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Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

theguardian.com

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Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#31

Post by Sharlin »

B0btheBuilder wrote: post #11
antonvs wrote: post #9

This is projection by people who are untrained in what they do. Competent people with good training in some discipline are able to apply that training to competently achieve goals. This allows them to apply knowledge that they didn't develop themselves by trial and error, and is much more efficient, with better outcomes than the alternatives. Unfortunately, this often seems to be the exception rather than the rule. A…

Even competent people with good training aren't perfect. Competent people make mistakes. You mention bridges, buildings, and ships, all projects built by massive teams of people and stringent processes. These massive teams of people and stringent processes are necessary exactly because people aren't perfect. I'm unclear what you mean by the article focusing on "untrained people", unless you're trying to claim that po…

Making occasional mistakes while applying formal knowledge seems to be qualitatively quite different from making suboptimal decisions because you’re improvising due to lack of such formal knowledge.

In some domains you don’t have a choice; there are too many moving parts, decision making is of necessity based on noisy and incomplete information, the domain is too messy for formal models to be useful. You just have to intuit and improvise. This is more often than not the case when human interactions are involved. Trying to impose engineering solutions to social problems usually ends in disaster.

Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#32

Post by yelloweyes »

davnicwil wrote: post #26

I'm always really impressed by young people, early in their careers or without any career experience at all, who intuit this and are confident in their convictions and get stuff done despite their inexperience. When I was young I was convinced that life beyond academia in all fields would be this super serious, mega competitive space where most everyone has everything figured out. That everyone who was there, in any…

> the classic Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg etc, is not actually what they did but that they had the sheer temerity to do it at that age without first building their confidence in industry for a few years.

They are/were all known for being very arrogant people. Just because some of them become billionaires doesn't mean everyone should be like that.

> How did they have the confidence to hold their own when confronted with such adults

Have you ever met a 12 year old know-it-all? Same thing.

Linus didn't win the debate vs Tanenbaum. He simply happened to be the right guy at the right place at the right time.

Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#33

Post by lostgame »

yelloweyes wrote: post #32
davnicwil wrote: post #26

I'm always really impressed by young people, early in their careers or without any career experience at all, who intuit this and are confident in their convictions and get stuff done despite their inexperience. When I was young I was convinced that life beyond academia in all fields would be this super serious, mega competitive space where most everyone has everything figured out. That everyone who was there, in any…

> the classic Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg etc, is not actually what they did but that they had the sheer temerity to do it at that age without first building their confidence in industry for a few years. They are/were all known for being very arrogant people. Just because some of them become billionaires doesn't mean everyone should be like that. > How did they have the confidence to hold their own when confronted with suc…

I think this is really a huge part of it. Right place, right time.

There are plenty of brilliant people with ideas actually executed very well that just go nowhere for whatever reason or other.

Also right team, right people, I mean, right circumstances in general. In those kinds of right circumstances, the dumb move would be not to capitalize on it.

Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#36

Post by derefr »

yelloweyes wrote: post #32
davnicwil wrote: post #26

I'm always really impressed by young people, early in their careers or without any career experience at all, who intuit this and are confident in their convictions and get stuff done despite their inexperience. When I was young I was convinced that life beyond academia in all fields would be this super serious, mega competitive space where most everyone has everything figured out. That everyone who was there, in any…

> the classic Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg etc, is not actually what they did but that they had the sheer temerity to do it at that age without first building their confidence in industry for a few years. They are/were all known for being very arrogant people. Just because some of them become billionaires doesn't mean everyone should be like that. > How did they have the confidence to hold their own when confronted with suc…

> Have you ever met a 12 year old know-it-all? Same thing.

Not at all. Words versus deeds. There are tons of inexperienced people who talk like they know everything; but of those, very few of them actually set out to do the things that "require experience."

Say that there's a person who thinks they have an awesome idea for a game, but knows nothing about game development. It's the difference between them talking about this amazing game they want to make "one day", or maybe them posting on Upwork saying "I have an awesome idea for a game, I just need someone to build it"; and them sitting down and trying to actually build their idea themselves right now.

It's also a question of how they confront obstacles. Most people without this trait of inexhaustible self-confidence, when they realize they don't have the skills to do something, will stop trying to do it, or will shelve the project and set out to first learn those skills. (And maybe never get back to their original dream/passion, instead just using the acquired skills in more mundane ways. All of you here who got into programming because you wanted to be a game developer know what I mean.)

A person with this mindset, meanwhile, will create the best version of the thing they can right now with their limited skillset, and then keep iterating on it, improving their skills in the process of creating the thing.

For an example, there are quite a number of webcomic artists working today, who, when they started, didn't know a thing about drawing (or much of anything, being teenagers), and it shows in their first comics. But they didn't care that they didn't know how to do it well; as long as they could do it at all, they just did it, and kept doing it, drawing and publishing a strip every day. And over the years, doing so has taught them how to draw—such that now, they're great at what they do.

Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#37

Post by paganel »

johnjohnsmith wrote: post #20
antonvs wrote: post #9

This is projection by people who are untrained in what they do. Competent people with good training in some discipline are able to apply that training to competently achieve goals. This allows them to apply knowledge that they didn't develop themselves by trial and error, and is much more efficient, with better outcomes than the alternatives. Unfortunately, this often seems to be the exception rather than the rule. A…

I'd like to offer a few decades of perspective on your claim. I've been programming for 30+ years. When I sit down to code, most of the time I've thought through it before even typing and am ~99% confident I won't hit a roadblock. I've spent half my life mastering my programming skills. BUT: I'm a high-level technical lead / product lead, so I only get to write code a few times a month and it is more for stress-relea…

Sites like this one (and especially the initial spirit behind them) are the result of programmers and programmer-like minds (“hackers”, if you will) just “winging” it and seeing what will happen if they’ll build them. The reddit’s founders’ decision to initially write it in Lisp or even Paul Graham’s decision to write this website in Arc is almost quintessentially “winging it”, no sane person should have picked the wingy Lisp or Lisp-like Arc over a non-wingy and easily “architecturable” platform like Struts (we’re talking about the years 2005-2006). The same goes for Zuckerberg using PHP to write Facebook as PHP is the most winging-like programming language ever.

What I’m trying to say it’s that winging it is good, it’s good to get lost in a bazaar, we don’t all need cathedrals.

Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#38

Post by B0btheBuilder »

davnicwil wrote: post #26

I'm always really impressed by young people, early in their careers or without any career experience at all, who intuit this and are confident in their convictions and get stuff done despite their inexperience. When I was young I was convinced that life beyond academia in all fields would be this super serious, mega competitive space where most everyone has everything figured out. That everyone who was there, in any…

Zuckerberg's mom's a psychiatrist and his dad's a dentist. His dad taught him BASIC programming as a kid and then hired a software engineer as his tutor.

Gates' dad's a prominent lawyer and his mom was a prominent businesswoman on the board of directors on several different organizations. Not only did Gates learn programming as a kid, but Microsoft only got on IBM computers because his mom knew IBM executives.

When you come from privilege, it's much easier to have confidence that things will work out.

Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#39

Post by jameslk »

pdonis wrote: post #35

So the evidence this article is based on is...a Reddit thread? Excuse me? Somebody is certainly winging it without knowing what they're doing.

Yes I'm also confused by this article (opinion piece?) and the comments here (also mostly opinions). I'm pretty sure I'm not just winging it when I do my job. But I guess we don't really have a formal definition of "winging it" to have a meaningful conversation about what that is exactly.

Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#40

Post by Flozzin »

This article reminds me of a clip from an interview with Obama recently. https://youtu.be/N7ZHDoNhScY?t=716

He states that he expected people in charge would be more informed or smarter as he progressed up the chain from community organizer to world leader. But in his experience they did not. In his words, "It was all the same people."

Another person that touches on this idea is Adam Corolla. His often states his observation that he thought everyone was good at their job when he was a child. But when he grew up and worked with people he realized that there are so many people that are bad at their jobs.

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