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Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role

tucker.wales

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Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role

#51

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

nzeid wrote: post #30
arnorhs wrote: post #23

This article is highly AI generated. The first paragraph is probably not AI generated, but the rest is definitely. I also double checked on gptzero me and it 100% agrees with me. I'm curious to know though whether or not the "author" used Gemini. I've been using Gemini a lot in the past year, and the writing sounds exactly like Gemini. But it's possible that all the models sound the same. Edit: I'd like to add that I…

Definitely stinks of LLM phrasing, metering, and punctuation. But I'd say the ideas are the author's alone and they do cut through.

How do you know? I think LLMs are more than advanced enough to come up with this text.

In fact, I think they've got so much more management in their training set than a senior engineer that I expect they're going to be a better source of material than the author.

Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role

#53

Post by roenxi »

michaelt wrote: post #37
jaggederest wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a middle ground. I used to be intensely critical of "doing things just to do things." The more perspective I get, the more I realize that, in a situation where things are not going right by whatever criteria you use to determine that (outside scope here), you need to make changes. The right way to make those changes, or at least one way and I don't know a better one, is to perturb the system and see h…

> But ultimately if you're dealing with an opaque system, which most companies are, While most companies have elements that are hard to see clearly [1], I would hope 95% of what the company is doing would be transparent to the CEO. The CEO should easily be able to tell which divisions/projects are profitable, which are on track to hit their goals, how those goals combine into a coherent strategy, which areas are gett…

If you can figure out how to turn the "should" in that sentence into "can" then you'll die wealthy. Tracking goals and turning them into a coherent strategy is a major unsolved problem in software engineering.

We accept best-effort from CTOs, but that leads to an industry that is a bit like a comet with a few success stories and a huge burning tail of leadership where they have limited to no ability to understand whether they are on track to achieve their goals and those goals don't come together into a coherent strategy. There is a strong argument that many of the success stories are only good relative to companies that failed even worse than they did and we all had to pick one of these bug-ridden software packages.

It is a lot like the era of the manufacturing industry before the statisticians moved in around WWII. We haven't managed a similar moment in software yet.

Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role

#54

Post by jedberg »

My last few jobs I started with a listening tour. I talked to everyone who was relevant to the job and asked them:

- what is going well,

- what is not going well

-what do hope that I will fix

-what should I do

-what should I not do

I put those question in the agenda for the meeting invite so they could come prepared. Then we took the conversation from there.

I put it all into a google doc, then synthesized it into summary that hid the identities of the people who said it and used it as my guide for the first few months.

Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role

#55

Post by hinkley »

gsnedders wrote: post #27
hinkley wrote: post #16

Nobody talks about SEI anymore but their Capability Maturity Model informed and/or aligned with how I approach new-to-me projects whether that 'new role' is internal or a new employer. CMM says that an engineering team whose processes aren't written down is level 0, and writing them down, even if they are batshit, gets you to level 1. Which leads to a fun bit of catharsis with the older employees where they get to sa…

It's also, inevitably, the newest people who are often the best at fixing basic documentation — because they're the ones who don't already know it.

Yes, the curse of knowledge. The new person only has industry jargon that everyone else will have and so they will describe any new concepts that way instead of with the circular logic the team has established. And that is often something I have to explain to the new person when they look dubious at the notion that they have any right to be touching the docs at all. They have more right than just about anyone.

It takes a really good teacher to be able to explain as easily to an intern as to a principal, and often the intermediate people have to take the beginners aside and reframe your explanations anyway. Whether you witness it happen or they do it where you cannot see, it happens.

Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role

#56

Post by udfalkso »

arnorhs wrote: post #23

This article is highly AI generated. The first paragraph is probably not AI generated, but the rest is definitely. I also double checked on gptzero me and it 100% agrees with me. I'm curious to know though whether or not the "author" used Gemini. I've been using Gemini a lot in the past year, and the writing sounds exactly like Gemini. But it's possible that all the models sound the same. Edit: I'd like to add that I…

Who cares!

Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role

#57

Post by massysett »

arnorhs wrote: post #23

This article is highly AI generated. The first paragraph is probably not AI generated, but the rest is definitely. I also double checked on gptzero me and it 100% agrees with me. I'm curious to know though whether or not the "author" used Gemini. I've been using Gemini a lot in the past year, and the writing sounds exactly like Gemini. But it's possible that all the models sound the same. Edit: I'd like to add that I…

I don’t see why it is interesting to claim that a piece is AI generated, especially in light of the concession in your last paragraph that you liked the article.

AI is a tool. It outputs things only when asked to. Asking it requires skill. Saying “This is AI generated” is like pointing at furniture and saying that “power tools were used to build that” or at a program and saying “that’s not assembly, a modern garbage-collected language was used to build that” or at a meal and saying “this was cooked in a kitchen with a modern temperature-controlled oven” or at a paper and saying “this was obviously typeset in LaTeX, not roff or plain TeX.”

So what? Give me a shop full of power tools and I can’t build any furniture, give me Python and a bunch of libraries and I can’t write Mercurial, and give me any LLM and I couldn’t have written this piece.

Does the conceit come from the idea of “some LLM wrote this, so anyone could”? This is like walking through a modern art museum and seeing some obvious-looking piece and saying “I could have done that.” Well, you didn’t.

Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role

#58

Post by jmcgough »

jaggederest wrote: post #35
edoceo wrote: post #11

I had a role, we got a new CTO. This man could not stop wiggling things. Almost from day one. Not just small things but larger things too (let's migrate to a new issue tracker/wiki thing (back when Redmine was popular)). Flipping staff to new focus (eg: moved a help-desk staff to top NetAdmin, replacing Cisco Certified guy, which caused some havoc during an audit). What a mess, just had to put his fingerprint on ever…

I think there's a middle ground. I used to be intensely critical of "doing things just to do things." The more perspective I get, the more I realize that, in a situation where things are not going right by whatever criteria you use to determine that (outside scope here), you need to make changes. The right way to make those changes, or at least one way and I don't know a better one, is to perturb the system and see h…

This might be appropriate in some cases, but it's important to consider that you have a finite amount of social capital as a new leader. Once people get sick of poorly thought-out changes it can be hard to keep changing things and get buy-in, and talented employees (who almost always have someone asking to hire them) can be the first to leave.

I'm a fan of Chesterton's Fence [1]. Put effort into understanding the organization and why it's architected the way it is before making changes.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/w/chesterton-s-fence

Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role

#59

Post by gwerbin »

nswango wrote: post #32
NoItsDanger wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always liked Chesterton’s Fire. Maybe there’s a reason you’re on fire. Until you can say for sure, I will not put it out. I will just be here roasting these marshmallows on your burning flesh. :)

My version was Chesterton's Facehugger. Something which, as soon as you discover it, you should immediately respond by trying to remove it, without asking questions about where it came from or what its purpose might be.

Do you have a real practical example of this? I have never encountered a real one that didn't turn out to be a fence in hindsight.

Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role

#60

Post by userbinator »

arnorhs wrote: post #23

This article is highly AI generated. The first paragraph is probably not AI generated, but the rest is definitely. I also double checked on gptzero me and it 100% agrees with me. I'm curious to know though whether or not the "author" used Gemini. I've been using Gemini a lot in the past year, and the writing sounds exactly like Gemini. But it's possible that all the models sound the same. Edit: I'd like to add that I…

The title was already a clue that it's AI-generated, and it only gets worse...

The first paragraph is probably not AI generated

"A bias toward action is a superpower only when applied correctly - here's how to frame it as moving decisively after building context, not rushing in before you have it."

...followed by many, many bloated words that can basically be summed up in two words of old Internet lore: LURK MOAR

I agree with the article too, but I didn't have to read that many words to know. "Don't just start doing things because you want to show off, and understand what value you're providing" is how I'd phrase it.

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