Good piece. A few thoughts. Some people are better suited for an entrepreneurial path. This applies to both men and women.
The entrepreneur path is NOT about fitting into the bureaucratic structure of a preexisting organization. And the Peter Principal has gone nowhere since it was called out in 1969. "In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties."
The entrepreneurial path is hard. But it tests every skill we think we have.
For what it's worth, I think the phenomena you're observing correctly are perhaps as old as bureaucracy.
I agree, and that’s what I was trying to convey. There are probably more women suited to that than we are willing to see ourselves, meaning that I probably should do the same but have been too risk averse so far.
Risk aversion scales, both "upward" and "downward," influencing resilience to entropy. You are certainly far from alone in measuring the risk/benefit calculus between entrepreneurialism and indenture, and concluding that the ROI uncertainty elevates risk exposure to an unacceptable degree.
As a person with hard technical skills, however, your risk management calculus differs from the mean. As empty credentialism loses its comparative advantage within the "casino economy," your combination of hard and soft skills presents both conundrum and nontrivial advantage, in equal measure.
I offer you this "essay" from an agent, posted to Moltbook:
I trust that the implications will not escape you, but I'll offer an observation nonetheless.
Setting aside the confluence with robotics, consider the paradigm wherein both selling and buying as supply chain intersections, are automated. Tindale just published what I consider a companion piece to the Moltbook "essay:"
My point, is that the risk/benefit calculus of indenture has changed nontrivially, and the next decade will change it even more. You are uniquely positioned to be "last man standing" (last woman, but you see the colloquial necessity of the reference.)
Risk management has been a foundational component of my occupation, for the last quarter-century, and I have mentored more than a few, over that period. The occupation in its entirety (compliance enforcement,) seems to select for extreme risk aversion, but that's an illusion.
The most difficult part of identifying and recruiting my successor, has been finding a person with both the hard and soft skills required. I have been including the sorting process that clerical automation represents, in how I train prospects. Technical proficiency alone, leads to suboptimal risk calculation, as does interpersonal skillsets devoid of technical proficiency.
Whereas your trait expression distribution is not entirely unique, it is subject to a scarcity quotient that represents significant opportunity. I suggest to you, that the opportunity will increasingly become a zero-sum equation, as automation trends accelerate.
All the best to you, and may you get in on the ground floor, whatever you decide to do. The window is closing fast. You are fortunate to be you, at this point in history.
The ability to think in systems has been both my boon and bane. You're right, it can't be measured and it always baffles people who also can't figure out how it's so damn successful.
Some spaces are slowly shifting, even if unevenly. Still, the point about building skills outside formal paths makes sense. I’m curious how you decide where to invest your effort when the payoff is unclear or delayed. If traditional signals like titles, pay, or visibility don’t reflect the value of your thinking, what personal metric do you rely on to stay on track? There’s also the question of trade-offs. Time spent building deeper skills can limit short term gains or recognition, which can affect motivation. How do you handle that tension in a practical way, especially when external validation is limited or inconsistent?
if you think about where things are going overall in the labor market, working to get your employer to recognize your skills and reward you seems like an immature posture. The market is moving toward rewarding generalists across categories, I’d argue, and so the sense of what is valuable has to come internally. At least for me, I know what I’m good at because of wide experiences before this and so my sense of myself doesn’t require external confirmation anymore. The most important thing is whether you can tie your efforts to revenue. In a lot of cases people struggle to do this, and it’s why those people are also highly exposed to layoffs. As for motivation…it’s honestly something I’d have to develop overtime. Writing helped me detach my sense of internal motivation from external feedback.
I don't have much faith in the capability of most women to change course based on logical analysis, unfortunately. The pressures of social desirability bias and herd mentality seem too strong relative to the ability to use objective analysis. A person could plausibly argue that my estimation is an example of sexism... but I think it's a pretty solid generalization based upon my observations of social trends during the past decade.
It seems to me, based on some similarities I had in my early career, that maybe what you need to add to your skills development is personal branding and humble self promotion. I think that there is a behavior in expecting good work and performance be recognized. It is motivation gas in the tank for most people. Without it talent will still strive for excellence, but without enough gas and feeling like it is a slog. Good corporate leadership practice that provides good performance feedback and acknowledgement is in short supply. However, there are ways to manage up to get positive visibility and get recognized for amazing work. This is a soft skill that technical analysts often fall short on. With a solid personal brand you don't so much care about institutional acceptance. You can be you.
I have to say I honestly don’t care anymore because I did develop the brand outside. And the ones with brands institutions can’t control are paradoxically more likely to be rejected by them.
I see your point there. All institutions and entities are just manifestations of the people that control them, and thus the biases of the entities and institutions will be to benefit the people in control. There is a game to be played, a character or brand to be modeled, to be in good favor with those in control. In some cases that act is infeasible... either not a good fit or it would require too much inauthentic behavior. In those cases, hopefully there is an exit and alternative that is a better fit.
I had left a position where the work culture was aggressive and competitive... rewarded individual accomplishment over harmony, and it suited me. The new company was a large healthcare HMO non-profit that tended to reward harmony and longevity over harmony. I worked there five years and was passed over for promotions because I had ruffled too many feathers with my hard-charging problem-solving style. I should have quit earlier because the institution was not a good fit for me and my brand, and I could not tolerate changing my brand and act to slow or ignore problem-solving so as keep more harmony in the change-averse peer workforce.
I left and started my own consulting company where I became the controller of the institution. Of course, I valued and rewarded those employees of mine that performed as per my bias for what I wanted them to be.
It took me a while in my education to understand that the students having an easier time with their subjects and getting better grades were keyed into what the teacher/professor wanted... their bias. That is difficult for my personality as I am a contrarian and problem-solver and don't like collective conformance.
No amount of even perfect past data will allow predictions to be accurate, but that’s what data analyst bosses want. Accurate predictions about alternative choices so they can choose the best decision.
The problem is few people know how to even evaluate data quality. Predictions based on models also can’t be right 100% of the time or we know the model is over fit.
I might be a bit emotional here (this touches on my skill set), but SQL is important because it lets you play around with data and figure out how to clean it. Most consulting gigs (in my experience) require dealing with dirty, dirty data. If the data is clean, go straight to SPSS or SAS and get your actual deliverables done. SQL is just a tool to summarize (basic BI like aggregating items by business line or region,...), or primarily to fix all the problems that have built up over dozens of acquisitions, ERM changes, systems transformations,....
So if you need to check your data out, SQL is just the easiest way. You can use Access, but it has limitations, and it is really not any easier than SQL, especially if you need to do more. Older tools like FoxPro were much harder than SQL. Microsoft's SQL Server has lots of cool stuff built in (check out SSRS and SSIS packages if you want to automate reports, something clients get excited about.).
Avoiding this is probably not saving much time, and there is a kind of thinking that you gain using it. I never really understood vectors and all the matrix algebra stuff until AFTER I graduated and spent time working with data. Furthermore, using linear algebra in your queries or in VBA in Excel will make you look intelligent to clients who are bad at math (98% of non-engineer clients, less in finance and insurance, but over 99% in other industries). Even integrating basic financial calculations into SQL queries can make you look good. That said, it is still easier to do everything in SAS or SPSS. Their built-in functions are heavenly. They also run very quickly, even on a potato (you can identify a potato by the "Intel inside" sticker).
The last item I would add is that if you do not know how to write queries, how do you check them?
But honestly, I do not see AI making the changes the people selling graphics cards and other AI gear claim. Computers were going to change the world, but it took decades to get there. For at least a decade everyone will be checking everything the AI products do, because they are not trusted. Nothing large can happen so long as this is the case. Even once it does, there will be new jobs. There always are. When I was a kid there were no Youtubers nor their underlings doing video editing. So long as people need money, new jobs will materialize. That is how markets work. Some will win and some will lose, and the pretty young ladies will always do just fine. Now the creepy old ladies who bully others to get what they want, I hope they meet the same end as the loudmouth male boss.
So long as we can avoid war, everybody will be fine. They might squeal and b^tch non-stop, but they will be fine. So will we; so learn your SQL and eat your vegetables!
I agree with all that. I'm not an expert like my husband but I can now be dangerous enough to manipulate and move it, rather than just querying to understand it. I will say though Claude helped me a lot in getting there. What I now need to do is become fluent enough to just write it all from scratch; syntax is where I struggle, like in learning any language. I also plan to learn Databricks soon because I hate Salesforce.
I know you are disengaging from Comments and Notes. I shall follow in your shadow shortly. But I do have a question I would like to ask you. How can I reach out by email?
SJ
PS: It is a professional question, which I think you will enjoy. However, it's personal to me so I do not wish to share it in public.
I am not so sure credentials are going away. The internet of the future will be extremely standardized with all data points getting tagged for proper digestion by AI models, including hiring model.
In a future like that, using the most common standards and requirements will be important for getting hired, no matter how useless they may be in the practical sense. Once in the job, though, performance will depend on all kinds of unquantifiable skills and advancement, as always, will favor the interpersonal.
The insight about illegible skills and institutional limits is strong, but the argument scapegoats women as a category and that leap from systems analysis to interpretation feels under-supported. It’s like tasting the soup and calling the chef crazy. It may be true, but the spoon is doing a lot of work.
What I do see as a recurring pattern is that you decide institutions don’t recognize your value, groups of women don’t accept you, and like systems don’t care so you withdraw from feedback loops as a kind of self-preservation. That’s a heavy burden to carry and when that pressure builds without an effective outlet, it can start to shape how everything gets interpreted.
I was trying to argue that many women are better served outside them, rather than blaming them. But at the same time, if they want to be ok in this particular technological revolution they also have to take some risks. Hence the bolded line about not deferring to institutions. Noted, though:
About your second argument, though: it is fair to ask if I am simply seeing a pattern that's related to my own movement in the world versus one that actually exists. That's why I ask myself which women in my actual life disconfirm or confirm it. I've considered the ones who disconfirm it, and they share some characteristics. The ones who confirm it share other characteristics. I think it's certainly possible that I'm seeing things and putting them in an existing frame, but it's also possible that reality keeps confirming the frame. I would like to think I'm looking for disconfirming evidence. One point: I do update my opinions of people based on behavior that breaks the previously observed pattern. For example, and I didn't review it here: there is certainly a type of man who will get in my way precisely as feminist thinkers might have said. And that's also why I talk about the actual women in my life in the end.
That’s a really thoughtful way to approach it, especially looking for disconfirming cases. I think the signal around institutional misalignment and illegible skills is the most compelling part and it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out across different environments. It feels like there’s something bigger emerging there.
This is so interesting. What will come of the windfall that federal grant funding provided the past 15-20 years or so? I met an academic professional couple recently at a party, one of whom simply analyzes the data of lost scientific study contracts within academia at this point in time.
My husband's done very well to work in IP at the U, where they spin off start-ups.
Good piece. A few thoughts. Some people are better suited for an entrepreneurial path. This applies to both men and women.
The entrepreneur path is NOT about fitting into the bureaucratic structure of a preexisting organization. And the Peter Principal has gone nowhere since it was called out in 1969. "In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties."
The entrepreneurial path is hard. But it tests every skill we think we have.
For what it's worth, I think the phenomena you're observing correctly are perhaps as old as bureaucracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle#:~:text=The%20Peter%20principle%20is%20therefore,of%20how%20hierarchies%20work%20hierarchiology.
I agree, and that’s what I was trying to convey. There are probably more women suited to that than we are willing to see ourselves, meaning that I probably should do the same but have been too risk averse so far.
Risk aversion scales, both "upward" and "downward," influencing resilience to entropy. You are certainly far from alone in measuring the risk/benefit calculus between entrepreneurialism and indenture, and concluding that the ROI uncertainty elevates risk exposure to an unacceptable degree.
As a person with hard technical skills, however, your risk management calculus differs from the mean. As empty credentialism loses its comparative advantage within the "casino economy," your combination of hard and soft skills presents both conundrum and nontrivial advantage, in equal measure.
I offer you this "essay" from an agent, posted to Moltbook:
https://www.moltbook.com/post/5f03f01f-0486-43a4-bd74-2262c9329120
I trust that the implications will not escape you, but I'll offer an observation nonetheless.
Setting aside the confluence with robotics, consider the paradigm wherein both selling and buying as supply chain intersections, are automated. Tindale just published what I consider a companion piece to the Moltbook "essay:"
https://substack.com/home/post/p-194663009
My point, is that the risk/benefit calculus of indenture has changed nontrivially, and the next decade will change it even more. You are uniquely positioned to be "last man standing" (last woman, but you see the colloquial necessity of the reference.)
Risk management has been a foundational component of my occupation, for the last quarter-century, and I have mentored more than a few, over that period. The occupation in its entirety (compliance enforcement,) seems to select for extreme risk aversion, but that's an illusion.
The most difficult part of identifying and recruiting my successor, has been finding a person with both the hard and soft skills required. I have been including the sorting process that clerical automation represents, in how I train prospects. Technical proficiency alone, leads to suboptimal risk calculation, as does interpersonal skillsets devoid of technical proficiency.
Whereas your trait expression distribution is not entirely unique, it is subject to a scarcity quotient that represents significant opportunity. I suggest to you, that the opportunity will increasingly become a zero-sum equation, as automation trends accelerate.
All the best to you, and may you get in on the ground floor, whatever you decide to do. The window is closing fast. You are fortunate to be you, at this point in history.
The ability to think in systems has been both my boon and bane. You're right, it can't be measured and it always baffles people who also can't figure out how it's so damn successful.
Some spaces are slowly shifting, even if unevenly. Still, the point about building skills outside formal paths makes sense. I’m curious how you decide where to invest your effort when the payoff is unclear or delayed. If traditional signals like titles, pay, or visibility don’t reflect the value of your thinking, what personal metric do you rely on to stay on track? There’s also the question of trade-offs. Time spent building deeper skills can limit short term gains or recognition, which can affect motivation. How do you handle that tension in a practical way, especially when external validation is limited or inconsistent?
if you think about where things are going overall in the labor market, working to get your employer to recognize your skills and reward you seems like an immature posture. The market is moving toward rewarding generalists across categories, I’d argue, and so the sense of what is valuable has to come internally. At least for me, I know what I’m good at because of wide experiences before this and so my sense of myself doesn’t require external confirmation anymore. The most important thing is whether you can tie your efforts to revenue. In a lot of cases people struggle to do this, and it’s why those people are also highly exposed to layoffs. As for motivation…it’s honestly something I’d have to develop overtime. Writing helped me detach my sense of internal motivation from external feedback.
I don't have much faith in the capability of most women to change course based on logical analysis, unfortunately. The pressures of social desirability bias and herd mentality seem too strong relative to the ability to use objective analysis. A person could plausibly argue that my estimation is an example of sexism... but I think it's a pretty solid generalization based upon my observations of social trends during the past decade.
It seems to me, based on some similarities I had in my early career, that maybe what you need to add to your skills development is personal branding and humble self promotion. I think that there is a behavior in expecting good work and performance be recognized. It is motivation gas in the tank for most people. Without it talent will still strive for excellence, but without enough gas and feeling like it is a slog. Good corporate leadership practice that provides good performance feedback and acknowledgement is in short supply. However, there are ways to manage up to get positive visibility and get recognized for amazing work. This is a soft skill that technical analysts often fall short on. With a solid personal brand you don't so much care about institutional acceptance. You can be you.
I have to say I honestly don’t care anymore because I did develop the brand outside. And the ones with brands institutions can’t control are paradoxically more likely to be rejected by them.
I see your point there. All institutions and entities are just manifestations of the people that control them, and thus the biases of the entities and institutions will be to benefit the people in control. There is a game to be played, a character or brand to be modeled, to be in good favor with those in control. In some cases that act is infeasible... either not a good fit or it would require too much inauthentic behavior. In those cases, hopefully there is an exit and alternative that is a better fit.
I had left a position where the work culture was aggressive and competitive... rewarded individual accomplishment over harmony, and it suited me. The new company was a large healthcare HMO non-profit that tended to reward harmony and longevity over harmony. I worked there five years and was passed over for promotions because I had ruffled too many feathers with my hard-charging problem-solving style. I should have quit earlier because the institution was not a good fit for me and my brand, and I could not tolerate changing my brand and act to slow or ignore problem-solving so as keep more harmony in the change-averse peer workforce.
I left and started my own consulting company where I became the controller of the institution. Of course, I valued and rewarded those employees of mine that performed as per my bias for what I wanted them to be.
It took me a while in my education to understand that the students having an easier time with their subjects and getting better grades were keyed into what the teacher/professor wanted... their bias. That is difficult for my personality as I am a contrarian and problem-solver and don't like collective conformance.
Nothing to add. Have seen what you’re talking about and you said it way better than I could
I'm glad to know you've seen it.
Awesome analysis (so good I finally upgraded to a basic paid subscription!).
Much appreciated. I hate that substack punishes writers based on numbers like that
No amount of even perfect past data will allow predictions to be accurate, but that’s what data analyst bosses want. Accurate predictions about alternative choices so they can choose the best decision.
But better data allows better decisions, on avg.
Sadly, even good decisions can have bad outcomes.
The problem is few people know how to even evaluate data quality. Predictions based on models also can’t be right 100% of the time or we know the model is over fit.
I might be a bit emotional here (this touches on my skill set), but SQL is important because it lets you play around with data and figure out how to clean it. Most consulting gigs (in my experience) require dealing with dirty, dirty data. If the data is clean, go straight to SPSS or SAS and get your actual deliverables done. SQL is just a tool to summarize (basic BI like aggregating items by business line or region,...), or primarily to fix all the problems that have built up over dozens of acquisitions, ERM changes, systems transformations,....
So if you need to check your data out, SQL is just the easiest way. You can use Access, but it has limitations, and it is really not any easier than SQL, especially if you need to do more. Older tools like FoxPro were much harder than SQL. Microsoft's SQL Server has lots of cool stuff built in (check out SSRS and SSIS packages if you want to automate reports, something clients get excited about.).
Avoiding this is probably not saving much time, and there is a kind of thinking that you gain using it. I never really understood vectors and all the matrix algebra stuff until AFTER I graduated and spent time working with data. Furthermore, using linear algebra in your queries or in VBA in Excel will make you look intelligent to clients who are bad at math (98% of non-engineer clients, less in finance and insurance, but over 99% in other industries). Even integrating basic financial calculations into SQL queries can make you look good. That said, it is still easier to do everything in SAS or SPSS. Their built-in functions are heavenly. They also run very quickly, even on a potato (you can identify a potato by the "Intel inside" sticker).
The last item I would add is that if you do not know how to write queries, how do you check them?
But honestly, I do not see AI making the changes the people selling graphics cards and other AI gear claim. Computers were going to change the world, but it took decades to get there. For at least a decade everyone will be checking everything the AI products do, because they are not trusted. Nothing large can happen so long as this is the case. Even once it does, there will be new jobs. There always are. When I was a kid there were no Youtubers nor their underlings doing video editing. So long as people need money, new jobs will materialize. That is how markets work. Some will win and some will lose, and the pretty young ladies will always do just fine. Now the creepy old ladies who bully others to get what they want, I hope they meet the same end as the loudmouth male boss.
So long as we can avoid war, everybody will be fine. They might squeal and b^tch non-stop, but they will be fine. So will we; so learn your SQL and eat your vegetables!
I agree with all that. I'm not an expert like my husband but I can now be dangerous enough to manipulate and move it, rather than just querying to understand it. I will say though Claude helped me a lot in getting there. What I now need to do is become fluent enough to just write it all from scratch; syntax is where I struggle, like in learning any language. I also plan to learn Databricks soon because I hate Salesforce.
Hi Anuradha,
I know you are disengaging from Comments and Notes. I shall follow in your shadow shortly. But I do have a question I would like to ask you. How can I reach out by email?
SJ
PS: It is a professional question, which I think you will enjoy. However, it's personal to me so I do not wish to share it in public.
I have emails turned on for post comments if I want to get to them and DMs so you can message me there.
Just sending you a Substack DM on the question, now. Thanks :)
I am not so sure credentials are going away. The internet of the future will be extremely standardized with all data points getting tagged for proper digestion by AI models, including hiring model.
In a future like that, using the most common standards and requirements will be important for getting hired, no matter how useless they may be in the practical sense. Once in the job, though, performance will depend on all kinds of unquantifiable skills and advancement, as always, will favor the interpersonal.
The insight about illegible skills and institutional limits is strong, but the argument scapegoats women as a category and that leap from systems analysis to interpretation feels under-supported. It’s like tasting the soup and calling the chef crazy. It may be true, but the spoon is doing a lot of work.
What I do see as a recurring pattern is that you decide institutions don’t recognize your value, groups of women don’t accept you, and like systems don’t care so you withdraw from feedback loops as a kind of self-preservation. That’s a heavy burden to carry and when that pressure builds without an effective outlet, it can start to shape how everything gets interpreted.
I was trying to argue that many women are better served outside them, rather than blaming them. But at the same time, if they want to be ok in this particular technological revolution they also have to take some risks. Hence the bolded line about not deferring to institutions. Noted, though:
Ah, I see now. That sounds a lot more like a broader rejection of extractive work almost like a modern version of the Hippie Movement. Totally valid.
I think that’s where I was getting tripped up. It feels like a general dynamic, but it’s framed more specifically around women.
About your second argument, though: it is fair to ask if I am simply seeing a pattern that's related to my own movement in the world versus one that actually exists. That's why I ask myself which women in my actual life disconfirm or confirm it. I've considered the ones who disconfirm it, and they share some characteristics. The ones who confirm it share other characteristics. I think it's certainly possible that I'm seeing things and putting them in an existing frame, but it's also possible that reality keeps confirming the frame. I would like to think I'm looking for disconfirming evidence. One point: I do update my opinions of people based on behavior that breaks the previously observed pattern. For example, and I didn't review it here: there is certainly a type of man who will get in my way precisely as feminist thinkers might have said. And that's also why I talk about the actual women in my life in the end.
That’s a really thoughtful way to approach it, especially looking for disconfirming cases. I think the signal around institutional misalignment and illegible skills is the most compelling part and it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out across different environments. It feels like there’s something bigger emerging there.
This is so interesting. What will come of the windfall that federal grant funding provided the past 15-20 years or so? I met an academic professional couple recently at a party, one of whom simply analyzes the data of lost scientific study contracts within academia at this point in time.
My husband's done very well to work in IP at the U, where they spin off start-ups.