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John Ousterhout: My favorite sayings

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Re: John Ousterhout: My favorite sayings

#3

Post by MFogleman » 

  The three most powerful words for building credibility are "I don't know"
I had a supervisor once who always had an answer to your question. He was always 100% sure he was right. He was not always right. Consequently, going to him for help would sometimes result in the problem becoming worse.

The best supervisor I ever had was the one who routinely told me "I don't know, let me call {PersonInOtherDepartment}" or "See if the answer is in {RelevantManual} under {PossibleSection}. If you don't find it, give me a call."

We treat "I don't know" as an admission of failure far too often. It should be seen as an entry point to improvement.

Re: John Ousterhout: My favorite sayings

#4

Post by csours »

MFogleman wrote: post #3

The three most powerful words for building credibility are "I don't know" I had a supervisor once who always had an answer to your question. He was always 100% sure he was right. He was not always right. Consequently, going to him for help would sometimes result in the problem becoming worse. The best supervisor I ever had was the one who routinely told me "I don't know, let me call {PersonInOtherDepartment}" or "See…

I had 2 team leads at one point - One of them would ALWAYS answer your question, and the other would sometimes say "I don't know/I have to research that/Let's look it up"

They both had the right answer about 95% of the time, but the one who said "I don't know" was only wrong about 1% of the time.

Re: John Ousterhout: My favorite sayings

#6

Post by asdfman123 »

I took a class from John Ousterhout. Great guy.

However, file this under "too honest":

> For example, a few years ago I started working on my first large Web application

I've spent most of my career learning the do's and don'ts of building large web applications... I assumed Professor Ousterhout had more experience in this sort of thing than I do!

Re: John Ousterhout: My favorite sayings

#7

Post by [deleted] »

asdfman123 wrote: post #6

I took a class from John Ousterhout. Great guy. However, file this under "too honest": > For example, a few years ago I started working on my first large Web application I've spent most of my career learning the do's and don'ts of building large web applications... I assumed Professor Ousterhout had more experience in this sort of thing than I do!

[deleted]

Re: John Ousterhout: My favorite sayings

#9

Post by wenc »

Side note: Ousterhout was famous for being the author of Tcl/Tk, which was a popular language and GUI toolkit in the early days of Linux (before Qt and GTK came along).

I wouldn't be surprised if many older Unixes are still running Tcl/Tk apps.

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