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Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? [pdf]

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Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? [pdf]

#61

Post by mwfunk »

kuzehanka wrote: post #38
will_brown wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The notion of bullshitters needs to be brought to the front of our industry's consciousness The industry (tech, startups, VC money) do bring bullshit to the front of the industry consciousness. I’ve never seen another industry push and promote “fake it till you make it” so hard. Democratizing this...disrupting that...we respect your privacy and data...DAO/code is law...Self driving cars...uber is creating good jobs.…

I always interpreted 'fake it till you make it' as 'promise what you could do with sufficient resources'. That is fundamentally different from people who just make up random shit that sounds good to whoever has money, without any idea or plans to materialise it or whether it's even possible. You do raise a good point with Uber/theranos/dao.

"Fake it till you make it" means, sound like you're way more confident about what you're saying than you actually are, until you become the sort of person you're presenting yourself as. It's not people making up random shit, it's people making up totally plausible sounding shit.

Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? [pdf]

#65

Post by adamnemecek »

kuzehanka wrote: post #7

The notion of bullshitters needs to be brought to the front of our industry's consciousness. Our industry is one where the impostor complex is rife and anyone who sounds confident must know what they're talking about, since even the PhD's aren't half as confident in their field of expertise as a bullshitter is at anything. The tech industry is increasingly inundated with these types of people who manage to get placed…

Are the fizzbuzzers real? I feel like their existence is somewhat mythological.

Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? [pdf]

#66

Post by mgkimsal »

SimonPStevens wrote: post #19

I consider myself to be an anti-bullshitter. I once said in a job interview that I knew nothing about the technology they were hiring for, but I was pretty sure I could take a decent stab at it. I was telling the truth. I got the job.

could be any of a number of reasons (or combination thereof) why you got that job.

* comparison to other candidates * truthfulness/honesty * track record * personality

At some point, the "I know nothing about this" really isn't all that true, especially for senior dev folks. I'm not sure there's much tech I couldn't say "I know nothing about X", because I understand fundamentals. I don't know much about a lot of tech - erlang/lisp/rust all spring to mind. But I understand variables, scoping, order of operations, etc - even if the behaviour is somewhat different from what I'm used to, I know some fundamentals that I didn't know in the beginning (or... were not muscle memory on day one).

Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? [pdf]

#67

Post by hirundo »

Fede_V wrote: post #21

If you've never experienced it before, the first time you work with someone who is a pathological liar and bullshitter is a completely disorienting experience. Normal people just don't lie that brazenly and with so little remorse - so you walk out of meetings wondering if perhaps you just misunderstood because there's no way someone would straight up lie that way. Interestingly, both of the worst bullshitters I've ev…

Sometimes a bullshitter consistently peddles untruths, but is unaware of it, and so isn't a liar, just mistaken. I grew up with an older brother like that. He regularly spouted pure bullshit that to him was Truth.

That became clear once when I was struggling with math homework. He looked at the problem, pronounced that he understood it and could solve it easily. So I handed him the pencil. He didn't know he was bullshitting so didn't make an excuse or acknowledge that I'd called a bluff. He took the pencil and sat down, then stared at the book and the problem for 20 minutes. Then shrugged, got up, and walked away. But he really thought he could do it so he did try.

Since then he's made a living in a retail construction trade and hasn't changed. He'll visit a homeowner who will explain the problem. He'll confidently and convincingly explain how he can solve it, and get the job. Then he'll utterly fail and ignore the resulting problems, and not understand why the customer gets upset. His last name, and so mine, is dirt in the city where he works, which he seems to be unaware of. But another sucker is born every minute so he moves on. As a tradesman he is crap but as a salesman he's golden, largely because he honestly believes in his own competence.

Growing up with that has inoculated me against this mode of bullshit so it's been a blessing. I suppose it's like the benefit of raising a kid in an environment that's not too clean.

Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? [pdf]

#68

Post by jpmattia »

Fede_V wrote: post #21

If you've never experienced it before, the first time you work with someone who is a pathological liar and bullshitter is a completely disorienting experience. Normal people just don't lie that brazenly and with so little remorse - so you walk out of meetings wondering if perhaps you just misunderstood because there's no way someone would straight up lie that way. Interestingly, both of the worst bullshitters I've ev…

Amen to that first paragraph.

> both of the worst bullshitters I've ever met were in academia - and the business world has been a breath of fresh air in comparison.

I've had the opposite experience. One example was a company with bicoastal research operations: A fairly high-level manager had the west-coast operations convinced that he was pretty consumed working the east-coast ops and could spend only a little time with the people in the west. In a parallel development, he had the east-coast operations convinced that he was pretty consumed working the west-coast ops and could spend only a little time with the people in the east.

The company pretty much melted down before specific action was taken against him.

Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? [pdf]

#69

Post by mg794613 »

Reedx wrote: post #28
SimonPStevens wrote: post #19

I consider myself to be an anti-bullshitter. I once said in a job interview that I knew nothing about the technology they were hiring for, but I was pretty sure I could take a decent stab at it. I was telling the truth. I got the job.

"I don't know" is such an underappreciated phrase (followed with action to remedy that).

We had an interviewee (is that a word?) today who said that he didn't know and to me that was a reason to hire him.

Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? [pdf]

#70

Post by mg794613 »

formalsystem wrote: post #35

I think we need to take the right message from this. BS seems to be a necessary evil and instead of lamenting the fall of intellectualism, I would encourage techies to focus on their craft, writing and speaking in that order. The other day I was reading https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312427581/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b... and the TL;DR was that most of the modern art movement was brewed out of a PR machine which did involv…

No, if you are actually skilled, you take pride in what you do. I will not give up and join the bullshitters.
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