CEOs should be replaced by AI, charm shouldn’t be a factor in decision making.
Charming AIs is totally a thing; only it's called jailbreaking.
My Colleague Julius
101–110 of 136 posts
Re: My Colleague Julius
#102I have to say I became a lot happier in this field once I aligned myself more with Julius. I think what happens to developers and engineers is that since we have the ability to attune our toolsets very specifically to our needs, we assume everyone can do the same. This is untrue. Most people live a life of hodge-podge technical solutions that don’t work very well, meaning their expectations for how software should wo…
> Management does not care how or why the software does or doesn’t work - they just want 12 rules for life style platitudes and charisma. Which clearly shows that something is wrong in the industry, or how management roles are filled, or how wealth and influence and opportunities are distributed generally.
> something is wrong in the industry, or how management roles are filled, or how wealth and influence and opportunities are distributed generally.
And will you be able to fix these issues within your own lifetime? Will you be able to turnover the behemoth of bureaucracy and golf playing managers that has become the technology industry?
If not I highly suggest adopting the Julius mentality.
Re: My Colleague Julius
#103This is a nice parable, but in my experience, people who see their self-image reflected in this story can be just as difficult to work with. They often view themselves as smart and quietly capable, the unsung heroes keeping things running with little compensation and even less credit, while perceiving incompetence and unworthiness in everyone around them.
These individuals may think of themselves as “nice guys,” but their unwavering confidence in their own infallibility blinds them to the distinction between doing things wrong and doing things differently. They dismiss documentation, consensus building, and communication with non-technical colleagues as wastes of time—then wonder why their accomplishments go unrecognized or unappreciated.
Re: My Colleague Julius
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, i know him... it's me! I do "computer stuff" as my profession for about 20 years and always for rather small companies. I do everything from wiring a network, any level of supported, programming and administrative stuff... oh yeah, and in my current job I sometimes drive a forklift in the warehouse. I work now for about 10 years for the same company and have built significant parts of their software ecosystem, an…
The key issue of Petes is when they don't stay and make sure management knows that it's a prototype that needs more love. They milk the credit and move on, leaving the next engineer explain to management that what they have is not what they believe they have.
> They milk the credit and move on, leaving the next engineer explain to management that what they have is not what they believe they have.
I worked with a Pete. He was brilliant. He wrote all proof of concepts that drove major flagship products. He showcased them. He proved the concept worked. He delivered with lightning fast time-to-market.
He also made it abundantly clear to management that his proof of concepts required major architectural overhauls to make them maintainable. That was the tradeoff. This was clear from the start.
Managers didn't listened. They could not or would not understand why you'd need to rearchitect a service that was working, in spite of the very creator of said service saying it. They believed, or wanted to believe, that the project was done and over.
The problem aren't the Petes. The concept of technical debt is either foreign or tabu for managers. They have to sell the higher-ups the need to spend more resources fixing something that works. It's bad for careers.
Re: My Colleague Julius
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, i know him... it's me! I do "computer stuff" as my profession for about 20 years and always for rather small companies. I do everything from wiring a network, any level of supported, programming and administrative stuff... oh yeah, and in my current job I sometimes drive a forklift in the warehouse. I work now for about 10 years for the same company and have built significant parts of their software ecosystem, an…
I don't think you are the same Pete. People like you acknowledge and understand the engineering trade-offs. Which you might smirk at, but is true nonetheless. If there is only one example of you not being op's Pete is that you tell your boss about the reality of the situation. The OP's Pete I have met many. It is exactly as described.
> The OP's Pete I have met many. It is exactly as described.
I don't think they are different, or at least that far apart.
I have a couple of Pete stories of my own. The last one I had a manager wanting a year's worth of work released in 3 months to meet nice-to-have deadlines. I explained that it was impossible to meet that requirement, but I offered an alternative solution that delivered a MVP in a couple of months but we would still need a year of intensive manual intervention alongside development work to get the system running. I repeated over and over the technical debt. He accepted the tradeoff.
After I delivered the MVP, that manager completely axed any follow-up development work and replaced it with four more ambitious projects. Now we have engineers wasting a few days of work per month doing manual maintenance tasks on top of project work because actually finishing the MVP is no longer in the roadmap.
Here's the kicker: what would happen if I left the company? Would I be singled out as the scapegoat for the MVP being a mess that's missing critical features? Would I be blamed for the project not working as presented by the manager to higher ups? Would I be vilified by the engineers tasked with doing grunt work for something that could be easily automated if a team worked on it for a few months?
Re: My Colleague Julius
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds like a management error, not a Pete problem. If Pete was told to get a demo done as soon as possible, that's what he did. And in many cases that's not a bad thing for management to tell people. Finding product market fit, usually trumps tech debt. The thing is, that management should know, how time intensive and difficult it can be to turn a cobbled together demo into a production system.
Pete's just a rational actor in this scenario, the real issue is management with no insight into the reality of what they're 'managing'.
> Pete's just a rational actor in this scenario, the real issue is management with no insight into the reality of what they're 'managing'.
That's the norm, isn't it? The bulk of product managers aren't even technically oriented, let alone software engineering experts with a deep understanding of their own codebases.
Once I worked with a PM that quite openly stated he had to google what was a frontend and a backend developer and still failed to get a clear idea of what they did. How do you explain concepts such as technical debt to this sort of character?
Re: My Colleague Julius
#107I've met a breed of career min-maxers adjacent to Julius that I have a hard time describing. Picture this: you join a new team with a senior engineer, call him Pete. Pete wrote the initial version of a new product, and you joined the team to take over and continue it's development. Pete is bona fide genius who can work miracles and he is always in the critical path of each new initiative, you are told. Once you open…
In large companies I have seen a related pattern. Usually a mid-level engineer that the managers love because they "get stuff done".. meanwhile they are a bulldozer in the code, usually with some "ship-it" buddy green lighting the work. The reason they can "move fast" is because everyone else is trying to limit complexity, etc. and they are punching holes through the abstractions. Then turn into your "Pete" when they…
> The reason they can "move fast" is because everyone else is trying to limit complexity, etc. and they are punching holes through the abstractions.
That's perfectly fine. Your salary is paid by paying customers which are attracted and maintained by improving their user experience. You will never get a new paying customer by advertising that you prevented your abstractions from being soiled.
Re: My Colleague Julius
#108Fantastic, hilarious, and too relatable. Perhaps I am becoming overly cynical as I approach middle age, but it seems to me that this phenomenon exists because the people who have the ultimate decision making powers in businesses are business people. Businesses exist to serve the egos and goals of the people who run them - from their perspective things like technical competence and honesty are often secondary to achie…
>the people who have the ultimate decision making powers in businesses are business people... I would dearly love to believe that an alternative is possible, but there seem to be powerful incentives pushing the world towards this scenario.
Love him or hate him, Elon Musk has done a pretty good job of demonstrating that the market can reward autistic technical leaders who piss everyone off.
Recent viral video of Andrej Karpathy describing Elon's management style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSiJ4YTKxfM
Obviously Elon's character flaws are well-documented. I don't think anyone should venerate him. I'm just skeptical that conventional management practices are over-determined by incentives.
Re: My Colleague Julius
#109Fantastic, hilarious, and too relatable. Perhaps I am becoming overly cynical as I approach middle age, but it seems to me that this phenomenon exists because the people who have the ultimate decision making powers in businesses are business people. Businesses exist to serve the egos and goals of the people who run them - from their perspective things like technical competence and honesty are often secondary to achie…
The counter agreement often made is that if there was a better alternative to this then, like a company run by people who understand the fundamentals of what they actually make, then they would outcompete all these lazy bones, self-serving business people. My observation however has been that in fact many such companies have come, they have indeed dominated their competitors, only to later become infiltrated by the s…
>only to later become infiltrated by the same business types they had once trounced.
Did you see PG's Founder Mode essay by any chance?
>The theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could be optimistically summarized as "hire good people and give them room to do their jobs." He followed this advice and the results were disastrous. So he had to figure out a better way on his own, which he did partly by studying how Steve Jobs ran Apple. So far it seems to be working. Airbnb's free cash flow margin is now among the best in Silicon Valley.
Re: My Colleague Julius
#110Fantastic, hilarious, and too relatable. Perhaps I am becoming overly cynical as I approach middle age, but it seems to me that this phenomenon exists because the people who have the ultimate decision making powers in businesses are business people. Businesses exist to serve the egos and goals of the people who run them - from their perspective things like technical competence and honesty are often secondary to achie…
>the people who have the ultimate decision making powers in businesses are business people... I would dearly love to believe that an alternative is possible, but there seem to be powerful incentives pushing the world towards this scenario. Love him or hate him, Elon Musk has done a pretty good job of demonstrating that the market can reward autistic technical leaders who piss everyone off. Recent viral video of Andre…
Well, assuming I agree with your premise (I'm not sure I do), what percentage of all the companies in the world does Elon run?
I can also assure you that Julii exist at e.g. Tesla, which employees over 100000 people.
I don't want to start an Elon flame war, but from what I've read I would be sceptical of attributing his business success to technical acumen (which is not to deny that SpaceX builds very cool and impressive rockets, or that the businesses he own employ very smart and motivated people).