For example, most PM books offer very general advice and frameworks, not specific or concrete knowledge - repeating the same superficial information, without much practical insights.
My hypothesis is that a lot of people got where they are from plain luck, but later justify their successes as "hard work" and create a story to sell themselves as "changing the world".
Does anyone feel that a lot of jobs are bs, paid by the rich to stroke their egos, keep their privilege, and prolong these self-perpetuating lies? Or that most "professionals" are subconsciously or intentionally lying their way through and feel proud about it?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30215033
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
I'm not exempting myself from this delusion at all. In fact, it was eye-opening to hear it called out. I've spent vast swaths of my 3-decade career hoping or believing that I was doing something purposeful -- or that my company or customers were. In retrospect, what we probably did is help a few already rich people get richer and provide for our own livelihoods during some part of the process.
Just working to care for yourself and your family doesn't sound particularly ennobling, but it does seem realistic. Since work is varied and so are the measurements of success, it's easy for anyone to map "success" or "failure" onto their own results, or someone else's. It's also easy to think that one person's work is more heroic or more important than another's, when really we're all just monkeys with typewriters trying to survive.
* UX is IT's life coaching, etc... yes there is people who work as life coach, they get paid to be someone's friend basically, they suggest things to do, spend time with them in vacation, and somehow they give you the dope tips and tricks to be happy. There is hardly anyone who is mainly a UX person, the only purely UX person I worked with in my life was someone who did basically management of UI people. Bigger more important companies do have UX people. At that point any small improvement is worth it.
* PM, those guys are important in coordinating work, someone has to do it, its useful role, but it doesn't take any unique skills, the type of personality would help but the unique skills no. There is no way we are people of science and agile and scrum and things we do are highly precise, ofc you have to "know" bs to do the job, we will never stop pretending being a PM is more than being someone who know how to coordinate work, talk to people, get stressed out by higher up so he amplify than and stress out the devs so they can finish in time. Manufacturing jobs have such hierarchies too, it is simple work just do the thing, but someone has to be making sure you doing the thing. We devs are a bit sensitive and it has to be someone with some super duper knowledge in doing the management and he has to hint to you that you should give it 110% instead of yelling to you as the old way in the manufacturing world.