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My Colleague Julius

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Re: My Colleague Julius

#111

Post by lproven »

cgio wrote: post #62
angarg12 wrote: post #4

I'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…

We tend to underestimate management's visibility in such situations. I had three senior engineers. One was your Pete (names are not real of course), throw him anything and he'll have something half-working in no time. Ugly but enough function to be called a proof of concept. One was the opposite, call him Paul, give him any problem and he would spend his whole life if possible researching every minute detail of the p…

> Julius could still bring a unique delivery skill-set that is required in the context of the overall team's work.

I do not know the author of the blog, but this part especially strikes me as a misinterpretation of the point of the piece.

But that's shedding light, and maybe it's not and my interpretation was too narrow.

My interpretation was: Julius is a parasite, who contributes nothing but merely makes the productive members of the team work harder to compensate. He sounds convincing but understands nothing, does nothing, contributes nothing, and not only wastes others' time but also steals their credit.

But you see him as contributing? You see what he brings as being valid and valuable -- is that right?

Re: My Colleague Julius

#112

Post by _t9ow »

awanderingmind wrote: post #110
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 impres…

> I would be sceptical of attributing his business success to technical acumen

If you don't mind elaborating, what would you attribute his success to?

Re: My Colleague Julius

#113

Post by awanderingmind »

_t9ow wrote: post #112
awanderingmind wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 impres…

> I would be sceptical of attributing his business success to technical acumen If you don't mind elaborating, what would you attribute his success to?

As I said, I'd rather not start a flame war ;)

Re: My Colleague Julius

#114

Post by MortyWaves »

angarg12 wrote: post #4

I'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…

I have always called them 0.1x devs. Worked with several exactly as the describe. They provide negative value.

Re: My Colleague Julius

#115

Post by xenocratus »

Dansvidania wrote: post #58
bytesandbits wrote: post #17

we hired a Julius. Result after a year: Prolific people were laid off, yappers stayed, sales didn't grow, more money was spent than made. Company has 6 month left of runway. Oh Julius why you be like that? Amazing presentations tho. Like watching a movie.

Wouldn't you agree that the problem in such a situation is not the Julius/Julii, but the managers who hired and misunderstood his/their contributions?

Wouldn't you agree that the problem is not the managers who hired and misunderstood their contributions, but the society who forged them and incentivised them to behave and think like that?

You can basically choose a "scape-goat" at any of these levels, or just choose to accept them all as equal parts of a strange contraption.

Re: My Colleague Julius

#117

Post by cgio »

lproven wrote: post #111
cgio wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We tend to underestimate management's visibility in such situations. I had three senior engineers. One was your Pete (names are not real of course), throw him anything and he'll have something half-working in no time. Ugly but enough function to be called a proof of concept. One was the opposite, call him Paul, give him any problem and he would spend his whole life if possible researching every minute detail of the p…

> Julius could still bring a unique delivery skill-set that is required in the context of the overall team's work. I do not know the author of the blog, but this part especially strikes me as a misinterpretation of the point of the piece. But that's shedding light, and maybe it's not and my interpretation was too narrow. My interpretation was: Julius is a parasite, who contributes nothing but merely makes the product…

In my example, the first two would reach next level of maturity when they could appreciate the work their peers do and see it to its purpose.

Re: My Colleague Julius

#118

Post by Earw0rm »

epicureanideal wrote: post #98
Earw0rm wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two possible outcomes: - The Julii infiltrate and take over, - A company run by Julii from the outset comes to dominate the market. This is because "what we actually make" is a specialist skill, whereas business, sales, operations, financial planning and governance, HR, culture, legal are broadly generalist; and the bigger you get, the greater the important all that stuff becomes, relatively, to core execut…

I would argue it’s because the whole economy is basically an oligopoly and there aren’t really enough opportunities for competition. Once a company reaches a certain level, it focuses on pulling up the ladder rather than climbing the ladder.

"enough" is a value judgment, it depends what field of endeavour we're talking about (and whether the types of bug that proliferate in large firms are preferable to those that proliferate in small ones).

Uber, for example? Dreadful company, but a lot of the small local outfits they displaced were in some ways worse.

Local news media? This seems a more cut and dried case where small is preferable to large, and yet.. small firms are by no means incorruptible, and if the local vested interest succeeds in doing so, history will record only his point of view.

Cars are an interesting one, it looks like the EV transition is going to allow a whole new generation of (mostly Chinese, it must be said) manufacturers to establish a foothold. That's a pretty rare event for modern consumer products, the barriers to entry are huge and in general the reasons why are good.

Re: My Colleague Julius

#119

Post by photonthug »

roenxi wrote: post #95
photonthug wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly agree, although Pete is kind of a jerk if he’s self aware enough to notice exactly what he’s doing to repeatedly and intentionally exploit this pattern of ignorance in management anyway. But engineers blaming engineers that benefit from being a rational actor inside the mainstream incentive structure of corporate life is basically a distraction, because it gives management a pass for their mismanagement. Like,…

What choice does Pete have? There is a certain romance in defying management but that sort of move is ... career limiting in multiple ways. Management are not there to be defied. Persuasion and honesty are great tactics with good managers. With bad managers they tend not to work. Bad managers will demand bad software and only be happy when they find someone to deliver it.

> What choice does Pete have? There is a certain romance in defying management but that sort of move is ... career limiting in multiple ways. Management are not there to be defied.

Pete's got a choice about whether or not to act with integrity, same as everyone else at pretty much every other fork in the road. If management orders you to do something stupid, ways to act with integrity might include: you can say no, or you can do it under formal or informal protest, or you can do it under the condition that related technical debt is prioritized in a timely fashion, etc. There are usually many options for a proportionate response. Design docs with some formal structure will often increase accountability, or since management isn't reading the code anyway perhaps a bare minimum is a comment for posterity that says "Code written under duress. Senior manager SomeGuy said on SomeDate that this would be temporary and can be rewritten by OtherDate" ?

In terms of acting without integrity, sure it's possible to go through a career/life acting out endless scenarios where you basically enter into a conspiracy with your direct superior to screw the other people at your level and to a lesser extent the company in general, all so that you can possibly go one rung up the ladder and do the same thing again. Setting aside the ethical question of how this effects others, and whether or not this is a soul-crushing and dehumanizing thing for Pete to do to himself.. my guess is that most engineers will avoid this mainly just because they'd find ladder-climbing more boring than problem-solving.

> Management are not there to be defied. [..] Bad managers will demand bad software and only be happy when they find someone to deliver it.

Oof. Lucky that when people talk about engineers working "down in the trenches" or "on the front lines" it's usually just making apps or whatever and not actually soldiering, otherwise the whole "just following orders" thing can get ugly. Bad outcomes may always happen regardless, but it makes a big difference to me whether I'm the one that's responsible.

Re: My Colleague Julius

#120

Post by Dansvidania »

xenocratus wrote: post #115
Dansvidania wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't you agree that the problem in such a situation is not the Julius/Julii, but the managers who hired and misunderstood his/their contributions?

Wouldn't you agree that the problem is not the managers who hired and misunderstood their contributions, but the society who forged them and incentivised them to behave and think like that? You can basically choose a "scape-goat" at any of these levels, or just choose to accept them all as equal parts of a strange contraption.

I would not agree. Managers are the fitness function in the system. Workers tend to optimise based on it.
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