Neither of those answers seem at all dishonest. They just skip past the diagnosed cause to focus on the impact.
Maybe the boss being a raging ass is the root cause of the team moving in the wrong direction. But that may be debatable, and knowing that doesn't answer the interviewer's question. The more relevant piece is that you and the director disagree and that you don't want to waste your time working on something you aren't inspired by.
Why are you leaving your current job questions are typically inartful checks whether there's "something wrong with you." Refusing to meaningfully answer can come across as, "I'd prefer not to discuss whether there's something wrong with me." Not explicitly damaging, but certainly not confidence building.
The most useful answers I've heard in the wild were dispassionate, one sentence expressions of why <objective fact> made the existing job irreconcilable with your <valid need>. Done well, that shows the hiring manager you're able to approach conflict constructively, and gives reason to believe the bad fit is unlikely to recur in this role.
AskAManager[0] also suggests "I’m not actively looking, but I saw this job and was really interested because of X," as a reasonably broad spectrum solution to this problem. (Though after just a year, I as a hiring manager might still worry you are flighty).
Not OP, but also used the API for music discovery, crawling the related artists network from playlists I'd created to find highly connected nodes. I found that strategy was very efficient at filling blind spots in major genres I listened to, and reasonably good at exploring random niches, but generally wasn't the place I found songs that felt truly fresh to me. It felt like it got noticeably worse about 5 years ago, when I perceived them to have ramped up the payola, but that might just be in my head.
The major costs you're missing are marketing and "plate" (up front cost to produce the content). Those make up most of the total costs. For textbooks, the decision makers are professors (so door-to-door sales to get their attention), and the market is pretty small, especially for upper level content (so few units to amortize fixed costs over). Print, paper, and binding are cheap, say ~$10-12 average for a textbook. Typically, distribution channel takes a 20-25%, depending on channel partner, and many colleges mandate that sales go through the school bookstore because they get a cut, so publisher's website isn't necessarily a viable option (without a lot of student marketing). Author royalties run ~13-15% of revenue, and editors hit plate expense (they're publisher employees, so not a variable cost like authors). Textbook publisher Ebitda margins wind up running 20-25%, but most publisher's pay a lot of interest expense, partly because the major costs are up front, and partly because there's been a lot of PE ownership. Net margins can be tight as anyone else's.
Source: worked for a plaintiff publisher in this case. Think Pearson, Cengage, and MHE all publish financials also.
The chart you linked stops before it gets to the cohort discussed in the article. The youngest cohort shown is the 25-34 cohort in 2016 would have been born in 1982-1991 ("gen y"/"millenials"). The economist article is discussing the cohort born starting in 1997. It seems to think the chart gets rosier for the young.
Fair point on data comparability. The trend (younger generations substantially worse off) is pretty clear though.
> It seems to think the chart gets rosier for the young.
That seems comical optimistic to me. Between gig economy, covid and rising cost of living, unaffordable housing, college loans I struggle to see the young ones building rapid wealth all of a sudden. If anything id expect even worse than where that chart stops.
When a company goes into bankruptcy, they still have assets (inventory, a brand, real estate, customer contracts) -- those things just belong to their creditors now. The new owners need _someone_ to manage selling all those things to recoup some money.
More often, though, the business is still worth more than the sum of its parts. It just wasn't making enough to pay the loans it'd taken out. Since the loans get eliminated in bankruptcy, the new owners might decide to just keep running the company (and want a new CEO, who they think will do a better job.
It does, but it can be expensive enough as to be prohibitive [0]. For example, offices tend to have fewer water hookups, fewer breakers (meaning high construction costs to repurpose) and wide floors (meaning lots of windowless units).
They can be, and that's a statement about the distribution and consistency of skill in those activities. I see little reason to believe those distributions apply to SAT taking or general capacity to learn (which is what you're really aspiring to measure).
If we set up an ELO league for best-of-three rock paper scissors, I'd expect score to diverge over sufficiently many hours, but would give almost even odds to a 99th v 93rd percentile candidate.
Stay bonuses [1] are probably the most common case. It's actually pretty common in a merger, especially one with a long period between announcement and integration, to hand out parachutes of various metals to key employees.
If you're the CEO closing a deal where the buying party is overpaying by $15B, they really really don't want you to quit in the middle.
If you're a rock star category manager, they still want you to stick around because you might get the job after in the combined entity, and even if you won't, who will they be able to hire to manage the category while they're doing the deal?
Maybe the boss being a raging ass is the root cause of the team moving in the wrong direction. But that may be debatable, and knowing that doesn't answer the interviewer's question. The more relevant piece is that you and the director disagree and that you don't want to waste your time working on something you aren't inspired by.