Show, don’t tell. Rather than doing human ceremony around product features, just make it instead. Cost of communication and coordination has increased dramatically relative to what it takes to crank out code. And you get to have some tangible results, skills and deep domain knowledge even if it is discarded later.
Shooting down ideas is not a skill
131–140 of 187 posts
Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He's describing critical & low effort cheap shots. The examples he used included: the plan depends on a different team providing labour and that team is not on board, the business plan for the idea does not make sense. I suppose they are low effort in the sense that they are very basic 101 criticisms, but i wouldn't call them cheap shots. Literally no plan is ever going to work if it involves the labour of others w…
It's not a plan, it's an idea. You're shooting down an idea for not being a plan. The best person for coming up with the idea will probably also come up with some of the pieces of the plan, but they're unlikely to be the best person to figure out all of it. That's why you have a company not a sole proprietorship.
> You're shooting down an idea for not being a plan.
If you are pitching an idea out of nowhere, than i think it better have a semblence of a plan, otherwise you are just wasting everyone's time.
Like maybe its a bit different if you are brainstorming for an acknowledged problem, but that is not what the article made it sound like.
The article made it sound like the idea was being pitched unsolicited, with no clear problem it was trying to solve and no clear plan on how to do it. After all 2 of the so-called cheap criticisms were people asking why we want to do this ("the customers aren't asking for it") and how are we going to do it when it has dependencies on stakeholders who have not bought in ("devops doesnt like it").
Why would anyone care about such an idea? Like if you want to work on something by yourself, you dont have to convince anyone, but if you want other people on board, you are going to have to answer basic questions. Questions like: what benefit would implementing this idea bring me, and will my effort on this idea be a waste because neccesary stakeholders aren't on board.
There are a lot of details that can be sorted out on the way. Things like, why would we even want to do this in the first place, is not one of them.
Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill
#133Maybe it's an conflict in wording, but what is even an idea?
I think the article doesn't try to figure it out, but frames the word as an self sufficient concept that is ultimately good. But it's not. A child could have the idea to see what happens if it touches a hotplate. It is certainly a personal lesson, but just because it's an "idea" it's not something that you should always explore.
Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill
#134> "I haven't heard any customers request this." "We can't use Python for that, it's too slow." "That introduces too much complexity." "We tried something like that before and it didn't work." "DevOps won't want to support another service." "People are used to the way it works now." > None of these people are wrong or stupid. And none of them have added any value. Bzzt. Since all of these people are correct and smart,…
> Can't use Python because it's too slow? Show a proof of concept that is fast. Python is slow though, and for many use cases it won't work. For example, say somebody wanted to build a performant systems type software like version control. You're not really going to do that in Python. Something like that would even be slow in much "faster" Node.js. Some stuff you can't really use dynamic langauges for, if you want it…
Mercurial was written entirely in Python for quite a while.
But more to the point, I doubt there are many ideas for which the choice of implementation language is core to the idea. Maybe that's how it was presented, but that's usually because you need a concrete realization of an idea in order for people to even get what you're talking about.
Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill
#135> "I haven't heard any customers request this." "We can't use Python for that, it's too slow." "That introduces too much complexity." "We tried something like that before and it didn't work." "DevOps won't want to support another service." "People are used to the way it works now." > None of these people are wrong or stupid. And none of them have added any value. Bzzt. Since all of these people are correct and smart,…
you're right that a good idea should be able to survive scrutiny. The issue I'm describing isn't "someone asked a tough question". It's when objections pile up so ast that nothing can survive long enough to be properly evaluated. That's not a rigorous process, that's just a kill zone. The difference between a productive and unproductive kill zone comes down to culture. Teams that default to "here's why it won't work" end up very efficient at producing nothing. The teams I've seen do this well still kill ideas but they just do it after giving them a fair shot. The proposer has to do their homework but the environment has to let them get far enough to do it.
Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill
#136Show, don’t tell. Rather than doing human ceremony around product features, just make it instead. Cost of communication and coordination has increased dramatically relative to what it takes to crank out code. And you get to have some tangible results, skills and deep domain knowledge even if it is discarded later.
I'd agree with this take where possible. Trying to explain the idea requires all the listeners to imagine the same thing in their head. If you can show them something, it's worth a thousand words..
I have this with a colleague right now who has a rather solid idea (I think). Trying to convince him that at least some diagramming would help get it across.
Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill
#137Shooting down ideas is absolutely a skill, and it's essential to driving out the mountains of slop people throw out these days. However, the essential thing to do is to make sure that you're not shooting down the person. Better still, if you can socratically get them to the point of understanding why their idea won't work, that will have them own the shoot-down, and it may lead to a better idea that addresses the act…
I like that angle a lot, and this very thoughtful comment. Distinguishing between the idea and the person is a good way to think about it. I think sometimes people cross that line without realizing it. Your point about making sure people still want to bring ideas next time is really what it comes down to.
Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill
#138The least productive teams I've been a part of are the ones where everyone is waiting for their turn to say why an idea is bad. Sometimes being "too smart" can hold you back from building something genuinely new.
The vast majority of software engineers is never tasked to do something genuine. It's the opposite, you are tasked to improve, expand and maintain things under very specific constraints. Corporate work is by default anti innovation, the company has made the innovation and wants you to maximize its profits.
Also many great innovations or discoveries have outlived extreme opposition. The problem isn't people saying no, the problem is having non-sociopathic people being reluctant hearing no.
Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill
#139This article commits exactly the sin that it claims to warn against. It has obligatory positive statements about the value of critical thinking, surrounded by highly disparaging comments about how people practicing critical thinking in good faith are not adding value. The net effect will be to discourage the healthy development of critical thinking practice. Taking generic potshots at critical thinking is not a skill…
That's fair. The title is provocative and probably overstates my actual position, which as you note is closer to "the way people practice critique in meetings is low value and here's how to do it better". The point about making critical thinkers feel worse is taken too. The people I'm describing in the post aren't the careful, thoughtful critics, but instead the reflexive ones. I could have drawn that line more clearly.
Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill
#140I always try to remember the quote "Those saying a thing is impossible need to stay out of the way of those doing it" A important word doing a lot of lifting here is "doing". talk is cheap, the problem is never lack of ideas.
Agree 100%.
If you are doing it yourself shoot for the moon. If you want other people to work on your idea, then yeah you better be able to explain to those other people why the result would be worth it and why the approach is viable (or pay them not to care)