I'd never given a lot of thought but the proliferation of budget airlines creating a race to the bottom always made it seem like airlines were a bad investment.
Yeah I don't know - my experience is that a manager's competence is essentially the toss of a coin. The only non-technical manager I've had was great and the only hands-on player-coach manager I've had was terrible so not enough of a sample size to drill down.
Sounds like Australian police. I remember 15 or so years ago being in a big team assisting the Australian police with something on a remote farm. There were 20 people that needed to be taken back to base and one 10 seater car. Someone asked the police if everyone could get in the car and policeman shrugged and said you can try. So the policeman drove a four wheel drive across farmland with 16 people stuffed into the back.
Low sample size but two sets of ancestors from agricultural societies that married in the 1920s weren't especially happy together from what I've been told. One of the marriages was definitely a result of adjacent land though in neither case was it child of wealthy person getting married off to child of another wealthy person.
> Money is a really good motivator for people not to quit on the first frustrating experience.
So true. I volunteer in an organisation with many older members, and a few of the older members have a thinly-veiled disdain for the younger people who don't contribute the same time and effort that they do... so some young people just stop turning up because they don't want some retiree with no life judging them for having a job, family commitments etc.
I've been told that Australian company Wesfarmers fanatically avoids synergies when acquiring companies so that if the time comes to cast it off, there's no painful separation of a bunch of shared systems/departments/real estate etc.
Not saying synergy is a dirty word, always. It's the assumption that there is a lot of overlap (which rarely materializes) and that assimilation or merging has no cost. In practice, company cultures are rarely aligned (the merger wasn't conjured by employees, they weren't even consulted) and frustrated talent leaves. Time is lost navel gazing.
Synergy (i.e.: cost reduction) looks great in Q3 balance sheet, but in the mean time intrinsic company value has decreased. The long term prospect isn't so great.
Oh agreed - I was at a company that was the result of two companies merging and while the reduced head count was an easy synergy (don't need two legal, HR, cyber-security etc teams), everything else was pretty slow.
I've never used it myself but I've helped out a family members with Marketplace sales before - go and be their nominal "back-up" when they meet the buyer in a local car-park.
> Once you have the foundations in place for account balances and the ledger, processing a payment isn’t that daunting. Those foundations, however, took a lot to build and evolve.
Pretty much. I've worked at places with PHP payment processing that worked just fine, and at a place with C++ payment processing (and no testers) and it worked just fine. I wasn't around when the systems were first built though so not sure if there were tears along the way.
Yeah I recently heard about people working multiple jobs at once - I wasn't surprised - with work from home being a thing and many jobs at big companies being not overly strenuous, you can get away with it.
A previous coworker had been not especially good at his job and left after two months, and a little later I went looking for his LinkedIn to see where he'd ended up. Couldn't find him but didn't give it much thought. A friend told me that he was working at a company up the street but was also working another job at the same time, and the penny dropped - you can't have LinkedIn and be working two jobs at once and reasonably expect to get away with it or get hired again.
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