This issue has a ton of pictures; if your email client doesn’t handle it well you can read it at the Substack website. Look for “What’s Going Right At the Moment” with a posting date of January 8, 2024.
This personal story/essay/reflection is a creative writing post (#26) from my occasional series for paid subscribers, who can also leave comments on most posts. As always, email hollymathnerd at gmail dot com if you would like a paid subscription but can’t afford one.
A couple of months ago, I got moved to a different team at work. (The move was required for budgetary reasons, nothing I did wrong and nothing I could have prevented.)
My previous boss was a wonderful woman with whom I got along very well. She was a great communicator who knew when to step in and when to leave me alone, was an advocate for me and my ideas who understood that credit is not a zero-sum quantity, and was in general a real joy to work with, and for.
Most importantly, she knew what she doesn’t know.
My new boss is the worst communicator I’ve ever met, and that’s not hyperbole. A representative scenario: he needs me to do something. In order to do it, I need a yes/no question answered. I spend five to seven hours asking repeatedly—begging—for clarity. He then is upset when, after eight hours, the task is undone. He cannot seem to understand that the five to seven hours I spent trying to get my question answered were hours I couldn’t work on the task, even when I point out that my emails said things like, “I cannot do anything—not one thing, can make absolutely zero progress of any kind—because I am COMPLETELY STALLED until I find out if the answer is yes or no.”
Then, being on salary, I have to get my deliverables delivered regardless of the obstacles he puts up, so I end up working a lot of unnecessary evenings and weekends.
My new boss’s primary problem is, I think, my coworkers. Everyone on the team, except me, is a woman from southeast Asia. Their culture appears to be such that men are treated as gods. In our team meetings, with the exception of me, the reactions are perfectly consistent. Absolutely every idea he has is brilliant; every mildly amusing remark gets laughter as if he were Chris Rock on stage; every client presentation is genius itself; every speculation is a proclamation from Mount Olympus. As a consequence of this kind of feedback, he believes that he knows a lot more than he actually does—including about mathematics.
I have never been so grateful not to be male. There are apparently cultures on this earth where men can get no truthful feedback, can never experience having their mistakes corrected or their weaker notions challenged. Men in those cultures can not only never grow or get better; whatever they are on the very first day of a new situation is all they will ever be.
With this kind of fawning bullshit, their skills, like muscles, atrophy.
I’ve asked around; my boss was not the idiot he is today when he started his current position. He used to have ideas that were deeper than “we should leverage AI” and he used to be capable of answering even complex questions, and certainly yes/no questions, on the first try.
Ironically, it’s the worst form of disrespect I can imagine: men are regarded as so fragile that the idea of having a man face any part of the truth is unthinkable, unless the truth in a given situation happens to be that he has performed superlatively.
Work has gotten so frustrating lately that I’ve slipped into behavior I never imagined I would, including taking a sick day when I wasn’t sick.
I am doing what I can do: documenting every interaction, and trying hard to find another job.
Because I’m doing what I can to deal with what’s going wrong, the rest of this post is my attempt to assume control of my emotional state and mindset by pivoting to a focus on what’s going right.
It turns out, there’s a lot going right. Many pictures below, and I’ve included links where appropriate.