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Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

earthly.dev

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Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#261

Post by void_mint »

duxup wrote: post #252
void_mint wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my last job, my boss was very guilty of "At ____, we found x to always cause us problems", but he never really connected that "x" was a problem because of the context surrounding it, not inherently. We went through this really awful process of: Manager either demands or rejects an idea based on a totally different company -> I spend days/weeks proof of concepting/documenting/testing/validating for or against his m…

Yeah it absolutely can be an endless process. Human imagination is endless. You can't 'try catch' for everything that has happened sometime, even more so when addressing it at a high level without detail / nuance. You easily can get nothing done.

> You easily can get nothing done.

That's exactly what we did. A year spent conducting experiments to validate or invalidate positions based in dogma rather than building, iterating and adding value.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#262

Post by quetzthecoatl »

mym1990 wrote: post #260
quetzthecoatl wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Messi can teach the ones who teach football. Not the best example. He was doing unbelievable things when he was a literal teenager. A surprisingly better example would be Cristiano Ronaldo. Ronaldo was absolutley frustrating to watch in his early career. It was someone trying hard to do flashy moves without any end product. He needed guidance, rules and structures. He also slowly transitioned from Winger to Forward/S…

I literally have no idea what you mean by 'Messi can teach the ones who teach football' but my comment was not an invitation to discuss who is better. The rules I am talking about are the ones like 'you can't kick the ball out of bounds', 'you have to score between the goalposts', 'this is a corner kick', 'this is offsides'. Neither Messi nor Ronaldo made those rules, but they are all time greats in their competency.

I meant he could mentor the mentors in his teens - an age he should be getting mentored. He was that good, and surprisingly mature. He was a finished product in his teens. Cristiano wasn't. He was just one of the many talents among robinho, robben, rooney, van persie, fabregas, quaresma (to name a few i remember) - all of them rated better than cristiano.

And by rules, I don't mean offside, handball, freekick rules. I mean how to hold the line, when to dribble, when to shoot, to hold formation, play as a team, end product etc.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#263

Post by agarden »

iainmerrick wrote: post #154
spyckie2 wrote: post #35

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…

Your response to this article about how contingent advice is usually better than universal advice is to propose a universal theory?

A universal theory is not the same thing as universal advice. What would one universally do just because one knows the universal theory?

...Now that you bring it up, the OP is offering a piece of universal advice. The irony seems stronger there. Not sure if that invalidates his advice or not. Probably just invalidates taking it as a hard and fast rule.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#264

Post by void_mint »

void_mint wrote: post #100
colechristensen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t even have to be somewhere notable, beware of the engineer trying to recreate their previous environment (and in yourself too).

In my career I've found this to be a huge huge huge red flag as well. If you can only build software one way, you don't really understand how to build it. If moving to a new employer means replicating a previous employer's practices exactly, I don't think you really lack the knowledge or reflectiveness to understand what was good or bad about it.

* I don't think you really have the knowledge or reflectiveness to understand what was good or not

Really wish I could just edit my comment.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#265

Post by devchix »

megameter wrote: post #47
agbell wrote: 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

There is a very similar problem in advice-giving for technical questions, the problem of "Why do you want to do that? You should do this instead." I've seen others recommend trying to ask binary yes/no questions ("I think it's like this. Yes/no?") or to turn an open-ended question, when asked, into a set of binaries rather than guess at the intent. The property that seems to be common in addressing both is benchmark-…

> the problem of "Why do you want to do that? You should do this instead

IIR, there's a word or idiom that describes this kind of solution, I can't think of it and now it's going to bother me until I do. It's a stackoverflow issue, someone asks "How do I do X?" Someone will counter, "Why do you want to do X?" and upon receiving additional information, answer, "You don't want to do X, or this other thing you're doing before doing X. You want to start this way and go down this path and that way you don't have to do X." Maddening!

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#266

Post by labrador »

Sammi wrote: post #193
labrador wrote: post #12

1996: OOP all the code! 2000: XML all the data! 2004: AJAX all the websites! 2008: JQuery all the browser code! 2012: Nodejs all the website backends! 2016: TypeScript all the JavaScript! 2018: Rust all the system code!

The first half of that list were just the best options available at the time (in any practical sense). After that you start listing things that aren't nearly universal.

Functional programmers would like to have a word with you...

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#267

Post by muttled »

ianmcgowan wrote: post #112
lostcolony wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take it one further. "Okay, let's sit down together and write out a story that fully defines what you're asking me to do". Half the time they won't bother. -Your- effort is free, but -their- effort has a cost. The other half of the time they will, because they care about it, and so it goes into the backlog, and they get to see what stuff takes precedence (and it's a legitimately good faith effort on my part to see…

Aka "The Wally Reflector". https://dilbert.com/strip/2005-07-10 Even a small task is usually enough to filter out requests where the requestor is basically trying to move a task from their list to your list..

Careful about saying yes early on, though. Even if they disappear, that won't stop them from telling everyone else that it's now your job.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#268

Post by goodpoint »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #211
goodpoint wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Different thing. "I told you so" is a smug, nasty statement. It wins no friends, and closes the ears of those most in need of it. A postmortem is a clinical, reasoned, and scientific review. Everyone is on board, and agrees to abide by the results. I worked for a Japanese company, for a long time. I made some colossal mistakes, during my tenure, and was told "That was, indeed, a mistake. We expect you to mitigate it,…

> Different thing. "I told you so" is a smug, nasty statement

I agree. The fact that the parent feels like his warning were ignored and his voice was unheard is a cause for frustration.

Having a postmortem process after each incident would prevent such frustration.

> A postmortem is a clinical, reasoned, and scientific review.

I'm well aware of this.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#269

Post by ineedasername »

l33t2328 wrote: post #228
ineedasername wrote: post #25

Tetlock also found that foxes were less likely to be famous because contingent advice is harder to explain in a sound bite. Yep. Occasionally there will be a complex problem with a simple solution. More often, complex problems have difficult solutions. And unfortunately, If you're in a room discussing the problem and one person gives a simple solution and you try to start a conversation about the complexities involve…

> one person gives a simple solution and you try to start a conversation about the complexities involved and resolving sub-problems A simple “that solution doesn’t seem to address $subProblemA or sufficiently handle $efgeCaseB” would do the trick, eh?

You would think so, and sometimes it does. Sometimes you get looked at as being too negative and people decide well let's give the easy option a shot. If it's wrong we'll adjust." That actually isn't a bad way to go either, as long as there's nothing time/resource critical at stake and an incorrect "easy" solution doesn't make things worse.

I've managed to head off some of those. Had a CEO who favored simple solutions, but would listen to options. And I had a good manager who brought me along to important meetings. The CEO would hear me out. Sometimes they agreed.l, and things worked out. Sometimes the opposite. Once though I did see them cut a Gordian Knot in a very simply way-- though for some rather painful. I still think it was a drastic oversimplified solution to a problem where there were better options, but others had had a chance at those better options and dropped the ball (basically ignored it), and the problem did have to get solved...

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#270

Post by ex_amazon_sde »

throwaway_fjmr wrote: post #224
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different thing. "I told you so" is a smug, nasty statement. It wins no friends, and closes the ears of those most in need of it. A postmortem is a clinical, reasoned, and scientific review. Everyone is on board, and agrees to abide by the results. I worked for a Japanese company, for a long time. I made some colossal mistakes, during my tenure, and was told "That was, indeed, a mistake. We expect you to mitigate it,…

How do you, or how should anyone in a similar situation learn that actions have consequences? I work for a large (not FAANG but spatially close) ecommerce company, and I’ve yet to see substantial changes or learnings after outages or mistakes. I often find that wishy-washy post-mortems smear responsibility and deflect accountability. This doesn’t incentivize a change in behavior, and when people blindly get more trus…

> I work for a large (not FAANG but spatially close) ecommerce company, and I’ve yet to see substantial changes or learnings after outages or mistakes.

I worked for Amazon and postmortems were taken seriously and done regularly - but things can be different in other teams.

If people warned about a risk in the past this would be noticed.

If nobody flagged the risk people would start asking why.

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