).
Unless they’re wrong. You’re supposed to turn down unlawful orders.
Wonder how often that goes well for the subordinate.
What are you talking about? All the world knows we are the shining beacon of truth, justice and righteousness, over here!
Primitive human nature. It’s a bitch
