Thanks for the kind words, Jack. And thank you to any readers who subscribe to Occam’s Racer. Most of the content is free, and you can get the password to the locked articles by using the Buy Me a Coffee link. Or by sweet talking me.
subscribed to your <del>stack</del> blog. The hood up parade lap literally made me LOL, as the kids say. Will buy coffee as soon as decide which credit card to use.
This make so much sense! I remember when I first stumbled across your website it looked like there was a lot of good content, but nothing new. I'm definitely interested in the content, but I didn't want to buy a coffee for an abandoned site. Subscribing here shortly.
Non sequitur on Miata aerodynamics: Back in the nineties, Bill Cardell (of Flyin' Miata) and Corky Bell started a project called 200mph (NA) Miata. It lacked the trick aero you've come up with and IIRC died on the vine well before meeting their goal.
Verus Engineering has some effective bits for the ND gen.
Yeah, that’s my identical twin brother Ian. I used to race the Yaris more frequently when I lived in the Bay Area. I’ll be racing it at Thunderhill in February. He has the You Suck at Racing blog, which is what got me inspired to start my website.
Small world! I've learned a lot from YSAR, and Ian helped a lot when I had a Yaris-based racer. I tried to introduce myself in person at Sonoma Dec 3-4, but kept missing him. I was right behind the Yaris when one of his drivers (slowly) sailed the Yaris into the tire barrier after hitting the lake in T11. uNDerSTeerZ aT tHE LImiT!
"...I truly believed that we were always just about to get approval for the site..."
It happens to most of us. In my naive youth, I would interview for good jobs. The interviews would go well (Thanks, career counselor dad!) and they'd say they needed two weeks to make a decision.
Two weeks. Uh huh. That was the running joke in "The Money Pit," too.
So I'd anxiously wait for the agreed-upon two weeks, which would become three. And then a month. I'd get on the phone and ask if they'd made a decision. No, they'd say, they still needed more time. The VP of Engineering was on vacation and he needed to be in on any hiring. Or the Prototype Shop Manager was at a trade show for the week and had to sign off on new employees. Or some other Big Deal whose OK was required wasn't available for some reason.
I nuked an opportunity from orbit when I indignantly called one company after THREE MONTHS of this and told them that I wanted an answer RIGHT THEN AND THERE, and ANY word other than a "Yes" would be interpreted as a "No."
Guess who didn't get the job that day.
I remember trying to figure this out, so I asked my dad. He called it "Being put in the freezer." He told me that in his experience as a career counselor, companies would pull this shit because they liked a candidate, but they'd already spent their recruiting budget for the year and didn't want another company to hire the guy. Or they had no real intention of hiring ANYONE, they just wanted to see who was out there and available.
I later learned that if a potential employer thinks it's okay to string a potential employee along like this, FUCK THEM. If you aren't prepared to hire someone at the interview, DON'T FUCKING INTERVIEW THEM.
I won't play games with you, and you don't play games with me. I'll go first.
It’s depressing but once you get one job or one girl the rest of them will knock your doors down. Im married and bought into a firm so I will hopefully never be in the dating world or job market again
No excuse for getting jerked around like that; f-ing with people’s lives is absolutely shameful.
One thing, I was a hiring manager for quite a long time. Never did I hire someone at the interview. I usually interviewed 5-10 candidates (depending on response) and made my decision within a week or so afterward. Therefore, the first interviewee might wait a month. I always let everyone know what the potential decision timing would be. Face to face.
So let me ask you this: If you know some Big Deal's approval is required to hire somebody, why do you conduct recruiting when you know that Big Deal's gonna be in Cancun for two weeks, or at some trade show in St. Louis till next Thursday?
Not you specifically, but one.
I figure companies don't actually WANT to hire anyone. They MUST not, otherwise they wouldn't approach recruiting with the same enthusiasm they normally apply to cleaning the bathroom.
Here's how I'd do it: Either somebody tell the Big Deal before he leaves, "Hey, we're hiring this week, and you gotta be here to choose" or when he gets back and asks, "Hey, who's that?" about the new guy, is told, "We needed another guy in the Prototype Shop, remember? You took off and we needed another set of hands NOW. His name's Ed."
My group of friends use a saying, I’m sure many here have heard it. Own your shit. Owning one’s shit is what men do. Or rather what people of good character do. When good people own their shit it makes them more interesting and ultimately likable. I try to do right by others for a selfish reason, it is easier to live life without the baggage of trying to screw people. Sometimes things get screwed up for reasons we could have controlled but did not foresee. I like use my goodwill capital for the right reasons and let the rest just sort itself out. Now, having said all that I am still capable of being an A1 class asshole but generally I have, what I believe, are good reasons for that. But that’s a different problem altogether. Sleep well tonight Jack.
"You can't spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes. You fucked up! You trusted us!"
Seriously though, I think you're being too hard on yourself. Yeah, you were naive about what a shitty company you worked for, and sitting on that guy's content for that long was kinda dumb, but so be it. Learn and move on. Admitting you were wrong is one of the hardest things a person can do, which is why so few ever actually get around to it. You're bigger than most for taking the blame here, but I don't think that's a weight that's entirely yours to be carrying around.
All that good people can do sometimes is try to keep their moral bank account in the plus. The amoral people and organizations are always an obstacle to overcome. Sociopaths don’t tell each other to “keep fighting the good fight”, only the moral do. You know what to do, and you’re doing it.
The SEO thing really got to me. I own a small e-commerce business and paid for a site to be done a couple years back. I have a halfway decent understanding of how web sites work, and the amount of SEO “expert” bullshit that gets tossed around is utterly ridiculous. I tried hiring someone to help with a bizarre indexing problem we were having and explained in detail the circumstances of the problem only to have said expert get back to me with a description of how to fix the problem without even suggesting that he’d read my detailed outline. How can I hire someone to do work like this when I seemingly know more than them about problem solving???
As a side note if anyone is actually good at SEO or knows someone who is, I’d like to know them, and not pay $1500 for a “report on how your site could get to the first page on google”
Past is past. Lessons are learned. People move on. The folks that never got involved are probably better for it. The ones that did and got crapped on; that really sucks. Not your doing, though. I’m sure you feel there were things you could/should have done differently— but how different would the final outcome be? That place took a turn that was difficult to foresee; once it did— nothing anyone in your position could do. Believe me, I’ve gone through a lot of those thoughts myself regarding the wonderful people that reported to me.
Writing this was a beautiful thing to do; and I’m sure it goes a long way for those mentioned. (Not to mention being somewhat cathartic for the author.)
You can chalk a lot of this up to 20/20 hindsight. When you look back on everything that transpired it's easy to connect the dots but it's a lot harder to make those connections when you are living it. The way I see it, you were building something that you were convinced would be something special and you were reserving the resources that it would take to make it so. You couldn't know what was happening in the background. and how everything would eventually shake out.
Still, it takes a lot to look in the mirror and admit to yourself that you could have done better. Harder still to publicly admit it to everyone else. You showed a lot of courage here.
"For purposes of fairness, and for purposes of compliance with my severance agreement . . . "
I hope this means you have concluded your unfinished business with the insurance company, and I hope it was favorable to you.
The topic of this article must have been the hardest part of that experience to swallow. Truth is hard to bury and most people will understand and forgive.
has anybody further developed the dimpled-body tests that mythbusters did with a ford probe? that'd be the first thing i'd do if i were building a racing car from scratch.
they made a huge difference--they measured coasting distance with the car at the same weight; the dimples were put in a plasterlike coating on the car. they carried the stuff in the car for the equal-weight comparison
How do they effect the surfaces, dies, chemical etching, lasers? Wait, those cars are wrapped if I'm not mistaken. Are they manipulating the vinyl wraps?
There are *alot* of things you can do with polymers/copolymers as far as tuneability goes. It may be that the wraps themselves are a proprietary compound.
Vinyl film is extruded from rollers...we've all probably seen things like shower curtain liners that have a pattern in the surface. They may be doing something like that.
"I truly believed that we were always just about to get approval ..."
Been there, and it's a toss-up between the amount of time that gets wasted and the lack of decision-making ability from those in management, that bugs me more.
Now, when I want to implement something, I spell out my intentions to proceed unless told otherwise.
I'm much happier as a result. I'm either getting things implemented or moving on to the next project with minimal angst. And less of my time is wasted as well.
Richard Marcinko wrote about how he would always file his orders with
"Unless otherwise directed, I plan to..."
I did that at lot at the last job, only to find that the company was willing to go to intense and hugely expensive lengths to cancel what I did after the fact and "get everyone involved".
You know who you are. You also know how the corporate world works, even for smaller, unique, or otherwise "different" companies, which for now I'd lump Hagerty into. In general, corporate leadership will absolutely hang you out to dry for any reason that serves them.
So, having said all that...how preventable was your departure at Hagerty, and thus how preventable The Big Letdown of all these people? I know you can't talk about specifics, but were they expecting you to violate principles, or just preferences? Or would the damage to these people been done even if you had stayed?
Don't get me wrong, I love ACF and it likely wouldn't exist if not for your exit (and my Track Day Club membership fee is right around the corner!), but could you have suffered fools and stuck it out for the benefit of all the wonderful writers/artists and the content they were bringing to Hagerty, and avoided the apology tour?
I was fired for something I wrote, about three months after I wrote it. I personally appealed to the company CEO. I asked if perhaps it would be satisfactory for me to stop writing altogether and just manage my people. The company was not interested in such an accommodation.
As much as I disliked the job, and as sick as it made me to deal with certain people there, I would have borne any humiliation just to have a steady source of income until my son was 18 years old. I wasn't given that option.
It's depressing to be short on money and prospects but on the positive side I no longer have to edit everything I write and do to satisfy the most querulous and cowardly leadership possible.
Thanks for the kind words, Jack. And thank you to any readers who subscribe to Occam’s Racer. Most of the content is free, and you can get the password to the locked articles by using the Buy Me a Coffee link. Or by sweet talking me.
On my way!
subscribed to your <del>stack</del> blog. The hood up parade lap literally made me LOL, as the kids say. Will buy coffee as soon as decide which credit card to use.
This make so much sense! I remember when I first stumbled across your website it looked like there was a lot of good content, but nothing new. I'm definitely interested in the content, but I didn't want to buy a coffee for an abandoned site. Subscribing here shortly.
Non sequitur on Miata aerodynamics: Back in the nineties, Bill Cardell (of Flyin' Miata) and Corky Bell started a project called 200mph (NA) Miata. It lacked the trick aero you've come up with and IIRC died on the vine well before meeting their goal.
Verus Engineering has some effective bits for the ND gen.
Odd question, but does someone related to you race a Yaris on the west coast?
Yeah, that’s my identical twin brother Ian. I used to race the Yaris more frequently when I lived in the Bay Area. I’ll be racing it at Thunderhill in February. He has the You Suck at Racing blog, which is what got me inspired to start my website.
Small world! I've learned a lot from YSAR, and Ian helped a lot when I had a Yaris-based racer. I tried to introduce myself in person at Sonoma Dec 3-4, but kept missing him. I was right behind the Yaris when one of his drivers (slowly) sailed the Yaris into the tire barrier after hitting the lake in T11. uNDerSTeerZ aT tHE LImiT!
"...I truly believed that we were always just about to get approval for the site..."
It happens to most of us. In my naive youth, I would interview for good jobs. The interviews would go well (Thanks, career counselor dad!) and they'd say they needed two weeks to make a decision.
Two weeks. Uh huh. That was the running joke in "The Money Pit," too.
So I'd anxiously wait for the agreed-upon two weeks, which would become three. And then a month. I'd get on the phone and ask if they'd made a decision. No, they'd say, they still needed more time. The VP of Engineering was on vacation and he needed to be in on any hiring. Or the Prototype Shop Manager was at a trade show for the week and had to sign off on new employees. Or some other Big Deal whose OK was required wasn't available for some reason.
I nuked an opportunity from orbit when I indignantly called one company after THREE MONTHS of this and told them that I wanted an answer RIGHT THEN AND THERE, and ANY word other than a "Yes" would be interpreted as a "No."
Guess who didn't get the job that day.
I remember trying to figure this out, so I asked my dad. He called it "Being put in the freezer." He told me that in his experience as a career counselor, companies would pull this shit because they liked a candidate, but they'd already spent their recruiting budget for the year and didn't want another company to hire the guy. Or they had no real intention of hiring ANYONE, they just wanted to see who was out there and available.
I later learned that if a potential employer thinks it's okay to string a potential employee along like this, FUCK THEM. If you aren't prepared to hire someone at the interview, DON'T FUCKING INTERVIEW THEM.
I won't play games with you, and you don't play games with me. I'll go first.
I’ve said this in the comment section at acf but it’s amazing how much corporate recruiting and dating are exactly the same.
I've been saying that for years.
I'm currently unemployed and single. It gets shittier every time you put yourself back on the market.
It’s depressing but once you get one job or one girl the rest of them will knock your doors down. Im married and bought into a firm so I will hopefully never be in the dating world or job market again
There’s that whole unconscious bias training sh!t in hiring that I don’t think exists in dating.
That would seem to be the case.
Is wanting to reconcile with an ex the same as trying to get rehired by a company that fired you?
It's probably not quite as miserable on average because the ex doesn't have an HR department.
She has her girlfriends that think you're a worthless piece of shit. That's kinda the same thing.
The on again off again nature of certain relationships: How to Love that Crazy
"Question 24: Would you date someone who takes antidepressants?"
"I don't know, what are we talking about here? 'The color blue makes me sad' or 'SWAT standoff! Film at 11!'"
No excuse for getting jerked around like that; f-ing with people’s lives is absolutely shameful.
One thing, I was a hiring manager for quite a long time. Never did I hire someone at the interview. I usually interviewed 5-10 candidates (depending on response) and made my decision within a week or so afterward. Therefore, the first interviewee might wait a month. I always let everyone know what the potential decision timing would be. Face to face.
So let me ask you this: If you know some Big Deal's approval is required to hire somebody, why do you conduct recruiting when you know that Big Deal's gonna be in Cancun for two weeks, or at some trade show in St. Louis till next Thursday?
Not you specifically, but one.
I figure companies don't actually WANT to hire anyone. They MUST not, otherwise they wouldn't approach recruiting with the same enthusiasm they normally apply to cleaning the bathroom.
Here's how I'd do it: Either somebody tell the Big Deal before he leaves, "Hey, we're hiring this week, and you gotta be here to choose" or when he gets back and asks, "Hey, who's that?" about the new guy, is told, "We needed another guy in the Prototype Shop, remember? You took off and we needed another set of hands NOW. His name's Ed."
You are absolutely correct in your thoughts on how that situation should be handled.
I was never in that spot. The decision was always mine.
My group of friends use a saying, I’m sure many here have heard it. Own your shit. Owning one’s shit is what men do. Or rather what people of good character do. When good people own their shit it makes them more interesting and ultimately likable. I try to do right by others for a selfish reason, it is easier to live life without the baggage of trying to screw people. Sometimes things get screwed up for reasons we could have controlled but did not foresee. I like use my goodwill capital for the right reasons and let the rest just sort itself out. Now, having said all that I am still capable of being an A1 class asshole but generally I have, what I believe, are good reasons for that. But that’s a different problem altogether. Sleep well tonight Jack.
"You can't spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes. You fucked up! You trusted us!"
Seriously though, I think you're being too hard on yourself. Yeah, you were naive about what a shitty company you worked for, and sitting on that guy's content for that long was kinda dumb, but so be it. Learn and move on. Admitting you were wrong is one of the hardest things a person can do, which is why so few ever actually get around to it. You're bigger than most for taking the blame here, but I don't think that's a weight that's entirely yours to be carrying around.
All that good people can do sometimes is try to keep their moral bank account in the plus. The amoral people and organizations are always an obstacle to overcome. Sociopaths don’t tell each other to “keep fighting the good fight”, only the moral do. You know what to do, and you’re doing it.
The SEO thing really got to me. I own a small e-commerce business and paid for a site to be done a couple years back. I have a halfway decent understanding of how web sites work, and the amount of SEO “expert” bullshit that gets tossed around is utterly ridiculous. I tried hiring someone to help with a bizarre indexing problem we were having and explained in detail the circumstances of the problem only to have said expert get back to me with a description of how to fix the problem without even suggesting that he’d read my detailed outline. How can I hire someone to do work like this when I seemingly know more than them about problem solving???
As a side note if anyone is actually good at SEO or knows someone who is, I’d like to know them, and not pay $1500 for a “report on how your site could get to the first page on google”
The only thing you really need to know about SEO is that it’s the only digital media work that is billed by the hour, not by the click.
Maybe I can help. john@pavlick.dev. Drop me a line.
Past is past. Lessons are learned. People move on. The folks that never got involved are probably better for it. The ones that did and got crapped on; that really sucks. Not your doing, though. I’m sure you feel there were things you could/should have done differently— but how different would the final outcome be? That place took a turn that was difficult to foresee; once it did— nothing anyone in your position could do. Believe me, I’ve gone through a lot of those thoughts myself regarding the wonderful people that reported to me.
Writing this was a beautiful thing to do; and I’m sure it goes a long way for those mentioned. (Not to mention being somewhat cathartic for the author.)
ROFL because of your brilliant comment about SEO optimization!
You can chalk a lot of this up to 20/20 hindsight. When you look back on everything that transpired it's easy to connect the dots but it's a lot harder to make those connections when you are living it. The way I see it, you were building something that you were convinced would be something special and you were reserving the resources that it would take to make it so. You couldn't know what was happening in the background. and how everything would eventually shake out.
Still, it takes a lot to look in the mirror and admit to yourself that you could have done better. Harder still to publicly admit it to everyone else. You showed a lot of courage here.
Jobs like Hagerty are very political in nature and beyond anyone’s control, especially in these hyper political environments
Glad I let my HDC membership lapse last fall.
"For purposes of fairness, and for purposes of compliance with my severance agreement . . . "
I hope this means you have concluded your unfinished business with the insurance company, and I hope it was favorable to you.
The topic of this article must have been the hardest part of that experience to swallow. Truth is hard to bury and most people will understand and forgive.
I already got the money and spent it all!
Important piece that really resonates. And a reminder how much talent is wasted.
has anybody further developed the dimpled-body tests that mythbusters did with a ford probe? that'd be the first thing i'd do if i were building a racing car from scratch.
Speed holes?
I think he's referring to the dimples like those on a golf ball, which affect the aero of an object.
they made a huge difference--they measured coasting distance with the car at the same weight; the dimples were put in a plasterlike coating on the car. they carried the stuff in the car for the equal-weight comparison
NASCAR has been doing a lot with rough surfaces at the microscopic level.
How do they effect the surfaces, dies, chemical etching, lasers? Wait, those cars are wrapped if I'm not mistaken. Are they manipulating the vinyl wraps?
All I know is that it's something they figured out in the coast-down tunnel, and that you can't feel the roughness with your bare hands.
There are *alot* of things you can do with polymers/copolymers as far as tuneability goes. It may be that the wraps themselves are a proprietary compound.
They've gotta be wrapped...most of them show up with a different wrap each week.
Vinyl film is extruded from rollers...we've all probably seen things like shower curtain liners that have a pattern in the surface. They may be doing something like that.
"I truly believed that we were always just about to get approval ..."
Been there, and it's a toss-up between the amount of time that gets wasted and the lack of decision-making ability from those in management, that bugs me more.
Now, when I want to implement something, I spell out my intentions to proceed unless told otherwise.
I'm much happier as a result. I'm either getting things implemented or moving on to the next project with minimal angst. And less of my time is wasted as well.
Richard Marcinko wrote about how he would always file his orders with
"Unless otherwise directed, I plan to..."
I did that at lot at the last job, only to find that the company was willing to go to intense and hugely expensive lengths to cancel what I did after the fact and "get everyone involved".
Yep, my approach at work was usually "its better to ask forgiveness than permission".
Smokey Yunick, master of, "It didn't say you couldn't."
Obviously, I'm not a disinterested party but I'm certainly glad that you took the gig in the first place.
No disrespect to anyone else on staff but Grace was a terrific hire, she's a fine editor who makes my work better.
Every time I talked to Grace, she was definitely full of grace. Very fine person.
So here's a hard question, but one I have to ask.
You know who you are. You also know how the corporate world works, even for smaller, unique, or otherwise "different" companies, which for now I'd lump Hagerty into. In general, corporate leadership will absolutely hang you out to dry for any reason that serves them.
So, having said all that...how preventable was your departure at Hagerty, and thus how preventable The Big Letdown of all these people? I know you can't talk about specifics, but were they expecting you to violate principles, or just preferences? Or would the damage to these people been done even if you had stayed?
Don't get me wrong, I love ACF and it likely wouldn't exist if not for your exit (and my Track Day Club membership fee is right around the corner!), but could you have suffered fools and stuck it out for the benefit of all the wonderful writers/artists and the content they were bringing to Hagerty, and avoided the apology tour?
I was fired for something I wrote, about three months after I wrote it. I personally appealed to the company CEO. I asked if perhaps it would be satisfactory for me to stop writing altogether and just manage my people. The company was not interested in such an accommodation.
As much as I disliked the job, and as sick as it made me to deal with certain people there, I would have borne any humiliation just to have a steady source of income until my son was 18 years old. I wasn't given that option.
It's depressing to be short on money and prospects but on the positive side I no longer have to edit everything I write and do to satisfy the most querulous and cowardly leadership possible.
ACF T-shirt ideas
READERSHIP > LEADERSHIP
or
BROS BEFORE CEOS
I’d buy one…