Oh god this is me.
Arguing with a VP that their expectations aren’t realistic, our market is saturated and cost of are increasing.
“You’re just not being creative enough, 20% annual growth isn’t even worth me being in this meeting. Come back when you have bigger numbers”
Oh okay. I just spent a quarter doing deep competitive analysis on every project on our roadmap and backlog with detailed per line analyses, but sure, your gut knows more.
Isn’t that just the most frustrating thing about working in the corporate world? People like us that look at actual data will never make it past being middle management at the highest. If you wanna make it to the top, you have to be able to confidently pull numbers from your ass.
It’s even worse with snake oil salesman and AI.
A guy built an AI model (i.e. wrote a prompt for the ChatGPT API) which generates fantastic looking offline test results for a problem. He promised the execs this will drive significant growth, so he’s on the fast track straight to the top and definitely got some nice bonuses. All his projects get big teams and resources.
I looked at the “projected” numbers, they make no sense, it’s just straight up made up numbers. It solves a problem nobody actually has, so nobody actually uses the output. The real usage numbers are abysmal.
Doesn’t matter, we’re counting on this for growth, haven’t I seen the model scores he demo’d?!
You’ve found your spirit animal
I love the later bit where Wormtongue says “There is no such army”, and Saruman shows him the army he must have spent an hour walking through on the way in.
“seriously wormtongue, you need to go outside more often”
“He’s coming, guys… hide! …omg he’s gonna be so surprised when he walks out on that balcony!”
To be fair to Saruman, this orc didn’t think to use the nearby forest to stoke the fires until he was told to. Not the brightest bulb.
What happened after they used the forest?
The trees slaughtered his workers, broke a damn, and destroyed the factory.
Typical executive short term thinking, yeah, Saruman hit his production targets, but he Boeinged them by doing it.
Well if the boss would quit sexting with an egurl all the time maybe he could have helped out with the whole ent thing
