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Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

earthly.dev

201–210 of 289 posts

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#201
My favourite personal example of this was a "big project" I was working on in the early 2000's. There were two QA reviewers for my project plan:

One raised "serious objections" to the QA section, saying it wasn't detailed enough, we needed a full test plan, and demanding TDD be used for all development. They cc'ed the CEO with their review.

The second QA reviewer said the test plan was a "good high level approach" and that only thing they wanted to see was an explicit "design for testability" requirement for one of the critical, and hairy, modules.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#202

Being a hedgehog is useful on the journey to domain mastery because sticking to frameworks saves you time and headache compared to not having any frameworks at all. The 3 stages of domain mastery: Stage 1 - No knowledge or structure to approach a domain (everything is hard, pitfalls are everywhere) Stage 2 - Frameworks that are useful to approach the domain (Map to avoid pitfall areas) Stage 3 - Detailed understandin…

> All of this makes it hard to move beyond stage 2 into stage 3. Often, moving to the stage 3 is a waste of time and resources. There are a few cases if your business's main secret sauce is stage 3, but for most other things - commoditize and focus. I've seen so many teams and engineers trying to master stage 3 but no real business need and ROI. Engineers love mastering things but good leaders guide them in the right…

> commoditize and focus

You say that as if there were any agreement about what that means. But the point of the article is that this is not true; you'll always find someone that insists on using technology (or technique) X for your project, only technology X will be different for each person. Moreover, X might be actually making the project harder to understand, longer to develop or have other significant downsides.

The point of reaching step 3 is not necessarily to be able to develop your own custom solution (although that can be sometimes valuable), but to able to pick the right technologies for a given project given the myriad options available.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#203
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To be a good X you must follow the rules. To be a great X you must have followed the rules so well as to learn why they’re there and when they should be broken. In my experience slavishly following the "rules" or "best practices" can actually be worse than never following them. Not understanding when it's good to deviate usually means of a lack of understanding of why the "rules" or "best practices" exist in the fi…

"Rules" often contradict each other. For example, in software development, "keep it simple" often directly conflicts with "dont repeat yourself" as it takes increased complexity to achieve reuse of code. I often see keeping it simple take a back seat in newer developers as they slavishly follow the don't repeat yourself trail. The end result is routinely a brittle, rigid, and overly complex solution.

Don’t repeat yourself or making code “DRY” sounds/sells so much better than tightly coupled.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great read. One thing I've found (as a person who advises engineering managers and startups) is that recipients of advice seem to value non-contingent advice more. They just want simple answers that don't make them think. When someone asks me a question like "how should I interview candidates?", my default answer is "it depends". Tell me about the role. The company. The culture. The product. Remote or in-person? What…

I personally find that I want opinionated advice in two scenarios: either all the options look indistinguishably similar or they are very different sets of trade-offs that leave no clear winner. At that point, the advice is more a tool for breaking decision paralysis than a choice between options with noticeably different outcomes.

Good point. I find outlining the two (or more) possible scenarios as explicit options and asking "I'm on the fence, which would you do?" is the best way to get that type of opinionated advice from "the foxes". Otherwise you quickly get the "it depends" answer.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#205
post #2

Author here, thanks for sharing this. Let me know what you think. I'm trying to connect the dots on research on expert advice and our fields 'thought-leaders'. The connection is a bit tenuous but I think contingent advice can be shown to be better than non-contingent advice. I also think people are too confident in their opinions. Also another submission here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27462255

This a good framework for identifying a particular type of bad, or useless, feedback. I've added "non-contingent" to my vocabulary.

For example, another type of useless feedback is so general as to be insulting; "this needs to scale" or "it needs to be high quality".

"too general" vs "non-contingent" are nice distinct buckets.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#206
I enjoyed that read. I suspect that it probably pissed off a few folks.

I'm a grizzled, scarred old codger that spent most of his career, saying "Are you sure that's a good idea?", only to be ignored, and then put in charge of mopping up the blood.

I have learned that "I told you so." is absolutely, 1000% worthless. It doesn't even feel good, saying it.

What I have learned, is that, when I see someone dancing along a cliff edge, I quietly start figuring out where the mops are kept. If that person has any authority at all, I'll never be able to stop them from their calisthenics.

One of my favorite quotes is one that pretty much describes "hedgehogs":

    "There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong."
There's another one, by the same chap (H. L. Mencken):

    "The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake."
Of course, the issue is that for every 10,000 appalling, messy, featured-on-rotten-dot-com failures, there's one spectacular success. Since humans are biased to think of successful outcomes as more likely than they actually are, the ingredients for that success become a "recipe," and are slavishly reproduced, without any critical thought, or flexibility.

It's like a witch doctor's formula for headache cure is bat urine, dandruff from the shrunken head of a fallen warrior chief, eye of newt, boiled alligator snot, and ground willow bark. The willow bark is what did it, but the dandruff thing is the most eye-catching ingredient, so it gets the credit, and everytime the chief gets a hangover, they start a war.

Somewhere down the road, a copycat substitutes hemlock for the willow bark, and headaches become a death sentence.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#208
post #2

Author here, thanks for sharing this. Let me know what you think. I'm trying to connect the dots on research on expert advice and our fields 'thought-leaders'. The connection is a bit tenuous but I think contingent advice can be shown to be better than non-contingent advice. I also think people are too confident in their opinions. Also another submission here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27462255

You captured this well. I genuinely thought this was just something that happened in my company, which has been around for a bit. ;-) I accidentally stumbled upon your technique independently!

A) I’d love to have a coffee with you. Virtual or otherwise!

B) What do you think about alignment of priorities -within- a team? I’ve seen some interesting behaviors and misbehaviors in a team, where initiatives that are both trivial and non trivial die a death of a thousand cuts because of various and sundry plausible reasons. If I peel back the onion on it, it seems like those situations are ones that arise because of a fundamental lack of trust. Would you challenge or support that premise? If supported would you consider external stakeholders’ objections to stem from the same root lack of trust? It seems like we get more “hedgehog” like behavior when we don’t trust each other, and more “fox-like” behavior when there’s better trust and communication.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#209

I enjoyed that read. I suspect that it probably pissed off a few folks. I'm a grizzled, scarred old codger that spent most of his career, saying "Are you sure that's a good idea?", only to be ignored, and then put in charge of mopping up the blood. I have learned that "I told you so." is absolutely, 1000% worthless. It doesn't even feel good, saying it. What I have learned, is that, when I see someone dancing along a…

> I have learned that "I told you so." is absolutely, 1000% worthless.

This is proof of bad company culture.

Doing post-mortems is important to learn what went wrong in the decision process and how to prevent it.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#210
post #20

Found this to be a straightforward and interesting article. Not sure I've ever seen someone connect Tetlock's research to engineering planning before; I certainly hadn't made the connection myself. I also appreciated the tip that instead of saying no to something, you can just add it to a "future work" section of lower-priority but definitely-still-very-important-i-promise-really-i-mean-it tasks and everyone will end…

From How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk (1980): > My husband and I took Jason and his older sister, Leslie, to the Museum of Natural History. We really enjoyed it, and the kids were just great. Only on the way out we had to pass a gift shop. Jason, our four-year-old, went wild over the souvenirs. Most of the stuff was overpriced, but we finally bought him a little set of rocks. Then he started…

> administrative process and formalism is just a stratagem to make people feel like they have a say when they really don't. Almost everyone falls for it.

Democracy in a nutshell.

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