Ask HN: Why is your job hard? - legitthroway
======
vfulco2
Harvard Business Review and the other ivory tower guys never focus on the true
loss of creativity and innovation, political B.S. Just today was talking to
two clients in Shanghai about the deleterious effects of horrible, bullying,
management in 2 educational companies here. And then senior management can't
figure out why their company doesn't grow.

------
dominotw
Bad management. Ppl promoted to thier incompetence.

~~~
byoung2
I would say that about my last company. I was director of engineering and it
was torture having to deal with so many meetings, opinions, status meetings,
and planning spreadsheets. That I could deal with if we could actually get
anything done, but it was made worse by the politics and fighting. The manager
meetings were like toddler tantrums and usually ended up with someone (never
me) screaming and running out of the room. The best part was when the CEO
tried calling me out for lack of leadership for trying to be friends with all
the engineers. I reminded him that my team was the only team in the company
that had not lost any members in 2 years, and our meetings never ended in
tears. He hated me for that, and in the end I quit, wondering if it would get
better after I left. It didn't...there were massive layoffs, and the latest
news is that they are trying to liquidate the company.

------
grawprog
I program, operate and two cnc machines, a bridge saw and a line polisher
alone. I lift large pieces of stone all day alone. I have to complete a
certain amount of work in a day no matter how long it takes. Machines fuck up
a lot and when they do it puts the whole schedule behind. I have to manually
cut things to 1/16" precision. The only person I have to help me has a
tendency to make things more difficult. My coworkers speak poor English making
communication difficult at times. Setting up new tools is finicky as fuck and
I mostly just figure it out as I go and hope for the best. I work with
expensive, fragile materials that break when you look at them sometimes. A
broken piece can be worth up to $10,000 or more depending on the material.
Interior designers are fucking idiots. Customers ask for impossible things and
fail to understand they must work within the limits of geology for their
products. Miter cutting stone that crumbles at the slightest glance. Writing
programs that do things i've never had to do before on expensive material with
a day's notice that i'm not even sure is possible at times. My shop's been at
least 35°C for the last 3 months now and in the winter it can get down to just
above freezing. Digging out trenches full of mud. Carrying hundreds of pounds
of sand to load the waterjet. Trying to grap slabs of stone with a crane on a
forklift that's tucked in the backcorner of the fucking lot behind god knows
how much shit while the forklift is this close to tipping over because the
forks are as high as they go and you're on a full forward tilt on a slope.

And I guess the most difficult of all...is spending most of the day alone with
my own thoughts and the roar of industrial machinery and constant whine of air
polishers working stone.

But I love my job though. Every day is different and I get to make beautiful
expensive things every day.

