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It's important to note that this study focuses on data from 15-year-olds taking a math test. I assert that drawing broad conclusions based on that sample is suspect and may be, in fact, bullshit itself.
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…
That could be said, but it wouldn't be 100% The Truth.
Still, it almost feels right to say that. Because I started to feel truly dehumanized each time I found myself deeply mired in a process that revolved around a daily stand-up. I wanted to punch walls, strangle people, rip my hair out and scream in people's faces for all the polite stupidity and phoney baloney lip service we waded through every morning.
It was like, hey, let's start the day with complete fiction, and then try to build real progress on that foundation of laffy taffy and silly putty! YAAAYYYYY!
Why did I have to stand in a circle and tell lies and listen to lies for 20 minutes? Why did we go around the circle, look each other in the eye, not wink, and then say things that weren't even close to true?
I lost respect for most of my co-workers that way. It felt like the worst descriptions of a certain cult, where as you level up, you must, with ever-more convincing conviction, claim to believe in science fiction fairy tales revealed by The Word of a 1950's sci-author.
Before agile/scrum, it was safe and reasonable to take two or three weeks to complete a long-running chunk of serious effort that mattered to the success of a project.
After agile/scrum, that was no longer true. Daily incremental progress had to be "proven" and if that were not possible... UH OHHHHHHHHHHHH! NOTHING HAPPENS. (but still, uh ohhhhhhhh)
And then the fucking beating a dead horse sessions. Running back-to-back meetings (yes, these are called meetings, folks) for planning AND retrospectives. Two hours chopped out of each Friday, having planning for next week, and a retrospective for this past week, or I don't even know what week. Really? Seriously?
Two hours locked in a room where nothing happens, even though we have to stand around in a circle and prove something happened yesterday, or justify why it did not.
And oh yeah! Backlog grooming. Another hour for that. Where the rubber meets the road on the bullshit artistry, accumulated backlog garbage fires, for all the actual daily tasks like log scraping and urgent bug fixes that actually have to happen or a significant portion of real and necessary business falls flat on its face if neglected.
And oh yeah, multiple hours long actual design and planning sessions injected at random any given week, where we would be assembling the true-true goals that might ostensibly take shape next quarter or something. This is where you gain the realization of who the ghosts of Christmas past are. The dead, fired and quit employees who were responsible for all the backlog tickets, long long ago, before time immemorible, frolicking amid the primordial ooze with with prototypical vertebral boney plate exoskeletons and filter feeding mouth parts, must have experienced meeting like these... but where are they now?
I'm not going back. I won't work any such sort of job ever again. I won't interview for them. Apply to them. Talk to people. It doesn't matter. I never want to work again, if that's what work looks like now.
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…
It's an impossible task if it's not their job to implement. So it borders on impossible to be an IC and a bullshitter.
However if you're a supervisor or manager which I would argue are the majority of bullshitters, and you aren't committing code (or other similar technical work), then how would you prove that they don't know what they are talking about, without getting fired, until it's too late? What happens when the bullshitter has top cover and can't be called out/fired?
The standard response to these is "that's a bad place to work so quit." Ok, maybe sometimes. However most people don't have the ability to do that. So they just double duty the work and get the job done.
So, I'm curious how do you call out bullshitters when you can't prove they don't know something? Honestly asking cause I'd love to do this a lot but don't know how.
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…
Start-ups are foundationaly bullshit. It's almost always some person with some type of observation and a relative level of blind faith for an idea or system that MAY work. Worse than that, almost every major breakthrough or improvement ends up looking completely different than the original hypothesis immediately rendering the original confidence as bullshit. We just apply genius historically.
In the end startups seem to be a confidence game where a group or person basically need to survive long enough for a point on their series of experiments to work and their bullshit to be "prescient."
My observation on tech and engineering is the disdain for bullshit is a clumsy hatred for the uncertain nature of social exchange amongst people. The rules are very different than the absolute predictability of systems like math and logic and that makes people uncomfortable and angry.
It's important to note that this study focuses on data from 15-year-olds taking a math test. I assert that drawing broad conclusions based on that sample is suspect and may be, in fact, bullshit itself.
As an American, I am so disgusted by lies that I refused to bullshit my kids about Santa Claus. I informed them that it was utter bullshit but that they were not to ever tell other kids the truth because that was between them and their parents. It really gave my kids an entirely different perspective on American culture and the mass insanity (however benign it is considered) that entire cultures can adopt as the status quo.
Personally I felt that weaving an absurd yarn about something so important for the overall culture in general and for the kids in particular was only going to damage my credibility with my kids later when they finally learned the truth, that truth being that I had foisted a ridiculous lie upon them since before they could remember.
It is my conclusion that the vast majority of what people consider their precious traditions are nothing more than excuses to continue to act badly in the face of a lack of critical thinking.
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.
The problem is that when "making it" is a huge long-shot (most tech ideas) and "faking it" is really easy (most tech ideas) then you end up with a whole lot of fakes that never make and a bunch of people who either need to come to grips with the fact that they are basically frauds or who will simply spin it as a "learning experience" and use their failure to promote themselves as having "made it", since who has ever made it without making a few mistakes, right?
Accountability is the big problem, but I also think that the superficiality of relationships is another big contributor. It's the same as accountability, really, just on a different scale and it's done before the "fraud".
I once went through an LGA (large group awareness) program where a part of it was about having small teams and buddies keeping each other accountable to their personal goals. There was a phrase that came out of that when people who were supposed to be holding each others accountable would both fail in their goals because neither wanted to call the other person out for fear of being called out themselves, or out of a sense of hypocrisy for giving someone shit when they had not finishing their own goals.
This was called "Cosigning each others bullshit" and I think it's what happens more often than not in high level business/political dealings. We'd have a lot less high-profile fraud/incompetence cases if more people had the courage to keep other people honest before it got to that point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You need to find the right balance between bullshitting and delivering . Elon Musk or Steve Jobs are first class bullshitters but they also back it up quite often (not always though).
Elon Musk and Steve Jobs are and were highly intelligent people. For them it is less about bullshitting but more about their dreams and goals. I do not believe Elon Musk is bullshitting when giving timeframes, he knows what is possible technically, but fails to predict how long it takes to deliver
I'm 17 pages in and I am wondering if the paper itself is bullshit and that's the joke.
If it's not bullshit, then I definitely need a ELI5 explanation of this: https://imgur.com/38CXnRx
Take Table 3. The outcome "O_ij" for each student's "views of abilities" is the scale score (split into self-efficacy and problem solving). The table shows bullshitters think they're awesome, giving positive scores (higher than the mean). Bullshitters were previously categorized into four groups by asking questions about what math terms they were familiar with, including terms that don't exist (maybe they were familiar with 0,1,2, or 3 of the fake terms)
Control for other factors by adding levers for achievement, socio-economic status, gender and school. These are the capital letters, set by test scores, etc. Students from each school will have a different u_j, probably higher for higher-performing schools B.S. is probably a matrix of ones, or 1-4, or something.
Perform a regression (let a computer do some matrix math to solve for unknown variables), using all of the students as data points. Each student will end up with a different set of italic letters indicating how much the capital letters influence their outcome, with students who are similar in one aspect sharing similar (or equal, depending on how they set up the problem) values for that italicized letter. For table 3, it looks like the study claims students who have been identified as bullshitters end up with higher beta values ("regression results").
It's possible this explanation is bullshit, though.