The Bozo Event Horizon • Hacker News Board

Re: The Bozo Event Horizon

#91

Post by moldoutside » Tue, Aug 21, 2012, 10:16 AM UTC

Is there anyone else that thinks Harvard is now spewing out "bozos" for writing this type of piece? Are you that arrogant? First of all "B class" employees are generally speaking still highly intelligent and educated. Second off, you seem to dismiss the reality of the business world in replacement for technical achievement.

To me all this article displayed is the clear distinction between the technical and the business side (that which employs the technical).

Degrading "B class" people as "Bozos" is quite frankly disgusting. You can have all the brightest minds in the world that create the next progression of technology, but without the "bozos", they will be stuck in a room congratulating themselves into perpetuity...

Re: The Bozo Event Horizon

#92

Post by protomyth » Tue, Aug 21, 2012, 11:58 AM UTC

wonnage wrote: post #82

protomyth wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the current environment where HR googles everyone leads people to not give post-mortem stories of failures. Even if a technical person would see the wisdom of your post, HR might use it to discard your resume.

Most startups don't have HR resources to waste on that sort of thing. In any case, what kind of HR person would even understand a detailed story of programming-related failure?

They don't have to understand, they just need to see the word.

Re: The Bozo Event Horizon

#93

Post by lancewiggs » Tue, Aug 21, 2012, 12:06 PM UTC

recroad wrote: post #47

Two cases: 1. You work for a tech company which produces a tech product (e.g., Google, Microsoft) 2. You work as a tech person in a business company (e.g., bank, insurance) This article fully applies to #1 where the core competency is technology. For #2, there's debate.

It applies to #2 as well - not just in tech but across all of the functions. Top level A sales people are wildly more productive than average joes, and can deliver millions more in revenue. Meanwhile spreadsheet jockeys, deal makers, marketing people, engineers, production engineers and even HR folk also fit the curve.

Re: The Bozo Event Horizon

#94

Post by maked00 » Tue, Aug 21, 2012, 1:03 PM UTC

I have seen the effect of an appointed organization head, hiring and promoting only those less competent than them selves. Even after the head retires, the infected organization may take a lifetime to recover.

The whole Jobs A thing is just pure BS ego speaking.

Re: The Bozo Event Horizon

#95

Post by warfangle » Tue, Aug 21, 2012, 1:21 PM UTC

recoiledsnake wrote: post #69

Retric wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They bought Kinect, other than that I can't see any real innovation in the last 5 years. Consider there is plenty of talk about surface, but they where talking about it before the iPad came out and it's still little more than a tech demo. Bing is not bad, but it's interface is on par with Duck Duck Go and hardly the 'revolution' in search they were hoping for. That said, they do seem to keep refining things and that'…

>They bought Kinect And Apple bought FingerWorks, which means there was no real innovation from Apple in iPhone multitouch technology, same with Siri. Or does it? There is a lot to getting research technology into a usable, affordable and marketable form than just buying it and copy pasting the code.

There is a lot. But that still doesn't explain why Microsoft has canceled some actually interesting projects just because "they weren't Windows" -- the Courier comes to mind.

Re: The Bozo Event Horizon

#96

Post by roc » Tue, Aug 21, 2012, 1:43 PM UTC

agentultra wrote: post #43

A constrained elite does seem useful within an organization. I like the idea of distinguishing those engineers who go above and beyond and really create something new. However it can also become a gerontocracy easily and can limit the adoption of innovative ideas in the long run. The problem I have with these sorts of social structures is that it assumes that one person out of a hundred is some how "gifted." After re…

> "The problem I have with these sorts of social structures is that it assumes that one person out of a hundred is some how "gifted.""

The point of DE-style positions is to get demonstrated great engineers out of the org chart, to free them from bureaucratic overhead. The key is, again, is that these engineers demonstrated their technical value. It has, in ideal form, nothing to do with anything other than a big pile of really excellent work. The idea that some people are better than others despite such a stack of excellent work is antithetical to the DE position and precisely the sort of mechanism by which bozos infiltrate those positions.

Re: The Bozo Event Horizon

#97

Post by anonimo » Tue, Aug 21, 2012, 1:59 PM UTC

moldoutside wrote: post #91

Is there anyone else that thinks Harvard is now spewing out "bozos" for writing this type of piece? Are you that arrogant? First of all "B class" employees are generally speaking still highly intelligent and educated. Second off, you seem to dismiss the reality of the business world in replacement for technical achievement. To me all this article displayed is the clear distinction between the technical and the busine…

I'm really surprised that yours is the only comment pointing this out.

Note that the author implicitly defines "bozo" as anyone who's not a world-class programmer or researcher (or possibly, any such person that rises above a certain level in the hierarchy). So, 99.9% of programmers, including even some programmer-entrepreneurs who have built valuable companies without being world-class technically.

Re: The Bozo Event Horizon

#98

Post by agumonkey » Tue, Aug 21, 2012, 2:33 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #85

agumonkey wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's desperately few informations about NeWS (at least with my limited googling abilities)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?NetworkExtensibleWindowSystem I developed against NeWS (mostly using HyperNeWS) for a research project in the early 90s - was a huge amount of fun.

Those are the desperately few I was aware of. That said I never looked into the NeWS book. I'll keep digging

Re: The Bozo Event Horizon

#99

Post by arethuza » Tue, Aug 21, 2012, 3:58 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #98

arethuza wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?NetworkExtensibleWindowSystem I developed against NeWS (mostly using HyperNeWS) for a research project in the early 90s - was a huge amount of fun.

Those are the desperately few I was aware of. That said I never looked into the NeWS book. I'll keep digging

If you like NeWS then I can recommend trying to find out about Arthur van Hoff's HyperNeWS which was, as the name suggests, a HyperCard like system but written in NeWS.

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/index.html

Re: The Bozo Event Horizon

#100

Post by knewter » Tue, Aug 21, 2012, 4:31 PM UTC

jmtame wrote: post #56

agentultra wrote: post #43

A constrained elite does seem useful within an organization. I like the idea of distinguishing those engineers who go above and beyond and really create something new. However it can also become a gerontocracy easily and can limit the adoption of innovative ideas in the long run. The problem I have with these sorts of social structures is that it assumes that one person out of a hundred is some how "gifted." After re…

This reminds me of part of an essay PG wrote (context: it was intended for high school students, but seems relevant): "People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems li…

This is huge. I once dated a girl who absolutely believed that there was some inherent skill with math / programming that I possessed, and consequently felt that my making good money was just a function of my genetics. This entirely undermines the fact that I spent years upon years forgoing any sort of social life to learn more about computers. The only 'inherent' thing wasn't skill - it was an inability to not want to learn more about computers and programming.

It took sweat, and there's an entire category of people who believe in inherent genius versus really effing hard work. That category of people will never put in the work necessary for others to inappropriately categorize them as inherent genius. I hate this problem and don't know how to convince people when they've fallen into that trap :-\