Software is the prototype for actual bulshitter vapor ware modus operandi. I wonder why?
Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? (2019) [pdf]
11–20 of 44 posts
Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? (2019) [pdf]
#12I've seen too many bullshitters in the software industry - people whose technical capabilities extend only as far as their ability to convince non-technical managers that they know what the fuck they're talking about. I've seen these people be promoted to positions where they can do serious damage, no longer a mere developer not knowing what the hell you're meant to be able to do - but a lead developer crippling an e…
I think it's unfair to only blame developers for this bad culture in our industry. At every layer of the stack the same things happen. At my local government they reformed child benefits and needed a new IT system to handle it, of-course we ended up with the over-engineered enterprise architecture of micro-services running on kubernetes, communicating over an event bus with CQRS, continuous integration and continuous deployment all day everyday, managed priorities with using agile on a scrum board, for a specification that did not exist because the law hadn't been finalised until half way through the project, all to get people money on their account. But did anybody in charge bother fixing the situation where their are 5 different commercial and not-for-profit institutions handling the money, acting as intermediaries
and thus profiting off the tax benefits for people to help them raise their children, No.
Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? (2019) [pdf]
#13I've seen too many bullshitters in the software industry - people whose technical capabilities extend only as far as their ability to convince non-technical managers that they know what the fuck they're talking about. I've seen these people be promoted to positions where they can do serious damage, no longer a mere developer not knowing what the hell you're meant to be able to do - but a lead developer crippling an e…
For every really-faking-it-until-they-make-it junior dev there's a goldbricking veteran spending 80% of company time on a side pursuit.
It's not "company time", it's time in a human being's life.
Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? (2019) [pdf]
#14Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? (2019) [pdf]
#15I've seen too many bullshitters in the software industry - people whose technical capabilities extend only as far as their ability to convince non-technical managers that they know what the fuck they're talking about. I've seen these people be promoted to positions where they can do serious damage, no longer a mere developer not knowing what the hell you're meant to be able to do - but a lead developer crippling an e…
How is the knowing developer, not with the lead title, able to survive on a team like this? I tried escaping - from my bumpkin locale to Boston, a 3 hour trip every morning and 3 hours back, until I couldn't handle it five months later and went tail back to the same team with the same issues. Here, I'm still hopeful to eventually figure this out.
I think it's a lot harder for a bullshitter to hide in a small company than in a large one, all else being equal. That's not everything of course but still probably worth some consideration.
Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? (2019) [pdf]
#16Software is the prototype for actual bulshitter vapor ware modus operandi. I wonder why?
In many other roles, bullshit can actually get you somewhere, especially if persuasion is part of the job.
In other situations it's not just bullshit but fraud, so we consider it another category.
Software itself is unforgiving of bullshit. If it's buggy as hell, you can't just talk your way out of it. It's also opaque enough that it's difficult to definitively distinguish between incompetence, bullshit, straight-up lying, and just failing at a difficult problem (if only because of insufficient resources). It takes a significant amount of work to make that kind of distinction and that work doesn't necessarily translate from project to project.
Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? (2019) [pdf]
#17As a developer, I've found that the Agile methodology is great for weeding out bullshitters.
A decently run sprint planning session with a retrospective at the end will highlight who didn't actually do anything. The killer feature is that these people volunteered the amount of effort for the work and then have to explain why nothing got done.
They eventually leave the team once they realise they've been discovered.
Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? (2019) [pdf]
#18The paper only surveyed teenagers... Smells like BS to me
Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? (2019) [pdf]
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
For every really-faking-it-until-they-make-it junior dev there's a goldbricking veteran spending 80% of company time on a side pursuit.
It's not "company time", it's time in a human being's life.
Both, and they coincide during business hours, at the least.
Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? (2019) [pdf]
#20I think the elephant in the room for this study is the high bullshit scores of immigrants. If you're a non-native language speaker and someone asks if you understand something, you're probably used to having to figure it out offline - but you might say "yes" anyway, for a myriad of reasons. Something I find disingenuous in this study is the failure to follow up on competency. "High bullshit index" individuals claim w…
> the high bullshit scores of immigrants
I think that statement is far too broad: I can think of some fairly bullshit free cultures, like many Scandinavian countries.
I can also think of people from specific religions that I generally find to be bullshitty, versus people from the same country but a different religion that appear to me to be much more honest.
Also a lot of people I meet from the USA appear to me to be extremely bullshit oriented compared to New Zealanders... Perhaps that is due to my own selection bias because of the type of people that emigrate or travel to New Zealand, or because I tend to meet businessmen?